Is Marianne Williamson’s promotion of A Course in Miracles any more relevant to her political persona than Biden’s Catholicism? If it demonstrably informs her every instinct and communication (as we expect it would given she sermonizes out of it every day), then yes, it is. If it leads her to suggest that meditation can help contain nuclear waste, divert hurricanes, heal the “scam” of clinical depression, or “boost the immune system” against COVID19, then yes, it is.
Is it sexist to highlight Williamson’s reported history of interpersonal abusiveness, when male politicians get away with far worse? There is definitely a double standard to resist. But when a candidate builds a political persona on being a love-and-light wayshower, it’s important to evaluate what that actually looks like ground-level. It’s also important to consider whether immature behavior might be a plausible outcome of following the Jesus of A Course in Miracles, who is a huge asshole.
Finally: if Williamson is the only candidate out there talking about reparations and M4A, is it reactionary to dismiss her on religious or behavioral grounds? Not if you’re actually interested in a functional progressive politics, free from magical thinking and charismatic bafflement.
Show Notes
Williamson’s COVID meditation, Facebook Live
Read: Pope Francis’ May prayer to Mary for the end of the pandemic | America Magazine
Marianne Williamson’s ‘abusive’ treatment of 2020 campaign staff, revealed - POLITICO
Marianne Williamson is a controversial AIDS-crisis figure for gay men.
MARIANNE'S FAITHFUL | Vanity Fair | June 1991
Project Angel Food Rocked by Feuds
The Divine Miss W — People
The Power, the Glory, the Glitz - Los Angeles Times
Marianne Williamson Bows Out as Pastor - Beliefnet
Marianne Williamson's Democratic debate performance raised eyebrows. But she's no friend of the left.
Marianne Williamson responds to Politico article alleging abuse toward staff - BBC News
Here Are The Presidential Candidates Women Have Been Donating To
Marianne Williamson on Her Insurgent Campaign Against Joe Biden ❧ Current Affairs
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
I'm Julian Walker, and this is episode 148, Marianne Williamson and Asshole Jesus.
You can follow us on Instagram, and you can follow us individually on Twitter.
And you can catch us on Patreon at patreon.com slash conspirituality, where we release weekly bonuses, we host live streams.
One of the things that I've been doing with the bonuses is I've created a series called Listener Stories.
I think you've done one too, Julian.
Oh yeah.
And, you know, one of them is called Maggie the Good Conspiritualist, where she describes actually conspirituality being part of her family heritage and it not entirely being a bad thing.
I talked to Sarah, who grew up in Scientology and has figured out how to disentangle herself from that, and also Jessica Hopper, Who spent years in the high-demand pole dance group called S-Factor.
And most recently, I released an audio essay about how recording the audio book for our upcoming book at a very swanky Toronto studio sent me down a memory hole to wonder about things like performance and self-awareness and anxiety and their relation to charisma.
That is perhaps one of my favorite pieces of work that you've ever done.
I highly recommend people go and listen to it as soon as possible.
Oh, why thank you, Julian.
Now, you are preparing a bonus on the religious history and significance of Trump launching his 2024 bid in Waco, Texas.
Is that right?
Yeah, I believe that'll be already out by the time this episode drops.
You know, it's just not an accident that Trump, who is styling himself as a victim of a weaponized justice system, a stolen election, and government corruption, launched his campaign on the 30th anniversary of the Waco siege, which embodies both end times apocalyptic religion And white supremacist militia grievance politics.
And the history of all of that is both chilling and fascinating.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, off the top here, we're also going to flag again a new development on the home front, which is that starting tomorrow, which is April 7th, our main feed episodes and briefs will be hosted by Glassbox, but they'll also be posted on Patreon, where they will run without ad breaks.
Yeah, and if you're subscribed via Apple Podcasts, you'll continue to receive Monday bonus episodes ad-free.
But for Patreon, we have this added perk, it's just easy for us to do it this way, of ad-free everything.
We've got a little post up on the website that explains the whys and the hows of the shift, including how to get your podcast app to pick up on your Patreon feed if you want to go through those steps.
And that's going to be, I think, for new subscribers, something that is probably easier to do.
The link to all of that will be in the show notes today.
Right, and one last bit of housekeeping.
Allow us to encourage you to pre-order our book through the link at the bottom of the show notes.
Just listen to this endorsement.
This is a groundbreaking and beautifully written roadmap into a topic that is so multifaceted, internally diverse, and consequential that I would not have trusted anyone to write it except these authors.
The book benefits from their years of immersive experience and deep research on conspiritualist milieus.
A masterful job.
And that comes from Amarnath Amarasingham, who's the fantastic anti-extremism researcher and professor at the School of
Religion at Queen's University in Ontario.
Marianne Williamson is running for president again.
This is her third attempt at holding public office.
In 2014, she ran as an Independent for Congress in California's 33rd.
She placed fourth.
In 2019-20, she ran for the Democratic Party's nomination and raised almost $8 million, and she got onto the debate stage twice.
And she bowed out of the race before the Iowa caucuses, and then six weeks after that, she endorsed Bernie Sanders.
At the debates, Marianne Williamson spoke eloquently about reparations for slavery as a debt to be repaid, about the water crisis in Flint being the tip of an intergenerational iceberg of financial trauma, But what caught the most attention, both positive and negative, were statements like this.
Sorry we haven't talked more tonight about how we're going to beat Donald Trump.
I have an idea about Donald Trump.
Donald Trump is not going to be beaten just by insider politics talk.
He's not going to be beaten just by somebody who has plans.
He's going to be beaten by somebody who has an idea of what this man has done.
This man has reached into the psyche of the American people and he has harnessed fear for political purposes.
So, Mr. President, 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.
Wow, you know, listening back to that, I immediately started to feel the cadence and just the rhythmic way in which she's just in the groove.
It's very well practiced and I think some of that rhythmic talent actually probably comes from years of her immersion within the book that we're going to be talking about a little bit.
Yeah, and it also, it's reminiscent of how, I think there's several politicians who do this, where when they go into that kind of preacher mode, it has to have that Southern Baptist kind of flair to it.
Right.
We don't really have a section here on Williamson's accent, but it's definitely, there's some Southern in it, but it also carries this kind of mid-Atlantic movie star quality as well, a kind of Katharine Hepburn thing.
Yes, yes.
So, you know, bits like this made Marianne stand out because they were disruptive to the typical discourse.
They grounded her brand in a kind of outsidership.
What I'm going to focus on is how in those moments we could hear her real career as a spiritual influencer shine through, specifically her 40 years of proselytizing A Course in Miracles.
