Hoping to woo with woo-woo
Self-help writer, 2020 candidate hopes woo-woo will woo voters
Candidate Marianne Williamson brings her unique perspective to the 2020 campaign.
There was only one presidential candidate on stage during last week’s debates who has ever lived in a geodesic dome, led a room of hand-holding moguls in prayer at David Geffen’s 48th birthday party or officiated a wedding at Neverland Ranch. The bride was Elizabeth Taylor (entering her eighth and final union, with a Teamster she met while both were drying out at the Betty Ford clinic), and the candidate in question is, of course, Marianne Williamson.
Williamson, who has spent the better part of her adult life in the state, is a uniquely California creature.
She operates at the nexus of celebrity, pop psychology and potential salvation, where shrewd business acumen and astral planes collide.
The 67-year-old is a selfhelp author, motivational lecturer and new age guru who believes that performing miracles is her life’s work, and she delivers her love-based philosophy at sold-out seminars.
Like most California eccentrics, Williamson hailed from elsewhere (Houston, in this case), wandered lost and then was found.
Southern California has long drawn prophets and gurus like moths to sundrenched light. Our shores are an oddly fertile breeding ground for all manner of cultists, mystics and new religious movements.
In his indispensable 1946 volume “Southern California: An Island on the Land,” historian and social critic Carey McWilliams penned the ur-history of the region as the world capital of woo-woo and dated the emergence of the phenomenon to roughly the turn of the last century, when Katherine Tingley, “the first major prophetess of the region” established a Theosophical community near San Diego in 1900.
It’s not exactly a direct line from Tingley to Aimee Semple McPherson to Williamson, but the path is there.
Williamson typically speaks as if she’s delivering the answer to a riddle at a dinner party hosted by Tom Wolfe. She has written seven New York Times bestsellers, including the 1992 debut “A Return to Love,” which launched her career into the mainstream with Oprah’s ringing on-air endorsement.
She came west in 1970, for a two-year stint at Pomona College that helped shape her very California candidacy.
“We read Ram Dass and Alan Watts in the morning,” she recalled to the audience at an L.A. event, according to a recent profile, “and went to Vietnam antiwar protests in the afternoon.”
Williamson, who was raised Jewish, first encountered “A Course in Miracles,” the thousand-plus page spiritual tome that has shaped her teachings, on a friend’s Manhattan coffee table in 1977.
Los Angeles — a city that specializes in the brand of post-denomination, chooseyour-own-adventure spirituality necessary to casually accessorize a red string Kabbalah bracelet with a crucifix necklace — was a natural destination for a Jew to riff on a book that purports to be the words of Jesus, as dictated directly to a New York shrink. (Yes, that is literally the background on “A Course in Miracles.”)
Williamson began giving her talks in 1983 at the Philosophical Research Society on Los Feliz Boulevard (the nonprofit, which gets a name-check in McWilliam’s chapter on the abundant flowering of Southern California occultism, is still in operation).
She started to gain an L.A. audience in the mid’80s, particularly with Hollywood’s gay community in relation to her AIDS activism.
She launched her political career in 2014 with a glitzy bid for California’s 33rd Congressional District (Henry Waxman’s old seat, now represented by Ted Lieu). The campaign was unsuccessful but drew support from multiple Kardashians and spawned “Mermaids for Marianne” lawn signs.
In the crowded race for 2020, Williamson remains a long-shot candidate who has been polling at less than 1%.
Her wacky and extremely meme-able performance during the first round of debates in June brought her outsize attention, though much of it was as a punchline.
She’s been derided as a “dangerous wacko” and made deeply controversial statements on vaccines, weight loss and mental health, among other things.
“In many ways, Williamson is the left’s answer to Trump — an outlier candidate who celebrates her lack of political acumen with the language of popular culture and believes, at some level, that feelings are the same as facts,” my colleague Mary McNamara wrote in a columnin June. In an election season with an incumbent president who had never before held elected office, McNamara suggested that Americans ignore Williamson at their own peril.
And Tuesday night, Williamson delivered the most surprising performance of all: that of an eerily near-viable candidate, who spoke powerfully on race and dominated Google search traffic.
