“Socialist Snake Oil & The ‘Years of Lead’ Danger”

This is an edited transcript of the remarks of Noah Schenk to the Center for Political Innovation gathering on January 11th, 2026 in Newark, New Jersey.

Before I introduce our keynote speaker, I’d like to touch a little bit on something that makes CPI really special as an organization, and that is that what we offer is political clarity.

We’re not LARPing as a political party. We know we’re not that. But we really offer something special, and that’s political clarity in a time where things are very, very, very crazy.

Last year, something pretty disturbing happened. I’m sure you all remember: Brian Thompson, the CEO of an insurance company, was assassinated. He was murdered on the streets of New York City in cold blood. It was a political assassination.

And I’m not here to defend Brian Thompson. I don’t think he was a very good person, and I think he contributed to the suffering of thousands and thousands of people. But all of a sudden, he was killed—and the internet was flooded with all this talk of love for the person who allegedly did it, Luigi Manion. “He’s so handsome and good-looking,” and all that.

And I’m not even sure that Luigi Manion did it. I have a lot of questions. There’s a lot of stuff that doesn’t make sense. All the pictures we’ve seen—I don’t know.

But the internet wasn’t flooded with that. It was flooded with: “He did it and that’s awesome. I love murder.”

Even though it would’ve been popular—and we would’ve gotten more likes and shares and retweets—if we had said, “Luigi Mangione is so awesome, thank you internet,” instead we decided to publish a book. We published The Danger of an American Years of Lead.

And it makes an argument that used to be really, really standard on the left. It used to be common sense: that left-adventurism is bad, terrorism is also bad, and isolated acts of political violence are not the answer.

There’s a classic American novel, The Grapes of Wrath. It’s one of my favorite novels—about how suffering changes people. There’s a part that talks exactly about this.

There’s a farmer on his property, and somebody hired by the bank to foreclose on his home is basically bulldozing his home. He comes out with his gun, and he has a conversation with the person who’s about to bulldoze his home.

He says, “Get off my property or I’m going to shoot you.”

And the person bulldozing his home says, “Well, what would that solve? They’d just call the sheriff.”

He says, “Well, then I’d shoot the sheriff.”

“Okay,” the guy says. “But then they’d just hire another cop.”

And they go through person after person after person, all the way up to the CEO of the bank that wants to bulldoze his home. And he explains: even if you were to kill the CEO of that bank, they’re just going to put somebody in who would do the exact same thing—because they’re being paid. That’s all the system can produce.

The problem is not any one individual. It’s the system.

There’s been this extremely disturbing trend where the ruling class, for whatever reason, has decided that we need political violence.

And it was made more and more clear with the assassination of Charlie Kirk. This was just a few months ago.

I don’t agree with Charlie Kirk about very much. He was right about like one and a half issues, I would say—but he was pretty good on those one and a half issues.

But he was killed. And then the memo went out to the left on the internet: we need to celebrate this, we need to be really shrill, we need to go on there and cheer. This guy was violently murdered—shot in the neck in cold blood—in front of a crowd of people, in front of his wife and kids, and we need to go out there and celebrate and cheer and look like a bunch of crazy people.

Then the memo got sent out to the right that said: the left is trying to kill you.

And I don’t blame them for being upset at the idea that half the country is trying to kill them.

This is a culture of political violence, and it’s not coming from below. This is not organic—because the internet is controlled by forces that are not organic. It’s controlled by the State Department. We know this. The Hillary Clinton State Department has been using social media for regime change all around the world for years and years and years. That’s coming from above.

And that’s because the system we live in—the system of globalism, imperialism—is in a profound crisis. It’s collapsing. It can’t sustain itself any longer. We’ve been in a depression since like 2008, and they just can’t seem to fix their system.

They can’t seem to adapt to AI.

And there’s a danger that factions within dissident MAGA—within elements of the ruling class—may want to pull away from NATO. And that represents a huge challenge to the foreign policy establishment in the United States.

They did the very same thing in Italy. You had the Christian Democrats and the Communist Party coming together to form a coalition and decide they wanted Italy to be a sovereign country—and they wanted to pull out of NATO.

What happened? The CIA did Operation Gladio. They decided they were not going to go in with a violent U.S. occupation like was done in Greece—the first instance of napalm being used on civilians.

