Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat

by Derek Beres

Winfrey really deserves her own book as an enabler of dodgy channeled wisdom. She played a key role in boosting the American psychic and Amway superstar Esther Hicks and her “Law of Attraction,” a thoughts-change-reality concept. Hicks claims that the “Law” emerged from channeling a gaggle of entities she calls Abraham. Abraham offers garden variety self-help bromides, such as “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” But Abraham also spiced it up with some truly disgusting claims, such as only 1 percent of rape allegations being true violations, with the rest being attractions. Abraham also believes that for Black people in America, slavery was “the beginning of a journey that was better” and part of an “overall improvement in humanity.” Like the New Age celebrity publisher of Hicks’s bestsellers, Louise Hay of Hay House, Abraham also thinks that people contract AIDS when they don’t love themselves.