>By providing all the necessary clues to convince his audience that what they saw was truly “scientific,” Hörbiger’s doctrine “produced sensations of authenticity that made the distinction between ‘serious’ scientific work, committed to objectivity and rationality, and mere dramatic banter about it almost impossible, at least for the broader public,”
Did 'sensation of authenticity' leap off the page to anyone else? That is the exact phrase I would use to describe most enterprise sales decks.
There's a lot more. The rabbit hole goes deep and gets extremely bizarre.
There's also a strong affinity between the alt-right and some of the more bizarre currents of conspiracy theory: the flat Earth movement, Apollo hoax conspiracies, weird alternative theories of history like ancient alien wars, and the absolute wackiest 9/11 conspiracy theories (e.g. controlled demolition with energy weapons from space). You can see this very clearly if you look at overlapping participation and moderation of various Reddit forums and at the similarity of jargon and propaganda.
Historically it seems like totalitarian movements usually employ what we might term "radically anti-rational bullshit" as signaling. The Soviets did it too with Lysenkoism and statistical/mathematical quackery designed to bolster Lenin's theories.
It seems to serve both for social signaling within the movement and as a straightforward ideological stance on the profound and radical rejection of reason.
I would say it's the other way around, that people who are fascinated by the occult are liable to get sucked in by the alt-right. Same category of extreme paranoia.
Although I hate drawing the parallel (Godwin's Law and all that) but the current "conspiracy right" delves into the "occult" to a certain extent: there are myths about Democratic operatives taking part in human sacrifices or running child-sex rings, publishing lists of confirmed kills!!! by this or that person and a consistent narrative of the (((globalists))) (read: Jews) and "deep state" impeding their current Savior from achieving greatness. Some people like Alex Jones go even further into full-on crazy territory.
Unfortunately it's becoming a mainstream part of politics.
The left is just as bizarre. Here in Boulder people seem to be graduating from yoga to astrology to drinking 'structured water' from bottles charged with 'orgone energy' at a surprising rate.
It seems like overkill to use modern marketing techniques to twist people's cognitive facilities, ultimately just to sell more stretchy pants.
The "new age" thing has been going on for a really long time. That these people happen to be "the left" is neither here nor there. The Alex Jones phenomenon of "occult forces are out to kill us all" has only become mainstream now. There's a huge difference between people drinking "magical water" and preparing for apocalypse (which they are told is coming any day now, in the hands of "the libruls") by buying racks full of guns.
Yet, guns might actually be useful to the left should the US ever go tyrannical. So really, you are the one saying we're on the verge of the 4th Reigh, you should be the one stockpiling ammo, after all, that's a Rights the alt-right is fighting for you to have.
I have a hard time imagining even a large group of people with vast stockpiles of weapons competing on any level with the largest military in the history of the world. If the US government turns against its citizens, it's game over. Or, to quote Andre Benjamin, While we ranting and raving about gats / N%&, they made them gats / They got some shit that'll blow out our backs.
Vietnam was more of a failure due to anti-American agitators within the u.s. government and media, but your other points are valid. Also people who think the military would turn against the people are insane... the people stockpiling ammo are overwhelmingly military related.
> Yet, guns might actually be useful to the left should the US ever go tyrannical.
Funny, I've heard that argument thrown around so many times it's lost all meaning. During Obama, we were a fart away from him taking our guns... Jade Helm 15 came and went, and here we are. Still owning guns.
Now, Trump tells the police it's OK to rough suspects here and there, and "the righteous right" doesn't make a comment about how tyrannical that sounds. Wonder why?
(BTW, all that to say that the argument is kind of lame... if the government was to go tyrannical, their repressive tools are pretty damn impressive. They won't do it that way, they'll just use propaganda.)
> There's a huge difference between people drinking "magical water" and preparing for apocalypse (which they are told is coming any day now, in the hands of "the libruls") by buying racks full of guns.
Not really. Firearms are common, unexceptional personal belongings for many people.
No offense, but you have no idea what you're talking about. He never says that the water is magical, and he also never says that liberals are bringing the apocalypse. The left in America shoots themselves in the foot time and time again by refusing to learn the right's viewpoints and effectively counter them. The party of "skeptics" who live under a rock (or maybe in a cave?).
Huh? When I said the water was "magical" I was deriding the people who buy it, not the poster. Also, the "right" in America choses to live under a solid rock (as exemplified by them electing a reality TV presenter with a passing understanding of how the political system works as president and expecting him to magically fix everything they don't like) and they've given up on any pretense of actual discourse. I can't count how many times I've been told "the left doesn't understand", but when I ask exactly what "the left" doesn't understand I'm just given vague answers like "well, what the right wants." Of course "the left" will never understand if things aren't articulated.
