[guest post by JVW]

Meanwhile, back in the Democrat primary, everybody’s favorite spiritual guru turned progressive influencer Marianne Williamson, whose own campaign has been “suspended” (a modern euphemism for “we’re spending down the rest of our money before formally closing up shop”), is lending her unique credibility to a fellow outsider candidate. Times being as they are, the announcement was made via Instagram, and Marianne being Marianne, the announcement was made in three long posts. Here’s the third part where she discusses her newfound buddy Andrew Yang (parts one and two, if you are interested):

With a week-and-a-half to go until the Iowa caucuses, former Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson says she’s supporting tech entrepreneur Andrew Yang in the contest that kicks off the presidential nominating calendar.

“I’m lending my support to Andrew in Iowa, hopefully to help him get past the early primaries & remind us not to take ourselves too seriously. We need that this year. We need to lighten up on a personal level, because the moment is so serious on a political level,” Williamson announced in a series of Instagram posts.

Ms. Williamson is quick to note that this is not actually an endorsement and that she continues to admire both of the tiresome lefty New England Senators running for President, but at this point she wants to ensure that Andrew Yang stays in the Democrat primary long enough to impact the rest of the race.

I salute Marianne Williamson for coming to the aid of another non-establishment candidate. Sure, I wish she had chosen My Little Aloha Sweetie as the beneficiary of her largesse, but it would seem that she has somewhat of a gender and generational affinity for Hillary Rodham Clinton and she probably didn’t want to get in the middle of any ugly feuds. It also the same rationale, found in the second of her series of posts on Instagram, that leads one to believe that at the end of the day she prefers Elizabeth Warren to Bernard Sanders among the remaining major delusional leftists.

I too am warming to Andrew Yang for many of the same reasons that I am fond of My Little Aloha Sweetie. No, it’s nothing to do with the magic of Island music or inspiring workout videos: I appreciate Mr. Yang because like Rep. Gabbard, and Ms. Williamson for that matter, he doesn’t seem to want to herd his political opponents into reeducation camps, nor does he think that the object of the game is to drive them from polite society and force them to knuckle-under to more enlightened progressive beliefs. Though I find Mr. Yang’s universal basic income proposal to be impractical, and though I lament his nod to the world of trendy social justice engineering, allowing those who disagree with you to remain part of the debate tends to go a long way with me in these thuggish days.

In any case, I hope that Ms. Williamson’s intercession on behalf of Mr. Yang is fruitful, but only to the degree that he begins to draw votes from the current top four candidates. And I hope this isn’t the last we hear from America’s favorite Crazy Cute Hippy Crystals Chick this election season.

– JVW

I was going to leave this as a comment, but it deserves a post.

This morning I read a comment from someone who says that he “used to respect” me for my work as a DA and my behavior through the Kimberlin saga, but now he apparently does not respect me because I believe Donald Trump is corrupt and should be removed from office. I think he believed the expression of that opinion hurt me. It did not. Comments like that used to bother me, but not any longer. Today, I see many comments like that a lot, on my blog or on Twitter. I block the people, or ban them, dust off my hands, and go on with my day.

If you claim to have respected me in the past, for my media criticism, for my work as a prosecutor, for my willingness to take on Brett Kimberlin and refusal to settle with him, or whatever — and now you say you don’t respect me because I don’t like Trump — you never respected me. You respected an image of me that wasn’t me. You respected an image of someone who you believed was a partisan warrior who would always be on your “side” regardless of what your side did. You didn’t know me, you didn’t respect me, and I’m glad to be rid of you.

I wrote a fairly impassioned post last night praising the closing argument of Adam Schiff and bemoaning the fact that Mike Lee and Ben Sasse, two men *I* used to respect, are going to back Trump to the hilt. The thing is, I respected the image of those guys, that they projected through their books and public speeches. But as it turns out, my image was different from the actual men — who, as it turns out, are flawed (as all men are), and weak, and who could not muster the necessary courage in the end (which is not true of all men). Like my commenter, I respected my vision of a person, but I didn’t know the person — and in the end, the person is not the image. I’m not the unwavering partisan warrior that my commenter thought he respected, and Mike Lee and Ben Sasse are not (as far as I can tell, though I’d love to be surprised!) the stand-up guys I thought they were.

So be it.

In comments to that post, at least a couple of my longtime friends have expressed opinions about this whole saga — opinions that I disagree with strongly. One believes Trump to have been railroaded. One believes Trump to be a fool but says he is not the danger; his puppeteers are. I disagree with them, but they are friends — as dear friends as someone whom I have never met can be — and I am not going to simply cast them aside because they have a different opinion about some political matter than I do. (If they had spent their lives portraying themselves as heroes of the Constitution, and had any actual say over this matter and caved, things might be different!)

Someone who casts me aside over Donald Farking Trump? Feh. Be on your way.

Thus ends the announcement.