Marianne Williamson gets puff-pieced by Ryan Grim

The Intercept reports that Marianne Williamson is gathering a backing with the under-30s on TikTok.

One thing Grim notes is that Agemonger Joe, especially with the voice of his press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre as an example, runs a risk by mocking her too much if the under-30s can't be retained in a general election.

That said, Grim has some BAD framing, specifically starting where he uses high book sales as a version of the classical ad populum informal logical fallacy.

As I told him, Deepak Shitty sells millions of books, too, and he's nothing but a New Age huckster in end. Williamson's book sales have nothing to do with her credibility. 

Grim quotes her as saying:

“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.”

Ahh, Ryan, we have the receipts, mainly left on Twitter, not in her books, from her 2020 prez campaign, unless this year's run has already done a massive Twitter cleanup from then. And, Grim checks on that or reports on that not at all.

But, I DID CHECK. Via the "receipts" in that blog post she INDEED has been Tweet-scrubbing, and that got the Just.Another.Politician.™ tag. But NOT Twitter-scrubbed is Fluxus' screen-grab of her being a down-the-line Biden duopolist in 2020. And, for someone at a place like The Intercept, to not check on this is either editorially lazy, or if deliberate to avoid finding stuff out, intellectually dishonest, IMO.

There's more receipts here about "the love" fixing the Middle East. (And fighting Trump.)

But, that's not the worst.

THAT — and what makes this a puff piece — is that the word "vaccine," or similar words like "anti-vaccination" or "antivaxxer" are not to be found in Grim's story. And, I told him AND The Intercept that. And, yes, per the "here" link two paragraphs up, her explanations or non-explanations didn't convince me, and Grim never even asked.

Grim then says she could become the Jordan Peterson of the left, claiming the younger Peterson was a font of psychological uplift. To the degree he was, that's not now, and in a puff piece, that's a bad story line because it's a distraction.

So, Grim's editors let him write a puff piece AND didn't edit it better.

The last third gets somewhat better, but it overrates how far left Bernie Sanders is, especially on foreign policy (the Russia-Ukraine war and the Israeli ongoing assault on Palestinians show the reality) AND ignores that Bernie wanted to be co-opted in 2020 in a way that he didn't in 2016, in part because of personal animus toward Hillary Clinton that he didn't have toward Joe Biden. We know that.

So, what you really have is a piece that, beyond being a puff piece, shows the political desperation of duopoly leftists, Nathan J. Robinson as well as Ryan Grim.

Related to that? This is not the first time that Grim has had a bad or weak take on national Democratic politics. I called him out for turd-polishing last fall over his attempt to spin The Fraud and the Congressional Progressive Cucks over Russia-Ukraine issues.