SUMMARY REVIEW WITH LINKS
Marianne Williamson, A Politics of Love: A Handbook for a New American Revolution (HarperOne, 2019)
6 Stars – The Only Authentic Democratic Candidate
Reviewed by Robert David Steele
This is a six page summary review of a political-cultural-economic-social transformation that is both needed and possible, by the one person seeking the Democratic nomination for the presidency who appears authentic, inclusive, and truthful. Links to free online supporting documentation for the author's radically humanistic and deeply spiritual proposals are included in the formal review. An additional five pages of links and one paragraph extracts are appended to give the reader easy access to a range of mass media depictions of the author that range from angelic to whacko.
I was so deeply impressed by Marianne Williamson’s authentic, inclusive, and truthful nature – all five minutes that she was allowed – during the second Democratic Clown Show, that I looked her up on my blog to find that she is the real deal – here is an edited work of hers that I appreciated in 2001, a year after which it was published.
Review: Imagine–What America Could Be in the 21st Century
My 5 star title then was “Vastly More Practical (and Political) Than Title Suggests.” I also noted then – 16 years ago – that the author was associated then with the Global Renaissance Alliance, a spiritually-oriented group that nurtured Citizens Circles.
Marianne Williamson’s presence in the 2020 presidential primaries is not an accident. She has been growing into this role as a spiritual complement to President Donald Trump (she has a great deal in common with First Lady Melania Trump, to whom I have mailed a gift copy of this book, and another copy to Kellyanne Conway). America needs to see more of the First Lady, and I would very much like to see the First Lady reach out to Marianne Williamson who shares her passion for helping kids in school “be best” and help – in her own way – make love for our citizens first and then humanity generally – the centerpiece of our President’s forthcoming 4th of July speech and a moderating influence on his second presidential campaign. While the President makes it clear that he cares deeply about the average American, embracing Marianne Williamson’s core points will make him a better president. Just as I have been urging the President to enlist Dr. Cynthia McKinney, I would urge him to enlist – and LISTEN TO – Marianne Williamson. The Democrats and media are trashing her because they fear her. I do not fear her, I VALUE her, and am quite certain the First Lady and Kellyanne Conway will see my point.
Marianne Williamson is the ONLY Democratic candidate that is truly authentic, inclusive, and truthful, and the only one who clearly articulates – as she does in this book far more than she was allowed to articulate during the debate – why we need to flip our government right side up and restore both the bottom-up aspect – the government must serve the citizens, not its Deep State bribers and blackmailers – and the love aspect. She AGREES with Candidate Trump (and Ron Paul) on so many fronts.
Perhaps even more importantly, she is so different from the other candidates in her spiritual embrace of reasoned civil conversation, that she and George Will may be the new pairing, as Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich once were. The below review should be read as a complement to this review.
Review: The Conservative Sensibility by George F. Will – Handbook for an American Renaissance
The book opens with deep authenticity, rooted in having a correct compassionate consciousness during the Los Angeles AIDS epidemic that ravaged gays and straights alike. She goes on to respect President Donald Trump as the answer to the prayers of millions of citizens who are in deep pain, in trauma, unheard and oppressed by the combination of an over-bearing state that imposes, among other things, vaccines that kill and maim and do not protect, and predatory unethical unconscious capitalism that has captured the government (George Will is more erudite but they are both in agreement: the federal government has been captured by what he calls rent-seekers and I call carpet-baggers).
I am giving a speech at the Dimensions of Disclosure conference in Ventura, California in August 2019, and my working title is “What Would a Full Disclosure Government Look Like.” This book by Marianne Williamson answers – imperfectly but importantly – the question “What would a government rooted in love for its citizens and for humanity look like?”
This is not a typical presidential campaign book, but it does cover the bases and there are so many specifics woven in here that I strongly suspect this book was ghost-written to an extent by Thom Hartmann (who wrote one of the Prefaces to my own book free online, ELECTION 2008: Lipstick on the Pig). I have read many of the “mandate for change” books put out by prior presidential campaigns – they were the basis for my focusing on twelve issues in my own very brief 2012 presidential campaign (agriculture, diplomacy, economy, education, energy, family, health, immigration, justice, security, society, water).
