Joining us now is author, spiritual leader and
political activist Marianne Williamson.
Marianne, thank you so much for joining us.
>> Thank you so much for having me.
>> So, I'm gonna get started with something that caught my attention
recently.
So, it was reported that you have formed an exploratory committee for
a potential run for president in 2024.
You also had noted that you have a big announcement coming up on March 4th.
You wanna maybe speed up that announcement and say something about it on this show.
[LAUGH] >> Well, when you,
when you kind of say I'm announcing that I'm gonna have an announcement on March 4,
you're sort of winking and I think everybody realizes that.
And and it's certainly been out there that I've had the exploratory and
I've done this sort of due diligence of figuring out whether or
not it would be full hearted to the extent of futile.
Or whether there is a compelling reason for me to run.
And I feel that I've come up with the answer, as far as my own heart,
my own gut register, and I'll be talking about that.
I'll be on live stream, I'll be in Washington DC, and
I'll let people know how I'm feeling.
Where I think the country has been, where I think the country is, and
where I think the country needs to go.
>> Well, speaking of that, you recently published a piece in your
substack titled a new America is struggling to be born but
it was don't be berthed unless we birth it.
And you touched on so many issues that we have in the country, but
what really struck me was your emphasis on how corruption has
really hurt this country in many ways.
You write, we don't need any more evidence that the system has become deeply,
intrinsically corrupt.
We can see it in the broken windows, shuttered factories and
violent crime in our once thriving communities.
We can see it in the hollowed eyes and
addiction rattled brokenness of our fellow citizens.
You also write, quote, we can see it in the mass despair of millions of Americans
who work hard all day yet cannot afford a one bedroom apartment,
who were holding on but now find themselves homeless.
Who are struggling with anxiety born of constant economic uncertainty, who tried
their best to get into the game but have found the game so rigged against them.
Marianne, if you had a magic wand and
there was one main issue that you could really focus on and
solve, what would that issue be?
>> If I could only do one, it would be universal healthcare.
We have 500,000 Americans who go into medical debt every year.
We have 68,000 Americans who die every year for lack of health care.
We have 85 Americans who either underinsured or uninsured.
We have an $88 billion dollars total medical debt.
And I think when you consider the fact that that produces so
much economic anxiety and so many people's lives.
We have 64% of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck,
60% of Americans who could not absorb a $400 unexpected expenditure.
Healthcare alone would really take that level of despair and drop it quite a bit.
What we know we all need to realize is exactly what you were saying before about
East Palestine.
What happened in East Palestine is a feature,
it's not a bug of the way the current system works.
And it's exactly the corruption, what I was talking about in that article,
is exactly the corruption that you and
John we're talking about over the last few minutes.
The deregulation, the fact that for the sake of short term profits,
it's not just the railroad companies, it's the insurance companies, it's big oil,
it's the pharmaceutical companies and big agricultural companies.
It's big chemical companies.
It's big food companies, it's a military industrial complex.
It's the system itself.
It's not just one industry and it's not just one incident.
And as long as you put short term economic profits before the health and safety and
well being of people and animals and planets, we're going to get more and
more East Palestinians.
But you know this is the thing, it's not like one particular institution.
Slavery was one institution, you gotta end it,
institutionalized oppression of women, we need suffrage,
one institution that needs to be removed, segregation, one institution.
Today it's more like an atomizer spray of injustice.
It's the racial inequality in our criminal justice system here.
It's infiltration of white supremacists into our police there.
It is lack of health care over here.
It is the fact that people don't have healthy food over there.
It is the East Palestinians, it is the environmental injustice of it all.
It is the fact that we have such high rates of chronic illness in this
countryand of course the war machine in the United States.
So, at this point, we need to recognize that the system is so
deeply corrupt that the corruption is baked into the cake.
And at this point, I don't think the system is going to disrupt itself.
That's really what you've been talking about here.
Pete Buttigieg is a Dmocrat.
So if you we know how the Republicans feel,
they're just a kind of like nosedive for our democracy and our society.
But the Democrats are kind of a managed decline at this point.
So when you ask me what one thing, yeah, the one thing would be healthcare, but
really it's the issue underlying all those issues, and that is neoliberalism itself.
It's the fact that we have had a 50-year aberrational chapter of American society
where trickle down economics, unregulated capitalism, whatever you wanna call it,
has led to this decimation of the American middle class.
We've had, I think Grand Corporation said,
over the last 48 years we've had $50 trillion of resources,
of money, that has gone from the bottom 90% to the 1%.
So we need genuine economic reform at this point, it's more than just healthcare.
It's more than that.
It's also a livable wage, it's also maternity leave, it's also free college.
It's just all those things that we know and that you talk about all the time.
>> So Marianne, you just laid out a really important case against corporate
Democrats, corporate Republicans, and basically corporate rule in America.
And I think that probably resonate with a lot of Americans, but
that is not what you will get from 90% of the media coverage of this room.
They will ask you, aren't you helping Republicans by doing a primary,
aren't you helping Trump by doing a primary?
It's almost an effort to paint you as a right winger when you're doing
a left wing challenge to Biden, if you announce on March 4th?
