williamson – Radio Free https://www.radiofree.org Independent Media for People, Not Profits. Thu, 22 May 2025 08:03:30 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://www.radiofree.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/cropped-Radio-Free-Social-Icon-2-32x32.png williamson – Radio Free https://www.radiofree.org 32 32 141331581 Genocide in Gaza: The BBC’s Self-Inflicted “Trust Crisis” https://www.radiofree.org/2025/05/22/genocide-in-gaza-the-bbcs-self-inflicted-trust-crisis/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/05/22/genocide-in-gaza-the-bbcs-self-inflicted-trust-crisis/#respond Thu, 22 May 2025 08:03:30 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=158452 BBC News regularly proclaims its supposed editorial principles of fearless, independent, impartial, fair and accurate journalism. In a January 2023 speech to the Whitehall & Industry Group in London, then BBC Chairman Richard Sharp boasted that BBC journalism is the ‘global gold standard’ of credible news reporting. Two years previously, in 2021, the public broadcaster […]

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Children in Gaza waiting to be served food

BBC News regularly proclaims its supposed editorial principles of fearless, independent, impartial, fair and accurate journalism. In a January 2023 speech to the Whitehall & Industry Group in London, then BBC Chairman Richard Sharp boasted that BBC journalism is the ‘global gold standard’ of credible news reporting.

Two years previously, in 2021, the public broadcaster had proudly published a focused, 10-point plan to ensure the protection of the highest ‘impartiality, whistleblowing and editorial standards’. BBC director general Tim Davie asserted:

‘The BBC’s editorial values of impartiality, accuracy and trust are the foundation of our relationship with audiences in the UK and around the world. Our audiences deserve and expect programmes and content which earn their trust every day and we must meet the highest standards and hold ourselves accountable in everything we do.’

When it comes to the broadcaster’s coverage of Gaza since October 2023, and long before, BBC audiences have seen for themselves the hollowness of such BBC rhetoric.

For example, the BBC’s withdrawal of its own commissioned powerful documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, earlier this year epitomised how much the UK’s national broadcaster bends to the will of the Israel lobby. The BBC dropped the documentary from iPlayer, soon after it was broadcast on BBC Two on 17 February, when it emerged that the film’s narrator, 13-year-old Abdullah al-Yazuri, is the son of Ayman al-Yazuri, a deputy minister of agriculture in Gaza’s government which is administered by Hamas. The film was withdrawn after a campaign by pro-Israel voices, including David Collier, a self-described ‘100 per cent Zionist’ activist, Tzipi Hotovely, Israel’s ambassador to the UK, and Danny Cohen, a former director of BBC television, who said that the broadcaster ‘is at risk of becoming a Hamas propaganda mouthpiece.’

Another documentary, Gaza: Medics Under Fire, made by Oscar-nominated, Emmy and Peabody award-winning filmmakers, including Ben de Pear, Karim Shah and Ramita Navai, has been held back by the BBC, even though it had been signed off by BBC lawyers. The film includes the testimony of Palestinian doctors working in Gaza under Israeli bombardment. It has been ready for broadcast since February after months of editorial reviews and fact-checking.

Over 600 prominent figures from the arts and media, including British film director Mike Leigh, Oscar-winning actor Susan Sarandon and Lindsey Hilsum, the international editor of Channel 4 News, have signed an open letter criticising the BBC for withholding the documentary:

‘We stand with the medics of Gaza whose voices are being silenced. Their urgent stories are being buried by bureaucracy and political censorship. This is not editorial caution. It’s political suppression. The BBC has provided no timeline, no transparency. Such decisions reinforce the systemic devaluation of Palestinian lives in our media.’

This, of course, is all part of an endemic pattern of BBC bias towards Israel under the guise of ‘impartiality’; a façade that has now been obliterated. The corporation’s longstanding, blatant protection of Israel, considered an ‘apartheid regime’ by major human rights organisations, has been particularly glaring since Benjamin Netanyahu’s extremist government ordered genocidal attacks on Gaza in October 2023.

The public has been subject to repetition and amplification of the Israeli narrative above the Palestinian perspective. Moreover, the broadcaster regularly omits ‘Israel’ from headlines about its latest war crimes committed in Gaza and the West Bank. Another remarkable feature of the BBC’s performance has been the dismissive treatment by senior BBC management of serious concerns about bias raised by their own journalists. A very brief summary of the BBC’s biased reporting on Gaza, and criticism by some of their own journalists, can be found in this thread on X. The essential conclusion concerning BBC News coverage of Gaza, wrote one dissident BBC journalist, is that of:

‘a collapse in the application of basic standards and norms of journalism that seems aligned with Israel’s propaganda strategy.’ [Our emphasis]

BBC management have ignored or dismissed ‘a mass of evidence-based critique of coverage’ from members of staff. So much for the BBC’s claimed commitment to taking whistleblowers seriously.

Karishma Patel, a former BBC researcher, newsreader and journalist, wrote earlier this year about her reasons for leaving the BBC. She observed ‘a shocking level of editorial inconsistency’ in how the BBC covers Gaza. Journalists were ‘actively choosing not to follow evidence’ of Israeli war crimes ‘out of fear’.