I wasn't excluding the left-- hence my comment about Soviet ideology. I was making a general point about the affinity that exists between totalitarianism and irrationalist ideas in other areas and how totalitarianism often adopts these ideas for propaganda and signaling purposes.
That being said I do find the alt-right more alarming than typical run of the mill left-leaning woo woo. The latter isn't advocating abolition of the constitution and violence against (((minorities))) (Jews, blacks, etc.).
I think the main difference between the extreme left and the extreme right in the US at the moment is that the extreme left is marginalized and holds no power beyond occasionally NIMBYing new cell towers and such, whereas the extreme right holds the Presidency, much of the legislature, and many other powerful positions.
There's nothing inherent about the two which means it has to be this way. It could easily be flipped if circumstances were different. But here and now, the extreme right is much more worrisome.
The extreme left, marginalized ? Come on, they were able to push near resignation on of their own (ie. a hardcode Sanders support) at Evergreen College and in Canada, they were able to pass what essentially boils down to "compelled speech" law.
They are nowhere near "marginalized", quite the contrary...
"Marginalized"? Nonsense, they have absolute control even over an institution as important and famous as Evergreen College... everyone knows that's the stepping stone to world domination
> the amendment also makes it a criminal offence to incite or promote hatred because of gender identity or gender expression
Seems vague, what counts as promoting hatred? If someone makes fun of the 1000+ genders and counting, do they go to jail?
And from the bill:
(2) Every one who, by communicating statements, other than in private conversation, wilfully promotes hatred against any identifiable group is guilty of
(a) an indictable offence and is liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years; or
(b) an offence punishable on summary conviction. [0]
> In Warman v. Winnicki, 2006 CHRT 20, Karen A. Jensen found the respondent had posted messages to the Internet which were "vicious and dehumanizing". The adjudicator ordered the respondent to cease and desist his discriminatory practices and to pay a penalty of $6,000
>In Warman v. Northern Alliance, 2009 CHRT 10, Edward Peter Lustig held that the respondent's website was in violation of s. 13(1) because the website carried controversial remarks about Roma, Jews, Muslims, homosexuals, blacks, Arabs, and others. The adjudicator made an order pursuant to s. 54(1)(a) to ensure that the impugned website, which is defunct, remained inactive
That's rather vague. "Vicious and dehumanizing" could be anything from "I dislike you" to "we will murder your entire ethnic group." The remarks in Warman v. Winnicki, which I won't reproduce here, look to be much closer to the second. For example: https://www.canlii.org/en/ca/chrt/doc/2006/2006chrt20/2006ch...
I'm having trouble finding the original material for Warman v. Northern Alliance, but according to http://www.richardwarman.ca/?page_id=6 it involved calls for murder and genocide.
If that's the standard the law requires, it sounds like a good law. Free speech does not include death threats. Even the US does not go that far.
I have no idea where I mentioned to validates the Nazi/neo-Nazi ideology. Nazism is a national socialism which, much like fascism, has nothing to do with conservativism, quite the opposite. That being said, this completely ignore the fact that Nazi's mass murder were preceded and followed by Communist mass murder, not just in the USSR (including the Gulag and purges dating back to the October Revolution), but also China, Cambodia, Cuba, etc. Mao's regime alone is responsible for twice the death toll of WWII.
The leading ideological cause of death in the 20th century is not fascism, it's communism.
That being said, I challenge you to find any pro-Nazi argument in the discourse of either Milo Yiannopoulos, Lauren Southern, Ben Shapiro or even (on the Canadian side) Jordan Peterson.
I have no idea what Evergreen College is, and I doubt anything that happens there would even slightly influence anything about my life. Is that the worst thing the extreme left are capable of at the moment? That proves my point if so.
That's absurd, neocons may be trying to harness the grassroots power of certain far right groups but their ideology is nearly identical to the ideology of say, the Clintons or Obama.
We should look at what they've done to really know who they are. Which is a bit tough, because they've done very little so far, but things like the Muslim/travel ban, attempting to repeal the ACA, cracking down on illegal immigration, and pulling out of the Paris climate agreement indicate a much more extreme right ideology than Clinton or Obama.
None of those policies are "extreme" for the right, let's break those down.
