Marianne Williamson Makes Complete Sense Now
Politico published a piece Thursday that concludes, on the basis of interviews with 12 of her former campaign staffers, that spiritual-author-turned-Democratic-presidential-candidate Marianne Williamson — the one who always preached about the need for a return to love and forgiveness in America — is not-so-secretly an abusive, toxic jerk.
“It would be foaming, spitting, uncontrollable rage,” one former staffer told Politico. “It was traumatic. And the experience, in the end, was terrifying.”
The allegations range from the physical — throwing her phone at staffers and pounding a car door until her swollen hand landed her in urgent care — to the emotional — she would scream at her employees until they cried.
In a 2019 email obtained by Politico, her then-Iowa state director, Robert Becker, resigned from his position, concluding that Williamson’s treatment of staff was “belittling, abusive, dehumanizing and unacceptable,” and that he could not “in good faith subject any future campaign hires to this kind of vitriol.”
Williamson bases her spirituality on the 1976 New Age–associated book A Course in Miracles, which author Helen Schucman said was dictated to her by Jesus. The volume gained widespread fame after Williamson vouched for it on Oprah.
The book concerns miracles, and it argues that the greatest miracle is to gain an awareness of love. Schucman writes that the book’s purpose is to remove “the blocks to the awareness of love’s presence.”
In this view, love — God — is all that is truly real. The negatives in the world or in ourselves, on the other hand, don’t actually exist.
“That’s what this world is: a mass hallucination, where fear seems more real than love,” Williamson wrote in her 1992 book A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles.
“Fear is an illusion. Our craziness, paranoia, anxiety and trauma are literally all imagined,” she continued. “That is not to say they don’t exist for us as human beings. They do. But our fear is not our ultimate reality, and it does not replace the truth of who we really are.”
Oprah said of the tome, “I have never been more moved by a book.”
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Hillary Clinton made an amusing mistake in 1998 when she delivered the commencement address at Howard University in Washington, D.C.
The then–first lady, upon receiving an honorary doctorate of laws, decided to share an inspiring quote from Nelson Mandela with the historically black university.
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate,” said Clinton to graduates standing under umbrellas in pouring rain. “Our deepest fear is that we are all powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.”
The problem was that Clinton lifted that line from Marianne Williamson’s A Return to Love, not a speech by the then-president of South Africa.
The full quote continues on, saying: “We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God.”
Again, for Williamson, our flaws don’t define us or even apply to us — because anything that isn’t love doesn’t really exist.
As she summarized in a 2012 Facebook post: “Only love is real, and nothing else exists. All the love we gave is real; all the love we received is real. Everything else is illusion, which only enters into the present if WE BRING IT WITH US.”
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On the backs of her loyal followers, spiritual-but-not-religious baby boomer women who purchased her spiritual self-help books and watched her on Oprah, Williamson managed to register 1 percent support in three separate primary opinion polls in 2019 and receive donations from 46,663 Americans, winning her a spot at the first Democratic presidential debate.
At the debate, on June 27, 2019, her concern for the impact of “chemical policies” on Americans’ health and her statement that her first call as president would be to then–New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern to say, “Girlfriend, you are so on,” drew amusement and internet attention.
At one point in the debate, Williamson began to deliver a soliloquy filled with dramatics that she addressed to then-President Donald Trump. She claimed that he “harnessed fear” while she would “harness love.” It was delivered in her signature accent that a writer at the New Republic once noted sounds “like someone who just dumped Humphrey Bogart.”
“So, Mr. President,” said Williamson, “if you’re listening, I want you to hear me, please. You have harnessed fear for political purposes, and only love can cast that out. So I, sir, I have a feeling you know what you’re doing. I’m going to harness love for political purposes. I will meet you on that field, and, sir, love will win.”
In her 2024 presidential campaign, which she formally announced on March 4, Williamson continued that vision, based in her spiritual beliefs, of replacing fear and hatred with love in order to solve America’s problems.
“It is our job to create a vision of justice and love that is so powerful that it will override the forces of hatred and injustice and fear,” she said at her announcement speech at Union Station in Washington, D.C.
During her 2019 campaign, Williamson claimed that she would be the one to bring forth that love. The love the nation needs, she explained, “will emerge from something I’m the one who’s qualified to bring forth.” It would be her, she claimed, as opposed to someone like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, whose “wonkiness” Williamson dismissed, saying it would not be able to “deal with this dark psychic force of collectivized hatred that this president is bringing up in the country.”
With Thursday’s Politico report, we now know that at the same time when Williamson preached herself as the one who could summon the love needed to solve America’s political problems, “[s]he would get caught in these vicious emotional loops where she would yell and scream hysterically.” At least, that’s the account of another anonymous former Williamson staffer bound by an NDA agreement.
Williamson denies the claims. But, even if the allegations are true, if we take Williamson at her word, then there’s nothing she needs forgiveness for.
As she wrote in A Return to Love: “If a person behaves unlovingly, then that means that, regardless of their negativity — anger or whatever — their behavior was derived from fear and doesn’t actually exist. They’re hallucinating. You forgive them, then, because there’s nothing to forgive.”
“Only love is real,” she said, dismissing the notion of sin. “Nothing else exists.”
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