Which is the New Age Bible she's been meditating on every day since 1977 and lecturing from since 1983.
There are over 2.5 million hard copies of this book in print.
In 1992, she published her own popularization of A Course in Miracles called A Return to Love, which got her onto Oprah.
And by 2012, A Return to Love had been translated into 23 languages and sold 1.5 million copies.
And I'll just say that that is also the book from which the quote, often misattributed to Nelson Mandela, Right, right.
Now, and just a note on the 2.5 million hard copies in print, I would be doubtful that many people have purchased a hard copy over the last four or five years, because one thing that the course is really sort of purpose-built for is internet indexing.
So, there are many, many sites in which you can scroll to the verse of the day, There are email lists where you can get the lesson of the day sent to you every day.
And so I think that 2.5 million hard copies is kind of like an old-school number, and I think it's been very effectively translated into online distribution.
And so part of what you're saying is it's reaching actually quite a bit.
Oh yeah.
Now, if you're not familiar with A Course in Miracles, the claim, the central claim of authority that sort of surrounds this book is that it was channeled directly from Jesus by the New York clinical psychologist Helen Schuchman starting in 1965.
And it provides a kind of universalist and non-dual update on Christian doctrine.
And when I say non-dual, what I mean is that a foundational concept in the book is that everyone and everything is God or the divine or oneness or at one.
And this means that salvation is always already our natural state.
Therefore, if we don't perceive ourselves as being at one with God or with our fellow, you know, reality or everything around us, it is simply because we
are dreaming a delusional dream of separation.
Now, I just remembered that, correct me if I'm wrong on this, Matthew, that the prescription
for this is atonement, which is often reframed as at-one-ment.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And one of the big themes of the text actually is that it claims to relieve Christian theology of notions of sacrifice and of penance and of paying back the ransom owed by Humanity's sin against God.
So, the transposition of atonement to at-one-ment is actually, it's a wordplay that carries a message, which is, you're not going to be sorry for yourself anymore.
You're going to feel as though you're unified with God.
Yeah, and it's not really an original message.
This echoes some very old principles in Indian philosophy.
What makes the book unique, though, is that it attempts in something of a final colonial act at the end of a century of Western Orientalism to absorb that Indian metaphysics fully into a Christian narrative.
However, this absorption also smashes several structural pillars in Christian theology.
So, A Course in Miracles suggests that the crucifixion And of suffering in general, which is positioned as a kind of mistaken perception.
to suffer and die along with human beings, but to realize a final lesson in the illusory
nature of the body and of death itself.
And of suffering in general, which is positioned as a kind of mistaken perception.
So we're going to get more into the themes as we go, but for now I want to underline
one really key point, which is that A Course in Miracles considers itself and presents
itself as a pinnacle of spiritual traditions, as better than Christianity.
I mean, self-consciously better than other traditions, better than Christianity, better than the Indian philosophical contexts that swirled around in the popular culture when it was first published in the 1970s.
It's kind of like the Francis Fukuyama book of the New Age, It proclaims that spiritual history is over once, you know, you open this book and that nothing else is needed but to recite its lessons.
We've run the experiment.
We did all of that dualistic shame and blame shit and then we did all of the non-dual intersection with like science of mind, Christian science, like every sense of a problem is a misperception of God's perfection.
Right.
And now we know.
So now we have the authoritative text.
This is really important for progressive Democrats to keep in mind as they consider voting for Marianne Williamson.
Her electability by undecideds and her potential to win over MAGA voters.
By any measure of Christian theology, A Course in Miracles is blasphemous.
I quote, a conversion to Christ is not a conversion to Christianity.
Right.
She says in a 1991 Vanity Fair article, and she goes on, it is a conversion to a conviction of the heart.
The Messiah is not a person, but a point of view.
By any measure of Christian culture, A Course in Miracles operates in a new age world that traffics in channeling, psychism, animism, crystal healing, and aura reading.
Right, and so if by a long shot that she beats out Biden in the primary for the nomination, Like, one of the first ad campaigns out from the more religious sector of Magaland is going to paint her as someone who thinks that she's cooler than the Jesus they're familiar with.
I would say even worse, if we're talking about the sort of media vulnerability of her as a candidate, is that when she teaches Out of a Course in Miracles, she really speaks as if she is Jesus or as if she is channeling Jesus herself.
Yeah, and they won't be wrong, because that is A Course in Miracles' core message and its core technique.
Despite the fact that Marianne Williamson stays away from crystals and the fact that New Age and evangelical cultures have found common ground through conspirituality and anti-vax politics, trans panics, COVID denialism, and QAnon, It will be dead easy to quote mine Williamson all day, digging up example after example of beliefs they will label as demonically confusing to the faithful.
She's a false prophet.
It will be much juicier and more fun for them to label Williamson's purported progressivism as demonic than it would be to do the same for, say, AOC, because she's an actual politician.
But I think that what the MAGA crowd may not pick up on, because they don't actually have an ear for cruelty, really, or, you know, good capacity for character assessment, is that the Jesus of A Course in Miracles is a real asshole.
And part of this comes from the content, and we're going to get into that, but also part of it comes from the very basic and bizarre rudeness of the channeling process.
And before we go there, let me just Remind us that when Mike Flynn spoke at that big Christian nationalist rally or service in one of those mega churches and he recited the Elizabeth Clare prophet Saint Germain kind of
Whatever the purple flame kind of stuff is.
He had a really, really hard time.
The backlash saying that he was reciting something that was not kosher Christianity and that was coming from some kind of weird, demonic New Age source was pretty intense.
The notion that Satan is the one who deceives you, especially going so far as to make you believe that they have some sort of propitious answer for you, that's like a very deep part of Christian rhetoric.
Back to Helen Schuchman.
Who said that she felt possessed by the voice of Jesus, whose authoritarian and patronizing tone she dictated to her colleague, William Thetford, who was a research psychologist for a while working in the MKK Ultra program.
By 1972, Shookman had sculpted the raw download into arced iambic pentameter, as in... Temptation has one lesson it would teach in all its forms wherever it occurs.
It would persuade the holy son of God he is a body born in what must die, unable to escape its frailty and bound by what it orders him to feel.
Wow, okay.
So, Matthew, aside from the goofy rhythm, did you catch the meaning of that?
Yeah, I mean, basically, this and many other passages in the book, you know, hundreds probably, says that believing you are a mortal human body with, you know, feelings is a sin.
It's a mistake.
So, that old chestnut pretending to be non-dual somehow.
Right, right.
