Elevatorgate still smolders in the minds of the riff-raff

Oh boy, we get to relive Elevatorgate again. Thanks, Atheists for Liberty, for revisiting it.

You are a proud atheist in the emerging New Atheist movement attending one of the most impactful and energized conferences in your community. In June of 2011, you are in Dublin, Ireland, attending the World Atheist Convention, an event celebrating atheism, science advocacy, and secularism with some of the most famous freethinkers of the time.

Thank you, thank you, thank you very much. I was one of the speakers at that conference.

<Thomas Sheedy whispers, stage left: Not you.>

What?

<I wasn’t talking about you.>

Oh. OK. <sits back down>

Sheedy titled his little essay “Ten years after Elevatorgate | What we should learn from our past mistakes”, but unfortunately demonstrates that he didn’t learn much. He continues with his saga:

You enjoy the attendees and speakers so much that you stay up in conversation at the hotel bar until four in the morning. You see an attractive speaker retiring for the night, and you follow them to an elevator to ask them if they would like to join you for a cup of coffee.

Yes, I was in that hotel bar late at night, but I retired a little earlier, and no one followed me into the elevator.

<Another whisper: Not you.>

What, again? Are you saying I’m not an attractive speaker? It’s no fair. I never get addressed by my handsomeness, it’s always the women who get singled out for their appearance. I wonder if that says something about the culture…

The speaker declines. You then go to your hotel room, alone. Afterwards, the speaker that you were attracted to goes online to decry what you did. The speaker, and other extremists, denounce the New Atheist movement, a healthy and growing movement, as sexist. What you did becomes a catalyst for extremists to infiltrate and destroy the New Atheist movement.

Extremists! Destroyed! New Atheism! That speaker was Rebecca Watson, who shattered the nascent atheist movement with the four little words, “Guys, don’t do that.” So much power. Such extremism. Sheedy even quotes Rebecca’s vicious, hateful commentary, as if he is oblivious to its actual mildness.

Um, just a word to the wise here, guys, don’t do that. I don’t really know how else to explain that this makes me incredibly uncomfortable, but I’ll just sort of lay it out that I was a single woman, you know, in a foreign country, at four a.m., in a hotel elevator with you, just you. I, don’t invite me back to your hotel room right after I’ve finished talking about how it creeps me out and makes me uncomfortable when men sexualize me in that manner.

Yes. Like when commentators think it’s perfectly natural for a man to follow an “attractive speaker” into an elevator and ask them to join them in their hotel room. And for half the atheists in the world to erupt in rage at the idea that a woman might question their right to hit on them.

The idea that the New Atheist movement was systemically sexist is a blatant lie.

Sorry. It was and is systemically sexist, but for one brief moment we extremists thought it could get better, that there was hope for some introspection and growth. We were wrong.

Claims like the ones these infiltrators have made over the years only hinder our community, a community that so many of us fought to develop. If anything, these infiltrators downplayed the problems of real systemic sexism that still exists in other parts of the world, as explained by Richard Dawkins in a sarcastic response to Watson, in what became known as the “Dear Muslima letter:’’

Yeah, he then quotes the “Dear Muslima letter” and says that Dawkins was right.

Here’s the deal. Sheedy keeps talking about these “extremist infiltrators”, but they weren’t infiltrators. We were there all along. That “impactful and energized conference” featuring “the most famous freethinkers of the time”? That included people like Rebecca Watson and me. We didn’t sneak in a side door, wearing disguises. We were part of the movement, and we had helped popularize it. We also weren’t particularly extreme — suggesting that women should be just as respected as men is not a particularly radical idea.

But of course saying that there is a real systemic sexism that still exists in other parts of the world implies that there is no sexism in America or Europe. He claims that atheist circles downplayed the injustices of the Islamic world. Many of the extremist infiltrators have silenced or critiqued criticism of Islam by non-woke atheists. This is not true. That there is sexist injustice in the Islamic world does not imply that the non-Islamic world is free of them. I read somewhere, “Why do you focus on the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not consider the beam that is in your own eye? How will you tell your brother, ‘Let me remove the speck from your eye,’ when, in fact, you have a beam in your own eye? Hypocrite!” We should be working on both the specks and the beams, you know.

Sheedy goes on, becoming increasingly ridiculous.

After their success in taking over the movement five years later,

Wait, what? Rebecca Watson took over the atheist movement? Or maybe it was me. I don’t know, he keeps snubbing me because I’m not attractive enough, but you never know — maybe I’m secretly in charge now. He keeps talking about these extremist infiltrators who have taken over, but he doesn’t name any. Is it Nick Fish, of American Atheists? Maybe Robin Blumner of CFI, who was put in charge after it merged with the Richard Dawkins foundation? Wait, Dawkins…? Could it be he’s the secret extremist mole? Not very likely.

But then he goes on to name all the types of people who’ve been thrown out of the atheist movement.

several groups of atheists, the majority of the movement’s supporters, men and women alike, were seen as pariahs at atheist conferences.

