An interesting observation after traditional Christmas arguments with my right--wing relatives in Poland:
Alt-right is now talking 100% postmodernism.
History made full circle: half-century ago it was mostly far left who ranted about "gender aspect of mathematics" and "science as a social construct", basically denying humans ability to objectively describe reality.
These tools were initially forged by Marx to facilitate his wishful thinking about how societies operate that science did not support.
In 20th century far-left faced the same challenge and picked the same tools as they knew them well due to ideological compatibility and general inspiration by Marx.
Today the same Marx-inspired tools are being picked up by alt-right generation that talks about "evils of cultural Marxism" (a bullshit term on its own).
Sokal Affair was LOL, this is LOL squared.
@kravietz
It's this again, but on a longer timeline. Leveraging "stale pasta and recycled memes" (from over 100 years ago).
What's really interesting is how reusing old memes makes a new story more plausible, even among people who believe themselves to be against said memes in their older form.
Unless there is an evolutionary reason why our brains like these ideas and so their current resurgence has no relationship to their previous life.
He obviously didn't acquire these from reading of Derrida whom he would despise if he ever heard about him (because "leftist") but from alt-right press. What was especially sad is that he's an engineer by education, so when he started ranting about his "intuition" about CO2 levels the obvious question I had was whether the chemical engineering installations he helped design were also built based on "intuition"...
@kravietz
He didn't invent these arguments himself so the person who did probably used postmodernist literature as a base.
Now whether they used it because it's pleasing to the mind or they used it because it has cultural base to build upon is what I'm not so sure of.
But, as I seem to recall, some surprisingly specific stories like virgin birth go way back into antiquity so I think there is a good argument to be made that beliefs are believable because they pattern on older beliefs.