Various drafts of the text titled by Jesus himself through his initial dictation, This is A Course in Miracles.
Please take notes, for example.
We're circulated amongst Helen and Bill's associates via photocopy.
The first formal publication came in 1976, and by the mid-80s, it was a New Age hit.
Williamson was an early adopter and has been a faithful popularizer, and it drips from every interview, video, and book that she's involved in.
and now every stump speech.
So today we're going to look at some common objections that we get when we have in the
past and especially me because I have a long history of A Course in Miracles when we've
written about or published on A Course in Miracles.
And a lot of these questions come from leftists who are disgusted by the DNC and with Biden, and I can sympathize with that.
These are objections to how we criticize Williamson's So question one, is it discriminatory to highlight Marianne Williamson's religious beliefs as a focus for criticism?
Are the beliefs promoted by A Course in Miracles any more crazy than Joe Biden's Catholicism, which feeds him blood and flesh every Sunday?
Yeah, good point, but in my opinion, I don't think it's discriminatory to point out the difference between levels of and applications of magical thinking and to look carefully at how religious practitioners present and frame their commitments.
As well as what kinds of social expectations are in play in those religious spaces.
So what's your take on that, Julian?
Well, you may be surprised to hear that I'm going to say that Christianity in America has a legacy of social justice activism.
You know, it's been three years, Julian, and we are coming closer and closer together.
You got through to me.
historically less problematic or superficial than a new age belief system, which tends to be mired
down in victim blaming, spiritual privilege, and in fact, denial of material reality.
You know, it's been three years, Julian, and we are coming closer and closer together.
You got through to me.
So one big thing to note is that Williamson doesn't merely use A Course in Miracles as a
source of personal counsel and comfort.
She evangelizes its messages whenever she can, including during disasters, in ways that would probably complicate her policy instincts and messaging.
For instance, in now-deleted tweets from 2011, she suggested that the radiation leaking from the Fukushima reactors could be controlled through the power of visualization.
You're not exaggerating.
Let's see angels surrounding the nuclear reactors, pouring cold water over them, keeping radiation from escaping into the atmosphere.
And another one.
The power of your mind is greater than the power of nuclear radiation.
We visualize angels dispersing it into nothingness.
Now, in September of 2019, which is a few months after that debate appearance, Williamson contributed to the discourse about Hurricane Dorian by tweeting out, Millions of us seeing Dorian turn away from land is not a wacky idea.
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.
And she deleted that tweet pretty quickly.
These are examples of her miracle-mindedness toward disasters, but her more familiar stomping ground is wellness.
How the power of the mind is really the determining factor in whether you are fat, whether you need psychiatric medications, or whether clinical depression is a scam, as she actually suggested to Russell Brand in 2018.
I've lived two periods of time that by any means today would be called clinical depression, but even that's such a scam.
All that means is somebody in a clinic said it.
There is no blood test, right?
But if you've been there, you know it.
Okay, Marianne, number one, you don't even think this is going to be done quickly?
So none of this like just, you know, today people say, well, your mother died a month ago.
Are you over it yet?
No.
Okay, it's going to take time.
Number two, who are the safe people who can accompany you on this?
Who are the people who will bear witness to your agony during this time?
What are the things that you're going to need to support you?
Make sure you have a lot of bubble bath.
Make sure that you stay with your meditation, even though you don't want to stay with your prayer work.
Make sure you show up for other people.
You will have a tendency to isolate during this period of time.
You must not do that.
You must get up and work.
Your subconscious will put aside your despair while you're showing up for other people.
And then when you come back from that you'll go back to crying again.
There is an art to navigating despair.
There is an art to navigating depression and the spiritual principles lead us there.
There are seasons of life.
I quote in that book from Rilke where he says, "'Let me not squander the hour of my pain.'"
I mean, obviously we can understand how compelling some of this rhetoric is.
And then it crosses over this line from, you know, basic advice around the ebbs and flows of one's emotional life into dismissing the notion that there are medical conditions or there's something that is in fact, you know, clinically diagnosed depression.
What is that dividing line, Julian, and why are so many of the people that we cover so willing to go over it?
Yeah, it's fascinating because as you listen to her, as I listen to her in that moment, most of what she's saying I find unobjectionable.
She's making a case for relationships, for attending to your inner life, for not pathologizing grief at the loss of a loved one.
for figuring out who the people are that you can really trust and be real with about your feelings.
All of that is fantastic. And by the same token, you know, there are people who differentiate themselves
from perhaps a more mainstream unhealthy lifestyle, shall we say, or lack of attention to
what it means to really practice self-care. And
And who will, who will say all sorts of other unobjectionable things about, you know, eating healthy foods and making sure you exercise and spending a little time every day, you know, walking out in nature and breathing deeply and how this is good for the soul.
And all of this is true.
But then when they cross that line into saying, and therefore COVID cannot affect you because you've gotten your immune system so strong through all of this, all of this like positive stuff that you're doing or therefore anyone who
tells you you have clinical depression and wants to prescribe something to you that we know the
data shows saves lives, is scamming you because really all you need to do is this common sense
kind of populist spiritual self-care.
I mean, that's where you cross that line.
And it's the people who are willing to just kind of slide by even recognizing that there's
a line there, I think have been reinforced through how much attention and how much attention
they get and how appealing that is to a certain audience to hear what seems like a hopeful
message.
It's the same with A Course in Miracles, right?
The seemingly empowering message of thought created reality is actually deeply corrosive
to people psychologically, but the package is super appealing.
Yeah, I guess I'm just really stuck on that clinical depression is a scam because there's
not a lot of space between that and COVID is a scam, is there?
Totally.
Totally.
Well, once you have taken one step into saying that I don't care, What they say the scientific evidence shows.
Right.
I am mistrustful of that in a generalized kind of conspiratorial way, and I trust these renegade outsider opinions regardless of whether or not they're supported by evidence or credentials.
Then it becomes kind of open season.
Yeah.
Now, we're not saying that Marianne Williamson denies the existence of COVID.
However, She steps up to the line in a way because on March 20th, 2020, her wellness content and philosophy met our global pandemic and
I think she got really excited because, you know, she's straight out there on Facebook Live eight days after the WHO declared the pandemic and that's how ready she was with this particular intervention and it comes from This spirituality that applies the same technique to everything.
So it was 800,000 plus Facebook followers that she led in a coronavirus meditation that she said would boost the immune system.
Now it's worth listening to the first three minutes here to see how she frames it.
Hey everybody, I want to talk to you about the coronavirus.
Not that you're not already talking about it.
It's hard to believe that in the year 2020 anybody has to defend the notion of the body-mind connection, but there does seem to be some confusion among some people.