In a follow-up article last month, she observed that:

‘many [BBC] journalists are afraid to speak their minds – to challenge editorial decisions or speak freely to powerful presenters and executives. This isn’t a newsroom environment conducive to robust journalism – a profession all about the pursuit of truth and accountability.’

She added:

‘It’s important the public understands how far editorial policy can be silently shaped by even the possibility of anger from certain groups, foreign governments, our own government, mega-corporations – any powerful actor – and how crucial it is that more junior journalists who see it can speak up.’

‘A Precious National Asset’

Last week, the BBC’s director general warned of a disinformation ‘trust crisis’ that was putting ‘the social fabric’ of the UK ‘at risk’. Tim Davie pointed the finger at social media platforms such as TikTok and YouTube where, as a Guardian report on Davie’s speech put it, ‘disinformation can go unchecked’. We have previously written (for example, here and here) about how ‘mainstream’ editors and journalists love to point at social media as prime purveyors of disinformation, diverting attention from their own culpability in much larger crimes of state-approved propaganda that fuels wars, the erosion of democracy and climate catastrophe.

Davie said:

‘The future of our cohesive, democratic society feels for the first time in my life at risk.’

He called for ‘strong government backing’ for the BBC as a ‘precious national asset’ to be ‘properly funded and supported’. The fact that the BBC has itself massively contributed to a ‘trust crisis’ in disinformation and propaganda, encapsulated by its complicity in Israel’s genocide, went unmentioned, of course.

The late, great journalist John Pilger put it succinctly in an interview with Afshin Rattansi:

‘The BBC has the most brilliant production values, it produces the most extraordinary natural history and drama series. But the BBC is, and has long been, the most refined propaganda service in the world.’

Daily examples abound of why the public should regard BBC News with deep scepticism. On 12 May, BBC News at Ten reported the release of US-Israeli dual citizen Edan Alexander by Hamas. Senior BBC reporter Lucy Williamson said that Alexander had originally been ‘kidnapped as a soldier’. The terminology is deceptive: civilians are kidnapped; soldiers are captured. Why did BBC editors approve this loaded use of the wrong word, ‘kidnapped’?

Consider another example. Richard Sanders, an experienced journalist and documentary filmmaker, noted via X on 15 May that the BBC had included this line in one of its news bulletins:

‘Israel says a hospital [in Gaza] along with a university and schools … have become terrorist strongholds for Hamas’.

Sanders commented:

‘The BBC knows such statements are untrue. Yet that sentence took up more than a third of its 22 sec 7.30 am news bulletin on Gaza – with no rebuttal.’

He added:

‘8am they go to [BBC] correspondent Yolande Knell for a lengthier report. She repeats exactly the same sentence – again, with no rebuttal.

‘The listener is left with the entirely false impression it’s perfectly possible it’s true.

‘Bad, bad journalism.’

And yet this is standard BBC ‘journalism’: the ‘global gold standard’, remember.

Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s international editor, is supposedly an exemplar of this gold standard. But his capitulation to the Israel lobby is repeatedly apparent in his interviews and articles. Media activist Saul Staniforth captured this clip where a BBC presenter said to Bowen:

‘[Netanyahu is] looking for other countries to take in Gazans’.

Bowen responded: ‘Well, that’s called…’

He then paused momentarily and continued: ‘… that will be called, by Palestinians and by a lot of people around the world, ethnic cleansing.’

Bowen presumably stopped himself simply stating the truth: ‘that’s called ethnic cleansing.’ This is what he would have said in any context involving an Official Enemy, such as Russia, rather than the Official Friend, Israel.

Jonathan Cook dissected an even more egregious example of Bowen’s favouring the Israeli perspective when the BBC journalist interviewed Philippe Lazzarini, head of United Nations refugee agency UNRWA. Before airing the interview, Bowen introduced the Lazzarini interview with a contorted cautionary statement:

‘Israel says he is a liar, and that his organisation has been infiltrated by Hamas. But I felt it was important to talk to him for a number of reasons.

‘First off, the British government deals with him, and funds his organisation. Which is the largest dealing with Palestinian refugees. They know a lot of what is going on, so therefore I think it is important to speak to people like him.’

As Cook observed, Bowen would never preface an interview with Netanyahu in a similar way:

‘The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for the Israeli prime minister, accusing him of crimes against humanity. But I felt it was important to talk to him for a number of reasons.’

During the interview, Lazzarini told Bowen that he was running out of words ‘to describe the misery and the tragedy affecting the people in Gaza. They have been now more than two months without any aid’. The UNRWA chief added:

‘Starvation is spreading, people are exhausted, people are hungry… we can expect that in the coming weeks if no aid is coming in, that people will not die because of the bombardment, but they will die because of the lack of food. This is the weaponisation of humanitarian aid.’

Cook noted:

‘Lazzarini’s remarks on the catastrophe in Gaza should be seen as self-evident. But Bowen and the BBC undermined his message by framing him and his organisation as suspect – and all because Israel, a criminal state starving the people of Gaza, has made an entirely unfounded allegation against the organisation trying to stop its crimes against humanity.’

