Inside, as I waited for Rogers and Candace, I perused a menu of spa treatments. My eyes settled upon something called Maharishi Light Therapy with Gems. For $120, I could get the Regular Beamer ($250 for the Big Beamer), a treatment which promised “higher states of consciousness.” After a long time on the campaign trail, it sounded nice, whatever it was. (I would later learn the treatment essentially sends light beams into your body through gems. Practitioners believe the stone’s crystalline molecular structure gives the light a restorative effect. The Big Beamer, by the way, “utilizes 12 times the number of gemstones for a more amplified and therapeutic effect.”)

Rogers, born in Western Kentucky, made his money in coal and oil investments and helped his family acquire the Boston Red Sox in the 1980s before moving here in the 1990s to deepen his transcendental meditation practice and be close to the university. In Iowa, he met Candace, a TM practitioner who grew up in Cleveland. (Their experience is not uncommon, I would learn. Everyone in Fairfield and Vedic City seems to come from somewhere else, drawn by the towns’ peaceful ethos: There are people from all 50 states here, and some 80 different countries. Filmmaker David Lynch, a TM devotee, is a town fixture, having established a master's in film program at the university.)

Fairfield mayor Ed Malloy in his office at City Hall.

Rogers and Candace took me into the parlor, the same room where they’ve entertained Williamson during her stays. The couple befriended Williamson years ago. The place has become something of a home away from home for the candidate, the Badgetts said. After her 2014 failed California congressional campaign, Williamson accepted an invitation from Candace to decompress here. Which treatments did Williamson prefer? We don’t have to go there,” Candace replied. “That’s kind of her private life.”

Over the next hour, the Badgetts sang the praises of Williamson. “I think they misunderstand her brilliance and her practicality because she talks about love, and love seems very kind of abstract,” Candace said. “Marianne’s understanding of love is much more profound than what people take it to be, because she’s just talking about an underlying field of intelligence in reality, and you come back to physics ... that there is an underlying field of intelligence that gives rise to matter. ... She understands the whole concept of collective consciousness, and that you need to raise collective consciousness to address issues.”

I kept the conversation more or less on politics and asked about Williamson’s lack of experience in most policy areas. The Badgetts informed me that transcendental meditation is more of a policy tool than you’d think: It has lessened conflict in war zones. From 1988 to 1990, 8,000 people known as the TM-Sidhas practiced meditation in the Middle East. Believers say this group was responsible for achieving a cease-fire in the Iran-Iraq War, the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan, the end of the Cold War and, in Mozambique alone, a “12.4% economic growth rate, inflation reducing from 70% to 2% and a liquidation of the national debt,” according to WorldPeaceGroup.org. “The biggest problem is that people probably think it’s a cult or probably New Agey,” Candace told me. “I don’t think people generally appreciate the way it’s evidence-based.”

Later, in the all-organic, non-GMO vegetarian dining room downstairs, I met with Travis, the Maharishi University professor and director of its Center for Brain, Consciousness, and Cognition. He wanted me to know that what I had just heard from the Badgetts wasn’t bunk. He mentioned that one doctoral candidate at the college recently examined the number of car accidents surrounding Fairfield and found that accidents increased the farther you went from the city. “People here are aware that we don’t live in a classical world,” Travis told me over a meal of vegetarian lasagna, broccoli and turnips. “We live in a quantum world.”

The claim to be able to promulgate peace and safety through meditation is one of Williamson and Fairfield’s less controversial beliefs. Williamson has questioned mandatory vaccines. She has written that “sickness is an illusion and does not exist” and that “cancer and AIDS and other physical illnesses are physical manifestations of a psychic scream.” None of this is “evidence-based” or backed by science.

Those pseudoscientific beliefs seem to be shared, in part, by residents of Fairfield. Immunization data from the Iowa Department of Public Health from 2013-2014 found that Maharishi School, the town’s K-12 school, had the state’s lowest vaccination rate, with only 47 percent of the school’s 178 students being vaccinated. Jefferson County had the state’s second-highest rate of vaccination exemptions that year, according to the Des Moines Register.