MARIANNE WILLIAMSON IS EXTREMELY FUCKING DANGEROUS
You almost certainly didn’t watch this week’s Democratic presidential debates. I sure didn’t. Aside from being more than a year out from the election, they’re not helpful, because the format of these early debates is almost aggressively bad. But I have read the news coverage of the first debate, and I am extremely alarmed to see self-help evangelist Marianne Williamson getting positive responses – despite some entirely justified comparisons between her campaign and Donald Trump’s.
The actual reason Williamson feels like a Democratic Trump is that she’s a scammer who has a decades-long history of shockingly dangerous rhetoric about and exploitation of marginalized people.
Naturally, she has dismissed criticism on this point as fake news.
Like Trump, she’s a talented con artist, which means that she knows how to capture voters’ attention by appropriating and regurgitating language on an issue that’s important to the party’s base. With Trump, it was his campaign promises to protect Social Security and Medicare. With Williamson, it’s her comments about reparations and racial injustice. Racial injustice is important and reparations are good. So are Social Security and Medicare. Someone who exploits people as a career is still dangerous even when they say the right things; that’s how they get in a position to exploit people. Whoever she stole her reparations commentary from was correct in their diagnosis. That doesn’t mean she cares about people of color more than any of the other marginalized groups she’s latched onto – which, incidentally, is exactly as much as Donald Trump cares about Medicare recipients.
Williamson has spent decades exploiting the predatory psychology of the “prosperity gospel,” but applied to health instead of finance: if you were pure enough of mind and heart, everything would be fine for you! Oh, things aren’t fine for you? Well, I can enlighten you, for this low, low fee! It’s Trump University, except she victimizes cancer sufferers instead of aspiring real estate agents.
Her presence is distracting and cruel to important parts of the Democratic coalition. The July debates were supposed to be about health care. If disability activists, LGBTQ voters, or women who have suffered from a dangerously disordered relationship with their bodies tuned in to hear about health care, they could not avoid the painful reality that someone on that stage thinks their health care needs would disappear if only they’d think happy thoughts. And now, if they want to learn about health care policy, they have to get their information from reporters who have publicly legitimized or even praised this person.
This is unacceptable. It needs to stop now.
When she is off the stage, we will be able to have an interesting and possibly even useful conversation about the respective vulnerabilities in the progressive and conservative coalitions to toxic con artists, and the similarities and differences between the dangerous charlatans who were drawn to each party. That will only be possible AFTER she takes her toys and goes home, which in turn will only happen when she stops making the debates with even 2% in opinion polls, or when the campaign becomes a liability for her brand instead of yet another scam. Make sure people know exactly who she is – especially if they’re starting to fall for it.
