Spiritual adviser Marianne Williamson ended her outsider campaign for president earlier this year after poor showings at the ballot box in the Democratic primary. However, on Wednesday, she posted an announcement that she was "unsuspending" her campaign to jump back into the race.
This comes after she got more votes in the Michigan Democratic primary than the only other significant primary challenger to President Joe Biden, Minnesota congressman Dean Phillips — despite her campaign being over and despite her having not actively campaigned for the state.
"I had suspended it because I was losing the horse race," said Williamson in her announcement video. "But something so much more important than the horse race is at stake here, and we must respond. Right now, we have a fascist standing at the door. Everybody's all upset about it. Well we should be upset about it. But we're not going to defeat the fascist by — well, by what? What is President Biden offering?"
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She went on to claim that Biden is not offering voters anything other than claiming "the economy is really doing well." (It is by virtually any metric, with record low unemployment, high wage growth, and rapid job creation.) And she said she would defeat the "dark juggernaut" of Trump by "lifting people up."
Williamson has come under criticism for her controversial statements about health and medicine, including questioning of vaccine science, telling AIDS patients that sickness is "an illusion," and that clinical depression is "a scam."
She also ran for president in 2020, and reports allege that during that campaign she had a systematic pattern of abusing her staff, including episodes of "foaming, spitting, uncontrollable rage" where she would scream, hurl phones at staffers, and on one occasion while campaigning in South Carolina, pounded a car door so ferociously that she injured her hand and had to be taken to an urgent care clinic.
Phillips, as the other challenger to Biden, has recently endured a tough news cycle, as it has emerged that a Louisiana consultant who previously worked for his campaign masterminded an illegal robocall telling New Hampshire voters to stay home from the primary. His campaign insists they were not involved in this scheme.