He continued:

‘This is the same pattern of smears from Israel that has claimed all 36 hospitals in Gaza are Hamas “command and control centres” – again without a shred of evidence – to justify it bombing them all, leaving Gaza’s population without any meaningful health care system as malnutrition and starvation take hold.’ [Our emphasis]

As Cook pointed out, it is quite possible that it was not Bowen’s choice ‘to attach such a disgraceful disclaimer to his interview. We all understand that he is under enormous pressure, both from within the BBC and outside.’ But just imagine the huge moral standing and public impact it would have if Bowen resigned from the BBC, citing the intolerable pressure not to speak the full truth about Israel’s genocide and war crimes.

For those with long memories, recall the exceptional courage and honesty when two senior UN officials, Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, resigned in 1998 and 2000, respectively, rather than continue to administer the ‘genocidal’ (their term) UN sanctions against Iraq that had led to the deaths of up to 1.5 million people, including around half a million children under the age of five.

One of the most insidious forms of ‘bad’ BBC ‘journalism’ is propaganda by omission, as we have noted in media alerts over the years (for example, see here and here). On 13 May, the investigative news organisation, DropSite, reported that Israeli troops had shot and killed Mohammed Bardawil, a 12-year-old boy. He was one of only four surviving eyewitnesses of the Israeli military’s execution of 15 paramedics, rescue workers and UN staff in Rafah, Gaza, in March 2025.

DropSite noted:

‘Mohammed had testified that some of the paramedics were shot at point-blank range – “from one meter away.” He was also interviewed by The New York Times for their investigation into the massacre, though his most damning claims were omitted from their final report.’

DropSite added:

‘Mohammed had been scheduled for a second round of testimony with investigators, this time with pediatric psychologists present. Instead, the 12-year-old war crime witness was killed by Israeli forces.’

At the time of writing, it is unclear whether he was specifically targeted in an attack, or caught up in an Israeli raid.

This shocking news has been blanked by the BBC, as far as we can see from searching its website. Indeed, our search of the Nexis newspaper database reveals not a single mention in any UK newspaper.

Imagine if Russia had executed fifteen Red Cross medics, first responders and a UN staff member in Ukraine, burying them in a mass grave along with their vehicles, including an ambulance.

Imagine if Russia had lied about this appalling war crime, as proved by footage recovered from the telephone of one of the executed victims.

Imagine if a 12-year-old Ukrainian witness to this Russian war crime was later shot dead by Russian soldiers. His killing would have been major headline news around the world and serious questions would have been asked.

The Fiction of BBC ‘Transparency’

As mentioned, BBC editors love to proclaim their accountability to the public and transparency of their editorial processes. How, then, would they explain their secrecy in holding private meetings with one of Israel’s former top military officers during Israel’s genocidal war against Gaza?

Declassified UK is a small publicly-funded independent news organisation that runs rings around BBC News, and the rest of the ‘mainstream’ media, on UK foreign policy and the impact of British military and intelligence agencies on human rights and the environment. Declassified UK reported earlier this year that BBC, Guardian and Financial Times editors had secret meetings with Israeli General Aviv Kohavi one month after the Gaza bombardment began.

In attendance were Katherine Viner, editor-in-chief of the Guardian, Richard Burgess, director of news content at the BBC, and Roula Khalaf, editor of the Financial Times. According to documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Kohavi’s itinerary also included meetings with Sky News chairman David Rhodes at the Israeli embassy, and then shadow foreign secretary David Lammy, between 7 and 9 November 2023.

Kohavi had only stepped down from running Israel’s military months earlier. According to Declassified UK’s investigation, Kohavi had subsequently been ‘tasked with cultivating support for Israel as it escalated its brutal military offensive in Gaza.’

A journalist who was working for the BBC at the time of the visit told Declassified UK:

‘I don’t recall any internal correspondence about the meeting, which the BBC would ordinarily send out if there was a high-profile visit of this kind. I also find it very difficult to believe that the organisation would hold an equivalent meeting with the Hamas government.’

The journalist, who requested anonymity, added:

‘Not only is Kohavi’s visit unprecedented but it’s also outrageous that one of the most senior editors at the BBC should court company with a foreign military figure in this way, especially one whose country stands accused of serious human rights violations.

‘It further undermines the independence and impartiality that the BBC claims to uphold, and I think it has done irreparable damage to any trust audiences had in the corporation.’

Des Freedman, a professor of media at Goldsmiths, University of London, told Declassified UK he could find no mention of General Kohavi in any BBC, Guardian or FT coverage since 2023, when searching on the Nexis database.

He added:

‘Obviously off the record briefings have a place in journalism. However, meeting secretly with a senior IDF representative in the middle of a genocidal campaign as part of an organised propaganda offensive raises serious questions about integrity and transparency.

‘You would hope that news titles would go out of their way to avoid accusations of bias by rejecting the offer to meet privately and instead to put such meetings on the record. In reality, editors at the Guardian, BBC and FT appear willing to open their doors to Israeli spokespeople – no matter how controversial and offensive – in a way which is denied to Palestinian representatives.’

Conclusion: ‘Palestine Is The Rock’

The function of the major news media, very much including BBC News, is not to fully inform or educate the public about what our governments or other elite forces in society are doing. Their primary role is to maintain structures of state and corporate control that keep the public away from the levers of power.