Instead, they were going to fund the Red Brigades—a group of communist terrorists. And they didn’t say, “We support the USA.” They said, “We’re the real communists.” And if you were a real communist, you would go out and break the legs of the Communist Party and anybody who wants to pull out of NATO.

A similar thing happened in Jamaica. They elected Michael Manley—sort of like a Bernie Sanders figure in Jamaica. And he hired Donald Harris—actually Kamala Harris’s father—who was a Marxist economist.

It looked like Jamaica was going to be friendlier to Cuba, friendlier to the anti-imperialist world. And what happened? They created the Shower Posse—a violent gang—to begin breaking people’s legs and shooting them.

People became afraid to get political.

And that’s what they want: they want to make it so that people are afraid to be political.

There’s been a lot of talk about: why was it that Charlie Kirk was killed? People try to find justifications—“maybe it was about this or that.” I’m not going to speculate.

But one thing is very clear: in spite of what you think about what Charlie Kirk said or believed, he was encouraging young people to get political. He was going to college campuses and having conversations with people. There were thousands and thousands of young people in this country who looked up to Charlie Kirk and believed they should begin to be active.

And that’s something that cannot happen.

They need us to fight amongst ourselves so that they can rule by default.

But none of the leftist groups could even say that the murder of Charlie Kirk was wrong. The Party of Socialism and Liberation—PSL—released a statement: they called Charlie Kirk a white supremacist and said, “He deserved to die.”

I’m sure that goes over really well with half the population who are terrified you’re going to kill them—saying: “Yeah, that person you looked up to? He deserved it.”

These people—they’re not really organizers. These internet fan clubs that call themselves communist parties in the United States—they’re snake oil salesmen.

Are folks familiar with the term “snake oil salesman”?

I want to go a little deeper on it, because a lot of people don’t know where the term comes from. Snake oil is actually part of traditional Chinese medicine. A lot of people don’t know this, but the water snake in China produces a kind of oil that acts as an anti-inflammatory.

When Chinese immigrants came to build the railroads across the United States, they would put it on their joints, and it soothed them after a long day of work.

So why did we get this idea that “snake oil” is a scam?

There was this guy named Clark Stanley. He called himself the “Rattlesnake King”—which is not even the right kind of snake to get snake oil from. He would do elaborate shows, go around the country and say, “This snake oil is going to cure your ills.”

He’d take rattlesnakes, throw them in a boiling pot, and say: “It’s going to solve all your problems. You just need to buy it from me.”

A muckraking journalist came along and revealed this was crazy. There wasn’t any snake oil. Not only did it not help anybody—there wasn’t actually any snake oil in the product he was selling.

But if you ask your average person, everyone knows: “Snake oil is a scam. Don’t buy snake oil.” The two became synonymous.

So if I were to come up to you and say, “Well actually, it’s part of traditional Chinese medicine and you should buy snake oil from me,” you’d look at me like I’m a crazy person. I would sound ridiculous.

And I say that the DSA, the PSL, and all of these socialist groups that speak in the name of the red flag—that wave the red flag to oppose the red flag—I say they’re snake oil salesmen.

To go around trying to correct people—“well actually, socialism doesn’t mean what these people think it means, it actually means this other thing, it’s anti-imperialism and it’s about managing the economy”—you sound like a crazy person to them.

They’re like: “Well, I just talked to somebody over there and he told me socialism means I get free stuff and get to be really mad at rich people. That’s what it means. It means I get to really hate Republicans and think they’re all bad people and that I’m a super-duper Democrat.”

So why would I go around and call myself a socialist? I’m a lot smaller than a lot of those people. Those groups are very big because they’re being boosted by the establishment.

That’s why we at the Center for Political Innovation have had our innovationist turn.

I’m an innovationist. I’m an innovationist because I believe in economic growth. I’m an innovationist because I stand with the oppressed and the exploited all around the world. I want a society where the last shall be first and the first shall be last. We believe we need a government of action that fights for working families.

That is absolutely what we need right now.

We need a government that will stand up to Wall Street—to the billionaires that are keeping our country poor, starting wars all around the world.

That’s what socialism means to me. That’s what innovation means to me.

And we need to build a movement of ordinary Americans that are going to oppose this imperialist system, that are going to oppose the bankers—a movement that says: Maduro is not my enemy, Wall Street is my enemy. Russia is not my enemy, Wall Street is my enemy.

And it doesn’t matter who’s in the White House—we need to oppose this system.