  • Bill Maher type Liberals
  • Secular Libertarians and Conservatives
  • Ex Muslims
  • Those accused of harassment without evidence
  • Anyone who questioned the Atheism+ narrative (criticism was constantly conflated with harassment and ‘cyberstalking’)
  • Women who disagreed with radical feminists (they were charged with ‘parroting misogynistic thought’ and ‘internalized misogyny’)

You know, all those kinds of people are still prominent in atheism. Rebecca Watson and I and many of the other people who spoke out against the casual (and sometimes not so casual) sexism and racism are out. I don’t know what he’s complaining about, since as far as I’m concerned, the assholes won. Have you looked at YouTube atheists lately? He could have been much more specific about who these pariahs are simply by listing the board of advisors for Atheists for Liberty.

  • Peter Boghossian
  • Melissa Chen
  • James Lindsay
  • Yasmine Mohammed
  • Gad Saad
  • Michael Shermer
  • David Silverman
  • Colin Wright

That’s a real rogues gallery of racists, rapists, evolutionary psychologists, and dishonest scum. It’s as if they went looking for people who should be pariahs and tried to elevate them! These are the kinds of people who still get invited to atheist conferences, you know. When was the last time you saw Rebecca Watson or me at a conference? Or on the board of advisors for an atheist group?

Who were the extremist infiltrators who conquered the atheist movement again?

Wait, before I stop, look back at the title of Sheedy’s screed, What we should learn from our past mistakes. What has he learned?

Unlike other organizations who tolerated such infiltration and subversion of the movement, Atheists for Liberty will not make the same mistake. It is because of the weakening of the movement that Atheists for Liberty exists in the first place!

Got it. So he’s going to reject tolerance, and not let feminists and egalitarians into his movement.

That’s nice.

Finally, more people are waking up to @elevatorGATE’s abuse

I’ve compared him to Dennis Markuze before, and it’s exactly the same: using internet protocols and an abundance of free time to constantly harass people he doesn’t like with pointless, content-free noise. The offender goes by the pseudonym “@elevatorGATE” on twitter (right away, you can tell what inspired him), and he’s been doing this for years now, obsessively dunning his targets with noise. There are some differences: Markuze aims his vitriol at skeptics who questioned the existence of paranormal powers.

@elevatorGATE hates women.

Another difference is that Markuze is a despised loner, while @elevatorGATE is surrounded with a little cloud of filth, people who share his hatred and use @elevatorGATE as an amplifier and who love to cloak themselves in the indignant mantle of FREE SPEECH! What they really want is the opposite, though: their goal is to drown out dissent with persistent shouting, and preferably to drive their victims out of social media altogether. They’re more of the trollish toxin that’s poisoning the internet. They’re also the first to squawk if anyone makes an effort to personally block their intrusions — these are privileged idiots who feel it is their right to demand that we listen to them.

Their latest tool is to use Storify. @elevatorGATE constantly gathers up tweets into a little bundle and echoes them back repeatedly; it’s especially easy because when he does that, all of his targets get a little notification (I’ve had to set up my accounts to automatically trash all notifications because the noise is deafening and useless). Imagine dealing with a junior high snot who’s brilliant strategy for harassing you is to follow you around and repeat everything you say, over and over: that’s the brain of @elevatorGATE. And there’s the newest offense: he thinks he has the right to do that. And worse, the CEO of Storify has agreed.

Ana Mardoll and John Scalzi have posts up about this. Scalzi has published a letter he received about this problem.

A Twitter and Storify user who goes by the handle “@elevatorGATE” is a well-known cyberstalker of women via social media. His latest method of doing this is to compile thousands of pieces on Storify, often including every single tweet sent by his chosen targets, and then publish them, which notifies the women in question that he had published yet another piece archiving their every word. After repeated complaints and requests for help, Storify temporarily deactivated the notification feature on his account, which doesn’t actually solve the problem.

In a conversation yesterday with Xavier Damman, the Storify CEO suggested that the women @elevatorGATE is targeting turn off all notifications from Storify, which essentially suggests that they withdraw from the medium if they don’t like being stalked, and which also wouldn’t solve the problem of this user archiving everything these women say. One of the users pointed out that this is very much like telling a woman who is being harassed via telephone to never answer the phone. It was at this point in the conversation that Damman went from passively enabling a stalker to actively assisting one. He tweeted, in response to the women, that they “…can’t do anything about that. It’s @elevatorgate’s right to quote public statements…”

Prior to this point in the conversation, the women had named their stalker, but not used the @ symbol in front of his username. You know enough about Twitter to know why that’s a big deal. Damman either carelessly or deliberately notified a man stalking multiple women that they were seeking some way to prevent him from continuing to harass them, and then claimed it was no big deal because anyone searching for the information would have been able to find it. But there’s a very big difference between information existing and that same information being directly brought to a person’s attention.

If you know much about stalking, you’ll know what happens next. @elevatorGATE has substantially stepped up his harassment of the women who had asked Damman for help. Men who follow him on both Storify and Twitter have been bombarding these women via Storify notifications and Tweets with additional harassment. He has also increased his harassment of known online associates of the women in question, making it difficult for them to seek out help or support from fear of his beginning to stalk their friends as well. It’s the reason I’m contacting you privately, via email, rather than via social media: I’m afraid. I don’t want to be added to his list of targets.

Think about that. Damman runs a company that is utterly dependent on social media, and he’s so incompetent or so heedless that he doesn’t recognize the responsibilities or potential for abuse in his own software. He is unaware that his product is easily misused by stalkers. That should be a cause for a lack of confidence in Storify.

I do have to correct the letter above on one point. It refers to “Men who follow [@elevatorGATE]…”, but I also know of several women who also defend him and chortle along with his barrages.