Jason Hickel, a professor of anthropology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics, made these cogent observations recently via X:

‘Palestine is the rock on which the West will break itself.

‘Put yourself in the shoes of people in the global South. For nearly two years they have watched how Western leaders, who love to talk about human rights and the rule of law, are happy to shred all these values in the most spectacular displays of hypocrisy in order to prop up their military proxy-state as it openly conducts genocide and ethnic cleansing against an occupied people, even in the face of *overwhelming* international condemnation.’

He continued:

‘What do you think people in the South are supposed to conclude from this?  What would *you* conclude from this in their position?  Decades of Western propaganda have been shattered, this time in full technicolour. Western governments have made it clear that they do not care about human rights and the rule of law when it comes to people of colour, the global majority.’

In fact, Western governments do not even care about human rights and the rule of law in their own countries, where these conflict with the requirements of power and control by elites. As Noam Chomsky has pointed out over many decades, ‘there is a very elaborate propaganda system’ in capitalist societies:

‘involving everything, from the public relations industry and advertising to the corporate media, which simply marginalizes a large part of the population. They technically are allowed to participate by pushing buttons every few years, but they have essentially no role in formulating policy. They can ratify decisions made by others.’

(Noam Chomsky and James Kelman, Between Thought and Expression Lies a Lifetime: Why Ideas Matter, PM Press, 2021, p. 159)

BBC News is a crucial component of this elaborate propaganda system. No amount of self-serving managerial rhetoric about ‘trust’, ‘transparency’ and ‘impartiality’ can refute that fundamental reality.

The post Genocide in Gaza: The BBC’s Self-Inflicted “Trust Crisis” first appeared on Dissident Voice.


This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Media Lens.

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Marianne Williamson on Running for President, Challenging Biden & Calling for a Gaza Ceasefire https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/23/marianne-williamson-on-running-for-president-challenging-biden-calling-for-a-gaza-ceasefire/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/23/marianne-williamson-on-running-for-president-challenging-biden-calling-for-a-gaza-ceasefire/#respond Tue, 23 Jan 2024 15:39:34 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=39c6d5b7358713e870971542a3f9de52
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

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Marianne Williamson on Running for President, Challenging Biden & Calling for a Gaza Ceasefire https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/23/marianne-williamson-on-running-for-president-challenging-biden-calling-for-a-gaza-ceasefire-2/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/23/marianne-williamson-on-running-for-president-challenging-biden-calling-for-a-gaza-ceasefire-2/#respond Tue, 23 Jan 2024 13:43:51 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=e3320af7d250dda614d88e5899d1efe3 Seg3 marianne williamson

It’s primary day in New Hampshire. As Donald Trump and Nikki Haley square off in the Republican race, we speak to 2024 Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson on her longshot campaign against President Biden. In an unusual twist, Williamson’s name is on today’s ballot, but Biden’s is not. Biden opted out of running in New Hampshire after the state refused to move its primary until after South Carolina’s. Williamson discusses why she’s running for president, her antiwar platform, calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, immigration reform and the New Hampshire primary election. “Just like with health and sickness, you don’t just treat sickness, you learn to cultivate health,” she says. “We need to not just drop bombs and put people in prison when there is conflict. We need to learn to prevent conflict. We need to proactively create peace.”


This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

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Marianne Williamson explains her 2024 presidential campaign https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/18/marianne-williamson-explains-her-2024-presidential-campaign/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/18/marianne-williamson-explains-her-2024-presidential-campaign/#respond Thu, 18 May 2023 16:11:39 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=fe3fd03dda6174d26c477e084d7fdf20
This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by The Real News Network.

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Marianne Williamson, Fusing Bernie Sanders and (Early) Jordan Peterson, Is Taking Over TikTok https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/14/marianne-williamson-fusing-bernie-sanders-and-early-jordan-peterson-is-taking-over-tiktok/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/14/marianne-williamson-fusing-bernie-sanders-and-early-jordan-peterson-is-taking-over-tiktok/#respond Fri, 14 Apr 2023 19:02:06 +0000 https://theintercept.com/?p=426138

The kids may or may not be alright, but one thing is clear: They are super into Marianne Williamson. If engagement on TikTok is any indication, a Democratic presidential primary held today among people under 50 would result in a landslide for the bestselling author now making her second bid for the nomination.

Williamson has only posted 65 videos on TikTok, yet has drawn more than 11 million views, according to a TikTok data counter. But there are also endless Marianne stan (Maristanne?) accounts — @marianne2024winner and @marianne4prez among them — that post her speeches and rack up massive numbers. A scroll through the popular account @realdemocrat20 turns up multiple Williamson videos, all generating eye-popping numbers for her treatises on universal health care, corruption, gun rights, or abortion, including nearly a million views for whatever this is.

A recent poll found Williamson hovering above 20 percent with voters under 30 — far higher than she reached in the crowded 2020 field — suggesting the buzz on TikTok is translating into real support or that real support is producing the buzz on TikTok. “I am obsessed with it,” said Jessica Burbank, a leftist political TikTok star who posts as @kaburbank, of the Marianne mania.

