Snake Oil Salesmen

"Snake oil is a euphemism for deceptive marketing. It refers to the petroleum-based mineral oil or "snake oil" that used to be sold as a cure-all elixir for many kinds of physiological problems." That's straight from Wikipedia. This is from WikiQuote: "by extension, a snake oil salesman is someone who knowingly sells fraudulent goods or who is himself or herself a fraud, quack, charlatan, and the like."

That's two Wikipedia quotes in one small paragraph, and it has to be said that Wikipedia is not, and has never been a 100% assured accurate source of information; all its articles can be edited by anyone, it's a "community-encyclopedia" after all. Still, inaccuracies are few and far apart and because of the public nature are usually quickly corrected. It's not 100%, but good enough for me to fall back on to fill in the (many, sizable) gaps in my knowledge. It's been a great pillar of support for me and other bloggers in our daily writing. So, for the remainder of this article, let it be understood that, in my opinion, Wikipedia does not fall into the category of snake oil salesmen, and therefore we can go with their description of the term. Keep this in mind; I'll return to Wikipedia's trustworthiness later.

One of the most notorious snake oil salesmen from modern history is William Rockefeller Sr., the father of Standard Oil's founders John D. Rockefeller and William Avery Rockefeller. Or, this should be general knowledge, but I wager it isn't. He called his worthless concoction "Rock Oil" instead of snake oil, and he went by the alias of Dr. William Levingston while selling his fake panacea. It's said that William once bragged, "I cheat my boys every chance I get. I want to make 'em sharp." William was also in the money-lending business, horse-trading and land speculation; the future billionaire Rockefellers inherited much of his... "entrepreneurship" shall we say... Although I've seen and read a lot about the Rockefellers before, all information I share here is available at Wikipedia.

We have our own contemporary snake oil salesmen too. They can be found on the online digital media and they don't sell cures or horses, they sell poisonous ideas that are based on half truths and outright lies. You've already been introduced to some of them if you've read my posts on the alt-right and the resurgence of fascism in many western societies. To name but a few: Steven Crowder, Stefan Molyneux, Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad), Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, and all of PragerU. This list is far from complete; these are just the usual suspects and have some of the largest fan-bases. All these men, and PragerU, are on a war-path against progressivism and all of them peddle the same nonsense to popularize their far-right to extreme-right ideologies among their viewer-base which consists mainly of young, straight, white and economically disenfranchised men. This is my own assessment of the viewer-base, it has to be said, and it's based primarily on the consistent narrative they all share.

This narrative is shaped around an extremely conservative and nationalist world-view and as a reaction to "political correctness," "social justice warriors," "multiculturalism" and "feminism." One term that's always used to point to their enemy is "cultural Marxism", a perfect slur to indicate that, as always, the world is in danger of being destroyed by those wacky socialist and communist lefties. Cultural Marxism doesn't exist; it's their ideological snake oil. In fact it is a conspiracy theory first used by the Nazis; cultural Marxism (kulturbolschewismus) was, according to Hitler, a Jewish conspiracy to destroy German culture and Hitler blamed the postmodernist and nihilistic influences in art and music on these Jewish Marxists. But like I said: it was pure propaganda by the Nazis.

Our modern day snake oil salesmen use this tired old antisemitic conspiracy theory today to give an air of scientific credibility to their reactionary rhetoric on the alt-right. Their theory is based on an erroneous interpretation of critical theory, which was indeed developed in the Frankfurt School. It was a reaction to the disappointment of not being able to establish anywhere in western Europe a lasting socialist state. Critical theory indeed seeks new ways to grow toward a post-capitalist society, but not in the way described by our alt-right free speech warriors.

They simply take the conventional Marxist critique on capitalist society, which is described as a struggle between two classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the owner class and the working class, and then apply that to all protected groups. Social Marxists, so they claim, have taken the class struggle and made everything a struggle between suppressed and suppressor; suppressed black people vs white privileged white people, feminists vs the patriarchy, gay vs straight and so on. The above linked video is from PragerU, the online "university." They sell themselves as some sort of Wikipedia with moving pictures; a good and reliable source to become smarter by taking their 5 minute courses. The video illustrates exactly where the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory comes from: an extreme right wing reaction to leftist politics. And I hope you'll never again look at PragerU as a neutral or even reliable source of information.