The first three chapters set the stage for agreeing that America is in crisis; that we all have the power to get right with God, country, community, and family now and forevermore; and that how we debate, how we engage, matters greatly. I agree with the author’s subtle dismay about both the extreme left and the extreme right, and I am surprised to find across this entire book more holistic analytics and true cost economics than any prior or existing “presidential” book, without exception.
QUOTE (8): Any person, economic system, or political establishment that fails to concern itself with the pain of others is out of alignment with spiritual truth. . . . Once we give ourselves social permission to think that money, not love, is the organizing principle of a well-adjusted society, chaos is inevitable.
QUOTE (11): Our government has become a system of legalized bribery, less concerned with deep issues of humanity’s purpose and more with shallow questions of money and power.
Although this book has no index and no endnotes I am deeply impressed by the breadth and depth of the insights across the book. For any sentence in this book, I can point to at least one non-fiction book that will add a sledge hammer of emphasis.
QUOTE (37): Someone knew exactly what they were doing when American civics and history lessons started disappearing from many public school curricula.
Review: Weapons of Mass Instruction
Review: TAVISTOCK INSTITUTE – Social Engineering the Masses by Daniel Estulin — Deep State Playbook
QUOTE (48): Economic values have taken precedence over ethical values, and now we’re having to face the consequences of this moral corrosion.
Review: Philosophy and the Social Problem–The Annotated Edition
QUOTE (55): The moral mission of the United States is to create a society in which, to the best of our ability, all material shackles are removed that keep any person from becoming who he or she was created to be. . . . The power of our first principles, our democratic values, is that they speak to something higher than politics. They speak to the human condition.
She might as well be channeling Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, AND George Will. This is common ground for common good.
This author – and the people who helped her research and write the book – easily pass my smell test for gravitas, civic sensibility, and truthfulness. They are wrong on some points, but on balance Marianne Williamson is first after Donald Trump in my heart and mind. She is a precious national asset who cannot and must not be ignored.
QUOTE (77-78): The threat is authoritarian corporatism, which does not respect serious conservatism, serious progressivism, universal humanitarian values, or even democracy itself.
Review: Griftopia–Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America
Review: The Soul of Capitalism–Opening Paths to a Moral Economy
The next four chapters each take one major issue and in a most compelling fashion, outline what our politics and our economy and society would like if we demanded an honest evidence-based government that focused on We the People, rather than doing the bidding of foreign powers and predatory capitalists who treat all of us as disposable deplorables.
Economy: Focus on natural capital and particularly children and the general education and health of the public. Education must include arts, music, play, as the engines of creativity. And of course civics.
QUOTE (110): The idea that a corporation should bear no responsibility to anything other than the financial bottom line of its stockholders destroys the social fabric of our society as well as the natural environment on which all business, and indeed all life, depend.
Review: Ecological Economics – Principles and Applications (Second Edition)
Review: The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid
Youth: This is a core chapter with insights very few “leaders” acknowledge. Generation Z is going to destroy the two-party tyranny (two wings, one bird, same crap) because Generation Z “gets” that the US government has betrayed them, their college educations are worthless, and there are not enough good jobs with meaning anymore.
QUOTE (133): So many of America’s children are endangered either physically or emotionally, it should be seen as a humanitarian emergency.
The author is very much in “family first” mode, such that I cannot help but see the transpartisan resonance of this theme as covered by a major conservative outlet:
American Greatness: America Needs a Family-First Movement
I agree – and the author is probably not aware that Deputy Secretary of Labor Del Spurlock, under President Ronald Reagan, foresaw this emergency and created the Joint Labor-Defense solution, “Building a Post Cold War Workforce for the 21st Century: Our Manpower Peace Deficit”. See also ON THE RECORD: Our Jobs Proposal, Centered on Veterans. We have two emergencies in the USA, the first centers on the need for holistic fulsome education of children who also have solid family networks, and the second centers on veterans who do not want to be thanked for their service to predatory empire, they want meaningful jobs and an honest government.