Some reasons for the support are obvious: Videos of her pledging to wipe out student debt and remove marijuana from Schedule I have predictably gone viral. But so have others that speak more holistically about the political system and the corruption that limits the ability of people to have their voices heard or their collective will translated into public policy. And the one that mentions student debt and weed also includes a pledge to beef up the National Labor Relations Board, cut all government contracts with union-busting companies, and otherwise do everything she can as president to boost organized labor.

The notion that Williamson, in her second run at the prize, can seize the Democratic nomination remains far-fetched, as she’d probably be the longest shot in American history to claim a major-party nomination, after maybe John W. Davis’s surprise win at a deadlocked Democratic convention in 1924. The same poll had Joe Biden up 73 percent to 10 over Williamson — though her support rises to 14 percent in battleground states. Still, there’s much to be learned about our current politics by taking seriously the phenomenon of her surging youth support.

Williamson realized something unusual was going on when friends began reaching out to say their kids were becoming her fans on the platform. “All these people would text me and say, ‘My 17-year-old loves you,’ ‘My 20 or 22-year-old wants to know if she can have your email,’” she said. “I don’t wake up in the morning, look in the mirror and say, ‘Hello, TikTok star.’ But obviously, I’m grateful that there is a platform, that there is a venue, where I’m seen and the message is received.”

The popularity of Williamson on TikTok and among young people generally means that the White House’s strategy toward her so far — explicit mockery — may come with some risks. Asked about Williamson in March, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre fumbled a canned effort at ridicule. “I mean, if I had a — what is it called? A little globe here,” Jean-Pierre said, laughing, “a crystal ball, then I could tell you. A magic eight ball or whatever. If I could feel her aura.” If Williamson does end up overperforming among young voters who see her as a credible outsider critic of the system, Democrats will have a hard time winning them back over if they’ve done nothing but mock her.

Williamson is often dismissed as a flighty, self-help mystic, and it grates on her. Her books have sold millions of copies and spent months atop the New York Times bestsellers list, but she senses that many of her critics are not among those readers. “A lot of people talk about my work who clearly have not read it, or they will take one sentence out of context.” she said. “When it comes to the idea of crystals and auras and all of that, I’ve written 16 books, and nowhere do you read anything about crystals or auras. Although in some of my books, you do read about the corporatocracy, racial inequity, criminal injustice, etc.”

What makes Williamson unique in politics is her explicit linkage of spiritual inspiration and personal uplift with left-wing sensibilities around community and a collective struggle against corruption and greed. Williamson largely champions the agenda established by fellow 2020 presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, but Sanders never spoke directly to the spiritual rot wrought by neoliberalism the way Williamson does. New Age is not quite his thing.

Yet the self-help, up-by-their-bootstraps mentality runs deep in American mythology. Even the term “New Age” undersells how old the phenomenon is, the way a mixture of striving and inchoate spiritual yearning has coursed through American culture back to its colonial days. It has most often been channeled politically by the right as an elevation of rugged individualism wielded against any form of collective action or as a valve to release pressure on the government to do something. Don’t like your working conditions? Don’t bond together with fellow laborers into a union; just go West, young man. Williamson inverts that right-wing critique and argues that it is our atomization, particularly in such anxious and precarious times, that drains both our power and our spirit in the service of the powerful. Her pairing of those two strains is neatly captured in the title and subtitle of her 2019 book, “A Politics of Love: A Handbook for a New American Revolution,” which is itself a nod to her mega-bestseller, the 1992 book “A Return To Love.”

Williamson has helped herself on TikTok by embracing the platform and using it the same way other creators do, which helps her appear more authentic. She also told me that her team reached out to one of the first stan accounts, @marrianne4prez, and brought the author in-house to show them how to do it. But Burbank noted that even the nonnative stuff does extremely well. “Videos of her giving speeches regularly go viral,” Burbank said. “She seems more unfiltered and ready to call out corruption and offer root solutions this time around.” She said a recent extended livestream of hers held an audience of 5,000-7,000 throughout, ending up with two million likes.

“Kids are just so critical and done with systems being broken, not being able to have access to health care, education,” Burbank said. “The actual deliverance of public goods is something that she’s always talking about.”

Marianne Williamson greets supporters as she launches her 2024 presidential campaign in Washington, Saturday, March 4, 2023. The 70-year-old onetime spiritual adviser to Oprah Winfrey became the first Democrat to formally challenge President Joe Biden for the 2024 nomination. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Marianne Williamson greets supporters as she launches her 2024 presidential campaign in Washington, D.C., on March 4, 2023.

Photo: Jose Luis Magana/AP


In capturing the hearts of young people on TikTok, Williamson is perhaps reproducing a phenomenon on the left that already swept through the right half a decade ago or more. I mean no offense when I say Marianne Williamson has the potential to become the Jordan Peterson of the left, fusing a politics of personal accountability with the pursuit of spiritual fulfillment that is achieved in significant part by fighting collectively with those around for a better world. Put another way, the Marianne Williamson phenomenon among young people is what you get when you combine Bernie Sanders and early Jordan Peterson. The Sanders slogan of 2020, “Not Me, Us,” is expanded by Williamson’s campaign to suggest that the me and the us are interrelated, that fighting for the “us” makes the “me” a better person, one more able to confront the traumatizing reality of contemporary society together than alone.

