Horse paste is an apple flavoured treatment for gut parasites. It is meant for horses and other large farm animals, but is much too strong for humans. Since the start of the CoViD-19 pandemic, it has also been used to describe conspiracy theories. Here's why.

In the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries, there were travelling medicine shows. Sales wagons staffed by flimflam men would travel from town to town, setting up in the local square and advertising patent medicines. The wagon operators made extravagant claims of the curative powers of their concoctions. Perhaps the most famous was Clark Stanley's Snake Oil Liniment. The labels on "Mr. Stanley's" bottles advised that their contents could cure rheumatism, neuralgia, sciatica, lame back, lumbago, tooth ache, sore throat, frost bite, chill blains and et cetera. (At least it had the decency to say the stuff was for external use.)

Of course, there were no snake derived ingredients in the bottles. The contents could be anything from mineral oil suffused with cocaine, opium, amphetamines, alcohol, household herbs and spices or even plain, unfiltered water. What mattered were the salesmanship skills of the flimflam men. They had only to convince the foolish townsfolk that the pricey "snake oil" could fix their medical issues. Mere placebo effect would keep them convinced until it became obvious that the stuff was worthless and they'd been tricked. By that time the wagons, their dishonest staff and the townsfolk's money were long gone. If the snake oil salesman was wise, he never went to the same town twice.

This is how "snake oil" became a metaphor for health care fraud, deceptive marketing, (especially for patent medicines), or other kinds of scams. Likewise, by "snake oil salesman" we mean someone who sells or promotes such fraud.

But during the recent SARS COV 2 pandemic, a special kind of snake oil became apparent. Most people tried to follow the advice of doctors, scientists and others who had actually trained in medicine and knew what they were talking about. But a loud few saw this advice instead as an infringement on their autonomy, their self-control. This vocal minority did everything in their power to spread doubt about what the doctors were saying. They advanced alternative explanations for the sickness and deaths the world was seeing. These counter-explanations were all conspiracy theories straight out of "The X Files." Mostly they featured government conspiracies to take control of democracy, (which is what a government is for in the first place), or "the deep state" and secret societies, (a dog whistle for the Jews), trying to wipe out The People, (for which read Whites.) There were other elements as well; covid vaccines became the focus of the old anti-vaccine movement, (started by Andrew Wakefield and his fraudulent Lancet article in 1998), which also took-in mask-wearing as an "assault on freedom."

When by early 2021 it became impossible to deny that something was making a lot of people very sick, the loud few still could not admit that they'd been wrong. Instead they blamed covid vaccines and 5G cellular towers for spreading poison. Their solution was ivermectin, an anti-parasitic medicine that was tried as a covid treatment and found ineffective. The loud few concluded that, if doctors had tried ivermectin but stopped using it, then it must be the magic cure either for covid or for vaccines and the government was keeping it a secret. To you and I this makes absolutely no sense at all. But in the topsy-turvy world of the loud few, it couldn't be more obvious. But ivermectin is a prescription drug. To get it, you have to prove to a doctor that you have parasites in your guts. The loud few needed an unrestricted source of the stuff.

Enter horse paste. There are several brands of horse dewormer sold online and at farming and horse goods stores. It even has a pleasant apple flavour. As word spread online of its power to stand between death and those guilty of being vaccinated, vendors became wary of new customers. Farming goods stores started asking for pictures of the horses of people who'd never had one before, especially if they'd never set foot in the store before either. But by hook or by crook, the loud few got their secret miracle drug. Only they got it at a strength meant for an animal much larger and heavier than even the fattest conspiracy nut. There are pictures in places on the eternal web of people with the linings of their intestines hanging out who "didn't even know they'd had worms!"

And this is how "horse paste" came to be a metaphor for snake oil that you wish on yourself. It can also mean a conspiracy theory, usually based on the covid pandemic, but sometimes just a particularly stupid one.