@elevatorGATE should be getting the same treatment that Dennis Markuze got. His followers should be ashamed of themselves. And Damman should either work to correct his company’s product’s flaws, or he should go bankrupt.

I was wondering what that stench was

I have been informed that the Slymepit is dead. The Slymepit was an online forum that was set up in the wake of Elevatorgate, when a small group of atheists decided to set up a base from which to hurl racist, sexist, homophobic slurs at Social Justice Warriors like Rebecca Watson, Stephanie Zvan, Jey McCreight, and many others, including me. It was one of the uglier sides of the internet, although its fans viewed it differently.

The Slymepit, a long-running atheist discussion board heavily involved in the A/S activism ‘Schism’, is shutting its doors after a ten-year run. Creator and host, ‘Lsuoma’, decided that the conversation, often humorous, insightful, and informative, but also at times pugnacious, scurrilous, or garrulous, had strayed too far from the site’s original purpose of “exposing the stupidity, lies, and hypocrisy of Social Justice Warriors.” Live commenting has therefore been shut down, with ten years of comments and user-created artwork archived.

(If you’d like to see examples of the Slymepit’s creativity, RationalWiki has you covered.)

OK, fine, you get to elide over the Slymepit’s many sins during its funeral. Goodbye, you won’t be missed.

Although I’m immensely amused by this comment:

The Pit’s greatest strength was always that it never took itself seriously. That really frustrated those who so fervently hated and obsessed over us.

Dude. The pit was frenetically abusive, regularly focused howling obscenities at individuals who dared to think social justice was an important cause, and took itself painfully seriously. You were on a mission to destroy people.

As for the “obsession” part — your little clubhouse of haters rotted out and collapsed six months ago, and no one, other than your fellow bigots, even noticed until now.

If anyone wants to find the Slymepit gang today, they’re usually hanging out on Jerry Coyne’s blog.

What happened to our brave, bold horsemen?

Scott Alexander has some ideas about how New Atheism failed. I largely agree with its thesis that the atheism framework was gradually abandoned in favor of an activist/social justice framework, so it didn’t exactly die, it just sort of metamorphosed. Also, it’s nice to get mentioned.

I don’t have a great sense of how this era went, since it was around the time I unfollowed every atheist blog and forum for the sake of my own sanity, but my impression is that some of the Atheism Plussers later admitted they came on a little too strong and dropped that particular branding. But the cleavage the incident highlighted (not created, but highlighted) stuck around. As far as I can tell, it eventually ended with the anti-social-justice atheists stomping off to YouTube or somewhere horrible like that, while most of the important celebrity members of the public-facing movement very gradually turned into social justice bloggers.

For example, I look at Pharyngula, which during its heyday was the biggest atheist blog on the Internet. On the day I am writing this, its front page contains posts like “Are They All Racists On The Right Side Of The Aisle?” (recommended answer: yes), a discussion of how opposing the Gilette commercial represents “classic toxic masculinity”, and an attack on Milo Yiannopoulos. Its sidebar includes links to “Discussion: Racism In America”, “Discussion: Through A Feminist Lens”, and “Social Justice Links Roundup”. There’s still a little bit of anti-religious content, but mostly in the context of Catholics being racist and misogynist.

Aside from Pharyngula, a lot of the old atheist blogs have ended up at atheism-blogging-mega-nexus-site The Orbit. When I read its About page, it doesn’t even describe itself as an atheist blogging site at all. It says:

The Orbit is a diverse collective of atheist and nonreligious bloggers committed to social justice, within and outside the secular community. We provide a platform for writing, discussion, activism, collaboration, and community.

It’s not “blogs on atheism” anymore. It’s “blogs by atheists about social justice”. The whole atheist movement is like this.

If I had any criticisms, it’s that it’s stating the obvious. Freethoughtblogs and The Orbit were explicit in stating their shift in focus. It’s not much of an insight to say that these formerly purely atheist blogs were talking about social justice a lot, when a commitment to social justice were clearly stated goals in the founding declarations in the formation of both networks. There’s also an omission: the atheism side of the Patheos network is still going strong, and it’s much more of an assortment of old-school atheist perspectives (perhaps one of the reasons I’ve lost interest in reading anything, other than a few bright lights, from that network).

Personally, what laid down a path for my own abandonment of atheism was the “dictionary atheism” nonsense from 2008. I thought the point was obvious — here are all these people attending conferences about science, atheism, Christian over-reach, the corruption of education by dogma, religious terrorism, etc., and simultaneously saying with a straight face that atheism was only about not believing in gods. It was an exercise in self-delusion and gate-keeping. By declaring their transparently false ontological purity, they were able to deny any kind of social responsibility. It was infuriating.

But Alexander also neglects to mention the huge chasm, the original Deep Rift, that shattered the New Atheism and set many of us off looking for a better paradigm. That was, of course, “ElevatorGate”. You really can’t try to discuss the history of New Atheism without mentioning Rebecca Watson and the trivial event that yanked back the curtains and revealed that a large fraction of that atheist community were flaming, unrepentant misogynists. They stomped off to colonize YouTube largely because that medium was so friendly to screaming sexism.

Still, I think this is a smart take on what happened to the New Atheism.

I think it seamlessly merged into the modern social justice movement.