>"Muslim" Travel ban
Its a blanket policy on ALL travelers from a specific list drafted by Obama for a similar policy he too actually enacted. Muslims were not banned from say, the UK or Pakistan. It is also temporary. Even center leaning right-wingers have concerns about foreigners from unstable nations.
>Attempting to repeal the ACA
TrumpCare is almost Obamacare-lite, doesn't completely overhaul it, barely right-of-center, and to the more libertarian right-wingers, actually still a very liberal policy.
>Cracking down on illegal immigration
A solidly right-wing position, not an "extreme" one.
>Pulling out of the Paris climate agreement
Climate scientists think the Paris agreement is a joke, if we're basing your judgement of this on effectiveness towards combating climate change, even liberal politicians are guilty of being "extreme right" on this one.
The travel ban was the administration's attempt to do a "Muslim ban" legally. Yes, it sucks as a Muslim ban, but that's still what it's trying to do.
As for "temporary," that's an obvious lie by the administration. They claimed that it was a temporary thing to keep the country safe while they reviewed how people from those countries are vetted. The original ban would have expired by now, so they've had enough time to review their vetting process according to their own metrics, but the administration is still fighting for it in court. Why would they do that unless it was intended to be perpetually renewed?
As far as the ACA goes, the "skinny repeal" that failed in the Senate yesterday by a single vote was definitely not Obamacare-lite. It would have basically torched the entire medical insurance system by retaining the protections for pre-existing conditions while removing the individual mandate and not replacing it with any other incentive to maintain coverage while healthy. That's rather extreme.
On Paris, if climate scientists think the agreement is a joke (and that is, as far as I can tell, not at all true), then the fact that the administration withdrew from it surely demonstrates that they are quite extreme.
Yes all of these things are extreme from a leftist perspective, but until there are talks of establishing an ethnostate or abolishing the Federal Reserve, they are not extreme right, it would do the left good to find subtler methods of communicating their concerns to the right wing with methods other than calling any policy solidly right of center "extreme".
I don't think he has any actual positions, aside from possibly being very positive on Russia. He just sort of says whatever comes to mind at any given moment, apparently based on whoever he last talked to. But he mostly talks to people on the extreme right. It's a weak hold, but it's a hold just the same.
The alt-right folks are at-foremost constitutional conservative. They can not be advocating for abolition of the constitution. This is a trait of the left who has no other wish than to eliminate Governemnt Constitutioal bound as well as the Bill of Rights (ie. no free speech, no right to self defense, no innocent before being proven guilty, no due process).
A strong argument could be made that that was a large part of its purpose for a large faction of the Founders. The opposition to that idea is what led to provisions for the end of importing slaves into the US and the Three-Fifths Compromise.
> The alt-right folks are at-foremost constitutional conservative.
There is a subset of them that makes rhetorical gestures in that direction, but it's far from the whole, and even the subset that makes rhetorical gestures at the Constitution is quite selective in their concern.
And then there's the one like Theodore “Vox Day” Beale (who lays out what I think is one of the clearest articulations of alt-right philosophy without obfuscatory rhetoric designed to make it palatable to conventional society):
I think the old conservatives would do well to call themselves Constitutionalists, because it is obvious that the current batch don't give a damn about it. And neither do we of the #AltRight, because it is obvious that the Constitution has not only failed, completely, by its own stated purpose, but is today being used as a means of hand-cuffing the Right. The #AltRight believes in three things: 1.Nationalism. 2. Western civilization. 3. Winning.
Everything else is negotiable or a means to one of those three ends. We aren't conservatives. We aren't philosophers. And we don't care about the Constitution, the Rights of Man, the Enlightenment, the Holocaust, or anything else with capital letters that is likely to get in the way. [0]
> They can not be advocating for abolition of the constitution.
They certainly can be (and some quite clearly are, more to the point) advocating for it's abolition, or at least it being treated as a tool of convenience to be used only insofar as it furthers other goals and ignored/dismissed otherwise.
> This is a trait of the left who has no other wish than to eliminate Governemnt Constitutioal bound as well as the Bill of Rights (ie. no free speech, no right to self defense, no innocent before being proven guilty, no due process).
The right to self-defense is not an enumerated Constitutional right, though its a traditional legal privilege enshrined in both criminal common law and most statutes. It's notably (as an individual right) not referenced in the second amendment, which is unusual in that it does provide a justification for the legal right it protects.
All of the other points are points on which traditionally the conventional right has been weak and the conventional left stronger, though its true that neither has viewed “free speech” as unbounded which has resulted in some who do (or who at least have a more expansive view of the bounds) to challenge the conventional left as being opposed to it.
