Marianne Williamson Is Selling You Something You Already Have

By Kate Sosin, with reporting by Nico Lang 


Marianne Williamson has forgotten her phone. She’s rifling through her overstuffed purse as soon as Wendy, her staffer, comes marching by way of the glass doors of the airless conference room at the Luxe Hotel in Beverly Hills, iPhone in hand. A minute later, Williamson again asks where the device is before realizing she’s right now holding it.


There’s no spokesperson to keep tabs on Williamson’s talking points, or her conversation with MTV News. No one is on hand to whisk her to her next appointment. She shares that the initial time she met Hillary Clinton, she spilled water on herself. She does it again while in our interview.


Williamson, an author and spiritual advisor, understands how her demeanor might come off, and she has a name for it: “woo woo.” Right after her efficiency in the opening Democratic presidential primary debate in June — while in which she promised she would conquer President Donald Trump with “love” — plenty of people took the possibility to cheerfully lampoon her on Twitter as a dippy, new-age mystic, a sentient Yanni CD for our current political crisis. BuzzFeed editor David Mack joked that she “threw the initial crystal at Stonewall,” while comedian Guy Branum predicted she could be the “only candidate bold enough to recommend a witchcraft-based health care system.”


Williamson has seen the memes. “They’re hilarious to me, too,” she tells MTV News. “I’m laughing as much as anyone else is, and I get it.”


She chalks her efficiency up to “nervousness,” and those nerves seemingly followed her to the second debate. She did not qualify for the third.


Others weren’t laughing. They were worried that Williamson’s brand of new-age self-help glossed over a far more sinister reality: another untested ego evangelizing “change” without an actual plan. The left’s version of Trump.


Because who can forget? The President launched his political career by means of the appearances and commentary on Fox News, and by supporting the “birther” conspiracy theory that targeted then-President Obama. He had no political experience and was known better as a reality TV star along with a businessman of dubious success and morality.


Williamson wants to take on Trump, although not with policy. In a climate where candidates have plans for everything and release complex policy proposals on Medium, Twitter, and Instagram, she is an outlier, in part because she doesn’t bring several long-established proposals to the table at all — something she believes is an asset.


“Democratic politicians have been saying to me for years, ‘I don't know why we lost [in 2016], we had them on the issues,’” she says. “And I've mentioned for years, the segment of the brain that decides who to vote for, that rationally analyzes a distribute isn't necessarily the segment of the brain that decides who to vote for. There really are clearly psychological and emotional issues involved.”


While it’s true that plenty of voters might not directly be as plugged into policies as pundits are, it’s more challenging to quantify why someone votes for a candidate. In a August 2015 Des Moines Register/Bloomberg politics poll, six in 10 likely Republican voters mentioned they would trust a candidate to calculate the answers to a given supply if they took office.


For all of the policy pages on her website, Williamson doesn’t allocate an actionable blueprint. If she has advocated for a reparations plan that would pay up to $500 billion to Black Residents of the United States in an overdue task to rectify the inequities that started with slavery, she hasn't perplexing how a Williamson administration would fund the plan. And her page on criminal justice lays out the ways that America’s legal system fails communities of color, although its solutions are murky at best.


“Incarceration is often necessary,” she writes. “But that does not mean we need to lose our humanity as a culture, nor do we need to disregard the humanity of incarcerated people.” She goes on to mention she believes in “teaching inmates emotional literacy, communications skills, conflict resolution skills, and job training.” That’s as deep as she gets into policy, which leaves her standing in stark juxtaposition to most of them of Democratic candidates — including frontrunners Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Joe Biden — who have pitched extensive policy proposals over the course of their campaigns.


She put out a policy centered on LGBTQ+ issues months before most of the other Democratic contenders. However once asked by MTV News to be more specific about those platforms, she stumbles to dictate the Equality Act, which would amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to prepare it unlawful to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people on the basis of sexual or gender identity and which she has vowed to support.


“The employment Equality Act?” She asks trepidatiously. “That's housing, isn't it?”


Upon clarification, Williamson states her support for it without allocating deeper policy details.


“There should be no area, housing, health, employment where someone's sexual orientation should quota their abilities,” she says. “Period. End of story.”

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Williamson, who is routinely polling between zero and one percent, according to FiveThirtyEight, believes she has been also readily dismissed because she comes in nontraditional packaging: She hasn’t contained political office and has made her living in the vague, lucrative world of commercialized spirituality and self-help.


so far, her primary plan is one of self-preservation: She didn’t qualify for the last three debates and it’s not likely she’ll make the next one in December, nevertheless she says she’s still in the race.


“I'm not a victim and I don't visualize myself as a victim,” she says of her candidacy. “But there really are strains of misogyny that run very deep and several of which are internalized by women.”


It is for this reason, she believes, that ladies in particular might not directly vote for her. At one point, there were five other ladies in the race with her, more than there ever have been while in any presidential primary race in American history. Once Annie Leibowitz photographed the female candidates for Vogue, she was not included; she later wrote on Instagram that “the framers of the Constitution did not make Vogue magazine the gatekeepers of America’s political process.”


