On Friday evening, a crowd of about 50 or so gathered at the Detroit Unity Temple near Palmer Park to support best-selling author and former local pastor Marianne Williamson’s second bid for U.S. president.
But don’t call her 2024 campaign a “long shot,” she says.
“That’s subliminal programming,” the 71-year-old Democrat tells the crowd. “Donald Trump was considered a long shot. Barack Obama, when he began, was considered a long shot. Bernie Sanders, a long shot.”
To be sure, the odds are not in her favor. As is typical, the Democratic Party has thrown its support behind incumbent President Joe Biden, and will not facilitate televised debates between Biden, Williamson, and recent entrant Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmental lawyer, vaccine skeptic, and nephew of former president John F. Kennedy. A recent poll found 68% of Democratic primary voters support Biden in 2024, with Williamson and Kennedy trailing at 8% and 9% respectively.
After charming viewers with her message of love and peace during the 2020 debates, Williamson dropped out before the primary, citing low polling and funds, and endorsed Sanders for president. With Sanders sitting out of the 2024 race, Williamson is running on a progressive platform calling for universal health care, protecting the environment, narrowing the widening gap of inequality, including reparations for Black Americans, and even creating a U.S. Department of Peace.
Her supporters at the Detroit rally appear to fall across the political spectrum. During a Q&A session, one fan identifies himself as an independent conservative. At one point, this reporter overhears a woman tell her date that she was afraid to post about attending the event on social media because all of her family members are Trump-supporting Republicans. “I don’t even know everything that she stands for,” she says of Williamson, adding that she was more of a fan of her self-help books. “I just know she leads with love.”
Another Williamson supporter tells me that he believed that “Trump did lots of good things for this country” but his biggest problem is that he is “a buffoon,” though he praises Williamson for sharing Trump’s knack for saying things that other politicians won’t.
“She and Trump are like two sides of the same coin, aren’t they?” he adds.
Despite Williamson’s newfound fame on the social media app TikTok, where her videos have been viewed millions of times, there are hardly any young people in the crowd, which skews older and multiracial. Many attendees appear to be members of the Church of Today in Warren, where Williamson served as a pastor from 1998 to 2002, and who she recognizes and greets warmly.
Born in Houston to an upper-class family, Williamson credits Michigan for much of what shaped her political beliefs; her father was born in Hamtramck, she says, and worked as a labor organizer for what was then the CIO. After an aimless youth that included aspirations of becoming a lounge singer, Williamson found her calling after moving to Los Angeles and preaching the 1976 book A Course in Miracles by Helen Schucman, which has been described as “The New Age Bible” and earned her many celebrity followers. But it was moving to metro Detroit and her involvement at the Church of Today that truly awakened her to the plight of everyday Americans.
“Something happened to me, and it really began when I was here, and that’s that I met many people … to whom nothing particularly bad had happened, and they were doing everything right, but life was still hard,” she tells the crowd.
“After I left Detroit, I saw that the things that I saw here were everywhere,” she adds.
Williamson believes that the U.S. is in the thralls of what she calls a second Gilded Age, a rigged system in which corporate power places its own short-term profits before the well-being of the American people.
“After I left Detroit, I saw that the things that I saw here were everywhere.”
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“There is something that we all know to be true, and that is that something has gone awry in America,” she tells the crowd. “When I was growing up in the 1970s, the average American worker could afford a house, and could afford a car, and could afford to go on vacation, and could afford for one parent to stay home if they wanted to and help raise the kids, and could afford to send their kids to college. ... Today that sounds like some quaint story out of a fairytale.”
She adds, “I realized that this was not an accident ... This was strategized. This has to do with a $50 trillion massive transfer of wealth into the hands of [the] 1%.”
@metrotimes “Something has gone awry in America.” 2024 presidential candidate and former local pastor @mariannewilliamson speaks in Detroit on Friday.
♬ original sound - Detroit Metro Times
Williamson is critical of both major political parties, saying that the Republicans have largely abandoned “the humanitarian and democratic principles on which we stand,” while much of the Democratic Party, including Biden, represent neoliberal “corporatists” who are too beholden to their donors to ever enact meaningful change.
“I’m not afraid of those donors, because they are not donating to me,” she says, comparing herself to Franklin D. Roosevelt and evoking his famous 1936 Madison Square Garden speech in which he taunted the powers that be. “They vehemently opposed him,” she says. “They called him a ‘socialist.’ They called me a socialist. But this is the difference between me and other candidates for this position, is that I would say what Franklin Roosevelt said: ‘I welcome their hatred.’”
She also denies that her point of view is particularly radical. It is the U.S. status quo, she contends, that is radical.
“Everything I’m saying is a moderate position in every other advanced democracy,” she says.
Williamson plans to return to Michigan ahead of the primary election, which Gov. Gretchen Whitmer moved earlier to Tuesday, Feb. 27. A strong turnout here could help propel Williamson’s campaign.
She faces other hurdles, however. Last week, Politico reported that a number of Williamson’s campaign staff have either resigned or were fired. Another Politico article from March alleged that Williamson was “abusive” to her 2020 campaign staff, including outbursts of anger at odds with her image as a self-help guru.
Williamson has denied many of the allegations, though she acknowledged flaws. “I am who I am,” she says when asked about them during the Q&A session in Detroit. “You know what I’m about and you know what I’m trying to do.”
After the event, Williamson meets with a throng of fans, answering questions and posing for selfies. In a brief interview with Metro Times, Williamson says that unlike in 2020, she spent “six months of serious due diligence” deliberating whether to enter the 2024 race.
“I was at that point just healing from the experience,” she says. “I’ve been in the belly of that beast. I didn’t have any naivete about it ... But I felt, ultimately, like I had an emotional fire retardant. So it was a tough decision.”
She adds, “I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t say these things.”
Williamson declines to answer questions about whether she would endorse Biden if he is once again the nominee.
“I plan to win,” she says.
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