QUOTE (143): The US Government should not be run like a business; it should be run like a family.
The author points out that over 74 million people in the United States are under the age of eighteen. This is our President’s non-voting constituency, this is the constituency that will determine whether he lives up to his ambition to be the greatest president ever and make America great again.
Race: The author loses me of reparations for descendants of slaves five generations ago – this is classic liberal nonsense – but she has a point when she emphasizes that we owe some form of justice not only to blacks but to Native Americans.
QUOTE (157): A politics of love is a whole-person pursuit that traces the psychological as well as political history of a relationship between peoples.
QUOTE (167): A politics of love is one in which we address the psychological and emotional wounds underlying our political realities and seek to heal them in meaningful ways.
Quite right. The USA is guilty of predatory capitalism, unilateral militarism, and virtual colonialism around the world, not just within its own borders (which are in turn based on wars rooted in lies), but reparations are not the answer, truth and integrity in all things are the answer. On that topic, the author falls for false narratives common to the liberal persuasion, but I am quite sure she would respond well to evidence-based dialog. We have no alternative but to have a national conversation about all threats, all policies, all costs, and that must include the cost of FORCING children to doubt their gender. Whites are now a threatened minority, and that is a good thing, because whites are now feeling the fear and pain that blacks have felt for so long. As I have written in Democracy Riots, “we are all black now, deal with it.”
The author is half-right on immigrants. I am a white Latino (Latinos come in all colors including red and yellow) on my mother’s side, born in the USA to a white US-born Angle-Saxon father and grand-father and like all legal Latinos, I cannot abide open borders and the use of taxpayer funds to give illegal immigrants more support than we give to our veterans. Immigration has been a political football, and open borders exist in part because the Johnson, Bush-Cheney, Clinton-Gore and Obama-Biden crime families have demanded open borders so they could run drugs, guns, cash, gold, and small children back and forth with impunity. The President has been slow to show us meaningful arrests, but when he does, the Executive Order on human trafficking should put many US border state politicians, judges, prosecutors, and sheriffs in jail (as well as the CIA, FBI, and DEA officers managing cross-border smuggling to beef up their agencies off-shore illicit bank accounts). The border crisis is not a “made-up” crisis, if anything it is a concealed crisis and I for one will not abide the destruction of America in the same manner that Germany and France have been destroyed by largely unemployed adult male Muslims who rape with impunity because it is “politically incorrect” to hold them accountable. In our case we are dealing with criminal gangs we helped create across the Southern Hemisphere. Europe’s politicians sold out to the Arabs for large bribes at the Barcelona Agreements, and all of our Presidents and Members of Congress since Ronald Reagan have sold us out on this matter. The buck stops with our President and the author needs to get a grip on the facts.
It merits comment that the census question about citizenship is VITAL because today Congressional Districts are apportioned on the basis of ALL voting-age individuals including illegal aliens and visiting foreigners. Counted properly, California would lose four House seats. This matters.
War and Peace: This is the author’s most powerful policy chapter, and far more sophisticated and nuanced than Tulsi Gabbard, who still thinks 9/11 was done by rag-heads armed with box cutters. On 9/11 and the President’s promise of disclosure see Memorandums for the President: 9/11 Truth. The author nails it when she calls our military a self-perpetuating war machine that yields profit for the banks and pain for everyone else including the US taxpayer. She singles out Saudi Arabia, perhaps fearful of singling out Israel, but the two together stand as examples of powers able to bribe and blackmail every Member of Congress particularly including Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi. We have a dishonest Congress – a rigged system – a pay to play system – and this is nowhere more evident than in the fact that 60% of our disposable income goes to the Department of Defense, at the same time that 50% of the Department of Defense budget has been documented as waste, and it is known we cannot win wars.
QUOTE (200): For the $550 million we are spending on just one B-21 raider, we could ameliorate the human suffering of billions of people around the world. That would be the moral thing to do.
