In conservative policy circles, particularly at the state level, a 2018 article originally published at the Democratic Socialists of America’s forum resurfaced this spring: “The Revolution Must Be Trauma-Informed.”
I saw this because in my home state of Louisiana, a DSA-aligned Democrat legislator was pushing a bill that would require the state department of health to staff up an office of “professionals” who would filter into the schools and other manifestations of government power to press the pseudoscience of “trauma counseling,” ostensibly with an eye toward indicting the capitalist system.
Therapeutic socialism is the apex of cultural Marxism in America, and it now forms the superstructure of the Democrat Party’s politics — and its culture.
And it’s a disaster. We all know this. We can see it in the failure of everything the Democrats touch — from Liz Warren’s destruction of Spirit Airlines to Karen Bass’s wholesale destruction of Los Angeles to Renée Good’s ill-fated rescue of an illegal alien criminal in Minneapolis. Everybody’s a victim, and everybody needs the gentle hand of a Big Sister government to help them through their pain. It isn’t even politics; it’s religion.
A crank religion, to be sure, but one that has very fervent belief.
Where did this come from?
I’m going to argue something you might not have thought of. I’m going to tell you this is all Oprah Winfrey’s fault.
This article is from The American Spectator’s summer 2026 print magazine. Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive the magazine.
For twenty-five years from the mid-1980s to 2011, Oprah Winfrey took the confessional format of female-targeted daytime talk pioneered by Phil Donahue and supercharged it into something darker: a daily ritual of public emotional excavation. Guests vomited forth their abuse, addiction, family dysfunction, and personal failures not as cautionary tales or spurs to repentance and character, but as badges of authenticity to be applauded by the suicidally empathetic as “their truth.” That grift turned Oprah into the single most powerful female mass media icon the world had ever seen.
“What happened to you?” became the new catechism. Personal responsibility and a recognition of consequences and reality? Old-fashioned, patriarchal, and oppressive. Instead, Oprah preached, you should “let go,” “honor your inner child,” and reframe every setback as systemic trauma rather than the predictable fruit of bad choices or sin.
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She platformed — endlessly — the false prophets of the therapeutic faith. Take Marianne Williamson, a crank New Age author who became such a big name thanks to Oprah that she ran for president in 2020. Williamson appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show right after publishing A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of a Course in Miracles. The episode drew more viewer mail than any other that year. Oprah gushed that she’d experienced “157 miracles” after reading the book and helped propel it to mega-bestseller status. Almost overnight, the book sold another million copies.
And what was this? It was gobbledygook. A Course in Miracles, the text Williamson was popularizing, is a 1970s “dictation from Jesus” that teaches there is no sin and no real evil, just “illusions” and “fear-based thinking.” Per Williamson, and Oprah as her carnival barker, salvation comes from shifting your perception through love, forgiveness, and positive thought — not repentance, grace, or traditional Christian doctrine. Williamson packaged it as self-help spirituality: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate,” she said. “Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.” Oprah called that passage one of her all-time favorites and revisited it in multiple specials.
Williamson was only one of the multitudes of cranks and grifters Oprah inflicted on the American public.
Eckhart Tolle got his A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose anointed as “the most important book” Oprah had ever chosen — twice. Deepak Chopra and Rhonda Byrne, whose self-help book The Secret promoted the “law of attraction,” were followed by a cavalcade of “energy healers.” Oprah gave us Dr. Oz, whose remedies for various illnesses weren’t all what he said they’d be, and Oz was one of the more credible of her regular guests. Like, for example, Christiane Northrup (who arrived with quack claims like that “energy blockages” cause disease). Or James Arthur Ray (a self-help guru whose “Spiritual Warrior” event ended in three deaths in a sweat lodge). Kurt Andersen, author of Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, credits Oprah with normalizing magical thinking over evidence.
