Marianne Williamson is the breakout star of the Democratic Debates. She said that if Democrats don t change their strategy soon, that Donald Trump is going to be re-elected. She also said that there is a dark, psychic force that we are fighting against.
00:08:40.900The ugly truth is with a timeshare, you can never tell how much it's actually going to cost or when it's going to end.
00:08:47.780That is totally up to the timeshare company.
00:08:49.620And you are just a piggy bank for them.
00:08:51.660Many owners trying to sell their timeshares online find out the hard way that it is not an investment when they can't get a single dollar for it.
00:08:59.760Those with rising annual maintenance and assessment fees, buying a timeshare is like giving the timeshare company a blank check.
00:10:06.720Because orbs and crystals and opal and all these sort of things are symbols of the new age movement.
00:10:14.140And that's what Marianne Williamson is.
00:10:16.560Marianne Williamson is a guru, self-styled guru, promoted by Oprah a million times, written a bunch of books about a spiritual and religious movement called the new age movement.
00:10:28.260Most people don't know what that means.
00:10:31.460So I think it's certainly worth taking a moment to explain it because Marianne Williamson is a fun sideshow.
00:11:36.400Occasionally she's said she's sort of Christian, but she doesn't believe in Christian orthodoxy or anything even remotely resembling Christian orthodoxy.
00:11:44.780So she's not a Christian religious figure.
00:14:53.560A Course in Miracles is the New Age anti-gospel.
00:14:57.640You wouldn't call it a gospel, but it's the anti-gospel.
00:15:00.040It's written by a tortured woman named Helen Shuchman, and she channeled what she called a new gospel through a spirit claiming to be Jesus Christ.
00:15:10.400So this woman, this very troubled woman, Helen, had a vision, and she believed that Jesus was speaking to her.
00:15:19.040She believed that a spirit from the spiritual world who was claiming to be Jesus and speaking to her a new gospel.
00:15:27.680She was having this private revelation of a new gospel.
00:15:30.700And why was the spirit speaking to her?
00:15:32.700The spirit, who she said was Jesus, was speaking to her to correct errors in scripture and the teachings of the church.
00:15:41.400Now, Christians hold the Bible to be inerrant, scripture to be without error.
00:16:25.040And Helen was a Columbia University professor and psychologist, and she was an acquaintance of a priest named Father Benedict J. Grushel.
00:16:34.960And Father Grushel was close enough to her that he actually gave a eulogy at her funeral.
00:16:40.360So it's not like he was some opponent of hers.
00:16:42.140They actually seem to be quite friendly.
00:16:44.580He later said, having known this woman and having given the eulogy at her funeral, quote,
00:16:49.040This woman, who had written so eloquently that suffering really did not exist, spent the last two years of her life in the blackest psychotic depression I have ever witnessed.
00:17:01.920And I know people who have gotten involved in the New Age movement.
00:17:05.600New Age is no joke, and it does lead people to some pretty dark places.
00:17:08.720The reason this matters, particularly for our politics, is not just that we're pretty soon going to be all living under the Williamson administration,
00:17:16.340but it's also because New Ageism is the kind of defining spiritual movement of our culture.
00:18:58.780So, like Gnostic dualism would be this idea that there is this hidden secret knowledge and the dualism would be the total difference between my soul and my body.
00:19:09.320Traditionally, what we believe, what Christians believe, is that our soul and our body are unified.
00:19:16.220We are neither simply our soul, and we're not simply our bodies.
00:19:19.920We're human beings, and human beings have body and soul.
00:19:23.740And then lots of various other ideas tell us we're either one or we're simply the other.
00:19:28.700So, materialism tells us we're only our body.
00:19:31.600And Gnosticism tells us we're only our soul.
00:19:34.760In transgenderism, you see a little bit of each of these, right?
00:19:39.600Transgenderism tells us if I am a man, I am by all visible evidence a man, but I think really deeply that I am a woman, then really I am a woman.
00:19:55.220It's denying the physical reality for the metaphysical reality or the so-called spiritual reality.
00:20:01.620Same thing, that comes directly out of New Ageism.
00:20:05.740Or, you see the kind of schizophrenic other side of it in our culture, too, which is that we deny spiritual realities altogether.
00:21:20.740She's speaking to a spiritual dimension.
00:21:22.580That makes her automatically so much more interesting than the rest of those schmucks on that stage for the last two nights.