Some people seem to think that if you pray, if you apply principles of spirituality, that somehow you're not honoring science and nothing could be further from the truth.
The whole issue of integrative approach to health has to do with a focus on the body and the mind and the spirit.
On the level of the body, we all know what's going on because the news is everywhere around us.
And I certainly support all of the efforts that need to be made, many of which should have already been made in this country anyway.
We need to develop a vaccine.
We need to develop and to disperse kits that have to do with testing.
And of course, we need to develop all needed treatments.
We need to make sure that all of the people who are working with the virus are protected as they need to be.
All of those external issues are true.
They need to be focused on.
But that's not why I'm making this video now.
I'm making this video now having to do with the spiritual aspects of our healing and our prevention.
And so I want to talk to you about the fact that the panic around the coronavirus today is actually debilitating.
Yes, we have a problem on our hands.
And yes, we need to give all necessary support to doctors, to scientists, and to political leaders to make sure that this is handled in absolutely the best way in all of our countries.
And we want to support all the people who are working very hard right now throughout the world to do what they can on an external level.
But there are many things that we can do on an internal level as well.
Now, what I want to do now is a meditation with you because what's happening is that the panic that we're all being thrown into, the fear that we're being thrown into, actually decreases the functioning of our immune system because that fear actually blocks some of the very needed energies that we need right now in order to prevent and in order to heal.
So if this is valuable to you, I recommend that you do this meditation.
I recommend that you do it in the morning.
I recommend that you do it at night.
You know, one of the most powerful things that you can do for your health.
It's a practice of, you might call it, mindfulness is applied to health.
When you wake up in the morning, no matter what your practice is, take a moment to see white light poured over your body.
And I'm going to now lead you through a very specific meditation to help you really take in as deeply as possible everything that you can do to enable your own immune system to drink in, as it were, the benefit of spirituality.
And so she goes on with like a very extended visualization of light pouring through every part of your body, cleansing the body, releasing fear and tension from the body.
So that's the meditation.
Yeah, I mean, and I do notice she's so careful to be respectful toward healthcare workers and supporting them, supporting the science, supporting doctors.
She acknowledges the necessity of vaccine and treatment development.
But the lip service kind of fades into the background as she pivots to her core message that internal work is the real work, that fear is the real problem.
And this is an idea that absolutely proliferated conspirituality channels at exactly this time.
Yeah, exactly.
And I think that it was a very, I want to say, tony or highbrow expression of the phrase, fear is the virus.
She came very close to saying exactly that.
Yeah, I mean, the interesting thing about it, right, is that these are the places where you will find people saying, well, I have the psychoneuroimmunology data.
That shows that stress weakens your immune system and that doing specific practices reduces your stress and therefore helps support your immune system.
And so why on earth wouldn't you want to include a spiritual component to how you're dealing with COVID?
Right.
Well, and you can for sure.
The question is like how Yeah, how much belief are you going to generate in your audience as you do that?
And, you know, can the immune system be boosted against a novel coronavirus?
No, it can't.
Like, that's just an absolute fallacy.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And then the thing about this, too, is that this is not new.
This is not unique to A Course in Miracles, even though it's a central belief.
This, you can find roots going all the way back to Mary Baker Eddy.
Christian science, the power of your mind attuned with God can ward off all disease.
And let's not forget you were talking about where the line is.
These are people who are so far over the line that they will keep their very, very sick kids at home as evidence of their faith in God and not take them to the hospital, which would be evidence that they have lost their faith.
Now, Williamson is extremely skilled at preempting criticism of her position and labeling it as close-minded or discriminatory.
And she'll also bring up her history in the early AIDS movement as evidence of her attitudes towards science as well.
But just check out this bit of rhetorical judo.
Some people seem to think that if you pray, if you apply principles of spirituality, that somehow you're not honoring science, and nothing could be further from the truth.
It's a total straw man argument, because the question is not about whether religious people can also honor science, but about how religious belief impacts scientific regard and priorities.
So in other words, how the principles of spirituality are applied, And what Williamson makes clear in content about mental health, radiation, and viruses is that her spirituality is instrumental to those questions.
Yeah, so we can compare her assertions about the magic of meditation with the following prayer written by Pope Francis in the early days of the pandemic.
Yeah, because the initial comparison was what distinguishes Williamson's New Age fascination from Biden's Catholicism.
How is it any more crazy?
Francis writes, Virgin Mary, turn your merciful eyes towards us amid this coronavirus pandemic.
Comfort those who are distraught and mourn their loved ones who have died.
And at times are buried in a way that grieves them deeply.
Be close to those who are concerned for their loved ones who are sick and who, in order to prevent the spread of the disease, cannot be close to them.
Fill with hope those who are troubled by the uncertainty of the future and the consequences for the economy and employment.
Protect those doctors, nurses, health workers, and volunteers who are on the front line of this emergency and are risking their lives to save others.
Support their heroic effort and grant them strength, generosity, and continued health.
Blessed Virgin, illumine the minds of men and women engaged in scientific research that they may find effective solutions to overcome this virus.
Support national leaders that with wisdom, solicitude, and generosity, they may come to the aid of those lacking the basic necessities of life and may devise social and economic solutions inspired by farsightedness and solidarity.
Mary Most Holy, stir our consciences so that the enormous funds invested in developing and stockpiling arms We'll instead be spent on promoting effective research on how to prevent similar tragedies from occurring in the future.
Now, in my view, if Francis goes on to say that reciting this prayer will have a biological effect on the virus, he would be in A Course in Miracles territory, but he doesn't and he wouldn't because his job actually here is to provide a little bit of comfort and existential perspective that might nurture the social and the moral bonds between Catholics who are playing all of those roles in the pandemic itself.
I mean my question Julian is as a born and raised but now lapsed Catholic is that I'm pretty sure that in most Catholic countries It's a pretty small minority of people who literally believe that praying along with the Pope will change material conditions.
And so, it kind of begs the question for me, like, what are Catholics doing when they say this prayer and how does it distinguish them from what Williamson is asking her followers to do?
Well, you know, with my atheist credentials, I have to offer some caveats.
I'm no fan of Catholicism or the Pope.
I'm not particularly into praying to someone who is holy by virtue of them being a virgin.
But what I hear in this prayer is much more about wanting human beings to feel inspired and resilient around their values and their commitment to do good work in the world for the benefit of humanity.
There is the little piece of like protecting the health care workers, which is a little bit on the line of like, let them not get sick through your kind of intervention.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, but that's a very, very small piece of what I heard overall.
