This is personal for me, because I'm just old enough to have been active and around for that weird time in Dubya years when it finally started to become permissible, even cool, to call oneself atheist in at least some parts of the United States, especially on college campuses like the one I went to.
I kept in contact with scores of people that I had close ties with from the early 2000s, but watching the followers of the "Four Horsemen," as well as the horsemen themselves (fuck Sam Harris in particular, the quack hack), lead their flock in an increasingly reactionary direction was disturbing. Dawkins in particular had many swans to wrestle, especially against even the slightest attempts to make the movement about anything in particular other than dunking on religious people and feeling smart about it.
I saw the "dunk on fundies" video makers become "dunk on feminists and SJWs" almost overnight, around the time the Gamergate reactionary movement began.
To summarize though, it freaks me out how many of my old New Atheist college contacts started calling themselves "culturally Christian" (which means lots of tradwife craving and authoritarian and colonial aspirations, minus the inconvenient deity part) and even started becoming subscribers to Jordan Peterson.
Wild ride, buckos. :agony-yehaw:
The real issue with the new atheism movement is that Richard Dawkins is an arse he's also like Jeremy Clarkson in that there's no deeper layer to him the whole of his being is summed up in the phrase "he's an arse".
He is a model obnoxious asshole for other obnoxious assholes to emulate. He's like the Rick Sanchez of real life, fandom included.
Tbh I'm actually kind of glad he isn't on the left as the strong anti-religious sentiment of past leftist movements has been used to great effect by right wing propaganda. For example when Irish catholics were convinced to go and fight for Franco in spain after priests were murdered bear in mind that this was the same recruiting pool as the IRA
Yes, to many of us suppression of religion is a delicate issue, and the USSR may have taken things farther than they should have in the name of perfecting a counter-revolution.
For a lot of people this is a crime against humanity and makes the USSR and every other state with a (partly) successful communist revolution something that must be destroyed.
I always need to remember to tread lightly when I'm around religious friends of mine.
Also the left takes a lot of positions like feeding the hungry and curing the sick that should appeal to people who are apolitical but have moral beliefs but can get instantly shut down while the right can say that the left is anti-god. It's really doing a lot of their work for them to play into that and I just don't see the benefit