So, how do you plan to combat what will be an enormous
industry of misleading statements about why you're running?
>> I think there's an ameliorated quality to saying the truth as you understand it.
All those things that you just talked about will happen.
And one might say it's a ridiculous thing to think that this could get anywhere, but
to that, Cenk, I remind people that Trump became President.
And he didn't become President by strategizing anything,
he became president by hitting a nerve.
And I think the nerve we need to hit at this point is the American realization
that the American people have been played.
We've been played for the last 50 years.
And I think that more Americans are waking up to this.
The kinds of things we talk about, whether it has to do with universal healthcare,
tuition-free college, free childcare, maternity leave,
paternity leave, sick pay.
These are considered moderate issues to any advanced democracy in Europe and
elsewhere, and they should be considered moderate issues here.
And if I get the chance on mainstream media, that's exactly what I will say.
Okay, and following up on that.
So they will go back to 1976 to try to find
an example of a primary hurting a sitting president.
Now, you can go to many contemporary examples of primaries helping,
whether it was the very contentious primary 2016 for the Republicans or
the contentious primary in 2020 for the Democrats, etc.
There's tons of recent examples, but they will all, all of them in media,
not even in politics, but in media go back to 1970, I'm sorry,
1980 when [CROSSTALK] Kennedy primary Jimmy Carter.
And they say that that hurt Carter's chances of winning.
So what is your battle plan for fighting back against basically
a misleading idea that we know for a fact they will throw at you 200 times.
>> I'm not interested in fighting back against them.
The fighting back thing is really what's the problem at this point.
The Republicans are gonna be fighting the Democrats,
the Democrats are gonna be fighting the Republicans.
The democratic candidate needs to say, I will fight poverty,
I will fight lack of healthcare, I will fight the fact that your children have
asthma because of the factories that should not be in your neighborhood.
We will fight the fact that people are sick because of fossil fuel extraction,
what it's doing to the environment and what it's doing to the planet.
I'm not interested in the football game and
I don't think the American people are that interested in the kind of conversation
that you were just talking about.
And gen Z isn't even watching mainstream media.
I think a lot of the conversation that mainstream media has is less and
less interesting to people who know that they're hurting, and
are less interested in the football game.
Because they figured out what's going on in this country.
They're not interested in the spectator sport,
they're interested in their own lives.
And capitalism has been weaponized against the American people,
an unfettered deregulated capitalism.
It's almost a diabolical force at this point.
It is sociopathic, it is pathological,
it literally does not care if people drop dead.
That's what you see in situations like East Palestine.
>> Marianne, I agree with you in regard to corporate media, certainly cable news.
If you look at the demographics that consume that content,
it's certainly not young individuals who are watching.
But what is your game plan in regard to reaching out to the individuals
that you wanna get your message out to, right?
Those who actually wanna hear about an economic plan that would
benefit them as opposed to benefiting corporate interests.
>> Last time when I did this, Ana, I was saying a lot of these things last time,
but there were two issues.
First of all, there was Bernie Sanders, which I totally understand, but
a lot of people because they were so involved with Bernie, and believe me,
I endorsed Bernie when I left, I adore Bernie.
I adore Bernie.
And it is true that because of Bernie taking up so much oxygen,
some people were not listening to me at the same time in a way they might.
Secondly, all this ridiculousness about me, the fairy dust that was thrown
in people's eyes, that I'm anti-science and that I'm the crystal lady.
And then, I told people they didn't pray enough and
that's why they got sick, all that ridiculousness.
I think I will have a greater capacity this time to counterpunch,
which last time I don't think I knew how to do.
When I actually talked to audiences, people got it,
people got it, people hear it.
So what I'm going to do is to go out and speak to voters and
also speak on the internet, speak on social media,
and do all the things that you do during a campaign.
And hope that this time, and
I think that part of the due diligence that I did was finding out,
will there be enough people this time who are willing to give me a listen?
And I have a sense that there will be, I have a sense more and
more people know Joe Biden beat Donald Trump, that's great.
We're very grateful that we didn't go off that cliff, but
we're still six inches away from the cliff.
Eleanor Roosevelt said to Franklin Roosevelt, we need more than the Emelia
reason of suffering, we need genuine economic reform.
For Joe Biden to go out in 2024 and to say to the American people that his
message is that the economy is doing better, when you have people suffering.
With the economic despair and
anxiety that the majority of Americans are suffering through every day.
People are open to the message now, why should it be so hard to survive?
Joe Biden's gonna help you survive?
Why should it be so hard to survive in the richest country of the world?
So we need to do more than hang out six inches away from the cliff.
We need everyone to have a livable wage.
We have a third of America's workforce who live on less than $15 an hour.
That's not a livable wage.
>> Yeah.
All right, it looks like on Friday people might have a second alternative other than
Joe Biden, to vote in the Democratic primaries.
And that is an exciting development.
>> Thank you. >> And we will certainly follow that very
thoroughly here on TYT.
Marianne Williamson, thank you so much for joining us, appreciate it.
God bless you, honey.
>> Thank you, thank you.