The other YouTubers I mentioned also have about them an air of reliability; they're all smart, very well educated in most cases, speak with confidence and throw in the occasional quote from reliable sources or well known philosophers to ensure everyone that their speech is valid. They claim that the evil Marxist professors from the Frankfurt School have started an insidious plan to weaken and eventually destroy the Judaeo-Christian capitalist tradition using feminism, multiculturalism, political correctness and social justice. First thing that comes to mind is that this would be far too simple and transparent plan to be kept secret. Second thing that comes to mind is that most of the Frankfurters were anti-postmodernism and anti-nihilism, which they ascribed to capitalism and individualism. This gross simplification of cultural Marxism and its perceived consequences has an enormous attraction to the white blue-collar disenfranchised men who are not only left behind by politicians and the economy, but have the added pain of not having anyone to fight for their rights specifically, something all the other groups do have. Whether intentionally or not, our modern day snake oil salesmen struck gold. Peterson in particular owes his online fame to his popular attack on Bill C16 in Canada, a bill that added gender preference and gender identification to the group of protected classes, like race, sex, age, sexual orientation and religion. This only means that it's not allowed to discriminate or incite hate or violence toward these groups. Nothing spectacular, unless you listen to our snake oil salesmen of course.

I'm going to leave it here, after we do just one more thing. If you payed attention, you've noticed that I have nowhere linked to a Wikipedia article on cultural Marxism or to the Frankfurt School, and now I'll tell you why; the article on cultural Marxism has been deleted, or to be more precise, it's been moved to the article on the Frankfurt School under the heading: "Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory," and rightfully so. What's even more telling is that there is another public online encyclopedia called Conservapedia. Conservapedia was founded by Andrew Schlafly, an American lawyer and Christian conservative activist, in reaction to what he perceived to be a "liberal bias" on Wikipedia. He got this idea after Wikipedia editors repeatedly undid his edits to the article about the 2005 Kansas evolution hearings. Schlafly is an advocate for teaching creationism and is fighting for schools to teach this pseudo-science alongside intelligent design via the Teach the Controversy method, thereby giving equal validity to them as evolution theory. This founder of Conservapedia even has or had plans to rid the Bible of terms he describes as "liberal bias".

This long introduction to Conservapedia and its founder is to make perfectly clear what the political bias of this site, with the subtitle "The Trustworthy Encyclopedia", is before I quote their article on Cultural Marxism:

Cultural Marxism is a branch of Marxist ideology formulated by the Frankfurt School, which had its origins the early part of the twentieth century. Cultural Marxism comprises much of the foundation of political correctness. It emerged as a response of European Marxist intellectuals disillusioned by the early political failures of conventional economic Marxist ideology.

The central idea of Cultural Marxism is to soften up and prepare Western Civilization for economic Marxism after a gradual, relentless, sustained attack on every institution of Western culture, including schools, literature, art, film, the Judeo-Christian worldview tradition, the family, sexual mores, national sovereignty, etc. The attacks are usually framed in Marxist terms as a class struggle between oppressors and oppressed; the members of the latter class allegedly include women, minorities, homosexuals, and adherents of non-Western ideologies such as Islam. Cultural Marxism has been described as "the cultural branch of globalism". [...] An effective way for cultural Marxists to influence the culture is to infiltrate schools and indoctrinate students, which the Democratic Socialists of America explicitly endorsed in 2018."
_{source: Conservapedia}

Now, I invite you all to go read the Wikipedia article on the Frankfurt School for the non-snake oil version ;-) Or, for a great snake oil free video about the subject, please watch this one by Three Arrows:

Thanks so much for visiting my blog and reading my posts dear reader, I appreciate that a lot :-) If you like my content, please consider leaving a comment, upvote or resteem. I'll be back here tomorrow and sincerely hope you'll join me. Until then, keep steeming!