Marianne Williamson

Marianne Deborah Williamson is an American New Age self-help guru, 2024 US presidential candidate, and author who worked for Oprah Winfrey. With little political experience, she ran in the 2020 Democratic primaries and in 2014 for the US House of Representatives, coming in 4th place. Nevertheless, she did this because she believes that the United States needed a moral and spiritual awakening. She joined the primary on January 29, 2019. She gained a big following on Reddit by capitalizing on the meme culture surrounding it. Initially, her Reddit subscribers totaled only 36, but it ballooned to around 2,400 after the Democratic debate. Additionally, after the debates, she became the top searched candidate on Google for two nights. Though she holds several reasonable left-wing views, such as supporting Medicare for All, DACA, the Green New Deal, taking climate change seriously, and tuition-free college, while also believing she could have countered Donald Trump's culture of fear with love, she also holds garbage views including anti-vaccine views and some New Age bullshit (some of which appear to bolster her anti-corporatist and anti-elite views). The amount of policy positions she has for her 2024 run is so large that it got split into 18 separate articles on her official campaign website.

Williamson announced her second campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in March 2023.

New Age blather
Williamson started her New Age career by regurgitating the 1976 book of alleged channelings known as A Course in Miracles with her own commentary in A Return to Love.

Williamson, like Trump, is a self-help guru, but Trump intends to help only himself. Trump's stated inspiration is from one of the progenitors of the prosperity gospel. But Williamson herself has also promoted prosperity gospel beliefs in her 2012 book The Law of Divine Compensation: To whatever extent your mind is aligned with love, you will receive divine compensation for any lack in your material existence. From spiritual substance will come material manifestation. This is not just a theory; it is a fact.

Williamson has offered tokens of incomprehensible wisdom and deepity in her Twitter posts.

It doesn't help that she has spouted anti-vaccine tropes.

She has made quite a few odd references to pregnancy.

Anti-vaccine views and other pseudoscientific views
Williamson, while not hard-core anti-vaccine, appears to be at least sympathetic to the anti-vaccine movement, a soft-core anti-vaxxer. Williamson believes that vaccine mandates are "Orwellian" and "draconian". She has compared vaccine mandates to abortion, saying that the mandates interfere with what people want to do with their bodies. Appeal to personal choice is a common anti-vaccine refrain that neglects children's health, and, newsflash, measles don't care about principles of bodily autonomy. Furthermore, people in general, especially immunocompromised ones, don't really like having diseases spread to them.

She later walked back on those remarks, though she still does not take a strong stance against the movement by stating something along the lines of "I think vaccines save lives but concerns about drugs are valid because Big Pharma" and believing that public safety has to be balanced with personal choice ("individual choice" again, is a common anti-vaccine buzz word and neglects those that don't have that luxury: children, people who were previously infected with measles and chicken pox and have to suffer long-term damage after the disease is gone, and immunocompromised people). She also, back in 2011, made a vague post in Facebook: "I understand the controversial aspects of vaccinations, and I share many of the concerns". During a 2015 segment with Bill Maher, she said that she believes that the "skepticism" is healthy and that while vaccines do protect against measles, she is rather concerned about the "overload" of vaccines ("too many, too soon" gambit by anti-vaxxers ) and how Big Pharma apparently covers up results of studies of vaccines they don't like.

Williamson doesn't like glyphosate, believing that it can cause cancer (no evidence has been shown to establish a link) and that it helps Monsanto. This is despite Monsanto's patent for glyphosate having expired in 2000. And since she links to Center for Food Safety, a site that heavily promotes GMO labeling, we're predicting that her views on GMOs aren't really stellar either.

On antidepressants
She believed the numbing effect of antidepressants are harmful.