It's sure that non-western civilization has been doing really well. Last I heard, LGBT were still sentenced to death and women deprived of their Rights (if not stoned to death) in countries basing their Law on "the religion of peace"
It sounds like he needs to make up his mind. The core of chivalry is willingness to lose, if winning would violate your principles; think of how Richard the Lion-Hearted died, mortally wounded when a crossbowman missed and King Richard gave him a second shot. And what is Western Civ without the spirit of chivalry? A miserable pile of bureaucrats and gladiators, nothing special or remarkable, certainly nothing worth fighting for.
You are comparing apples to oranges though? The number of people I've had discussions with that (in a roundabout way) advocate for the removal of free speech (hate speech) greatly favors the left. Comparing the most radicalized people on the right to the more centrist of the left is inappropriate.
> It seems to serve both for social signaling within the movement and as a straightforward ideological stance on the profound and radical rejection of reason.
Esoteric knowledge is definitely used for in-group signalling in elite "alt-rightish" affinity groups like frogtwitter. You gain status by having extensive knowledge of that stuff (e.g. relating current events to the Corpus Hermeticum) and posting about it semi-ironically. Then it filters down to the less-educated elements and gets taken seriously.
Quite so. The cranks are coming out in force, unfortunately. Historically they have been generally rejected in the US, but with the increasing populist tendencies of the last decade, their reach has grown and gullible people are suckered in.
As weird as all the pepe stuff can get, there are massive differences of scale and seriousness when it comes to alt-right memes vs. Nazi mysticism. I don't retreat too far into "it's just trolling," and there really are some interesting people on the internet sincerely worshiping chaos gods, but it's much more of the case that a movement built on transgression and confusion enjoys using weirdness as a tactic compared to the Nazis sincere and orderly pseudoscience.
First, some background - I'm an anarcho-capitalist, so when it comes to matters of policy I have as much issue with one side of the US political spectrum as another. I am explicitly not taking sides here.
Though I live today in a very blue community I was born and raised in a rural red state. I associate more easily with conservative Republicans because that was the community in which I was immersed during my childhood and as a young adult. I feel like I know how they "tick".
While there are certainly factions within the rising right wing that fit this description (e.g.: National Policy Institute, American Freedom Party), the vast majority of those who would be described as or even self-identify as "alt-right" are not part of them. They share very little with them aside from being associated with them by their political opponents.
> Historically it seems like totalitarian movements usually employ what we might term "radically anti-rational bullshit" as signaling. The Soviets did it too with Lysenkoism and statistical/mathematical quackery designed to bolster Lenin's theories.
I don't know anyone, of any political persuasion, that would disagree with this.
While it's easy to categorize the behavior of the right in this way, most on the right would do the same with the so-called "social justice" movement. Many would include those who advocate public policy to address climate change as well.
> It seems to serve both for social signaling within the movement and as a straightforward ideological stance on the profound and radical rejection of reason.
In my experience it is almost entirely signalling. The distinguishing characteristic of the "new right" is that they wear the labels applied to them in derision as badges of honor. See: http://sjwinsult.com/
Someone had remarked that the SS is what you'd get if the Pentagon hired the Church of Happyology to create a new branch of the military. I thought this was hilariously on-point; but then I refreshed the page to see more discussion, and the comment was gone. Are the clam spirits angry today?
64 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 119 ms ] threadDid 'sensation of authenticity' leap off the page to anyone else? That is the exact phrase I would use to describe most enterprise sales decks.
https://pepethefrogfaith.wordpress.com
https://pepethefrogfaith.wordpress.com/smug-pepe-sure-makes-...
There's a lot more. The rabbit hole goes deep and gets extremely bizarre.
There's also a strong affinity between the alt-right and some of the more bizarre currents of conspiracy theory: the flat Earth movement, Apollo hoax conspiracies, weird alternative theories of history like ancient alien wars, and the absolute wackiest 9/11 conspiracy theories (e.g. controlled demolition with energy weapons from space). You can see this very clearly if you look at overlapping participation and moderation of various Reddit forums and at the similarity of jargon and propaganda.
Historically it seems like totalitarian movements usually employ what we might term "radically anti-rational bullshit" as signaling. The Soviets did it too with Lysenkoism and statistical/mathematical quackery designed to bolster Lenin's theories.
It seems to serve both for social signaling within the movement and as a straightforward ideological stance on the profound and radical rejection of reason.