Oprah didn’t need Big Pharma checks to mainstream dangerous nonsense; she did it for free because it fit her therapeutic gospel. She gave Jenny McCarthy a multi-episode megaphone to claim vaccines caused autism, turning “a mother’s intuition” into substitute science while measles came roaring back. The same woman who later rolled out the red carpet for Ozempic executives in a prime-time special spent years eroding trust in actual medicine — then pivoted to selling the latest pharmaceutical miracle once it aligned with her personal brand. That’s not a false flag. That’s the grift: whatever keeps the ratings, the book club sales, and the empire humming, regardless of the bodies left in the wake.
Art by Bill Wilson for The American Spectator
The message was consistent, beaten into the heads of millions upon millions of impressionable women with time on their hands during the day: your feelings are truth, your ego is the enemy, and salvation comes from presence, affirmations, and external blame.
Traditional Christianity, with its established pattern of sin and repentance, self-denial and individual accountability, and submission to a higher moral order? In Oprah’s world, that was quietly sidelined as judgmental. Oppressive. Not good enough.
The result was predictable. And devastating.
Oprah spent the prime of her influence speaking directly to the formative years of two generations of American women. Teens and young adults in the 1990s and 2000s absorbed the gospel that their pain was not their fault and that “healing” meant perpetual processing, not building grit or character. The downstream harvest is now impossible to ignore. Unmarried women, disproportionately those steeped in the therapeutic socialist worldview Oprah gave them, now form the emotional and electoral backbone of the hard left. They vote Democratic by massive margins (59–70 percent in recent cycles), report sky-high rates of diagnosed mental illness (more than half in some surveys of leftist women), lean heavily on antidepressants, and have estranged themselves from traditional Christianity and the family structures that anchored all of our previous generations.
In the bluntest terms, Oprah’s victims, and those of the cranks and charlatans Oprah platformed, are spiritually burned, mentally fragile, and politically weaponized.
That DSA article mentioned above wasn’t some radical outlier. It was the logical endpoint of the culture Oprah mainstreamed. By the time the DSA was writing about weaponizing trauma as an indictment of capitalism, millions of American women had already internalized the template: your sins don’t come back to you; the free-market patriarchy does. Personal agency dissolves into collective victimhood.
The left didn’t invent this, you know. Oprah pre-sold it as self-care for two decades.
And the queen herself? The ultimate case study. Oprah’s own biography of childhood poverty and sexual abuse in rural Mississippi was relentlessly centered and weaponized as the source of her power. Oprah’s wounds became her brand, her authenticity, and her moral authority. And through the parade of charlatans she platformed to preach the gospel of trauma and “healing,” those impressionable rubes in front of the TV were invited to do the same.
Which brings us to the uncomfortable question no one in polite media circles ever asks: Where did this woman actually come from? Nobody ascends from local news to global cultural dominance alone. Oprah’s “rags-to-riches” narrative is true on the surface, but the ascent required a very specific ecosystem of gatekeepers. In 1984, Dennis Swanson, general manager of ABC’s WLS-TV in Chicago, plucked her from a Baltimore talk show to host the struggling A.M. Chicago. Within months, it was number one. Movie critic Roger Ebert then urged her to sign with syndicator King World Productions, run by Roger King, who turned the show national in 1986 and made it a cash machine. Even though she wasn’t even a professional actress, Quincy Jones got her the breakthrough role in The Color Purple. Jones aside, these were overwhelmingly white male executives in a cutthroat industry who saw star power and bet on it.
And yet Oprah wouldn’t let anybody forget that she was a strong, independent black woman. Because the key to everything is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.
And boy, did Oprah fake it.
She learned the top rule of that mass media world early: never bite the hand that feeds. The same media-entertainment machine that manufactured her brand later protected the predators she platformed, and she did nothing to challenge that arrangement. The therapeutic culture she exported was the perfect Trojan horse: it made women feel empowered by surrendering agency, all while she herself navigated the real corridors of influence with a pragmatic cold eye.
What am I talking about?
The same cultural icon who for a quarter-century sold American women the gospel of “empowerment” through trauma, feelings, and “speaking your truth” was perhaps the most egregious hypocrite imaginable when the camera was off. Oprah systematically cozied up to some of the sleaziest predators in entertainment.
