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 reason that the cynical theater critics of the American political press think Williamson is the Democrats’ Trump is that she’s a wealthy kook they don’t take seriously.
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.
Like Trump, Williamson is “skeptical” of vaccine science - that is to say, an anti-vaxxer. Unlike Trump, she is able to stick with a consistent position for more than five seconds. Williamson has a documented history of manipulating vulnerable people to reject the medical care they need in favor of her particular brand of crystal-mongering “positive thinking.” In the 1980s, she profiteered off the AIDS crisis, telling HIV+ gay men to think of the disease as their “Angels-In-Darth Vader-Suits” and promising that she could coach them to overcome it with acceptance and positive thinking. Please, please pay attention to gay men who lived through that era about how fucking monstrous this is.
She is hostile to psychiatric medicine. In practice, that mostly means she lectures people to stop taking their meds. But she, like the right-wing propagandists at InfoWars, also blames mass shootings on antidepressants. Seriously. And she sells eating disordered rhetoric dressed up as new age woo.
In fact, she’s hostile to medical science in general. She claims in her book that “cancer and AIDS and other serious illnesses are physical manifestations of a psychic scream” because “sickness is an illusion” that “does not actually exist” and only seems to respond to medical care because of the placebo effect.
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.
Unfortunately, she is also like Trump in that the press fucking loves her and is giddily shouting over the people she endangers.
The issue here is not only that she is a bad person who should not be president, although that is obviously true and we’ve all seen how that shit can get out of hand. It’s also that just being on the stage with decent people legitimizes her. Her airy-fairy magical thinking receives praise for “recognizing the gravity of our moment” and becomes an excuse to denigrate the serious candidates who are offering compassion for people’s problems along with rationally defensible public policy ideas to solve those problems.
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.
