The Gadsden flag became a symbol of the anti-Obama T-party soon after the election of the first black U.S. president. Perhaps it is no surprise that the symbol of a snake became its logo.
Paul Krugman this morning notes how much the selling of snake oil and the peddling of fringe-right ideas go hand-in-hand. So much so that, given the financial incentives in play, “extremism can probably be seen not as a reflection of deep conviction, but as a way of promoting snake oil.”
Vaccine refuseniks spurn life-saving medicine not just because they want to see a Democratic president fail. They are adopting quack medicines because of a long association between cure-all remedies and right-wing ideas.
To be fair, as an observer of the New Age Movement of the 1990s, I witnessed a lot of quack medicine sold as enlightenment by lefty practitioners of recently rediscovered “ancient” healing techniques. But later I encountered get-rich-quick scams in right-wing spam far more often. Snake oil was just around the corner.
Then Donald Trump arrived to sell political snake oil in bulk and to show budding amateurs how it’s done.
Once you start noticing snake oil in right-wing circles, Krugman observes, you see it everywhere:
This is clearly true in the right’s fever swamps. Alex Jones of Infowars has built a following by pushing conspiracy theories, but he makes money by selling nutritional supplements.
It’s also true, however, for more mainstream, establishment parts of the right. For example, Ben Shapiro, considered an intellectual on the right, hawks supplements.
Look at who advertises on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show. After Fox itself, the top advertisers are My Pillow, then three supplement companies.
Snake oil peddlers, clearly, find consumers of right-wing news and punditry a valuable market for their wares. So it shouldn’t be surprising to find many right-leaning Americans ready to see vaccination as a liberal plot and turn to dubious alternatives — although, again, I didn’t see livestock dewormer coming.
Krugman speculates that it may not be right-wing ideas driving the promotion of quack medicines, but the other way around:
Put it this way: There are big financial rewards to extremism, because extreme politics sells patent medicine, and patent medicine is highly profitable. (In 2014 Alex Jones’s operations were bringing in more than $20 million a year in revenue, mainly from supplement sales.) Do these financial rewards induce pundits to be more extreme? It would be surprising if they didn’t — as conservative economists say, incentives matter.
Even Phineas T. Barnum would be impressed.