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:

  • Lovely_sombrero [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    With few exceptions (Matt Dillahunty IIRC), you could see those people transforming from "religion sucks and because Christianity is the largest form of organized religion in the US, I will mostly talk about that" to "Muslims scary tho".

    • UlyssesT [he/him]
      hexagon
      ·
      3 years ago

      That was what I noticed too, in almost every case. "Muslims bad" somehow aligned with "feminists bad" and soon after that "SJWs bad" then "commies bad" then "poors bad" and so on and so on... :zizek:

      • GreenTeaRedFlag [any]
        ·
        3 years ago

        islamophobia is the main way of keeping europeans in check by capital. everything else flows from there.