It's an appeal to luck, isn't it?
It's an appeal to good luck.
Yeah, I agree.
And I would say, overwhelmingly, the feeling is of someone saying, if there is any way that humanity can be comforted and strengthened during this period of intense difficulty, it is my wish that that might occur.
Right, yeah.
And I'm going to use Mary, or whatever we understand Mary to be, to stand in for the subjective wish that I'm actually proposing, right?
That this is my actual hope.
Yeah.
In the face of this difficulty, I have this longing.
Yeah.
And you might, Marianne Williamson might see herself playing a similar kind of role.
But scrolling through the comments, you'll find that followers consider her role as that of a magician.
Hundreds of people saying things that you might find in queue adjacent forums.
We must trust the plan.
Nurture your own natural healing.
Some in the comments castigate her for mentioning vaccines at all, affirming that love and light are really the only answer to material problems.
One commenter made clear that the honor Williamson was offering to healthcare workers should be more specific.
So, the commenter says, a lot of us are not honoring pop science.
We are honoring the real science that is not bought by the big corporations.
Greg Brayden, Bruce Lipton, PhD, and Dr. Joe Dispenza study group.
So, meditation emoji, prayer hands emoji, and sparkling heart emoji.
Keep opening the eyes of humanity.
Oh dear, this is very unstable because the commenters are showing allegiance to her and not to the issues at hand.
Would she do this in office?
One would hope not, but the fact that she's willing to water down public health communications with
A Course in Miracles at a crucial moment and for an audience who can
and will take her advice too far is troubling.
Okay, so the second point of criticism that we have often, or I've often received,
especially on Twitter, is that it's unfair or sexist to focus on Williamson's interpersonal
behaviors, which we'll get into in a moment. And And I think this is a really important question because a lot of Williamson's support is coming from women.
70% of the donations to her 2020 primary run came from women, and certainly those people don't want to be told that their candidate is unqualified because she does some of the things that male politicians do on the regular.
But, there are 30 years of reporting now, going back, that suggest that abusiveness is a feature of Williamson's interpersonal style.
So, in a February 1992 LA Times feature about her founding and work with the Los Angeles Center for Living, we have the following.
feared in some quarters for her explosive temper, Williamson acknowledges that she often comes across
as the bitch for God.
And we also have.
Many people who have worked with her say she has an explosive temper that erupts indiscriminately
even in front of sick clients.
They contend she is a control freak who insists on becoming involved in every detail and cannot bear to be upstaged or challenged.
If you don't agree with Marianne, you're not going to be around very long, said Dick DeVogeler, a dismissed executive director who sued Marianne Center for breach of contract and later settled.
So here's another quote.
Marianne is someone who likes to control everyone around her, said journalist Jean Halberstam, who was formerly on the board for the Manhattan Center for the Center of Living.
In July of that year, in another LA Times report, this one about the controversy surrounding her managerial style, she was dubbed charismatic and volatile and temperamental and imperious.
Yes, and then more recently, so this is about three weeks ago, on March 16th, the Politico outlet dropped a report that had 12 ex-staffers on her 2020 campaign It would be foaming, spitting, uncontrollable rage said a former staffer who, like most people that spoke to Politico, was granted anonymity because of their concern about being sued for breaking non-disclosure agreements.
It was traumatic, they said, and the experience in the end was terrifying.
Williamson would throw her phone at staffers, according to three of those former staffers.
Her outbursts could be so loud that two former aides recounted at least four occasions when hotel staff knocked on her door to check on the situation.
In one instance, Williamson got so angry about the logistics of a campaign trip to South Carolina When presented with details of Politico's reporting, Paul Hodes, a former U.S.
a car door until her hands started to swell, according to four former staffers. Ultimately,
she had to go to an urgent care facility, they said. All 12 former staffers interviewed
recalled instances where Williamson would scream at people until they started to cry.
When presented with details of Politico's reporting, Paul Hodes, a former U.S. congressman
who served as Williamson's 2020 New Hampshire state director, said such descriptions mirrored
his own experience working with her.
So this is the on-record quote.
Those reports of Ms.
Williamson's behavior are consistent with my observations, consistent with contemporaneous discussions I had about her conduct with staff members, and entirely consistent with my own personal experience with her behavior on multiple occasions, he said.
So a note on anonymity and NDAs.
Politico reports that Marianne Williamson made taxi drivers sign non-disclosure agreements after blowing up in front of them.
So that's blowing up in public in front of service workers and then preemptively asking them to never talk about it.
This suggests that the behavior was well known, even by her, and that there was a system in place to mitigate it.
In an interview with Nathan Robinson at Current Affairs on the day the political report came out, she denies this allegation.
There's no shortage of male politicians who are assholes in everyday life.
And so when Nathan Robinson asked her about the alleged abuse, She said just that.
So, Julian, you do Robinson, and I'll play Marianne.
I don't want to press this too much.
Obviously, I agree with you that these are the sorts of accusations that fly, but I think it's also very difficult to know.
Well, not really.
Not if they think about their own lives.
Not if they think about having been in a high-stress situation.
Not if they think about for a man to be held accountable, he has to grab a woman's breasts.
For a woman to be held accountable, she has to fail to say please and thank you.
I think many people realize some things, and having said that, I would also say when I've raised my voice, if anybody has experienced me the way some of that was, I'm really sorry about that, and I hope that nobody will ever have anything like that to say again.
There's a double standard, but it's not saying please and thank you.
They're saying traumatic and terrifying.
I'm sorry.
If anything I did was traumatizing, then your bar is low.
Terrifying?
I don't know what more I can say here.
I've gotten angry.
I can be a bitch at the office sometimes.
If that's the worst they have on me, is that at times I've been a bitch at the office, I think I'm okay.
If anybody says, boy, she's been a bitch at the office, therefore I will not vote for her.
I have no control over that.
People just want to know.
Oh, I'm not so sure.
I think they want to know that you're for real.
Because there's a lot of concern for workers' rights and dignity at the moment.
You know what?
This is how real I am.
If you actually read my books and have heard me talk, I've never claimed to be anything other than who and what I am.
Plenty of people know me well, and I'm a decent human being.
I'm not a perfect human being.
I think I'm in that middle section.
I'm a decent human being.
That is my appraisal.
I have flaws, but I read an article like that, and I know it for what it was.
Yes, I understand, and I also had emails today from people who have worked for me showing support.
Williamson and Robinson are correct about there being a double standard.
Yeah.
But she also minimizes, deflects, and implies that the report is a hit piece against her.
And this is obvious because of the anonymous accounts.