It would be near impossible for any one story to capture even a sliver of the contradictions of life in Los Angeles, circa 2019.
But this headline, which ran in the Los Angeles Daily News alongside an excellently reported story by Ariella Plachta on Monday, offers a slice of the city’s darker contradictions: “Homeless people keep arriving at Tarzana mansion thinking it’s a shelter, but it’s really a prank by online trolls.”
The story itself — which involves a YouTube star and a tent city and the burn of a promised opportunity that doesn’t pan out when you are already so very down on your luck — unfolds a bit like a Russian nesting doll, peeled back piece by piece.
Let’s start with a newlooking mansion in the San Fernando Valley, just off Reseda Boulevard. “It has these big white walls around it and planters and a lot of security, like two gates and cameras,” Plachta told me. “And if you sort of peek over the wall, you can see this amazing infinity pool.”
Now, let’s add another layer. We live in an age where a not-small number of people make their living as professional streamers, broadcasting themselves to the world on platforms such as YouTube and Twitch. Most play video games, but some are what they call “life streamers.” Imagine that friend of yours who uploads eight or 10 Instagram stories a day, of their eating dinner or going to the store or just doing whatever, but on mega-steroids and maybe prankishly crossed with an episode of Johnny Knoxville’s cult MTV show “Jackass.” Now, imagine that they’re streaming it live, potentially to tens of thousands of people, all of whom could be providing instantaneous feedback.
Paul Denino, a 24-yearold known as “Ice Poseidon” to his army of fans, has been a pioneer of the genre, so prominent as to be almost synonymous with the act of IRL streaming itself.
Denino’s ardent fans don’t just watch; they troll and engage and routinely go to war with the very idea of there being any flimsy membrane of separation between live performer and viewer.
They phone in pizza deliveries, flood restaurants where Denino is eating with calls about fake emergencies and generally try to insert their antics into the livestream.
They also frequently up the ante with a more nefarious procedure known as “swatting,” in which a fake bomb or hostage threat leads authorities to swarm the area. Denino was banned from Twitch after a high-profile swatting incident involving a bomb threat at the Phoenix airport led to the closure of several runways.
But back to Tarzana. Denino was thinking big when he rented that mansion off Reseda Boulevard in February for the princely sum of $25,000 a month. He had plans for turning it into some kind of “streamer house,” although they never quite panned out.
Also February: While Los Angeles was experiencing one of the coldest, rainy winters in recent memory, digital warriors engaged in an act of online trolling that would have widespread consequences of rippling cruelty. They added the address of Denino’s Tarzana mansion to Google Maps as the “Ice Poseidon Homeless Shelter,” complete with photos of cots and fake user reviews.
Paul Read, a homeless advocate, said he first heard about the “shelter” from some friends who were staying in a large encampment in Encino. “They were asking, ‘Hey, have you heard about the Tarzana shelter? We want to go there and check it out and see if we can stay there.’ ”
Read was surprised when he initially heard talk of the new “shelter,” because usually advocates and service providers like him are aware of the plans long before any new beds open. “It seemed kind of weird. And sure enough, we find out it was a hoax,” Read said.
“Sadly, some people I know had gone up there and found out the hard way. Of course, it really brought them down and got them upset, because they were hoping for something that they had been waiting for for a while,” he said, explaining how there was a deep scarcity of existing shelter beds in the Valley.
Given the rain at the time, which can cause flooding in the Encino encampment, people were particularly desperate for a place to stay.
“A lot of people had no place to go. It was the worst year probably in a while for this to happen, because more people were fooled,” Read said. Some of them even traveled long distances by bus, foot or bike to reach the house.
Denino moved out of the house months ago, but the current residents told Plachta a man and a woman recently came to the house looking for shelter. Google Maps removed the phony listing only last week, thanks to Plachta’s reporting.
Speaking on the phone Thursday, Plachta told me that working on the piece “really made me think about all of these really active worlds online, that our mainstream society doesn’t always know about.”
“But this story is just one instance of the way that they can have consequences in real life,” she said.
YouTube star’s fans listed his Tarzana mansion as a shelter — then homeless showed up