In The New Statesman, Sophie McBain reviews two recent books on the Alt-Right — lt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump by David Neiwert and Making Sense of the Alt-Right by George Hawley — in a piece titled “The alt-right, and how the paranoias of white identity politics fuelled Trump’s rise”.

She begins her piece by comparing Alt-Righters with UFO cultists and the like:

Many Americans feel that their country and their livelihoods are being threatened by dark forces beyond their control. According to a 2013 survey conducted by Public Policy Polling, almost three in ten US voters believe that a globalist elite is conspiring to establish an authoritarian world government, or “New World Order”. The same poll found that over a third think that climate change is a hoax, 21 per cent believe that the government covered up a UFO crash in New Mexico in 1947 and 7 per cent believe that the first moon landing was faked.

Huh?

And it’s all downhill from here:

Later surveys suggest that Donald Trump voters may be more likely than others to place their faith in conspiracy theories of this kind. Polls conducted in 2016 found that two-thirds of Trump supporters believed that Barack Obama was a Muslim and 60 per cent thought that global warming was a myth. They are citizens of what the journalist David Neiwert calls “Alt-America” – “a mental space beyond fact or logic, where the rules of evidence are replaced by paranoia”. The inhabitants of Alt-America are overwhelmingly white, with better-than-average levels of income and education. Their distrust of the mainstream media and American establishment has rendered them oddly gullible, susceptible to believing any story that supports their world-view. The “beating heart” of Alt-America is white identity politics.

Well, at least she got one thing right: The average Alt-Righter is above average in both intelligence and income.

McBain better be careful: she may incur the wrath of SJWs who fear depictions of Alt-Right Nazi Monsters as average, well-functioning white people only serves to ‘normalize’ their Wicked Neo-Nazi Evil (e.g., libs freaking out over the NYT’s recent piece on Tony Hovater.)