00:21:29.280The only trouble with Marianne, my only hesitation with getting on the Orb Gang, is that she is peddling diabolical heresy.
00:21:35.180And one of the problems with just making jokes about Marianne all the time, and even acknowledging some of the interesting intuitions that she has about politics, is people lose sight of the seductive and false and misery-inducing spirituality that she is embracing.
00:21:53.400So we talk about this for all the other candidates.
00:22:00.640It happened in the Soviet Union, happened in China, happened in Venezuela, happened in North Korea, happened everywhere socialism has been tried.
00:22:57.780So how did the other candidates do who are living on this plane of existence rather than on whatever plane Marianne Williamson's living on?
00:24:31.980We can create a universal health care system to give everyone basic health care for free, and I have a proposal to do it.
00:24:38.320But we don't have to go around and be the party of subtraction and telling half the country who has private health insurance that their health insurance is illegal.
00:24:45.920So you remember when Obamacare was going to be universal health care?
00:24:50.540Once and for all, we're going to have Obamacare.
00:24:52.580Now they're all assailing Barack Obama.
00:24:55.080To hear them talk about Barack Obama during this debate, I thought, gosh, we've got to find this Obama guy, get him to run as a Republican.
00:25:01.720This Obama guy sounds like the most conservative guy I've ever heard of.
00:32:43.780And so if she's smart and if her campaign is smart, she's going to start running on this prosecutor thing again, own it, and go after Tulsi Gabbard because the best defense is a good offense.
00:32:55.420By the way, I mean, if the Harris campaign is watching, just remember, even though the left wing of the Democratic Party is now very anti-law enforcement, cops are the third most trusted institution in the country, according to a number of polls that have come out.
00:33:13.160The only more trusted institutions are the military and small business.
00:33:30.380Immigration enforcement is the number one chief political issue in the country, according to a Gallup poll that came out just two weeks ago.
00:33:38.860And yet they're running on open borders, very unpopular.
00:33:41.040They're running on free health care for illegal aliens, very unpopular.
00:33:45.260They're running on all of this stupid stuff.
00:33:48.220They're running on taking health care away from 150 million people.
00:33:51.320They're running against the American flag.
00:34:00.380The party knows that the party, that's why they opened the debate with the presentation of colors and a major star-spangled banner singing.
00:34:06.800They just know it doesn't play well in Peoria when all these left-wing candidates are spitting on the flag.
00:34:12.500But the candidates themselves are just wrapped up in this leftism because they have nothing real to argue about in the current political climate.
00:34:24.440If they're just going to oppose Trump, then they have nothing real to argue about.
00:34:28.640If they're just going to oppose Trump, the economy is going well, unemployment is very low, we have relative peace abroad.
00:36:03.480There is one really healthy thing going on in this Democratic presidential primary, which is you are seeing something that started with the Republicans in 2016 and it's continuing now in 2020.
00:36:23.900You're seeing the beginnings of a political realignment.
00:36:27.200So you're seeing old orthodoxies, political orthodoxy, being smashed, old ideological certitudes being destroyed.
00:36:37.220And this was obviously more apparent in the Republican primary in 2016, but you're seeing it particularly with Tulsi Gabbard in 2020.
00:36:45.400Here is Tulsi Gabbard making an argument on trade that sounds a whole lot like Donald Trump's argument on trade,
00:36:53.580which sounds a whole lot different from the old Republican argument on trade.
00:36:57.440And hers is a whole lot different from the current Democratic argument on trade.
00:37:01.960For fair trade, not trade deals that give away the sovereignty of the American people and our country,
00:37:09.360that give away American jobs and that threaten our environment.
00:37:13.460These are the three main issues with that massive trade deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
00:37:18.780I think the central one was the fact that it gave away our sovereignty to a panel of international corporations whose rulings would supersede any domestic law that we would pass,
00:37:30.260either a federal law or a state or a local law.
00:37:33.140This is extremely dangerous and goes against the very values that we have as a country.
00:37:37.840What to speak of the fact that it would have a negative impact on domestic jobs and that it lacked clear protections for our environment.
00:37:44.720These are the things that we have to keep at the forefront as we look to enact fair trade deals with other countries to make sure that we continue to be a thriving part of our global economy.
00:37:57.240This is a highly conservative argument that she just, I mean, look, she used the word sovereignty.
00:38:01.960All the other candidates on stage were talking about open borders.
