How was your weekend? Perhaps you spent it flitting between holiday parties or doing some shopping for your loved ones. Or if you’re 2020 presidential candidate Marianne Williamson, you spent it posting some extremely out-there late-night takes concerning vaccines and Charles Manson’s corpse. ’Tis the season!
The chaos began late Thursday night, when Williamson dropped a lengthy Facebook post questioning the safety of vaccines that was peppered with misinformation. Williamson has a history of expressing
“vaccine skepticism” (she called vaccines “draconian” as recently as June), but has insisted after some blowback to her presidential campaign that she is not an anti-vaxxer. Her new post, however, seems to indicate that she’s back at it, it being anti-vaxx propaganda: She promised that, as president, she would establish “an independent commission to review/reform vaccine safety,” despite the fact that the National Vaccine Advisory Committee, a board of doctors and scientists independent of the CDC, has performed this exact function since 1987. She also referenced vaccine “bundling” (a common anti-vaxx talking point that falsely claims it’s dangerous for children to get too many vaccines at once), and made up the word “neurons-toxins.”
Her Facebook antics were just a warm-up for some late-night Twitter posting that somehow surpassed even the most “controversial” of Williamson’s opinions in absurdity and sheer inaccuracy. At around one in the morning on Monday, Williamson tweeted that something was “deeply sinister” about President Donald Trump “pardoning” late murderer Charles Manson — something that definitely never happened. (Manson, who died in 2017, was actually convicted on state criminal charges.) “Dog whistles of the very worst possible kind,” she wrote, making zero sense.
It’s unclear whether Williamson got the extremely fake story from a satirical website called Moron Majority, where it was posted in November, or whether she saw it picked up by liberal website Daily Kos, where it was posted later by a “community member” and flagged as potentially fake. Either way, she took her tweet down soon after, and posted another one, gravely stating that she was “Glad To have been wrong.” That got taken down too, perhaps thanks to someone who explained to Williamson the sublime inner peace and harmony one can achieve from simply logging off.
This should serve as a reminder to us all that, yes, Marianne Williamson is still running for president.