Williamson pushes back against her branding as a “dangerous nut wacko” along with a “grifter,” and points out that the Constitution stipulates the presidency is open to any natural-born citizen over the age of 35, so long as they have lived In the
U.S. For 14 years. She takes those limited requirements at their word, and she views her outsider status as a selling point, although she is becoming increasingly an outlier by the day. (“No American citizen is a political outsider,” she says.)


Nevertheless in the months right following the Democratic primary race started in earnest, two female candidates have dropped out. Several billionaires are all nevertheless self-funding their own campaigns. The most diverse primary race in history has all however winnowed its candidates of color out — as of publish time, only white candidates have qualified to take the debate stage this month. Because the stakes rise and the primaries near, Williamson is still positioning herself as an alternative to anyone who might listen.

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The name “Marianne Williamson” usually evokes one of three reactions in people: They think her history as a Hollywood-made mystic is dangerous at best and sinister at worst, they would give up their first-born for a Twitter say from her, or they have never even heard of her.


Williamson was place on Earth in Houston in 1952, though the Marianne Williamson we know today was made in Hollywood in 1983. The AIDS crisis was decimating the entertainment industry at the time, and Williamson was preaching out of the Philosophical Studies Society, a library in Los Feliz that specializes in obscure works and mystical texts. Medicine was failing to respond to the AIDS epidemic, the government vilified the dead and dying, and major religions shunned gay people seeking comfort.


“And here was a woman, then a young woman at that time, talking about a god who loves you no matter what and why love works miracles,” Williamson reflects, a soft Southern lilt in her voice. “So gay males in Los Angeles, in a very real way, gave me my career because they began flocking.”


Today, she has 13 books, seven which have landed on the New York Times best seller list. Her most successful book, A Return to Love, extols the virtues of a self-help practice called “A Course in Miracles.” She has served because the spiritual advisor to Oprah.


However her AIDS advocacy, the work she says gave her a career, has also been central to the undoing of her campaign. She has come under fire for encouraging HIV-positive followers to pray about their ailments as a treatment; according to a 1992 cover story in the Los Angeles Times, she mentioned, “The AIDS virus isn't more powerful than God.” She also wrote in A Return to Love, “Sickness is an illusion that does not actually exist. It is segment of our world-dream, our self-created nightmare.”


Williamson argues her beliefs have been mischaracterized. She says if she and her followers prayed for anything in ’80s and ’90s, it was for a cure for the virus.


“People do visualizations that you're just seeing your cancer cells destroyed,” she tells MTV News, referencing the therapeutic practice that has been shown to improve people’s mental health in the face of trauma or illness. “This has been around for decades.”


She takes offer with being labeled as a “quack;” as she sees it, she advised people to think positively at a time of fear and darkness. While in her career, she has taken a metaphysical book called A Course In Miracles and applied it to any collection of popular self-help topics, including weight loss, women’s empowerment, and finance. Much of her rhetoric advises the reader to look inward. Weak people have a tendency to blame themselves for the bad things that happen to them. Plenty of passages Williamson has written while in the years affirm that impulse.


Mark S. King, a four-time GLAAD award-nominated AIDS writer and activist, knew Williamson throughout her Hollywood days. He remembers her message planned something that people confronting the virus desperately needed nevertheless couldn’t find anywhere else.


“I know this seems easy or quaint or obvious, yet to gay boys in the mid-’80s who were dying in droves and being refused by everybody — their families, their roommates, the guy that cuts their hair, religion, the government — we were feeling forsaken,” King tells MTV News, adding that motivational authors like Wiliamson and Louise Hay, who famously claimed she had cured herself of cancer, gave King and other gay boys hope at a time where there was very little.


Though King says,“They were with us holding our hands as we lay dying,” he notes that right now, "we have this troubled relationship with Marianne and what she represented. We welcomed it at the time, nevertheless we were so injured.”


Even so, King thinks Williamson has no firm running for president. He rolled his eyes watching while in the debates and calls Williamson “a little out there for a presidential candidate.” He says, “And it's also bad because I would hate for people's last impression of Marianne Williamson to be that hippy-dippy presidential candidate that mentioned all those loopy things.”

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This isn’t Williamson’s first foray into politics: In 2014, she made a unsuccessful run for Congress in California. Five years and a number of books later, she reported her bid for the Democratic candidacy on January 29 of this year in a 43-minute speech that was later published in full on her YouTube page.


While an appearance in July’s second presidential debate gained some ground for her bid, reports surfaced not long immediately after that planned that she was anti-science, an accusation she vociferously denies. Critics have pointed out the ways in which she or her past teachings have smacked of both fatphobia and ableism, and she also had to deal with major fallout immediately after telling supporters at a New Hampshire event in June that mandatory vaccines were “Orwellian” and “draconian.” She later apologized. Two months later, CNN unearthed an episode of her radio show from 2012, in which she gave an anti-vaccination activist space to express unfounded and debunked theories, without pushing back on those claims.


