Late last winter, Kim Kardashian taunted poor women and became embroiled in a scandal of her own making.
On camera, she parroted the malicious talking point that “no one wants to work anymore.”
She earned a tremendous amount of well-deserved backlash for her callous, villain-from-a-Christmas-movie nonsense.
On this week’s episode of The Kardashians, Kim dealt with the fallout.
“I have the best advice for women in business,” Kim said early this year. “Get your f–king ass up and work.”
The beneficiary of generational wealth declared: “If you put in the work, you will see results.”
“It seems like nobody wants to work these days,” Kim then complained.
“You have to surround yourself with people that wanna work,” Kim insisted.
“Have a good work environment where everyone loves what they do,” she instructed, “because you have one life.”
Kim continued: “No toxic work environments, and show up and do the work.”
Obviously, hearing an actual billionaire complain that people don’t “want to work” was jarring and awful.
Kim could have given similar advice — surround yourself with similarly driven people, don’t expect to get lucky — and been okay.
Instead, it sounded like she was ranting about the general work ethic of people in general, as if that were to blame for widespread inequality. Newsflash: it isn’t.
On Season 2, Episode 4 of The Kardashians, it was finally time for the world to see Kim react to the callout.
“I’m assuming you saw all of the backlash of the Variety interview,” Kim told her mother over the phone.
“I’m like mortified, I don’t know what to do,” she expressed. “It’s all my fault.”
Kris Jenner, misguided though she may have been, tried to reassure her embattled daughter.
“It’s not your fault, sweetie,” she said.
Kris continued, claiming that “people misunderstood where you were coming from.”
“When I made that statement, it wasn’t a blanket statement toward all women,” Kim told the camera.
She noted that people reacted “as if I didn’t think women work hard or respect the work that they do.”
Kim assured viewers that she knows that women work hard “because I see it every single day.”
“The most important people in my life that have shaped my life and shaped my career,” Kim went on.
“And helped me get to where I am today,” she continued, “all are women.”
Kim lamented: “So I hated that that got misunderstood. And for that I’m so sorry.”
Miss Kimberly sure sounds like she is apologizing that people misunderstood her.
That may be even worse than “I’m sorry that you felt upset.”
Kim may know a lot about business and the law and social media, but she may need to repeat some classes at Apology School.
“It never ends. Will it end?” Kim complained to her sister, Khloe.
This is a familiar sentiment from certain hyper-famous individuals, including the Kardashians. They lump in justified backlash with trolls and random haters — and then they tune it all out.
It insulates them from some of the internet’s monsters, but it also means that they sometimes miss real opportunities to learn and grow.
“No, it won’t end until we end. But guess what, we’re built for this,” Khloe then assured her.
Kim wasn’t so sure that she is really “built for this.”
But Khloe, repeating the same sentiment that we described, said: “It’s all noise. None of it’s real.” And that, folks, is how famous people avoid learning from their mistakes.