Special Report: Marianne Williamson’s Ex- Staffers Speak Out
Seven ex-staffers who worked on Marianne Williamson’s campaign have written an open letter describing her campaign as an “exercise in deception.”
Matthew analyzes the open letter, and contextualizes its allegations within Williamson’s worldview and history.
Show Notes
EXCLUSIVE: Seven Ex-Marianne Williamson Staffers Say Stop Supporting Her
148: Marianne Williamson and Asshole Jesus — Conspirituality
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I'm Matthew Remsky with a brief report called Marianne Williamson's ex-staffers speak out.
We've covered Marianne Williamson's spiritual influencer status for several years.
We've argued that while her 40-year devotion to the channeled-by-new-age-Jesus book A Course in Miracles is a part of the general culture of magical thinking that has deteriorated the general cognitive health of the alternative wellness demographic, it's also her private business.
Until, that is, its influence looms large over her political ambitions.
It is especially everyone's business when earnest progressive voters are taken in by her apparent commitments to progressive ideals and are enthralled by her spiritually inflected rhetoric, which at times seems to echo the voice of Martin Luther King Jr.
Is Williamson a progressive?
It often sounds like it.
She speaks about Medicare for All, reparations for slavery, the horrible environmental choices of the Biden administration, and the need for a demilitarized Israel.
And recently, she's been speaking out against the bullshit of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
And that is costly for her because their supporter pools overlap in the alternative health space.
But we've identified two gaping holes in Williamson's political coherence.
A Course in Miracles is a textbook for neoliberal spirituality.
Its individualistic, victim-blaming message is delivered in the most pastel-colored authoritarian tone we've come across.
This is the voice that encourages Williamson to claim that Trump can be overpowered by love and that meditation can strengthen our immune systems against COVID.
Secondly, there are now years of public reports available that allege Williamson is prone to treating her non-profit underlings and campaign workers with a condescension that's totally unbecoming her enlightened persona.
Now, we're not surprised by this because we are very familiar with hypocrisy in alternative wellness and spirituality spaces.
But now, there's something new.
A frontline report on how these flaws allegedly render her campaign incompetent.
On July 17th, freelance journalist Jen Dyes contacted me for an interview about Williamson's lifelong engagement with A Course in Miracles.
She said that she was going to break a story for a major publication about ongoing trouble within the New Age Guru's campaign for the Democratic nomination.
This was after the widely reported departure of six key staffers earlier that month.
Now listeners might remember that back in March of this year, Politico reported out a story about Williamson's allegedly abusive treatment of her campaign staff during the 2020 campaign.
I analyzed that report and other reporting about her interpersonal behavior dating back to her non-profit work in the 1990s.
That was in episode 148, Marianne Williamson and Asshole Jesus.
Dize told me that she was interviewing a group of those ex-staffers about working conditions within the campaign.
She noted that they had all signed NDAs and that they were afraid of reprisals, but that nonetheless they felt compelled to warn voters about the nature of Williamson's campaign.
On Thursday of this past week, Dize emailed me with a link to her article, which was posted to Substack.
She explained that she had self-published because the publication that contracted the piece had killed it.
Dize had refused to include screenshots of exchanges between Williamson and her ex-staffers that would have exposed their identities.
I asked Dize to confirm the kill communications, and she forwarded me the email from the senior politics editor of a major publication.
It was as she said.
I'll link to Dize's report in the notes.
It leads with the open letter signed by these seven ex-staffers and I'm going to focus on the letter here because it presents a very clear statement about the incompatibility of Williamson's personality and New Age charisma with reality-based progressive politics.
Like Dize, I will protect the anonymity of the ex-staffers who say that they engaged professionally with the campaign, in good faith, and with altruistic ideals.
And I've spoken with two of them directly.
I've verified their identities, and I've seen their work contracts and their pay stubs from the campaign, and they've shown me the Google Doc files where they collectively worked on the open letter starting on July 12th.
They open their letter by introducing themselves as progressive campaigners with experience on over 100 political campaigns, and that they all joined Marianne 2024 in the spirit of altruism.
Then they write, quote, Today, we come forward with heavy hearts because we were deceived, intentionally or unintentionally, and we know others are still being deceived by the continuance of Marianne Williamson's presidential campaign.
Our goal in making this statement is to be transparent and bring awareness to the fact that the campaign has been repeatedly sabotaged by the candidate herself.
As a candidate, Williamson has consistently prevented staff from completing the work necessary to run a campaign or win an election, disregarding their experience and expertise.
Despite having a staff full of competent professionals, she continually micromanages the campaign, disallowing any growth or forward momentum for the campaign as a whole.
Williamson assigns tasks to staff that directly conflict with the advice of the experts she hired.
When staff complete the work as directed, their work is frequently picked apart and criticized by Williamson to the point that she backtracks on her own decisions and gaslights staff into believing the mix-up was their own doing.
Her interactions with staff go beyond that of a tough boss, as she has claimed in her defense."
And I'll just note here that in response to the March Politico report and historical reports about the working conditions she fosters, that her common response is that she is a bitch for God who is unfairly criticized by a misogynistic culture that cannot tolerate strong female leadership.