This probably comes as a surprise, seeing as how everyone else talks about how atheists are heavily affiliated with the modern anti-social justice movement. I think that’s the wrong takeaway. Sure, a lot of people who identify as atheists now are pretty critical of social justice. That’s because the only people remaining in the atheist movement are the people who didn’t participate in the mass transformation into social justice. It is no contradiction to say both “Most of the pagans you see around these days are really opposed to Christianity” and “What ever happened to all the pagans there used to be? They all became Christian.”

I don’t really like being compared to Christians in that example, but sure. I wish this weren’t the case, but the label “atheist” has been tainted by the people who still put that title first in their description, and use it to justify some hideously regressive views. Nowadays if I see some new blog or account or YouTube channel with a name like “The <fill in the blank> Atheist” (or “Skeptic”, which has become just as toxic) I tune it out because I suspect it’s going to be a shit-show. I’m still just as much an aggressive atheist as ever, but now what I want to know is…what are you going to do with your self-declared rationality?

The patriarchy has deep roots, it’s going to hurt to dig them out

Jeanette Ng won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and this is how her speech began:

John W. Campbell, for whom this award was named, was a fascist. Through his editorial control of Astounding Science Fiction, he is responsible for setting a tone of science fiction that still haunts the genre to this day. Sterile. Male. White. Exalting in the ambitions of imperialists and colonisers, settlers and industrialists. Yes, I am aware there are exceptions.

Welp, that set a few people’s hair on fire, but she’s right. Corey Doctorow agrees.

I think she was right — and seemly — to make her remarks. There’s plenty of evidence that Campbell’s views were odious and deplorable. For example, Heinlein apologists like to claim (probably correctly) that his terrible, racist, authoritarian, eugenics-inflected yellow peril novel Sixth Column was effectively a commission from Campbell (Heinlein based the novel on one of Campbell’s stories). This seems to have been par for the course for JWC, who liked to micro-manage his writers: Campbell also leaned hard on Tom Godwin to kill the girl in “Cold Equations” in order to turn his story into a parable about the foolishness of women and the role of men in guiding them to accept the cold, hard facts of life.

So when Ng held Campbell “responsible for setting a tone of science fiction that still haunts the genre to this day. Sterile. Male. White. Exalting in the ambitions of imperialists and colonisers, settlers and industrialists,” she was factually correct.

It reflects my experience as a reader of science fiction, too. I got hooked on this stuff as a boy in the 1960s, and initially read all the old classic authors — Asimov, Clarke, etc. — and was fascinated with all the robots and spaceships and hyper-advanced gadgetry that they wrote about, but failed to notice that they weren’t very good at writing about people. Then I stumbled onto New Wave writers, and Ursula Le Guin, and Joanna Russ, and all these other amazing writers who had escaped the orbit of the John W. Campbell school, and discovered that the JWC stable tended to be not-very-good writers, period, because that wasn’t what he cared about, which is a strange characteristic for an editor.

Also, when I finally discovered Heinlein in my mid-teens, I freakin’ hated his books. They were long-winded exercises in self-indulgent misogyny. I don’t think he needed JWC’s coaching to be an asshole, he was one naturally.

Here’s another take on Campbell.

Ng’s assessment of Campbell is undoubtedly informed by Campbell’s personal politics and beliefs and those who have written about him. Campbell argued that African-Americans were “barbarians” deserving of police brutality during the 1965 Watts Riots, as “the “brutal” actions of police consist of punishing criminal behavior.” His unpublished story All featured such racist elements that author Robert Heinlein, who built upon Campbell’s original story for his own work titled Sixth Column, had to “reslant” the story before publishing it. In the aftermath of the Kent State massacre, when speaking of the demonstrators murdered by the Ohio National Guard, Campbell stated that “I’m not interested in victims. I’m interested in heroes.” While difficult to presume where Campbell’s beliefs would place him in modern politics, it is apparent that Campbell would disagree with many of the beliefs held by modern America.

I’ve read enough Campbell to guess he’d be cheering for Trump — the pseudoscientific racist genetics, the anti-immigration stuff, the contempt for anyone who rocks the boat, he’d definitely be a Trumpkin.

Doctorow continues.

Not just factually correct: also correct to be saying this now. Science fiction (like many other institutions) is having a reckoning with its past and its present. We’re trying to figure out what to do about the long reach that the terrible ideas of flawed people (mostly men) had on our fields. We’re trying to reconcile the legacies of flawed people [Harlan Ellison, fantastic writer, not such a nice person] whose good deeds and good art live alongside their cruel, damaging treatment of women. These men were not aberrations: they were following an example set from the very top and running through fandom, to the great detriment of many of the people who came to fandom for safety and sanctuary and community.

It’s not a coincidence that one of the first organized manifestation of white nationalism as a cultural phenomenon was within fandom, and while fandom came together to firmly repudiate its white nationalist wing, these assholes weren’t (all) entryists who showed up to stir trouble in someone else’s community. The call (to hijack the Hugo award) was coming from inside the house: these guys had been around forever, and we’d let them get away with it, in the name of “tolerance” even as these guys were chasing women, queer people, and racialized people out of the field.

Those same Nazis went on to join Gamergate, then take up on /r/The_Donald, and they were part of the vanguard of the movement that put a boorish, white supremacist grifter into the White House.

