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:

  • Ericthescruffy [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    I think that's a really really insightful take to be honest. Its interesting because I specifically remember before I stopped watching TJ Kirk/Amazing Atheist he kinda admitted that exact thing in a video. To paraphrase: he got tired of dunking on creationists and lampooning them because, basically, they "won"...or at least as much as they could in the purely online space. You basically couldn't make an creationist argument anywhere online without getting completely blown up and it had a boring stale circle jerk...and thus a new target was needed.