Early in his rise, Peterson also encouraged personal responsibility and offered his fans ways to improve their own lives and sense of self-worth, primarily through videos on YouTube and his bestseller, “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.” A Canadian psychologist, he would often urge his viewers to keep their bedrooms clean as a symbolic first step toward getting their life in order, as well as something concrete that makes their day-to-day life more ordered. That he amassed an audience in the tens of millions or more spoke to a collective — or, as he saw it, individual — yearning he met.

But Peterson has since lost the sense of uplift that originally distinguished him, leaning into a mean-spirited, reactionary politics and diving deeper into conspiratorial thinking. While Williamson speaks to the same spiritual void, she has a more constructive response: that you are responsible not just for improving your condition within the world, but also for constructing a new world along with others. There’s meaning, at least, in the struggle for it.

In one Williamson talk reposted to TikTok, she directly addresses the anxiety and trauma dealt with by the younger generation but urges people to consider that for, say, Iranian protesters or civil rights demonstrators crossing the bridge in Selma, trauma was motivating rather than debilitating. “I think we’ve gotten to a point where we’re coddling our neuroses a little bit too much right now,” she says, with orchestral music in the background. “This is not to minimize the pain. Sometimes you call your girlfriends, you call the people in your life: “Can I share my pain?” And then that call is over, and the person who loves you on that call says, ‘Promise me you’re going to go out there this afternoon and show ‘em what you got.’”

She added, “We need to say, ‘Meditate, take a shower, pray in the morning, and kick ass in the afternoon.’”

If anything, it might make more sense to think of Jordan Peterson as a Marianne Williamson of the right, as her rise to prominence predates his by several decades. But Peterson’s innovation was to code his worldview as rooted in or at least connected to right-wing politics. Williamson said that Peterson was given space to be seen as political in a way that she wasn’t. “He became specifically political,” she said. “He brought it in, and people didn’t say, ‘How dare you? Stay in your lane?’ Because in his world, they weren’t doing that. In my world, when I started talking about political things, [people said,] ‘Stay in your lane. How dare you?’ Even though my first political book was published in 1998.”

The world’s top left-wing expert on the phenomenon that was early Jordan Peterson may well be Current Affairs editor and writer Nathan J. Robinson, who, in 2018, watched hours of Peterson’s videos and read his works for the essay “The Intellectual We Deserve.” Robinson said the comparison of the Williamson phenomenon to that surrounding Peterson, insofar as it helps us understand where young voters are, has much to recommend it. But he said we need to focus on how Peterson is received rather than credit him with any genuine effort at reaching people.

“To me, Jordan Peterson is something of a charlatan, so if you describe somebody as a Jordan Peterson of the left, they are essentially a fraudulent pseudo guru dispensing bullshit, packaged as wisdom,” Robinson said. “So there’s a cynical view of what it means to be the Jordan Peterson of the left in a way that no one would want to be. But whenever I’ve analyzed Jordan Peterson, part of the analysis has always been, ‘Yes, but.’”

The “but” is the effect that he has had on people, almost exclusively young men. “He speaks to a lot of desperate people who want someone to talk to them in the language of uplift,” Robinson said. “How to fix your situation and speaking to people who are disaffected and who are lonely and who don’t know how to get themselves together. And of course, his individualistic solution is horrible. But I have to say, I’ve read ‘12 Rules For Life,’ and I’ve read Marianne Williamson’s ‘The Politics of Love.’ And I do think that both of them try and fill the spiritual void in people’s lives. I love what Marianne Williamson does in bringing a sort of moral language into politics.”

Given the reputation Peterson has since earned himself, it’s not the friendliest comparison in the wrong light, and I asked Williamson for her take on it. “When he began, I really liked him. And I’ve watched with horror as he moves in this extreme right-wing direction,” she said. “When he began, his power lay in the fact that he was speaking to the whole person, but then he veered off into a strange direction.”

But “the need is clearly there,” she said. “When you talk about being a figure that young men can look up to and learn from, I was really moved on my latest swings through New Hampshire and South Carolina, to hear how many young men came up to me and said, ‘I’m here because I heard about you from Kyle Kulinski,” she said, referring to the progressive YouTube broadcaster, “and then proceeded to tell me things that had nothing to do with politics, that had to do with the fact that they had been floundering, not knowing what to do with their lives going into what they called some dark places.”

Robinson said that Peterson’s drift into more conventional reactionary politics has cost him with his original audience, which wasn’t there for that. “He’s actually become very bitter and cynical now, and a lot of people, I think, have abandoned him,” he said. “I get letters all the time from former Jordan Peterson fans because he’s not really doing what he was doing a few years ago. Now he’s just ranting about climate change and stuff.”

