Aspasia Karras: Joining team true believer

I love Oprah. Who doesn’t? I was once employed by a company that had a direct line to Oprah. It was a big part of why I said yes to the job. You could call her up and ask her stuff! I never did, but I lived in hope. I pictured her sitting in the Harpo headquarters like a really kindly latter-day Delphic oracle with her handmaiden Gayle, both of them strategically placed over a steaming brazier of hallucinogenic herbs making life-changing pronouncements.

Oprah has serious sage vibes — she just does. Plus, everyone gets free stuff, you get one and you get one and you get one.

The thing I got from Oprah was the idea that, if someone shows you who they are, believe them. By which she meant, actually believe them. Don’t make up stories in your head about what they might really be saying or flat-out deny that they are saying what they are saying because it makes you uncomfortable or you cannot believe anyone would actually mean something like that.

No — take their statements as the objective truth and swallow them whole. This wards off the deadly sin of lying to yourself, which is very dangerous in the long term. Friends, I tell you this for nothing — this is hands down the best advice I have ever been given and I did not even have to get on the hotline. She made this pronouncement to all of us on the show, just before she handed out several vehicles. I was reminded of her great oracular wisdom as I watched the inauguration of the 47th president of the US in grim absorption.

I took Donald at his word and he immediately thrust us 50 years forward into climactic apocalypse with one fell strike of his pen. But what, I wondered, is Melania saying in her funerary garb? Why could we not see her eyes, with the peculiar low-brimmed hat she was wearing? What kind of sociopathic style statement was that? What does she know? Christ, what does she know?

Trussed up like a hard-core fräulein, three-parts matron and one-part nutcracker, she struck cold fear into my heart, with nary a smile or a softening of her grimly clenched jaw for the visiting authoritarians of the world on their lark to the US Capitol Rotunda. There they were, ready for their moment in the sun and the group-shot opportunities.

What is the collective noun for a gathering of Slytherins? The Giorgia Melonis, Santiago Abascals, Éric Zemmours, Tino Chrupallas, and Nigel Farages of the world, giving each other joyful high fives and chest pumps while the house mother is all cold-hearted dominatrix formal, channelling He Who Shall Not Be Named’s even more evil twin sister?

Now that the disaffected team members of white Southern African supremacy have successfully colonised the US, I would like to revert to that thing Oprah said. When Elon makes the Nazi salute at the inauguration — twice, for effect — believe him.

From the February edition of Wanted, 2025