2020 Democratic presidential candidate and self-help author Marianne Williamson has found politics to be a bizarre world. Speaking into a hot mic when she thought she was off camera on Tuesday, Williamson said she has found conservatives to be much nicer to her than liberals, whom she has recently criticized for becoming too anti-religion.
“What does it say that Fox News is nicer to me than the lefties are? What does it say, that the conservatives are nicer to me? It’s such a bizarre world!” Williamson said on “America This Week.” “You know, I’m such a lefty. I mean, I’m a serious lefty, I understand why people on the right call them ‘godless,’ and I mean it’s like, I didn’t think the left was as mean as the right, they are.”
.@marwilliamson: “What does it say that the conservatives are nicer to me? I’m a serious lefty but they are so — I understand why people on the right called them godless — I mean, it’s like, I didn’t think the left was as mean as the right, they are.” pic.twitter.com/0iXkWPRdAW
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) September 12, 2019
In recent weeks, Williamson has made several arguments that have been popular among conservatives engaging in the culture wars, such as denouncing those who mock “thoughts and prayers” in the eyes of tragedy as elitist and condemning those who shut down honest debate as so often happens on university and college campuses.
As the Carolinas braced in the path of Hurricane Dorian after the storm devastated the Bahama Islands, Williamson called on followers to use the “power of the mind” and pray for the direction of the storm to change.
“Millions of us seeing Dorian turn away from land is not a wacky idea,” Williamson wrote on Twitter. “It is a creative use of the power of the mind. Two minutes of prayer, visualization, meditation for those in the way of the storm.”
Williamson later deleted the tweet after wide-ranging mockery from elites unfamiliar and likely uncomfortable with Williamson’s New Age theology, following up with a criticism for those who engaged in such insults.
“I was born and raised in Texas so I’ve seen it,” Williamson said. “Millions of people today are praying that Dorian turn away from land, and treating those people with mockery or condescension because they believe it could help is part of how the overly secularized Left has lost lots of voters.”
I was born and raised in Texas so I’ve seen it. Millions of people today are praying that Dorian turn away from land, and treating those people with mockery or condescension because they believe it could help is part of how the overly secularized Left has lost lots of voters.
— Marianne Williamson (@marwilliamson) September 4, 2019
Earlier this week, Williamson went on Fox News’s “Fox and Friends” and decried those who stifle free speech and “honorable debate.”
“I have seen, that on the left and on the right, there are too many people that do not recognize how important honorable debate is in a democracy,” Williamson said in response to a question on criticizing liberals as mean in a recent interview with The New Yorker. “You can disagree with somebody’s opinion, but that doesn’t mean you should be shutting them down or lying about them or misrepresenting their views. That’s not a left-right issue.”
Williamson will be absent from Thursday night’s debate in Houston as the race’s top ten Democratic candidates face off at Texas Southern University for the third Democratic primary debate.
While Williamson qualified for the first two rounds of debates held in Detroit and Miami earlier this year and met the heightened donor threshold to be on the Houston stage, she failed to garner at least 2 percent support in enough polls to qualify for the next two rounds of debates, receiving enough support in only one poll pre-approved by the Democratic National Committee.
The outsider candidate only in her second race for high public office has framed issues through a unique lens, distinguishing the spiritual guru from the rest of the candidates. Yet her message has failed to catch on with voters.
On policy, Williamson is indeed as left as they come, supporting a universal basic income, the Green New Deal, socialized health care, and reparations for slavery. Williamson has rejected offering deep, complex plans but instead has challenged her competitors to win on a message of love.
While already a national figure with frequent media appearances on influential television shows such as “Oprah,” Williamson made her debut to millions of Americans at the first Democratic primary debate in June. In her closing statement, Williamson pledged to “harness love for political purposes” to combat what she referred to as a president reaching into the “psyche” of Americans to “harness fear” to promote his political agenda.
At the second Democratic debate, Williamson branded the White House a “dark psychic force” spewing a “collectivized hatred” across the country as she made her case for why Democrats must think broader in challenging the president next fall.
