Love that looting ideology!

And throughout those two centuries, there was the ongoing invention of new religions/quasi-religious formations and cults from, for example, Joseph Smith and Madame Blavatsky to Frank Nathan Daniel Buchman, and L Ron Hubbard. In fiction, Sinclair Lewis in Elmer Gantry (1927), and a decade later in the Budd Schulberg and Elia Kazan film, A Face in the Crowd, the focus was human susceptibility to huckster preachers.

In his novel, The Hucksters (1947), Frederic Wakeman portrayed the unique inventiveness of the transformative Madison Avenue adman, Victor Norman. He is recruited by an agency which fears that it will soon lose the big Beautee Soap account. Norman speaks very carefully crafted sales jargon truth to market power. The result is his unforgettable slogan, "LOVE THAT SOAP!".

Mel Brooks took a giant leap of the cinematic imagination of human gullibility in The Producers (1967), the tale of two astute fraudsters who relieve rich investors of heaps of money in order to stage a musical so manifestly obnoxious that it could not possibly survive its first night. However, "Springtime for Hitler and Germany: A Gay Romp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden is a huge first night success because the audience of sheep-like rich listers - at first very uncomfortable – soon convince themselves that it is satire. From there it is a short step via rapid advances in communications technology to the world of I-phone narcissism, social media, trigger warnings and enforced conformity of ideas and speech which underpins ideological multiculturalism. If some enterprising person wants to make lotsa money through a theme park celebrating human gullibility, P T Barnum said it all.

In the US, what might be branded as the Diverse Community of Latter-Day Hucksters is on a roll. One vade mecum for the sheepish congregations genuflecting in public for having the original sin of insufficient racial stamina and desperate to learn how to scale the heights of self-abasement, has been called "a corporate consultant's white guilt self-help manual". And, for a mere $1326 per month, one enterprise will supply dinner party discussion materials "for you to dismantle white supremacy".

However, especially in these grim times, there remains a solid basis for everyone to look on the bright side of life. Unrelenting resort to ridicule and satire should be at the forefront of preferred responses to the smooth-talking diversity/inclusion/empathy hucksters.