This is a keynote in conspiracy theorizing.
But let's say it's all true, though.
Why would we care if she makes her staffers cry?
Well, I would say that her giving, caring, empathetic, politics of love persona are an essential part of her political, you know, platform.
I think everyone recognizes Biden as a kind of affable boomer with corny jokes, but no one looks to him for moral or characterological guidance.
Yeah, because he doesn't claim that everything he's saying is based on some kind of deep spiritual truth.
Right, right.
And people note, for example, AOC's accessibility on social media, her friendliness on the streets.
There's a lot of people whose, you know, itches for charismatic radiance get scratched when they see her, but that's not what she banks her political capital on.
So, if Williamson's love and light persona is demonstrably untrue, that's a core platform item that's now in doubt.
And I'm going to argue as well that New Age or abusiveness in New Age circles is important and distinct from other forms of religious abuse.
First of all, in this situation, the politics are coded left, which means it's like particularly deceptive.
And I think Robinson is right to bring up, you know, this is an issue with regard to workers' dignity.
But adding to that deception, We're familiar with a number of aspects of the New Age culture that Williamson is central to that make interpersonal abusiveness hard to detect and therefore, you know, more important to look for.
Yeah, I mean there's this idea that has been translated in different ways across different subcultures that's called crazy wisdom and it's imported from Indo-Tibetan sources.
It refers to The Bizarre Behaviors of Mystics and Saints.
It's the premise that an enlightened teacher might have no choice but to behave deplorably or abusively so as to rattle a benighted normie out of their sleep.
So, this is Yogi Bhajan, this is Chogyam Trungpa, Bhikram Chowdhury being accused of rape, but then saying if he has sex with his students, they become enlightened.
It's a fancier version of saying this is for your own good.
And I've also heard it framed as the enlightened person He knows and says and does things that the unenlightened person can't possibly hope to understand because they haven't crossed that threshold into enlightened omniscience.
Alright, so there's crazy wisdom on one hand.
Secondly, in New Age culture, there is a relentless emphasis on self-responsibility.
So, A Course in Miracles brings every problem and suffering and conflict back to the level of individual perception.
If you see an injustice or sin, you are projecting it outward.
If you get angry, it's all coming from inside you.
So, as Chapter 6 says, Julian?
Always involves projection of separation, which most ultimately must be accepted as one's own responsibility rather than being blamed on others.
Anger cannot occur unless you believe that you have been attacked, that your attack is justified in return, and that you are in no way responsible for it.
Okay, so what is the Course's answer to this?
And we see it come clear in Chapter 2, which says, the sole responsibility of the miracle worker is to accept the atonement for himself.
Which is the moment I throw the book across the room.
Right.
This means you recognize that mind is the only creative level and that its errors are healed by the atonement.
Once you accept this, your mind can only heal.
By denying your mind any destructive potential and reinstating its purely constructive powers, you place yourself in a position to undo the level confusion of others.
Yeah, so there's nothing in this self-obsessed solipsistic book that calls for or supports the notion of accountability in response to wrongdoing.
And I'll say even further, this is such poison for interpersonal relationships.
And I've seen it firsthand again and again and again because anything you're upset about, well, you're obviously projecting, you've obviously lost touch with the higher truth in the situation, and it just, it gums up any possible interpersonal hygiene or real empathy or forgiveness or, you know, apology.
It's just a mess.
I mean, there's nothing worse than listening to two course students in a romantic relationship have an argument with each other, right?
Because each of them really believes or wants to believe that they are somehow taking the higher road or they're seeing the truth about the other or they're refusing to have a special relationship or stuff Yeah, and in fact, this is the problem, right?
This is an ultimate solution ideology.
There is an ultimate solution that hovers behind all of the details of what might be going on in the world, what might be going on with illnesses, what might be going on with interpersonal conflicts, and that's always the answer.
And if we can always just keep defaulting to that answer, everything will automatically figure itself out because it's the higher truth and everything else is an illusion.
And that's a bunch of bullshit.
Okay, so related to this self-responsibility piece, A Course in Miracles creates the pretense of anti-authoritarianism, because if all change and healing is a matter of finding a miraculous internal shift in perception, it would seem that you're really free to help yourself.
But the freedom really only comes from accepting, like, 100% everything that asshole Jesus tells you.
Also, A Course in Miracles students pride themselves on being anti-condemnation and anti-punishment.
The book rejects the notion of sacrifice and views punishment as a mistaken response to any wrongdoing, because wrongdoings themselves are one's own projections.
But in practice, peak responsibilism will always punish the individual.
Nowhere is this more visible than in the book's discourse around illness.
Yes, so here's where we always have to mention Lesson 136, which is titled, Sickness is a Defense Against the Truth, which basically shakes out to asshole Jesus telling the course reader that because the body is an illusion, You make up to prove that you are separate from God, that sickness is the further delusion that you are now the victim of this dream or false premise.
So the translation is that you perceive yourself as having cancer or AIDS because then you can win a flimsy and selfish sympathy through your victim status.
Now, in my recent bonus episode, it was called Marianne for Prez, New Age Jesus for VP, I quoted two of the verses from this garbage lesson, and they go like this.
Sickness is not an accident.
Like all defenses, it is an insane device for self-deception.
And like all the rest, its purpose is to hide reality, attack it, change it, render it, inept, distort it, twist it, or reduce it to a little pile of unassembled parts.
The aim of all defenses is to keep the truth from being whole.
The parts are seen as if each one were whole within itself.
Yeah, so much for being anti-condemnation, right?
So, next verse.
Sickness is a decision.
It's not a thing that happens to you.
Quite unsought, which makes you weak and brings you suffering.
It is a choice you make, a plan you lay, when for an instant truth arises in your own deluded mind and all your world appears to totter and prepare to fall.
Now are you sick.
That truth may go away and threaten your establishments no more.
Okay, so how did a person who believes such things come to be a leading figure of caregiving during the AIDS epidemic in Los Angeles?
We've mentioned this before on the podcast that her legacy in that area is quite mixed, that some remember her giving earnest attention and care to marginalized gay men when no one else cared.
But then others claim that she implied to many dying men that if they would only love themselves, or if they would only love God more, they would be healed.
The AIDS virus is not more powerful than God, she's quoted as saying in the LA Times.
So, Julian, you used to actually go and see her preach back then.
What do you remember about that?
Yeah, so during my first year in LA when I was going to Musicians Institute in Hollywood, the church that she spoke at every Saturday morning was literally halfway in between my apartment and the music school that I walked to every morning during the week.
And so my girlfriend and I would go and see her at that little church.
