P6 NY THE NEW YORK TIMES, THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2019
But Marilyn wasn’t concerned. She’d seen what
happened with President Trump, and she believed
that Williamson could cast a similar kind of spell.
In a modern campaign, unseriousness can be a
virtue. We are living in a time when two meme-literate
teenage boys are directing the campaign of Mike
Gravel, an 89-year-old former senator. They are the
political equivalent of children stacked in a trench
coat, angling to buy a ticket to the presidential race.
And they are riffing, really, on the example set by
Trump himself: that joke candidacies can be laced
with serious potential.
In Marilyn’s Bushwick apartment in August, we
spoke about the proximity she sees between
Williamson and Trump. “Both of them are talking to
people who don’t take politics very seriously,” she said.
These political cynics “think the whole system is cor-
rupt,” she added. “The only way they’re going to
engage is if it’s not going to take serious energy from
their souls.”
T
HERE’S A PERSISTENT MEMEformat known as
the expanding brain meme that depicts a human
brain growing in size and strength until it is so intellec-
tually powerful that mind lasers blast from its skull.
Somebody crafted a version of it (fig. 18)that perfectly
articulates Marilyn’s position: The most intellectually
evolved stance in the 2020 election — the laser-brain
one — is to support Williamson both ironically and
unironically. Perhaps the giddy feeling of memeing
could translate into the grass-roots energy necessary
to lift a guru to the White House. I mean, has anything
Joe Biden ever said supplied the natural high
produced by grafting Williamson’s face into a scene of
the Na’vi people of “Avatar”? All Marilyn knew is that
she had never been so excited about politics.
Within a month, she was juggling 20 meme pages
and managing online efforts across the chat service
Discord, the livestreaming platform Twitch, Facebook,
Twitter, Reddit and Instagram, plus a candy-colored
central hub, OrbGang.love. (fig. 19)She helped lever-
age the crystal ball emoji to inject Williamson’s ethe-
real vibe into the discourse, calling Williamson her
#OrbMom and the movement the #OrbGang (styled
after the #YangGang, for fans of Andrew Yang). Post-
ers on her pages often addressed their messages to
either “ironic supporters” or “unironic supporters,”
but increasingly that was a distinction without a differ-
ence. “Thanks to this group,” one supporter wrote on
Marianne Williamson’s Dank Meme Stash, “I would
now for real vote for Marianne Williamson.”
When the second debate came around, in July,
Marilyn attended a watch party in Manhattan. I
descended into a basement to find it stuffed with a
diverse array of her fellow travelers. There were
younger men in tank tops and older ones in suspend-
ers. One woman clutched Nancy Pelosi’s memoir and
another wore a fez. A guy in a Dallas Cowboys hat and
river sandals engaged me in a crossed-arm double
handshake and said, “We’ve closed the energy circle.”
We did not see much of Marianne Williamson that
night. Long shot candidates with more traditional
qualifications — John Delaney, Tim Ryan — crowded
out the margins of the televised debate. But the real
action was not happening on CNN. As Beto O’Rourke
droned on about his “administration” on TV, Marilyn
stared into her phone, its glow revealing her beatific
smile as she thumbed out tweets like “My spicy orb
mom there is no other but you .” A few incisive
political points (Williamson’s speech advocating repa-
rations) and aesthetic quirks (she dropped a “yadda,
yadda, yadda”) would be enough to sustain the #Orb-
Gang for weeks.
By the end of the evening, Williamson had become
the most-searched-for candidate on Google in every
state except Montana. When she walked off the stage,
a reporter asked her to rate her performance and she
replied, “I’ll tell you later when I see the memes.” Soon
she would share one on her Instagram: her face
Photoshopped into “Game of Thrones,” with
Williamson styled as Melisandre, a priestess who is
secretly very old and works blood magic in the service
of her god, the Lord of Light. (fig. 20)
The next morning, Marilyn texted me a link to a
Sarah Marilyn, right,
attended a debate
watch party for
Marianne Williamson.Refreshments were
served.Photograph by Calla
Kessler/The New York
TimesIN REALITY,Hillary Clinton is not a political force to be reckoned with. She
lost the presidency to Donald Trump, and she promises she won’t try for a
rematch. Instead she is performing color commentary from the sidelines
of this election. She’s posting “Mean Girls” GIFs. She’s advising against
nuking hurricanes. She’s tweeting at Lizzo.
But in the right-wing political imagination, Clinton looms over all the
figures of the left. Her effigy burns brightly across conservative sectors of
Facebook and Reddit. On the Facebook group Daily Trump Memes, she
appears as a skeletal demon (fig. 16)and Homer Simpson in drag. (fig. 17)
Her emails remain an urgent topic of discussion. Clinton may not be run-
ning against President Trump, but these groups operate as if he is still
running against her. Trump himself is still out on Twitter, relitigating the
election he won.
As influential as political fandoms can be, anti-fandoms — ones that
define themselves around their zeal for delegitimizing a celebrity, be she
Clinton or Taylor Swift — may be even more potent. (See also: the leftist
mantra that “Kamala Harris is a cop,” and the right-wing repetition of
“creepy Joe Biden.”) After all of the work that went into mounting an anti-
fandom around Clinton — one with familiar story lines, insults and visual
motifs — it’s more effective to keep investing in her demonization than it is
to start fresh with a real Democratic candidate. A vote for Trump is still a
vote against Clinton, whether she’s running or not.CASE STUDY
In some corners of the internet, she’s still running.HILLARY
CLINTON’S
ZOMBIE
CANDIDACY
fig. 16 fig. 17 fig. 18 fig. 19