I never took the “Oprah for 2020 Democratic nominee” speculation that seriously, so I didn’t spend much time dwelling on the prospect that President Winfrey would let Surgeon General Suzanne Somers urge menopausal women to take 60 pills a day and inject estrogen into their nether regions.īut the events of the past few years have made it impossible to ignore the damage caused by Oprah, particularly on the medical front, even if you just want to watch the woman expertly extract royal family dirt from Prince Harry. The various fantasies she has promoted on all her media platforms-her daily TV show with its 12 million devoted viewers, her magazine, her website, her cable channel-aren’t as dangerous as Donald Trump’s mainstreaming of false conspiracy theories, but for three decades she has had a major role in encouraging Americans to abandon reason and science in favor of the wishful and imaginary.Īndersen was reacting to speculation following Oprah’s Golden Globes speech that she might follow Trump’s path from TV to the White House. Perhaps more than any other single American, she is responsible for giving national platforms and legitimacy to all sorts of magical thinking, from pseudoscientific to purely mystical, fantasies about extraterrestrials, paranormal experience, satanic cults, and more. And I’m very much here for all her iconic TV moments, from her ridiculous “Favorite Things” car giveaway to her reaction to consuming prize-winning unseasoned chicken to her exquisitely-put query, “Who is having that conversation?”īut in a bizarre dichotomy, Oprah has also had an outsized negative influence on American culture, as Kurt Andersen summed up at Slate in 2018: Obviously, she broke numerous barriers for women and Black Americans. I believe that her openness about surviving sexual abuse as a child and her ongoing efforts to shed light on mental health struggles had an immeasurable benefit on our society. In many ways I’m thankful for that messages promoted on her show had a significant positive impact on me and various other women in my life. Like millions of American women, my mom was a big Oprah fan, so watching her daytime show was part of my after-school routine throughout the ‘90s. Oprah fandom was thrust upon me at a young age. In terms of the me of it all, the bigger problem is that I know I’m finally going to be forced to reckon with Oprah Winfrey’s penchant for promoting pseudoscience that harms society. My issue isn’t so much with the not-so-good doctor himself, though I’m certainly not thrilled about a known peddler of medical misinformation who entered the political arena by giving Donald Trump a bogus on-air health evaluation potentially becoming a senator. ![]() Senate seat in Pennsylvania was most definitely not on my vision board. If you need any further proof that The Secret is B.S., here it is: Dr.
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