And she was beautiful, she was charismatic, she was eloquent, she was authoritative.
And she talked about A Course in Miracles as being a course in spiritual psychotherapy, so that was very appealing.
There were probably like 20 people who would show up and sit in the pews of this little church.
And what I remember, one of the things I remember, because it was the first time I ever saw someone doing this, again I was 19 years old, was that there was sort of a Q&A period And there was a gay man who had some questions for her around HIV.
And...
I just remember her cutting him off at one point, saying, I'm going to stop you right there.
I'm just, okay, we've heard enough now.
I know where you're going with this because you we've, we've known each other for a while now.
And this is when you start to get into your whole victim kick.
Oh gosh.
And it's just, it's just something that you recycle.
and I'm gonna ask you to stop and sort of recenter yourself in, you know, fill in the gap
of whatever kind of spiritual truth or like picture white light around yourself
or something like that, that she went into.
And I remember simultaneously having that experience of being very impressed by this, by the boldness of it,
but also feeling like something's a little bit off about this
And she did it some other times with people just asking questions about interpersonal stuff, difficulties with relationships or, you know, my brother who's a crack addict or something like that.
You know, I'm going to stop you.
You're getting into that victim rumination and I'm going to remind you of the higher truth.
Now, the other thing I'll say, so this would have been 1990.
I went to see her years later, not that many years, like 94, again, right after the big earthquake that happened in LA.
Right.
And she was at a big amphitheater and there were a lot of people there and she came out in like a silk dress and she had like a cape.
It was much more like, wow, okay, she's really come up in the world.
But that was the time seeing her speak that I walked away just shaking my head and going, yeah, I'm not coming back again because she talked about the earthquake.
As being a wake up call from the universe or like the earth really telling us that we were not living righteously.
Right.
And that the way our government was run and the way that we were, you know, thinking about reality was somehow out of balance.
And that's why the earthquake happened.
Wow.
And I was just like, Oh God.
So, okay.
So you're 24 at that point or 23?
Worldly wise.
Yeah.
At that point or 23?
Worldly wise.
Yeah, so you graduated.
All right, well, I think we can hear some harmony between reports of Williamson's behavior and her hero,
the pious, the condescending, the emotionally avoidant Jesus channeled by this book,
who at all times is leveling these three insults, Jesus is saying, you are deluded about reality.
Secondly, the absolute truth of my teachings is inescapable.
And thirdly, any resistance you have to me is further delusion.
Yeah, the term gets overused lately, but there's some gaslighting going on here, which is like, you know, an abusive parent would be unconsciously proud of.
Right.
Here's the thing, the fact that A Course in Miracles claims to be a channeled text means that the reader becomes its channel.
The daily lessons are written by Jesus, but they're meant to be recited and meditated upon by the normal person, as if they were Jesus.
And surprisingly, A Course in Miracles teachers struggle To not sound like assholes.
Right.
Okay, yeah.
So, consider lesson 76.
It goes, I am under no laws but God's.
Now, this sounds like some constitutional sheriff stuff right there, but in a more conventional religious diction, this might be a humble admission that human knowledge and lawmaking is limited.
But if the I is also Jesus, the reader is encouraged to mimic this kind of cringy grandiosity.
Yeah, and sometimes Jesus actually mocks the reader.
In Lesson 76, the trolling takes the form of medical ableism.
You really think a small round pellet or some fluid pushed into your veins through a sharpened needle will ward off disease and death.
So, asshole Jesus coaches A Course in Miracles students to literally LOL at the idea that medicine, which does not operate under God's laws, again, I got your non-duality right here, can help.
Okay, so does asshole Jesus turn someone into a bitch for God?
I don't think it's a foregone conclusion, but you know, if you spend years of your life kind of reading his book as if it was coming from him and kind of pretending to be him declaring your glory and invulnerability all over town, What are you going to do when the world doesn't respond to all of this radiant wisdom?
Like, are you going to tantrum?
Are you going to throw a phone at staffers and then deny it?
Are you going to punch a car door so hard that you wind up in the ER?
Asshole Jesus is safe and serene within the pages of his dumb blue book, but if he had to do something in the world with complex people who don't echo his every word, he might be a little fragile.
And if you were trying to take care of him because you loved parts of his message, but you'd heard him scoff at people taking medication for moods, what would you do?
What medicine or help or expert advice might asshole Jesus actually accept?
So, homestretch.
Whenever I criticize Williamson's evangelization of A Course in Miracles, and I argue that it's incoherent with functional progressive politics, her followers, who are extremely invested in her as an iconic and enlightened figure, Always point out that she is the only candidate on the national stage backing progressive policies like Medicare for All, electoral finance corruption reform, the environment, and reparations for slavery.
So they ask, is it really fair to dismiss these good ideas to serve some ideological purity test?
And so my personal answer is that Medicare for All, finance reform, the environment, and reparations are all like no-brainer leftist positions that I fight for in all cases anyway.
So Williamson is not somebody I see as uniquely progressive as a politician.
So the question then becomes, is this the candidate who is able to coherently and credibly represent those positions?
And the answer for me is no.
You know, firstly, being a spiritual influencer and a presidential candidate are gear-grindingly different jobs.
And secondly, A Course in Miracles is just hot garbage.
And third, just imagine what will happen to her influencer persona when the MAGA media gets going on her.
And lastly, I don't think that Williamson's positions are grounded in real political analysis.
They are delivery devices for her spiritual product.
So, I've got more to say on this last point, but Julian, what's your take on this question?
I mean, I don't think I need to sum it up any better than you already just did.
I mean, you can have ideas that I agree with alongside many ideas that disqualify you In my opinion, from holding the kind of public office that you're running for.
It's pretty simple.
For two years, I've published on Williamson's usage of A Course in Miracles in all of its melted ways.
And then people will always ask me, but have you read her book on politics?
And what they're referring to is A Politics of Love, A Handbook for a New American Revolution.
She came out with it in 2019.
So finally, begrudgingly, I bought the book.
Julian, have you read any of it?
You've got to be kidding.
No, absolutely not.
I mean, look, there's nothing in any of her history, in any of her writings, in any of her speech making that I've heard that would suggest that reading another book by her that happens to be sort of positioned as a political book would somehow now have deep grounded insight.
I just, I don't see the point.
Well, listen, here's the point, and we're going to see if your view holds up, because I'm going to ask you to read a couple of quotes.
So here's the first one you've got here.
A belief in separation is always at the root of the problem, and a realization of our oneness is always at the root of its solution.
Oh, no, wait a minute.
