Amy Carlson was a manager at a McDonald's in Kansas who left her family in 2006, and by the mid-2010s was Mother God — the divine feminine, reincarnated 19,000 times, who had created the universe and would lead humanity through an ascension.
Love Has Won operated primarily online. The group livestreamed for hours daily from wherever it was based, and the streams were the product: Carlson talking, followers around her, viewers commenting and donating. Income came from donations and from selling colloidal silver and other items.
The mechanism this case contributes is parasocial charisma at internet scale, and it is genuinely new.
Horton and Wohl described parasocial interaction in 1956 in the context of television: the illusion of a face-to-face relationship with a performer who does not know you exist. Live streaming intensifies this substantially, because the performer responds to comments, uses viewers' names, and is available for hours a day, every day. The relationship feels reciprocal because in a limited sense it is.
Add the mere-exposure effect of chapter 24 — familiarity accruing with every hour watched — and a viewer can arrive at the subjective experience of knowing someone extremely well while having no information about them that was not broadcast.
The inner circle who lived with Carlson operated a rota of caretakers, sleeping little, managing her declining condition. She drank heavily and consumed colloidal silver in quantity over years, which produces argyria — an irreversible blue-grey discoloration of the skin.
Her deterioration was reframed, and this is the chapter's most important element. The blue skin was evidence of her divine nature. Her inability to walk, her physical collapse, her pain — all were interpreted as the cost of absorbing humanity's karma, and as evidence that the ascension was near. Each piece of evidence that she was dying was processed as evidence that she was divine.
That inversion is dissonance reduction at its most complete. Disconfirming data is not ignored or explained away; it is converted into confirmation.
Carlson died in Oregon in April 2021, aged forty-five, of a combination of alcohol abuse, anorexia and colloidal silver poisoning. The group did not report the death. They wrapped her body, drove it to Colorado, and kept it — mummified, adorned with Christmas lights, in a sleeping bag — while awaiting her return.
Police found her in a house in Moffat, Colorado, on 28 April 2021, and arrested seven people.
Splinter groups formed almost immediately, streaming under new names.