00:38:04.420We don't even have a right to decide who comes into the country.
00:38:07.120And Tulsi starts talking about sovereignty and she's talking about it, particularly on trade.
00:38:10.900And conservatives, with a short memory, get this wrong.
00:38:15.620We have this idea that conservatism demands total free trade.
00:38:44.200Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, said, give me a protective tariff and I'll give you the greatest nation on earth.
00:38:51.340Free trade became what you would call the neoliberal consensus beginning during the Reagan era, continuing through the Bushes and through Bill Clinton too.
00:39:00.800This was a consensus among both parties.
00:39:03.340Now we're dealing with some of the political consequences of that.
00:39:05.840There were many advantages that came through that sort of global free trade and there were some negative consequences as well.
00:39:13.160And what we're debating now, what Tulsi Gabbard is bringing up, is a really healthy discussion, which is you'll hear some people, the real free trade at all costs, can't even possibly question it.
00:39:24.580What they'll say is free trade works and the other one doesn't work.
00:39:28.340Well, economics doesn't make moral arguments.
00:39:36.940But when we're talking about politics, we're talking about moral arguments.
00:39:42.480Not just what the policies do, but what the policies should do, what policies we should enact.
00:39:48.440And what Tulsi is bringing up is basically, who cares about an efficient policy to increase, even if it does increase GDP by some percentage, if you lose your national sovereignty in the process?
00:40:02.300Who cares about it if you lose protections for some of your workers in the process?
00:40:08.560People lose their jobs and they get addicted on opioids and they kill themselves.
00:40:13.080Who cares about increasing GDP slightly or having more efficient markets if you lose your environment, your natural environment?
00:40:20.500These are debates that cut across what we would call the left and the right of the last 30 or 40 years.
00:40:27.100Now, she could be making that argument in a GOP debate.
00:40:29.760Maybe she could, or maybe she should rather.
00:40:31.660Trump basically did make that argument.
00:43:04.640You then make it more likely that someone will invest in capital.
00:43:08.780And you reduce the labor force for any particular business.
00:43:12.900It's not like raising the minimum wage all of a sudden gives businesses 20% more money to spend on labor.
00:43:19.440They just, they have the same amount of money, so they can pay either more people or fewer people.
00:43:24.080Or they can buy more robots to do more of the jobs that the people were doing.
00:43:29.280That would be the question that I would ask them.
00:43:30.880And I'd be curious to hear their thoughts on that $2 trillion minimum wage from Charles.
00:43:36.560In the absence of a divine power or prior consent from the child prior to conception, is conception not immoral?
00:43:44.980Does this not mean that we are either immoral as a society or must accept that God gives us permission to procreate?
00:43:52.020Well, no, I think the problem that you're coming up against is you're elevating consent as the most important, if not the sole moral category, which is what our culture does right now.
00:44:35.540And this gets to a broader problem that the libertarian right and the left have embraced, which is that they put consent at the basis of their politics.
00:45:38.840That's something I'm born into the world with.
00:45:40.520I never consented to that obligation, but I owe it to them anyway.
00:45:44.800When you switch your politics from a politics of consent to a politics of duty, from a politics of rights and entitlement to a politics of affection, duty, loyalty, responsibility, and respect, the world starts to make a whole lot more sense.
00:46:24.660I think it's fine to visit those things as a sort of cultural or historic curiosity to expand your knowledge, but you should not attend those worship services.
00:46:36.920I think it's perfectly fine when you're walking past a temple in India to say a prayer to Jesus, but I wouldn't attend those spiritual services.
00:47:01.860Now, we're about to see the extreme of that in politics because Marianne Williamson is about to just cast orbs and crystals all over all of the culture.
00:47:10.700And so I guess when you watch a Democratic presidential debate, in a certain sense, you are participating in another religious service.
00:47:16.400So you've got to be careful about that.
00:47:29.500We'll try to get to more mailbag questions today because I feel like I cheated you all by talking too long about 2020 and the Democratic debate.
00:47:36.400So we'll get to a little bit more tomorrow if you haven't checked it out and you haven't been able to submit a question.
00:47:51.000The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Rebecca Dobkowitz and directed by Mike Joyner, executive producer Jeremy Boring, senior producer Jonathan Hay, our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
00:48:09.340Edited by Danny D'Amico, audio is mixed by Dylan Case, hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera, and our production assistant is Nick Sheehan.
00:48:17.360The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.