He’s talking about the Rabid Puppies, but I don’t think SF fandom was specifically responsible. We saw exactly the same phenomenon in skepticism/atheism with Elevatorgate and the slymepit. It’s everywhere. It’s like we entered the 21st century and scumbaggery blossomed everywhere. Arthur Clarke could predict geosynchronous satellites, sure, but he completely failed to anticipate the effect of selectively amplifying the voices of arrogant white male dudes, as SF, and science, and atheism, and everything had been doing for decades. What we’re seeing now is the effect of a patriarchal culture being shaken up, and the reactionaries fighting back.

This stuff matters. It’s deeper than any fandom, and it reflects a world-wide pattern of necessary change as the old order resists its slow, painful demise. Ng brings it right back to reality.

So I need say, I was born in Hong Kong. Right now, in the most cyberpunk in the city in the world, protesters struggle with the masked, anonymous stormtroopers of an autocratic Empire. They have literally just held her largest illegal gathering in their history. As we speak they are calling for a horological revolution in our time. They have held laser pointers to the skies and tried to to impossibly set alight the stars. I cannot help be proud of them, to cry for them, and to lament their pain.

Yes. The fascists and capitalists and corporate goons and colonizers have been running the world for a few centuries now, and it’s time to overthrow the old order. There will be great pain in the churn.

Panglossian Naziism

This article, The Magical Thinking of Guys Who Love Logic, strikes a chord. You’ve probably all noticed the reverence the most irrational, horrible, repulsive people hold for “logic” and “reason” — it’s a common affliction in the atheist community.

Danskin points out that, even when their beliefs skew towards the bizarre and conspiratorial, people on the online right often identify as “rationalists.”

This will be unsurprising to those who often engage with the wider online right, whether it is with someone who identifies as alt-right, libertarian, conservative, as a fan of the “Intellectual Dark Web,” or even “moderate” or “centrist” (turns out a lot of people online are self-identifying as moderate while also believing in conspiracies about “white genocide”). Although their beliefs may not be identical, there are common, distinct patterns in the way they speak (or type) that one can’t help but notice.

Specifically, these guys — and they are usually guys — love using terms like “logic.” They will tell you, over and over, how they love to use logic, and how the people they follow online also use logic. They are also massive fans of declaring that they have “facts,” that their analysis is “unbiased,” that they only use “‘reason” and “logic” and not “emotions” to make decisions.

Oh god yes. It’s particularly bad on YouTube — search for “logic” or “reason” in the names of channels there, and you’ll turn up a collection of insufferable cocky snots who actually have no particular credentials or life experience that qualifies them to be experts in rationality, other than their own self-declared commitment to the ideology of holy reason. It’s also a wholly evangelical belief, and the people who convert to it are intolerable.

The men interviewed in the piece, once sweet and caring, started changing after going down a rabbit hole of extremist political content on YouTube and involving themselves in radical right-wing online communities. Convinced of their absolute correctness, these men became at first frustrated, then verbally abusive once they realized their female partners did not always agree with their new views. Any dialogue attempted by these men was not made — at least as far as their partners could tell — with the goal of exchanging views and opening themselves to being challenged. Their goal was to assert their beliefs as fact; to teach their partner the truth, as a Christian missionary might put it. Every woman interviewed in the article — including those who were more formally educated than their boyfriends — makes reference to their former partners belittling their intelligence and rationality. These men were certain that they were the smart ones, that they had correctly assessed the “facts” with “logic,” and that if their womenfolk did not accept this without question, they were simply too dumb to understand.

The article mentions one of the early events that led me to question my involvement with atheism at all.

Perhaps the nadir of the movement was 2011’s “Elevatorgate,” in which a prominent New Atheist woman mentioned that a man had behaved inappropriately to her at an atheist convention and advised other men to avoid this situation in future, and lots of atheist men promptly lost their shit. An over-the-top reaction to women speaking out against harassment is not unique to this movement; for every article praising #MeToo, there seems to be another from a Very Concerned Man who worries that everything is going too far and he’s afraid to even TALK to women now!

But I suspect the reason the reaction to Elevatorgate was so vitriolic was not just about general sexism, but also about the threat it posed to the New Atheist sense of moral superiority. It was much less fun for them to reckon with say, the complex social structures within the skeptic community, and the way that might affect the movement, than it was to make fun of some hick who couldn’t get his head round evolution. Those were the people who had some learning to do — for the New Atheists themselves, there was nothing more to learn. If people from marginalised groups within the movement started speaking about issues which involved listening and learning, or self-reflecting on one’s biases… well, that was unacceptable, since it would require wider reading and understanding of issues that were not immediately accessible or aesthetically pleasing to many New Atheist men.

I don’t think Rebecca Watson would like to be labeled a New Atheist now. Neither would I. That’s the movement that undercut itself by pretending that rationalizing prior prejudices is exactly the same as “logic”.

I am not saying that logic and reason and rationality are bad things, far from it. I’m saying that the Red Pill, Ben Shapiro, Atheism is Unstoppable crowd have stolen those words and abused them. For a beautiful example, look to Jordan Peterson, who uses logic to excuse Nazis.

