Marianne Williamson's campaign reportedly thinks she was 'swiftboated'

Marianne Williamson isn't surprised by how well her outsider 2020 run turned out, but she was surprised at how often she wasn't taken seriously.

The self-help guru-turned-2020 candidate gave unexpectedly standout performances in the Democratic debates, earning her a whirlwind of media coverage. But then came the quotes painting Williamson as everything from anti-science to a fat shamer, leading her campaign manager to speculate she was "swiftboated by someone who felt threatened by her," The New York Times Magazine reports.

Williamson gave a head-turning performance in the first and second Democratic debates, providing endlessly quotable answers about how "love will win" the presidency and how President Trump was stirring up a "dark psychic force" in the country. But the resurrection of her tweets suggesting antidepressants lead to suicide and quotes from her books describing how "sickness is an illusion" stopped any momentum she might have had. Williamson's campaign manager Patricia Ewing saw a pattern in those attacks, leading her to say she thought someone was conducting "opposition research" against Williamson, per the Times.

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Williamson's controversial ideas were meant for a "self-selecting crowd of spiritual seekers," people who "understand the metaphors and know how to derive wisdom from them," Taffy Brodesser-Akner writes for the Times. In the hands of "anti-vax nuts" and "science crusaders," they'd been distorted, Brodesser-Akner continues. And it all piled up into Williamson's eventual rejection from the next round of Democratic debates — an "overt and covert message" to political outsiders like herself to "go home," as Williamson put it.

Read more at The New York Times Magazine.