The letter goes on, quote, her behavior is frequently intimidating, demeaning, and demoralizing.
All of us have worked demanding jobs with tough bosses.
This was not the same.
Working for her did not feel tough. It felt emotionally abusive and hopeless.
There is a difference between working for a demanding boss and feeling like you're walking on eggshells in every
meeting, unquote.
They go on to describe her regular dismissal of expert advice.
And then they write, quote, We believe that her unpredictable nature and erratic behavior, which contribute to the constant turnover of campaign staff, is not conducive to leading a presidential administration or a nation.
We were wrong to believe that she is the leader our country needs at this critical time, even if the campaign were in a position to win.
However, the campaign is not in a position to win.
First, there is no plan for obtaining ballot access or securing delegates.
Second, in addition to the documented high turnover in the role of campaign manager, Williamson fails to fill other key roles such as political director, data director, comms director, etc.
This leaves staff to step in and fill the gaps, which we have proudly done as a team.
Third, efforts to resolve these issues were met with pushback, attacks, and in some cases, termination.
For example, when staff tried to raise the alarm regarding ballot access and offer a solution, those who spoke up were accused of ambushing Williamson and subsequently fired.
In the days that followed, every remaining staffer was directed to focus exclusively on events and social media by both Williamson and her new campaign manager, Carlos Cardona.
Based on our observations and our interactions with her, Marianne Williamson has demonstrated no intention of becoming president, no strategy to win this election, and no ability to effectively lead this country or follow through on her progressive platform.
For all of the reasons shared above and more, we are forced to conclude that this campaign is an experiment in deception and that we, as staff, played a role in that.
We cannot, in good conscience, allow it to continue without it being challenged publicly."
The writers then end by expressing support for the remaining staffers, but also advising them to find credible activist and political work elsewhere.
They advise donors to send their dollars elsewhere.
Both of the writers I spoke to wanted to make a distinction between Williamson's behavior and her competence.
For both of them, the interpersonal dynamics were bad enough, but what really compelled them to work on this letter was the conviction that Marianne 2024 is not a real campaign and that supporting it with time or money is a waste of altruistic energy.
I reached out to campaign manager Carlos Cardona for comment from Williamson and or the campaign.
The 33-year-old Democratic operative from Laconia, NH got back to me with the following statement.
The consistent string of unfounded attacks on Marianne Williamson's character are political hits that have nothing to do with the reality of who she is.
Vague accusations like gaslighting, dysfunctional and erratic behavior literally say nothing.
Williamson did not have a cross word with any of her online attackers, and she hopes they will move forward and find peace in their personal and professional lives.
It is only she who has been wronged here, and only those who read the spurious articles against her who have been deceived.
This hand-waving is consistent with prior responses and it doesn't sound very much like political communications in 2023.
It does sound very much like the candidate herself.
So I'll end this report by moving into analysis mode here and noting some key phrases that are distinctly Williamsonian.
And I'm talking about more than the Blanche Dubois echoes-like cross words.
Because for Williamson, a phrase like, the reality of who she is, carries the grandiose echo of a core belief taught by her favorite book, A Course in Miracles, which repeats over and over again that the follower's real identity is as a blameless child of God.
Next, to call the letter from her ex-staffers vague and to say that when they detail specific behaviors and campaign decisions, that they are saying literally nothing, this is not just a classic deflection.
It's an expression of the type of spiritual bypassing that is very common within Williamson's New Age milieu, where every criticism is either insubstantial or an indication of a psychological problem within the critic.
When she calls the letter writers online attackers, when in fact they were on-the-ground workers, this isn't just a dismissive insult.
In the world of A Course in Miracles, people who are not expressing alignment or union with God's plan are seen as delusional or illusory.
It's as if the text says they are walking around in a dream.
But there is one stunning phrase here that you probably caught.
It is only she who has been wronged here.
And this is where, in my opinion, the fatal flaw of her religion is laid bare.
Forty years of meditating on A Course in Miracles, which Williamson has logged, would encourage anyone to believe that they are at the center of the universe, that they are a holy child of God, and that, like New Age Jesus, they have been sent to heal the world with love and light and forgiveness.
But that message does not scan with the startling disavowal of accountability expressed in Cardona's response.
It is only she who has been wronged here is a one-to-one contradiction of everything A Course in Miracles teaches about self-responsibility.
And ironically, it presents a stark contrast to the self-reflection of the ex-staffers who freely admit that their participation in her campaign contributed to what they called an experiment in deception.
How does Williamson come up with a total victimhood statement like this?
If you truly believe that you are appointed to save the world with your enlightened mind, it can be very hard to interpret criticism as anything other than an attack on God's plan.
In closing, I'll just echo some of the sadness that I heard in the voices of the staffers I spoke with, who gave up positions elsewhere and months of their time.
Aligned with the sentiments expressed in the open letter, both were ardent believers in Williamson's policies.
And that's because, on paper, she sounds good.
But it's not just that sounding good is not enough.
It's that if altruistic and hardworking people surrender themselves to a person who cannot follow through, their labor and their money and their emotional gravitas has gone to waste in a moment where everyone feels very short on time.