Footage emerged this week, from a podcast recorded last year, of the professor discussing the conditions that led to the Holocaust. There was the normal equating of fascist and Antifa, on account of the latter’s “proclivity to violence” (as if violence were a moral constant); there was discussion of Hitler’s bravery during the First World War, as well as the revelation that “[he] was very sensitive to disgust”. According to Peterson (and I’ve no reason to doubt him), Hitler used Zyklon, an easy version of the gas used in the gas chambers at Auschwitz, to clean rats from German factories – and this, along with the economic instability in post-Versailles Germany, to Peterson’s mind, is evidence that the Holocaust was a logical progression.

That the Holocaust followed a series of logical progressions is, in a sense, true: if one were to reverse-engineer the Final Solution, each step would appear to follow rationally from the one before.

Watch it.

The problem is that he treats history as an inevitable logical progression of events. Horrors of WWI + Postwar Economic Hardship → Holocaust. It’s like math. Perfectly “logical”. Germany was in the grip of an ineluctable rational progression, it was inevitable. We are therefore led to the conclusion that picking a scapegoat and murdering them for unconnected phenomena is a forced choice, and the Germans had to bow to the pressure of history, as we might now have to bow to the decision to imprison and kill brown-skinned immigrants. Therefore, the alt-right is justified.

But anti-semitism is an irrational belief built on centuries of myth, bigotry, religious dogma, and xenophobia, and he fails to note that many of the decisions leading to the Holocaust were bad or not at all necessary. Congratulations, red-pilled buckos, your hero has just argued that the illogical is logical.

I must also point out that if you look at creationist arguments, it’s quite common to hear them declare that atheism or evolution are illogical. If the magic word “logic” can be invoked on both sides of the argument, isn’t it obvious that you have to do more work than saying you’re logical in order to make your case?

The train wreck that was the New Atheism

The title of the article is What Was New Atheism?. The use of the past tense is noted. The label was coined in 2006 by Gary Wolf in Wired, and we spent the next decade sort of agreeing that there is a kind of unified movement here (while trying to explain it wasn’t “new”), while what unity we had splintered beneath us. I guess it’s over now. The “New Atheism” had a 12 year shelf life. We should have used more preservatives, I suppose.

Yes, I was a New Atheist (past tense again). I promoted it, I happily wore the label, I was initially optimistic that we were going to change the culture, I was naive and stupid. I swallowed some of my early reservations — is this just a reaction against Bush fueled by xenophobia inspired by the September 11th bombings? — but figured that would pass, that people would step in the door and then find enduring meaning in science and evidence-based reasoning.

Boy, was I wrong.

Mainly what happened is that the credibility of science was stolen to bolster rationalizing prior bigotries. People were drawn into the Church of the New Atheism by Islamophobia, but rather than being enlightened about the unity of humanity, they instead learned that bastardized evolutionary theories could be weaponized to justify all kinds of abuses, because that’s what the self-appointed “leaders” were doing.

And that’s another thing — who put Dennett, Harris, Dawkins, and Hitchens in charge? They got profiled in Wired with ominously shadowy portraits (omens of the “Intellectual Dark Web” to come), and they made a video in which they appointed themselves “The Four Horsemen”. Whatever the New Atheism was, it was structureless, so it was easy for a couple of early popularizers to fill the vacuum. Watching a PR move rapidly turn into a de facto powerbase that would quickly dominate conferences and writings left me uneasy — but as long as we weren’t building idols and golden thrones for the Tetrarchs I figured this, too, would pass. Unfortunately, while it didn’t get to the golden thrones stage, for too many people the four turned into oracles whose dicta should not be questioned, and dissent would lead to being ostracized. It only took a year to build a cult of personality.

This particular article views the whole brief episode through the lens of politics, and just politics, which is rather interesting. To me, politics was a side effect, but I agree that it was clear that to some it was primary.

The genesis of New Atheism can be traced back to a series of foreign-policy debates in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Christopher Hitchens’s writings in this period had little to do with atheism, as they were mainly directed against fellow unbelievers on the intellectual left. The controversies that led Hitchens to break with that left nonetheless helped lay the foundation for the New Atheist phenomenon. Like so many other apostates from the American left—from Whittaker Chambers to Irving Kristol and the early neoconservatives—Hitchens held onto his disdain for the liberal mainstream for the rest of his writing career.

Yeah, Hitchens…what a mess. He was a brilliant polemicist and one of the most artfully eloquent people I’ve ever met, but he was also politically vicious, and was adept at denying humanity to the people he wanted bombed. The most dangerously intelligent person I’ve known, he was quick to seize on the intellectual foundation of atheism as a useful tool to persuade others that his causes were legitimate. I suspect part of the reason was also that with God out of the picture, that left him the smartest man in the room.

Unfortunately, it also introduced a political rift, because now a group of people who may initially have rejected the pious stupidity of the Republicans found themselves being told that we ought to support Republican militarism. And at least two of the other three horsemen were agreeing with him.

An aspiring neuroscientist with an undergraduate degree in philosophy, Sam Harris had founded the New Atheist genre in 2004 with his anti-religious manifesto The End of Faith. Harris’s critique of religion was simple, hinging on the idea that “beliefs are principles of action.” In other words, everything we hold to be true has the potential to inform what we do, and at bottom our behavior rests on a more or less coherent set of propositions. The major world religions are illegitimate not only because they make claims that science can show to be false—though for Harris this was obvious—but because a system of belief founded on “bad ideas” will tend to lead people to bad actions. Two years later, in The God Delusion, the Oxford biologist and “Professor for Public Understanding of Science” Richard Dawkins emphasized the other side of the equation. The most commercially successful of the New Atheist best sellers as well as the most evangelical, Dawkins’s book actively aimed to convert readers to scientific rationalism. Unbelief was not only a social good which prevented irrational acts of violence, Dawkins argued, it was also a good in itself for the individual.