That would also be the practical thing to do. I predicted the illegal immigration breakout in my 2002 book THE NEW CRAFT OF INTELLIGENCE: Personal, Public, & Political, and pointed out that as long as we subsidize 40 of the 42 dictators on the planet (the only two we don’t love are Cuba and North Korea), they will continue to abuse their publics and create waves of dispossessed, impoverished, diseased refugees.
The author embraces Dennis Kucinich’s idea of a Department of Peace, I would modify that somewhat by first closing all of our military bases overseas and bringing all of our troops and their wallets home, and then creating an Inter-Agency Development Command rooted in an Open Source Agency that stops the practice of lying to public about everything. It was quite telling to me that when I briefed the latter idea to the top national security aide for Senator Pat Roberts (R-KS) who many years ago wrote the Foreword to my second book, she lost interest the minute I said that the mission of the OSA would be “to tell the truth about everything.” She got up and left. No one in Washington wants the truth because the truth is a budget cutter and a power reducer. No one in Washington cares about balancing ends, ways, and means, something Senator Sam Nunn (D-GA) understood so very well.
This is also the chapter where the author’s commitment to holistic thinking is most visible, and I completely embrace her view that love instead of fear is a more sophisticated world view (and also much less expensive and much more sustainable in policy form).
QUOTE (207): According to research by the Friends Committee on National Legislation, “The world spends just $1 on conflict prevention for every $1,885 it spends on military budgets.
I nailed this one in my ghost-written article for the Commandant of the Marine Corps in 1989, but all of my ideas were seen for what they were: a threat to the unlimited budget for war and covert operations including regime change. I explicitly called for re-inventing intelligence so as to better justify “peaceful preventive measures.”
Gray, Al (Ghost-Written by Robert Steele), “Global Intelligence Challenges in the 1990’s,” American Intelligence Journal, Winter 1989-1990, pp. 37-41.
The author’s final two chapters are articulate and compelling – a politics of love that puts people first.
QUOTE (228): The day has come for an American reckoning.
Indeed. The Democrats are too corrupt to let this brilliant spiritually-grounded candidate for the Presidency advance – they will demolish her as The Daily Beast, a Cabal rag has, labeling her a wacko. She is not a wacko. She is the first Democrat since Dennis Kucinich, Cynthia McKinney, and John F. Kennedy to impress me – with perhaps a nod toward John Edwards. Marianne Williamson is the real deal, and if the Democrats are too craven to advance her toward the convention, then I pray that the First Lady and Kellyanne Conway will point out to the President that there is an oracle in play – a woman of great intelligence, great integrity, and great imagination – who should be heard, respected, and embraced. Marianne Williamson just defined the gold standard for politics – a politics that places people first and is rooted in love not fear, and there is not a single other Democratic candidate for president that is at this level of authenticity, inclusiveness, and truthfulness.
People, not parties. Love, not fear. Transparency not secrecy, peace not war. Yes, yes, yes, and yes.
SPECIAL: Marianne Williamson
Bloomberg: Marianne Williamson Is Just What the Democratic Party Needs
Finally, there is Marianne Williamson. When she first began to speak, I googled her, as I suspect did many other Americans. Her eccentric manner can be distracting, but I recommend instead focusing on her values. Her performance suggests that Democrats need to take a broader, deeper set of values into account: sometimes love and New Agey spiritual values, other times historical values. Her answer about making America the finest country for a child to grow up in was perhaps the best single moment of either debate, and that too stemmed from her understanding of values.
NJ.Com: Marianne Williamson emerges as the love-fueled, groovy folk hero of the Democratic debate
Marianne Williamson was a dance. Marianne Williamson was a song. Marianne Williamson was a fragrant breeze carrying whispers from another plane of existence. Marianne Williamson was a state of mind.