Unfortunately it's becoming a mainstream part of politics.
It seems like overkill to use modern marketing techniques to twist people's cognitive facilities, ultimately just to sell more stretchy pants.
Dilemma, you said ?
Victory is not just about how much raw damage you can do, is how you define victory.
In the case of Vietnam, them understood this very well.
Is super-clear you can't defeat a more powerfull army if you charge ahead.
So, you don't.
Funny, I've heard that argument thrown around so many times it's lost all meaning. During Obama, we were a fart away from him taking our guns... Jade Helm 15 came and went, and here we are. Still owning guns.
Now, Trump tells the police it's OK to rough suspects here and there, and "the righteous right" doesn't make a comment about how tyrannical that sounds. Wonder why?
(BTW, all that to say that the argument is kind of lame... if the government was to go tyrannical, their repressive tools are pretty damn impressive. They won't do it that way, they'll just use propaganda.)
Not really. Firearms are common, unexceptional personal belongings for many people.
So maybe it's time everyone came out of the cave?
That being said I do find the alt-right more alarming than typical run of the mill left-leaning woo woo. The latter isn't advocating abolition of the constitution and violence against (((minorities))) (Jews, blacks, etc.).
There's nothing inherent about the two which means it has to be this way. It could easily be flipped if circumstances were different. But here and now, the extreme right is much more worrisome.
They are nowhere near "marginalized", quite the contrary...
What's so bad about it?
Seems vague, what counts as promoting hatred? If someone makes fun of the 1000+ genders and counting, do they go to jail?
And from the bill:
(2) Every one who, by communicating statements, other than in private conversation, wilfully promotes hatred against any identifiable group is guilty of
(a) an indictable offence and is liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years; or
(b) an offence punishable on summary conviction. [0]
[0] http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-46/section-319.htm...
>In Warman v. Northern Alliance, 2009 CHRT 10, Edward Peter Lustig held that the respondent's website was in violation of s. 13(1) because the website carried controversial remarks about Roma, Jews, Muslims, homosexuals, blacks, Arabs, and others. The adjudicator made an order pursuant to s. 54(1)(a) to ensure that the impugned website, which is defunct, remained inactive
I am cherry picking a bit, more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_in_Canada#Cas...
I'm having trouble finding the original material for Warman v. Northern Alliance, but according to http://www.richardwarman.ca/?page_id=6 it involved calls for murder and genocide.
If that's the standard the law requires, it sounds like a good law. Free speech does not include death threats. Even the US does not go that far.
The incident between Ben Shapiro and Zoey Tur could have qualified if it had happened in Canada under the rule of the Human Rights Tribunal.
Also, recently, a landlord got convicted by that so called "human right tribunal" for not having removed his shoes in a muslim tenant's apartment.
The leading ideological cause of death in the 20th century is not fascism, it's communism.
That being said, I challenge you to find any pro-Nazi argument in the discourse of either Milo Yiannopoulos, Lauren Southern, Ben Shapiro or even (on the Canadian side) Jordan Peterson.
Most of Trump's cabinet and the legislature are neocons.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/to-understand-polarizat...
>"Muslim" Travel ban
Its a blanket policy on ALL travelers from a specific list drafted by Obama for a similar policy he too actually enacted. Muslims were not banned from say, the UK or Pakistan. It is also temporary. Even center leaning right-wingers have concerns about foreigners from unstable nations.
>Attempting to repeal the ACA
TrumpCare is almost Obamacare-lite, doesn't completely overhaul it, barely right-of-center, and to the more libertarian right-wingers, actually still a very liberal policy.
>Cracking down on illegal immigration
A solidly right-wing position, not an "extreme" one.
>Pulling out of the Paris climate agreement
Climate scientists think the Paris agreement is a joke, if we're basing your judgement of this on effectiveness towards combating climate change, even liberal politicians are guilty of being "extreme right" on this one.
As for "temporary," that's an obvious lie by the administration. They claimed that it was a temporary thing to keep the country safe while they reviewed how people from those countries are vetted. The original ban would have expired by now, so they've had enough time to review their vetting process according to their own metrics, but the administration is still fighting for it in court. Why would they do that unless it was intended to be perpetually renewed?
As far as the ACA goes, the "skinny repeal" that failed in the Senate yesterday by a single vote was definitely not Obamacare-lite. It would have basically torched the entire medical insurance system by retaining the protections for pre-existing conditions while removing the individual mandate and not replacing it with any other incentive to maintain coverage while healthy. That's rather extreme.