That’s an anodyne summary of Harris’s position. It needs to be mentioned that one of his themes is that Islam is particularly evil and that we’re in a great clash of civilizations and must overcome the Muslim hordes. I’d fully agree with that summary of Dawkins’ book, though. But again, the article looks at everything from a political perspective, which, while I agree that it’s valid, it doesn’t align well with my personal reasons for committing to the New Atheism, which were more humanist and scientific. But yes, these emerging political differences were definitely part of schism that was tearing the movement apart.

In this regard, the New Atheist critique of religion reflected liberal America’s defining worry about George W. Bush and his Christian voter base’s hostility to science and technical expertise. Under the Democratic consensus of the time, it was unnecessary to agree on whether the wars were just so long as everyone under the liberal tent could agree that the people in charge of these wars were irrational and incompetent—or simply stupid. American liberalism has a technocratic streak that long predates the 21st century, but both at home and abroad, the tenure of George W. Bush provided it with a counterpart that appeared uniquely ignorant of “facts, logic and reason.” Many liberals wanted no part in Bush’s personal crusade against the enemies of Christendom; others believed that they were more competent to win America’s wars than their boneheaded conservative opponents. New Atheism affirmed both of these impulses simultaneously.

From my perspective, though, the deepest of the rifts was the emerging anti-feminist wing and the active neglect of social justice issues. It wasn’t just that the New Atheism had a specific, narrow focus (on, apparently, oppressing Muslims), but that it loudly denied that anyone else within the movement could have other priorities. Feminism was wrong and bad and you should shut up about it, and there was the lie that atheism could only be about denying the existence of gods while not-at-all-subtly promoting other philosophical positions.

In the early 2010s, New Atheism was less in the headlines than it had been during its heyday. But at the conferences where the surviving New Atheists spoke and on the online forums where their books were debated, shouting matches regularly broke out over accusations that they were Islamophobic apologists for American empire. In addition, the 2010s also saw an increasing number of polemics concerning sexism within the atheist community, starting with a 2011 episode known as “Elevatorgate,” in which the feminist vlogger Rebecca Watson complained of being propositioned in an elevator late at night during an atheist convention, only to be scolded online by Dawkins that women have it far worse under Sharia law.

These kinds of incidents produced a schism among prominent atheists. On one side were proponents of an atheism explicitly tied to progressive values, such as the biologist PZ Myers, the “atheism plus” movement, and media figures like The Young Turks’ Cenk Uygur and Kyle Kulinski. On the other were most of the prominent New Atheist celebrities—including Harris, Dawkins, Michael Shermer and Dave Rubin, a former employee of The Young Turks—who felt that the emphasis on feminism, diversity and anti-imperialism distracted from the fight against religious extremism.

The rest of the article is describing an ongoing tragedy. The New Atheism has been successfully co-opted by the Alt-Right, and now is all about policing political correctness, whining about how white people are oppressed, and how women are ruining everything. The “celebrities” are all about sneering at social justice and promoting old conservatives, like Charles Murray, while denying that they’re actively working for conservative causes.

It’s interesting where the old guard have ended up.

Hitchens has died, but his fans continue the process of apotheosis. I don’t even want to talk about him anymore, because it usually prompts a deluge of people trying to patch over the ugly bits of his reputation. He was a saint, don’t you know.

Dennett has basically retired from the fray. Maybe he was the smartest of the four. Although I would argue with him fiercely on his misunderstandings of evolution, at least he kept his discussions on a philosophical plane.

Harris, the worst of the bunch, is also the most successful. He has successfully pandered to the most regressive members of his audience, and continues as an alt-right, “Intellectual Dark Web” figurehead, and is continuing to profit. If anyone is a symbol of the moral and intellectual corruption of the New Atheism, though, he’s it.

Dawkins had the most well-earned prestige, and has ended up squandering his reputation with repeated foot-shootings.

And me. I was never on a par with those big names, but I was a madly typing proponent of the New Atheism. Now, though…that period is the deepest regret of my life (not that that means much, I’ve been lucky to live a life with few regrets). I’m still a strong atheist, and will be on my deathbed, and I do not regret promoting godlessness and a reason-based life, but I was unfortunate to be part of that traveling shit-show before I realized it’s destination was where it is now: a shambles of alt-right memes and dishonest hucksters mangling science to promote racism, sexism, and bloody regressive politics.

Poisoning of a movement

Sigh. I might once have been willing to take exception to this characterization of the history of New Atheism, but I can’t anymore. I just can’t. It’s all too true, and what should have been an opportunity for reason to rise ascendant has been drowned in a rising flood of idiots who use “reason” as an empty buzzword.