She would rather not revisit the topic with MTV News. “The comment about mandatory vaccines being Orwellian and draconian was sloppy, and I mentioned so,” she says. “Vaccines save lives.”


She meant to mention something nuanced, she tries to explain, however there isn’t much room for that any time you’re running for president.


Last week, she issued a Facebook post that defended anti-vaccination viewpoints; she later unveiled a promise to create a “vaccine safety commission,” which by nature undermines the fact that vaccines are already safe.


“Williamson is no longer dog whistling to the anti-vaccine crowd,” NBC reporter Brandy Zadrozny contextualized. “She’s officially become their mouthpiece.”

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Like most of her competitors, Williamson has spent months attempting to convince people she is uniquely qualified to be the change she believes this nation needs. “I spent 35 years being very up close and personalized with people in times of crisis and seeking to articulate, to discern, and apply principles of transformation that will take us from process to opportunity,” she says. It’s obvious to her why that work would lend itself to the presidency.


It has been far less transparent for several other people, plenty of whom may have even forgotten that she is still in the race if only because she hasn’t technically dropped out. Even so, Williamson is still holding on, though her money on hand seems to be dwindling, and Rolling Stone noted that, in early November, her campaign sent an email advertising something called the Williamson Institute, which they later called a “vendor error.”


Her business would make her more cash than campaigning, or maybe serving as President, would. (She told Rolling Stone running for office is “the opposite of a lucrative thing to do.”) By her account, she’s holding tight to her belief that she’s meant to shake up the current political system — and the Democratic establishment at large — even if it comes at personalized cost to her.


“Not that they're not fantastic people, because they are actually,” she says of her Democrat competition. “But we require a disruption, a serious power disruption at this point, that will not be achieved only by external change.”


Williamson is still hoping to appeal to Democrats, sure, yet also the American public at large. That is complexified by nevertheless another element of our political sphere: Ours is a nation that treats celebrities like royalty. It could be easy for her to wield influence as a spiritual advisor rather than a politician — perhaps even easier than the months-long slog of running for office.


Dr. Sam Nelson, chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Toledo, points out that there really is a long history of celebrities running for office, however generally they were war heroes, like President Dwight Eisenhower. Before Ronald Reagan was president or maybe governor of California, he was an actor; Arnold Schwarzenegger, Cynthia Nixon, and the wrestler Jesse Ventura have all made forays into politics to varying degrees of success.


“Trump’s win kind made a lot of people think that he can be president, so can I,” Nelson tells MTV News, adding, “Different voters definitely weigh experience more heavily than others.” He points to Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who has served as mayor of South Bend, Indiana, for seven years; comparatively, other candidates have experience at the federal level going back decades.


She attributes the rise of Trump to the idea that he gave people something to believe in, to get excited about. “Donald Trump isn't just politician, he is a phenomenon, and I don't personally believe an insider political game will overcome him,” she says. She believes his campaign wasn’t about the platform he presented — indeed, his racist, xenophobic rhetoric and false promises likely mobilized a core strain of supporters more effectively than any policy he ever presented. “Democrat frontrunners aren’t ready to inspire people in the way Trump inspired his base,” she says.


“Republicans have the elitist policies, however some days an oddly more egalitarian relationship to its own constituency,” she says. “The Democrats have the egalitarian policies, yet some days almost a more elitist relationship with its own constituency.”


Early statistics, yet, indicates record-level voter enthusiasm. Both Democratic and Republican-targeting studies agencies predict unprecedented turnout in 2020, with more diversity among voters than any election in American history. And as enthusiasm for Williamson wanes, her better-polling contenders continue to rise. Sanders drew the biggest campaign crowd of any rally on October 19, where Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez endorsed his presidential bid. Warren has been labeled the “one to beat” by plenty of people, including her opponents, if their targeting of her at the fourth Democratic presidential primary debate served as any indication. And Biden advantages from outright name recognition and decades of public service, and also a perceived proximity to his former boss — even if he says he asked Barack Obama not to endorse him.


However while Williamson’s entire career has positioned her name because the brand, she believes that the brand of her candidacy goes in back of that package.


“It's not about me being the phenomenon,” she insists. “It's, are you ready? Are you ready? Are you ready?” She is pointing at people in the room who aren’t there, people she imagines joining her movement. “And I believe we are.”


This is Williamson’s bet: that a Trump-weary electorate will embrace a candidate without a road map. For now, they aren’t purchasing. The current president has veered so erratically from one policy to the next, even releasing hateful and unsubstantiated plans on Twitter before his administration derived word, that for several people right now, the idea of more uncertainty is just unpalatable because current alternative. Even in the event you never interrogate Williamson’s mysticism, the idea of voting by faith alone can be also much of a risk.