On Paris, if climate scientists think the agreement is a joke (and that is, as far as I can tell, not at all true), then the fact that the administration withdrew from it surely demonstrates that they are quite extreme.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/climate/2015...
I strongly disagree with this statement.
The extreme right elected the President, clearly. Despite his rhetoric, Trump's actual positions are a very mixed bag.
The alt-right folks are at-foremost constitutional conservative. They can not be advocating for abolition of the constitution. This is a trait of the left who has no other wish than to eliminate Governemnt Constitutioal bound as well as the Bill of Rights (ie. no free speech, no right to self defense, no innocent before being proven guilty, no due process).
There is a subset of them that makes rhetorical gestures in that direction, but it's far from the whole, and even the subset that makes rhetorical gestures at the Constitution is quite selective in their concern.
And then there's the one like Theodore “Vox Day” Beale (who lays out what I think is one of the clearest articulations of alt-right philosophy without obfuscatory rhetoric designed to make it palatable to conventional society):
I think the old conservatives would do well to call themselves Constitutionalists, because it is obvious that the current batch don't give a damn about it. And neither do we of the #AltRight, because it is obvious that the Constitution has not only failed, completely, by its own stated purpose, but is today being used as a means of hand-cuffing the Right. The #AltRight believes in three things: 1.Nationalism. 2. Western civilization. 3. Winning.
Everything else is negotiable or a means to one of those three ends. We aren't conservatives. We aren't philosophers. And we don't care about the Constitution, the Rights of Man, the Enlightenment, the Holocaust, or anything else with capital letters that is likely to get in the way. [0]
> They can not be advocating for abolition of the constitution.
They certainly can be (and some quite clearly are, more to the point) advocating for it's abolition, or at least it being treated as a tool of convenience to be used only insofar as it furthers other goals and ignored/dismissed otherwise.
> This is a trait of the left who has no other wish than to eliminate Governemnt Constitutioal bound as well as the Bill of Rights (ie. no free speech, no right to self defense, no innocent before being proven guilty, no due process).
The right to self-defense is not an enumerated Constitutional right, though its a traditional legal privilege enshrined in both criminal common law and most statutes. It's notably (as an individual right) not referenced in the second amendment, which is unusual in that it does provide a justification for the legal right it protects.
All of the other points are points on which traditionally the conventional right has been weak and the conventional left stronger, though its true that neither has viewed “free speech” as unbounded which has resulted in some who do (or who at least have a more expansive view of the bounds) to challenge the conventional left as being opposed to it.
[0]
It sounds like he needs to make up his mind. The core of chivalry is willingness to lose, if winning would violate your principles; think of how Richard the Lion-Hearted died, mortally wounded when a crossbowman missed and King Richard gave him a second shot. And what is Western Civ without the spirit of chivalry? A miserable pile of bureaucrats and gladiators, nothing special or remarkable, certainly nothing worth fighting for.
Esoteric knowledge is definitely used for in-group signalling in elite "alt-rightish" affinity groups like frogtwitter. You gain status by having extensive knowledge of that stuff (e.g. relating current events to the Corpus Hermeticum) and posting about it semi-ironically. Then it filters down to the less-educated elements and gets taken seriously.
I was on vacation for a week recently, and when I got back I had no idea what people were talking about for a couple of days.
But it's not confined to the Right, I assure you.
Though I live today in a very blue community I was born and raised in a rural red state. I associate more easily with conservative Republicans because that was the community in which I was immersed during my childhood and as a young adult. I feel like I know how they "tick".
While there are certainly factions within the rising right wing that fit this description (e.g.: National Policy Institute, American Freedom Party), the vast majority of those who would be described as or even self-identify as "alt-right" are not part of them. They share very little with them aside from being associated with them by their political opponents.
> Historically it seems like totalitarian movements usually employ what we might term "radically anti-rational bullshit" as signaling. The Soviets did it too with Lysenkoism and statistical/mathematical quackery designed to bolster Lenin's theories.
I don't know anyone, of any political persuasion, that would disagree with this.
While it's easy to categorize the behavior of the right in this way, most on the right would do the same with the so-called "social justice" movement. Many would include those who advocate public policy to address climate change as well.
> It seems to serve both for social signaling within the movement and as a straightforward ideological stance on the profound and radical rejection of reason.
In my experience it is almost entirely signalling. The distinguishing characteristic of the "new right" is that they wear the labels applied to them in derision as badges of honor. See: http://sjwinsult.com/