That's from A Return to Love.
Or which book is that from?
Let me see.
No, no, no, that's from a politics of love.
No.
Alright, next one.
We don't just need a progressive politics or a conservative politics.
We need a more deeply human politics.
We need a politics of love.
Love is the angel of our better nature, just as fear is the demon of the lower self.
And it is love, not fear, that has made us great.
When politics is used for loveless purposes, love and love alone can override it.
It was love that abolished slavery.
It was love that gave women suffrage.
It was love that established civil rights.
And it is love that we need now.
So did you know, Julian, that love abolished slavery?
I did not know that.
I think it may be slightly more complex.
Okay, and also you grew up in South Africa and I was wondering, like, could we apply this to, you know, something that you're familiar with?
Was it love that abolished apartheid?
Meditation, maybe?
Did apartheid stop when the whites changed their consciousness?
Or when the black people let go of the story of being victims?
No.
Apartheid ended when the country became ungovernable after about a 30-year period of civil unrest and struggle.
Armed attacks against infrastructure and the minority government at a certain point realizing that there would be such an extraordinary bloodbath if they didn't start figuring out how to do some kind of power sharing that they had better cover their asses.
Right.
Okay, so it wasn't just love.
No.
Okay, so I'll read a few quotes.
What is going on in America today is not just a political contest.
It's a spiritual contest.
Bigger forces are at work than mere political strategizing can cast from our midst.
The darkest parts of the human psyche are seeking political expression in America and around the world.
Nothing short of a politics of love can drive them from our midst.
I mean, this is the kind of stuff that just makes me furious because...
every... no matter what your political position is, it's rooted in some kind of values proposition.
And the angling to try to make it seem as if you have the special version of that values proposition
that is uniquely transformative in its power because of its absolute metaphysical truth...
It's just, it's, it's so flimsy.
Okay.
Last one.
Political manifestations, both good and bad, are but outer reflections of internal realities.
They emerge from realms beyond what the eye can see.
Love and lovelessness are constantly duking it out in our hearts and in our world.
Slavery, oppression, racism, and so forth are more than mere political wrongs.
They represent spiritual malfunctions.
Until we deal with our problems on the level from which they emerge, then no matter what we do to solve them, they will simply morph into other forms.
Whether it is a health problem, or a money problem, or a relationship problem, or a political problem, both the source of any problem and the source of its solution lie within our consciousness.
You know, it's word salad, and it's exactly what I... She basically made the argument I was attributing to her earlier about some kind of ultimate solution ideology, right?
That there's this thing that's at the center of all of it, and it's just superficial.
So, the subtitle is A Handbook for a New American Revolution.
And, you know, I looked in vain for notes on revolution.
I also looked for citations or detailed plausible, you know, policy ideas that actually account for on-the-ground realities, and I came up empty.
So, that's because I think the book really isn't about politics at all.
It's about vibes.
Yeah, posturing.
I mean, one last thing to say about this book.
We just read a few quotes, but it is all like this, every single page.
Vagaries and deepities all tied up in a kind of spiritual bow.
And so here's what I want to suggest, that having been in the New Age world for And, you know, alongside it for more years, I can say that one of the top monetizable skills is the ability to, you know, miracle riff or crystal riff.
You know, so what I mean is that the content on offer is usually extremely reductive and it often, you know, gets this pointed expression through aphoristic koans that just flow like a river.
And A Course in Miracles is a long book, but you shouldn't be fooled because it only says a few things over and over and over again.
And some of those quotes that you were just reading could be repurposed for anything.
They could be... For any other book.
For any other book and also for any other set of claims.
Like you could easily hear it as referring to organ cleansing.
You can treat all manner of different ailments in all of these different ways, but until you cleanse your liver, And I'm the one who knows how to cleanse the liver through this special technique that I have, you're going to continue having problems.
So let's go to the root.
It's even more vague than that because she's using consciousness where you're using liver there, right?
So until we address your energetic system, your physical system is going to continue to manifest dis-ease.
Right, exactly.
Yeah, and that's why we have a political mess.
Alright, so what I would ask people to consider when they listen to Williamson speak is that
I think she is as well rehearsed as anyone on any public forum.
And a lot of her positions line up with those of Bernie Sanders, who can also launch into
rhetorical set pieces at the drop of a hat.
Like every politician has to do this.
They have to be able to give the sound bites.
They have to be able to explain policy issues in 25 words, 50 words, 100 words.
They have to do it while they're like walking down the sidewalk.
They have to do it while, you know, they're just coming off stage.
You know, they have to develop these kind of repetitive skills.
But Sanders built those chops in politics as a discourse and as a practice while legislating.
And Williamson had to develop a skill that functions In a way that I would call a near-enemy to that, which is that in New Age and ACIM spaces, charismatics are just encouraged to riff in this kind of miracle language, to memorize keywords and phrases that have really deep cognitive and emotional impacts.
And the content is rarely the point, because the objective is to produce an entranced state in which the listener is convinced of the elevated spirituality of the speaker.
And so that's what I hear in my head as I'm reading Williamson's Politics of Love.
You know, aside from it being a Trojan horse for A Course in Miracles into political discourse, the main thing that I read and hear in my head is this rhetoric of entrancement, which doesn't have to be specific or grounded in reality if it can pull hard on the heartstrings.
So, I don't know, what do you think, Julian?
Is that too harsh?
Any final thoughts?
No, I don't think it's too harsh.
I think it's part of a broader phenomenon that is part of what we're tracking, but it's even bigger on the global stage in terms of the The misinformation crisis, in terms of the loss of trust in institutions, in terms of how conspiracy theories have become widespread, in terms of things like Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump and, you know, everything.
There's just, there's such a, there's such a lot of this going on in the world right now.
And the way I would frame it is that regardless of where someone might be on the political spectrum, If the emphasis is on this kind of populist appeal to being an outsider, to being a common person, to being someone who has common sense solutions to the questions or to the problems that lifelong politicians and deep state insiders have not been able to solve because they're so corrupt and they're
They're so stupid and they're so in bed with all kinds of really bad ideas.
Only some heroic figure from the outside can come along and with either some kind of charismatic flourish or some kind of spiritual cadence or some kind of, I'll punch them in the face if they don't listen to me because I'm on your side.
If someone like that is being touted as fit to be in one of the most consequential positions in the leadership of a country or of the world, We're in really big trouble and we've lost the plot.
It's another one of those lines that's been crossed over.
So are you going to be voting for Marianne Williamson in the primary, Julian?
No.
Alright, thanks everyone for listening to another episode of Conspiratuality Podcast.
