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:

    • UlyssesT [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      What you say really lines up with what I saw happening to so many New Atheists I used to be friends with and go to classes with. The pulpit became numerous reactionary celebrities, using much the same format as "watch me dunk on this creationist" and building their brands accordingly.

      From the start, looking back, most of those New Atheists never really had that moment of epiphany and vulnerability. They felt smart and enlightened and chased that dragon to the point that they convinced themselves that they couldn't be suckers, couldn't fall for charlatans, couldn't stumble into a cult by some other name.