These were men who preyed on the very women her brand claimed to uplift. She platformed them, took pictures with them, did business with them, and then, when the scandals exploded, issued the bare-minimum statements and memory-holed the evidence.
Power protects its own. Oprah knew that very well. She learned it from the white male gatekeepers who manufactured her rise, and she never forgot it.
Take Sean “P Diddy” Combs. For years, Oprah hosted him on her show and openly ran in the same celebrity circles. Then the raids hit and the “freak-off” sex-trafficking allegations piled up. In June 2025, at a forum with T.D. Jakes, Oprah declared, “I have never been near a Puff party… Anybody who knows me knows if there is a party, I am the first one out. The nature of my personality is that I am not a party person.”
Worse yet was Harvey Weinstein. Decades of friendship, red-carpet kisses on the cheek, business deals (his company distributed her film Lee Daniels’ The Butler). Oprah swore she had no idea about the serial sexual assaults everybody else in showbiz took for granted. Singer Seal wasn’t buying it; he posted the infamous photo of Oprah planting one on Weinstein’s cheek with the caption: “When you have been part of the problem for decades but suddenly they all think you are the solution.”
Rose McGowan, one of Weinstein’s earliest accusers, was blunter: Oprah was “as fake as they come.”
Russell Simmons got the same kid-gloves treatment. Oprah signed on as executive producer of the 2020 documentary On the Record, which detailed multiple women’s accusations of sexual abuse against the hip-hop mogul. Then Simmons leaned on Oprah privately. She pulled her name, yanked the Apple TV+ deal, and cited “creative differences” and “inconsistencies” in the women’s stories. The documentary flopped.
So much for believing all women.
But nothing captures the grotesque fraud of Oprah’s “female empowerment” brand quite like João Teixeira de Faria, better known as John of God, the Brazilian “psychic surgeon” she turned into an international celebrity.
In 2010, Oprah devoted a full episode of her show to the man, titled “Do You Believe in Miracles?” She followed it with a glowing O Magazine profile. Then, in 2013, she flew down to Brazil with a camera crew for Oprah’s Next Chapter. She watched him perform “surgeries” — cutting into women’s bodies without anesthesia, jamming forceps up noses, the whole carnival act. Instead of reacting with horror, she called the experience “inspiring.” This was a guy who claimed to channel dead doctors for miracle cures, and she was touting him in front of the world, with real — and ugly — consequences.
By December 2018, hundreds of women — eventually numbering more than 600 — accused John of God of sexual abuse, molestation, and outright rape during those “healing” sessions. Some were as young as nine. There were even whispers of a “baby farm” operation whereby Faria was allegedly harvesting children of his victims for sale on the black market. He surrendered to police, denied everything at first, and then racked up convictions totaling 489 years in prison. One of Oprah’s own 2010 guests, a Harvard psychiatrist named Dr. Jeffrey Rediger, later revealed he had warned her producers about existing rumors of sexual misconduct.
They ignored him. Ratings week trumped caution, and New Age “wonders” trumped objective reality.
When the John of God scam collapsed, Oprah scrubbed every trace of the episodes and magazine pieces from her website and archives. There was no apology tour. No reflection on how her platform had funneled vulnerable women straight to a serial rapist. Just a single, bloodless statement: “I empathize with the women now coming forward and hope justice is served.”
Yeah, right.
The women who tuned in day after day, absorbing her message that their pain made them powerful and their feelings were gospel, were the very ones she nonchalantly fed to the wolves. Does that sound like empowerment to you?
And then, a few years before the end of her run as the Queen of Daytime TV, Oprah gave us Barack and Michelle Obama — doing the same thing to American politics that she did to the culture. Obama said, as a little-known state senator from Chicago, that there is no individual salvation without collective salvation. How utterly on-brand for an Oprah charlatan!
Oprah sold generations of American women a bill of goods — then cashed the check while the predators she platformed cashed in on the very vulnerability she romanticized.
And those women she poisoned with therapeutic lies and feel-good propaganda are the vanguard of a predatory political movement the Obamas have led for close to twenty years.
We can call this out for what it is. If we’re going to save America, I think we have to.
Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our summer 2026 print magazine.