The differing analyses from Peterson and Williamson of who and what is oppressing young people reach back to the long-standing difference between right- and left-wing populism. Peterson identifies an elite cabal that gathers annually in Davos under the guidance of the World Economic Forum — on Friday, he was attacking Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as a “WEF puppet” — as the masters of the universe. It is not merely their wealth but their cultural power Peterson identifies and thus channels class war into culture war — a model that conveniently excludes from the villain category “good” billionaires with the correct cultural politics, such as Elon Musk. Williamson, meanwhile, identifies what she calls the corporatocracy more broadly, keeping the analysis in material terms.

Old left meeting New Age, said Robinson, has potential to appeal in the 21st century. “I actually like this fusing of the self-help thing with the political thing. And in fact, while some people might have contempt for it, to me, it seems like a potential huge source of support and power for her,” Robinson said. “It’s not a surprise to me that she’s big on TikTok.”

By now, that the Democratic Party will be caught unaware should go without saying. The party missed the Sanders phenomenon in 2016, which was perhaps understandable, as there hadn’t been any precedent for his campaign since Jesse Jackson’s in the 1980s. Getting caught off guard a second time, in 2020, and nearly being beaten by Sanders, suggested the party was incapable of absorbing what lessons his campaign had taught Democrats.

Yet the second shock woke the party up, and the Biden campaign, after its near-death experience, worked closely with Sanders and his allies, hoping to bring his supporters into the fold, rather than keeping them at arm’s length, as Hillary Clinton had done to her detriment four years earlier. Throughout 2021, White House chief of staff Ron Klain had the Congressional Progressive Caucus on speed dial, a direct result of the success of the progressive wing of the party. But like the goldfish they are, party leaders are already forgetting it. Klain has stepped aside for a new chief of staff who is dragging Biden rightward again. While Biden flirts with banning TikTok, Democrats are likely to keep missing what’s going on there and what it means.

How the party engages with the types of young voters investing their hopes in Marianne Williamson could shape their relationship to the party for decades to come. It shouldn’t take a — what’s it called? — a little globe, a crystal ball, or a magic eight ball to see that.


This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ryan Grim.

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Marianne Williamson on Being a TikTok Phenom https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/14/marianne-williamson-on-being-a-tiktok-phenom/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/14/marianne-williamson-on-being-a-tiktok-phenom/#respond Fri, 14 Apr 2023 15:50:35 +0000 https://theintercept.com/?p=426066

If engagement on TikTok is any indication, a Democratic primary held today among people under 50 would result in a landslide for Marianne Williamson. Williamson has only posted 63 videos but has drawn more than 10 million views, according to a TikTok data counter. This week on Deconstructed, Ryan Grim speaks with Williamson about her growing popularity with Gen Z, why her message focusing on the economic hardships Americans are facing resonates, and what the Democratic Party is missing.

Transcript coming soon.


This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Deconstructed.

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Are We Criticizing Marianne Williamson For the Right Reasons? https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/06/are-we-criticizing-marianne-williamson-for-the-right-reasons/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/06/are-we-criticizing-marianne-williamson-for-the-right-reasons/#respond Thu, 06 Apr 2023 05:49:06 +0000 https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=278501

Photograph Source: Gage Skidmore – CC BY-SA 2.0

“A tulip doesn’t strive to impress anyone. It doesn’t struggle to be different than a rose. It doesn’t have to. It is different. And there’s room in the garden for every flower. You didn’t have to struggle to make your face different than anyone else’s on earth. It just is. You are unique because you were created that way. Look at little children in kindergarten. They’re all different without trying to be. As long as they’re unselfconsciously being themselves, they can’t help but shine. It’s only later, when children are taught to compete, to strive to be better than others, that their natural light becomes distorted.”

—Marianne Williamson

Marianne Williamson is in trouble with the left for her reparations plan being too low. She should be in trouble for this. It is far too low. She is also in trouble for her support of Israel’s apartheid state. She should be in trouble for this too. The line for the left should be: liberation for Palestine. End the Israeli occupation. No excuses.

The left however is tagged with anti-Semitism for a reason. Not because it is a more anti-Semitic place than the right or center. Far from. But rather because we haven’t done a good enough job of separating our critique of capitalism from a critique of Jewish people.

At an event in South Carolina Marianne Williamson was challenged by an audience member on her reparations policy. See the interaction here:

The audience member refreshingly was not arguing that reparations would be unfair to white people (or the white “working class”). However, he quickly stumbled into a similar trap when he brought up the familiar spectrum of Judaism for the left. He claimed the United States gave victims of the Holocaust reparations. This was only a small amount to Jewish organizations and facilitation of German reparations. But specifics aside he undermined his important argument for expanding reparations by claiming Jews got too much.

Predictably the interaction turned ugly as both Marianne and her challenger claimed to be standing up for their ancestors. A similar protectionist argument for reparations is often used as Black people have to prove their ancestors were descendants of slaves. What about victims of colonialism, capitalism, imperialism, neoliberalism, de-industrialization, etc.? The arguments could go on.

This of course isn’t an argument against reparations for any specific group. Nor is it an argument against any specific protection for any group. Any policy will have exclusions and anything will progress. And it is worth being honest about which groups have gotten advantages and which have not.

But using these programs against one another is a right-wing framing. Point blank.