Slate: The Bizarre Charm of Marianne Williamson
In the closing moments of Thursday night’s Democratic debate, Marianne Williamson looked straight ahead and told the audience that her plan for her candidacy is to harness the country’s love. “Mr. President, if you’re listening,” she said, addressing Donald Trump directly, “you have harnessed fear for political purposes, and only love can cast that out. I am going to harness love for political purposes,” she continued, raising her eyebrows. “And sir, love will win.”
CBSNews: Marianne Williamson on bringing spirituality back into politics
“I think the issue is that politics has swerved,” Williamson said, opining that American politics has turned “toxic.” “The problem is with an over-corporatized, over-secularized political conversation so disconnected from values, so disconnected from issues of moral and ethical responsibility, as to have broken itself off of the major river of American thought and American life. That’s why so many people can’t relate to it.” She said that the U.S. is suffering from a “sociopathic economic system” that doesn’t value the American worker.
TIME: Marianne Williamson’s Vibe at Thursday’s Debate Was All Love. People Couldn’t Get Enough
Many viewers of Thursday’s broadcast found Williamson’s energy an “interesting” departure from the rest of the crowd.
UPI: Marianne Williamson running for president as a ‘political visionary’
Williamson first announced her bid for the White House in January, saying that America is in a broken state and in need of “political visionary” more than a “political mechanic.”
“I do not see American politics today as a conduit for a deep and meaningful transformative experience, either for our citizens or for our country,” she states on her campaign website. “Our government is now little more than a system of legalized bribery, and our traditional political establishment at its best is a container for an obsolete conversation about democracy and values and people.”
The Atlantic: What Do You Do When No One Takes You Seriously?
Williamson told me she saw Trump’s election as a blaring siren that the political establishment had ignored a revolution building underneath its feet. “The American people are not stupid. They know the game is rigged. They know we’re screwed,” she said. “The crying out for change was itself legitimate. Obviously they got the wrong kind of change agent. They got a con artist.”
2020 Democratic presidential candidate and writer Marianne Williamson on Tuesday put forth a foreign policy agenda that emphasizes “peace-building” and a return to global agreements spurned by the Trump administration. The author and spiritual adviser also promoted the use of “soft power” rather than “military might” to deal with international conflicts.
Yahoo Video: 20 Questions for 2020 Marianne Williamson
Oprah’s spiritual guru and presidential candidate Marianne Williamson talks about getting money out of politics, fighting the climate crisis, and why she wishes she never called herself ‘a bitch for God’ in today’s ’20 Questions for 2020.’ This video, “20 Questions for 2020: Marianne Williamson “, first appeared on nowthisnews.com.
VICE: Marianne Williamson Wants to Make Democrats the Party of Faith
For progressive, religious people like me, the 2020 candidate has a powerful message. It took a long time, but Democrats are poised to retake ground we ceded to a supposed faith and family–based party that nominated Trump, made him president, and cheered him on every step of the way.
BuzzFeed: Into America’s Spiritual Void With Marianne Williamson
Presidential campaigns can poll at zero and still have something interesting to say about America. In Iowa on the trail with Marianne Williamson, who helped shape today’s conversation about spirituality.
Bradenton.com: Who is Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson?
Marianne Williamson says she is running for president to bring a “moral and spiritual awakening” to America — and that includes a $100 billion investment in reparations for slavery. “We need to get real in this country,” the bestselling author and lecturer told a CNN town hall in April. “… Racism is a character defect. Let’s end this. Let’s fix it.” Williamson, 66, is a Texas native who has never held public office and is best known for being a spiritual counselor to Oprah Winfrey.
Intelligencer: 68 Minutes With Marianne Williamson
This is a campaign event for Marianne Williamson, the self-help author and now semi-serious Democratic candidate for president. She’s very much in the “long shot” category, but she has gathered enough support to qualify for the first debate — which is more than the sitting governor of Montana and a congressman from Massachusetts can say. She’s a friend of, and former spiritual adviser to, Oprah Winfrey; the person who officiated Elizabeth Taylor’s wedding to Larry Fortensky; and a onetime congressional candidate from L.A.’s 33rd District whose supporters included Kim Kardashian, Katy Perry, and Chaka Khan, and whose campaign anthem was written by Alanis Morissette (“We’re going down / Unless we move to new ground … Unless we revive this Constitution / From sure disintegration / Live out this revelation / Today”). In that race, she also received an endorsement from Dennis Kucinich, who remains an admirer. “Marianne is brilliant, insightful, and spiritually aware,” he says. “She is a true leader and does not require an office for affirmation, which is why she speaks with such compelling candor at a time this country desperately needs truth-tellers.”
