PHIL TORRES: How the New Atheists merged with the far right
New Atheism appeared to offer moral clarity, it emphasized intellectual honesty and it embraced scientific truths about the nature and workings of reality. It gave me immense hope to know that in a world overflowing with irrationality, there were clear-thinking individuals with sizable public platforms willing to stand up for what's right and true — to stand up for sanity in the face of stupidity.
Fast-forward to the
present: What a grift that was! Many of the most prominent New Atheists turned
out to be nothing more than self-aggrandizing, dogmatic, irascible,
censorious, morally
compromised people who, at every opportunity, have propped up the
powerful over the powerless, the privileged over the marginalized. This may
sound hyperbolic, but it's not when, well, you look at the evidence. So I
thought it might be illuminating to take a look at where some of the heavy
hitters in the atheist and "skeptic" communities are today.
What do their legacies look like? In what direction have they taken their
cultural quest to secularize the world?...