For example, the left is absolutely correct to critique the Israeli protests against the attack on their judicial system. Israelis should also be protesting for rights of Palestinians. Of course, I agree. But the same thing could be applied to the French protests against the rollback of retirement benefits. France, like Israel, should be held accountable not just for crimes against its own people but against the whole world. Where are the mass protests in France for the rights of migrants? Where are the mass protests in the US against the war machine?

The left does have the Jewish specter lingering because it is too often linked with the anti-capitalist struggle. We have to guard against this because we care about Jewish people but also because it is something the ruling class wisely employs against the left, not because it is 100% true about the left but because maybe it’s 10% true and that is still too much.

Of course, the same sort of thing could be applied to unions. What are unions but a way to protect a certain section of workers against the reserve army of the unemployed?

Like it or not globalization has employed certain segments of the working class and lifted them out of poverty. The politics of socialism is not against protecting the groups who have retirement benefits or unions. Far from. Protecting these folks is important for its own sake and also important because in theory at least, these people have enough rights to take risks to help the whole world.

Furthermore, they can teach the rest of the world about how to get these rights. Such a movement of empowerment and education goes beyond immediate charity and towards universal self-reliance by each community.

However, as soon as the left gets into the politics of protecting borders or jobs with the state or corporation there is a potential for allegiance to said state and corporation. There is a potential to defend one’s own country, job, skill set, identity group, etc, against the emancipation of the world.

A development project could be very good for the exploited workers, who have a bad job or no job at all. And yet what does it do to the environment of everyone else? These are the hard questions the left has to deal with. So the left already has a project that involves some sort of universalism against the individual right.

But the ultimate contradiction the left is here to square is that emancipation for the universal is emancipation for the individual. Building organizations is the only way to build the trust necessary so that we know we are stronger together than apart.

However, the first step has to be a hard-to-swallow pill. It is worth admitting that our project of universalism is potentially a hinderence to the individual but not necessarily so. If we have trust and faith and generosity generally it comes back to us. That may be denialist, that may be idealistic, those may be the same thing and that may be the only way to change the world.

Williamson does have bad politics. But no worse than Bernie Sanders did and her challenge to Biden should be welcome. I get the sense that Bernie had more credibility for the left because he claimed to represent some sort of nationalist working-class politics rather than being a hippy-dippy. If we have learned anything from history we are better off with the hippies than the nationalists. That being said supporting Israel’s apartheid is nationalist and we need to challenge it. We need to challenge it from the left.

Bernie may have effectively deflated the left’s enthusiasm for engagement with national movements. But that’s unfortunate. Biden is proving to be a far worse President than even Obama was and the left seems to be doing a lot of apologizing for him. This is puzzling and I welcome any challenge to the consensus. And no I don’t consider Donald Trump sticking it to the “deep state” to be a challenge to any sort of consensus whatsoever. Apologists for Bernie, Biden, and Trump alike all seem to be supporting a certain kind of nationalist vision. Jim Crow Joe fitting neatly into Bernie-Trump politics hopefully erases the idea of horseshoe politics.

The response to globalization can’t be nationalism. We are right to oppose globalization. We are right to oppose nationalism. Supporting one is a reaction to the other. Marianne Williamson is too nationalist for what our politics should be and not naturalist enough for what our politics are. Hopefully running up against this reality leads her (and all of us) back to peace, love and understanding.

Williamson is dismissed as not being serious because she talks about love too much. Perhaps this is why she is retreating into politics that aren’t clear in supporting Palestine. Perhaps it is simply because she has made too much money to be in touch with this part of the struggle. Regardless of our criticism, we need to take love very seriously. It is the most important part of the political struggle.

Far more important than anything else is the transformative power of love. Love is the only thing powerful enough to transcend historical materialism. Without love’s power to make us act for others, our script is already written. We can claim that we are acting on behalf of the oppressed but too often this claim, this race to vouch for a certain group at the expense of another, is just another attempt at competition.

Everyone is a victim. Everyone has a claim to a piece of the pie. That’s not our interest. Our interest is transforming people from those who see exploitation as the thing that defines their life (rightly or wrongly) and turning them into people who believe love can be the thing that emancipates them (rightly or wrongly).

Whenever we are taught something we tend to tune it out unless we are told why it is important. The best teachers are the ones who can say why they are doing what they are doing. We are for socialism because we are for love. We can’t just make a practical or moral argument for socialism. We do have to tell others why we are here.

Love is Marianne’s strength. Is she ready to lean into it? Are we?


This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Nick Pemberton.

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Beyond the Politics of Despair: an Interview With Marianne Williamson https://www.radiofree.org/2022/10/19/beyond-the-politics-of-despair-an-interview-with-marianne-williamson/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/10/19/beyond-the-politics-of-despair-an-interview-with-marianne-williamson/#respond Wed, 19 Oct 2022 05:56:45 +0000 https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=260379 As Americans live through varying degrees of angst during this final month before the mid-term elections, who should burst onto the scene but the unconventional political and spiritual activist Marianne Williamson offering words of love, hope, and defiance. Williamson, you may recall, ran as a progressive Democrat for the 2020 Presidency. Drawing huge crowds during More

The post Beyond the Politics of Despair: an Interview With Marianne Williamson appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Charlotte Dennett.

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