“If you don’t get real, and you don’t get brutally honest, and you don’t get down to what’s really happening in a situation, and you don’t look deeply at the dynamics and the gaps between people, and the gaps between us and our truths, between us and somebody else’s truth, between us and our own integrity, then things don’t heal, things don’t really move, things don’t really break through to a better place.”
“I’ve had a 35-year career addressing people’s trauma and how to turn that trauma into transformation,” she continues. “All that a country is a collection of people, so the same psychological and emotional and spiritual forces that prevail within the journey of an individual prevail within the journey of a nation. The political Establishment is so blind to the deeper psychological and emotional factors at work. Our feelings do more to drive our behavior than does our intellectual analysis. Where people are not loved and not supported, despair arises, and large groups of desperate people are one of the most dangerous sociological elements possible. Desperate people are more vulnerable to ideological capture by genuinely psychotic forces.
That’s true whether it’s a corner of an American city, where people are vulnerable to gangs, or the whole United States, where people are more vulnerable to an authoritarian demagogue.”
Jezebel: Marianne Williamson Went Full Goop at the Democratic Debate
Spiritual leader and best-selling author Marianne Williamson, who has skirted thisssssss close to being anti-vaccine in previous appearances, had quite a mouthful to say about our healthcare system—or what she called our “sickness-care” system—in the opening minutes of the second Democratic presidential debate.
New York Times: 18 Questions with Marianne Williamson
Ms. Williamson has built her campaign on the idea that love can be a political force. Her political heroes include Bobby Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower. She said she would not make any moves in Afghanistan until she first spoke to Afghan women.
Forward.com: 10 Wild Facts About Marianne Williamson, Self-Help Guru And Dem 2020 Candidate
Though she identifies as Jewish, Williamson served five years as Minister at Detroit’s 2,500 member Christian Church of Today, a non-denominational member of the Association of Unity Churches. Steven Tyler was a recurring musical guest, Los Angeles Magazine reports. In her early days in politics, LA Magazine reports, Williamson was known to refer to herself as “Obama 2.0.”
Vox: Marianne Williamson is Oprah’s spiritual adviser. She’s also running for president.
The self-proclaimed “bitch for God” wants us to look more closely at who we are.
”Our national challenges are deep, but our political conversation is shallow,” she said. “My campaign is for people who want to dig deeper into the questions we face as a nation and deeper into finding the answers.’’
“She uses the language and attraction of sensuality to hold an audience,” one Psychology Today journalist wrote in a profile of Williamson in 1992. “Her charisma is sexual and humorous. Watching her perform is more like wrestling naked with Venus than kneeling with the saints.”
In a foreign policy speech at the World Affairs Council of New Hampshire, Williamson explained, “The same holistic paradigm that has transformed our view of physical health can be applied to our societal health. Active peace-building measures reinforce the social health of our planet the way good nutrition and exercise reinforce the physical health of our bodies.”
The Daily Beast: Marianne Williamson, Longtime Wacko, Is Now a Dangerous Wacko
For decades, Williamson said that medicines don’t cure disease but positive thinking does. Now she’s taking her quackery to a new and dangerous level: the anti-vaxxer conspiracy.
Phi Beta Iota: The Daily Beast routinely lies and defames people. They appear to be a paid outlet for the Cabal and attack people who threaten the Cabal. These are the same people who said that elite pedophilia networks do not exist. Vox is also more often than not a drive-by assassin for the Cabal, but in this instance has painted a useful negative picture that will help Williamson evolve the campaign.
See Also:
DOC (11 Pages): Review A Politics of Love 1.5