Once Bush left office, the promoters of “intelligent design” curricula retreated from the public sphere, and millennials asserted themselves as the least religious generation to date; the group that had coalesced around the practice logically refuting creationists needed new targets. One of the targets they chose was women. Militant atheism had always been male-dominated, but it took several years and a sea change in American politics for the sexism within its ranks to fully bloom. In 2011, skeptic blogger Rebecca Watson described in a YouTube video how a male fellow attendee of an atheist conference had followed her into an elevator at 4 a.m. in order to ask her on a date—behavior that, understandably, made her uncomfortable. The community erupted into what was later remembered as “Elevatorgate.” A forum was created to harass Watson, and Richard Dawkins himself wrote a comment telling her to “stop whining” because she had it better than victims of honor killings and female genital mutilation.

This dynamic played out again and again. In 2012, the popular atheist vlogger Thunderf00t (real name Phil Mason) aimed his sights at Watson in a video titled “Why ‘Feminism’ is poisoning Atheism,” thereby reigniting the previous year’s controversy. This time it took off, leading him to create several follow-up videos accusing women of destroying the paradise that was New Atheism for their own gain. In 2013, Mason inaugurated his “FEMINISM vs. FACTS” series of videos, which attacked Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist video game critic who was then receiving an onslaught of harassment and violent threats for daring to analyze Super Mario Bros. This sort of idiocy, combined, again, with the growing popularity of jibes associating outspoken atheists with fedoras, neckbeards, and virginity, led to an exodus of liberals and leftists from the “atheist” tent. Those who remained for the most part lacked in social skills and self-awareness, and the results were disastrous.

And then the author starts talking about Stefan Molyneux and James Damore, and it just gets worse.

So here we are. There is still no god, religion is bunk, but the atheist movement has become a dogmatic label used by assholes, racists, and misogynists.

Get Out! A message for the atheist movement

A couple have a major disagreement. A metaphorical story.

Spouse #1: I want a divorce.

Spouse #2: But no! You can’t! Marriage is so, so important, and we have to stick together no matter what!

S#1: I’m a feminist, and you put a pic of Milo Yiannopoulis with a word ballon saying “Feminism is Cancer” as the background on your cell phone.

S#2: You can change! Or you can learn to tolerate my little quirks. I have to be me, you know.

S#1: You marched in a white nationalist parade!

S#2: Oh, you and your trivial, petty concerns. Our bond is more important. We have to stick together, for the sake of the marriage. We still have things in common: you think Black Lives Matter, but we can still agree that cops have really tough jobs. Why are you tearing us apart?

I ask, who’s side do you take here? Some of you will say that both sides are talking past each other, and that is correct. Some might then follow through and declare that therefore Both Sides Are Wrong, glossing over the misogyny and racism that one side takes for granted.

But some of us say instead, “Oh no, Spouse #1! Get out! #2 is an asshole with bad ideas!” It seems to me the only rational response: that’s a marriage that needs to end.

But a lot of atheists disagree. At least, that’s what I have to conclude from the last 6 years of abusive behavior by atheists against atheists, who then try to silence disagreement by declaring the inviolable importance of sticking together in the name of the precious Atheist Movement.

In 2016, David Smalley asked, What’s killing the atheist movement?”. His answer: public disagreement about social justice. Reading between the lines, it was clear that it was all the fault of people who criticized other people within the movement. We’re supposed to be quiet, show a unified front, and call each other up on the phone before we dare to disagree publicly. He was completely oblivious to the fact that silence favors the status quo, and that he was taking a side when he demands obedience to the nebulous leadership of the atheist movement.

I slammed him on it. I had a debate with him on his rather obnoxious and ignorant post; you can’t listen to it anymore because it was deleted by its creator. There is still my side of the conclusion, though.

Did he learn anything from this? No. Earlier this summer in 2017, he wrote another post that is nearly exactly the same as the previous, except that now he boldly states who the villain is: How the Regressive Left Is Killing the Atheist Movement. I hadn’t read it before, because I’ve written off any interest in anything Smalley has to say, but it’s an amazing piece of work: he starts by explaining that this is a result of a series of conversations he’s had with people like Richard Dawkins, Michael Shermer, Adam Carolla, Pete Boghossian, and Lawrence Krauss.

Wow. What a diverse collection of dissenting voices. Were Sam Harris and Dave Rubin busy that day? They are the only people I can think of who might have improved on that stellar collection of manifold heterogeneity.

Actually, it’s a collection of bogus conservative atheist bullshit. It’s got everything. Witch hunts. The horseshoe theory. Insistence that he’s the reasonable one. Misrepresentation of everyone else. It’s one long atheist dudebro cliche. All the problems in his first post were exponentially amplified.

It’s not just me. The Thomas Smith at the Serious Inquiries Only blog reamed him out. Which is good, because now I don’t have to address it.

But that’s not all. Smalley then made his garbage post the subject of his talk at Gateway To Reason. Watch, if you can bear it.

Most disappointingly, it was posted by Seth Andrews, who I thought was fairly level-headed. He prefixed it with this message:

At the 2017 Gateway to Reason Conference in St. Louis, David Smalley (host of Dogma Debate) gave his perspective on the challenges and often public divisions among atheist activists, and in regard to online interactions as a whole.

It’s a perspective…uploaded and presented here as a conversation starter, as so many are fervently seeking a fairer, more tempered, and more civil exchanges and interactions between people

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.” – Harper Lee

Fairer. More tempered. More civil. Applied to a speech in which Smalley trivializes our differences and begs people to stop criticizing fellow atheists. In which he sets up all kinds of irrational dichotomies. That thing in my imaginary dialog where Spouse #2 suggests that pointing out, as Black Lives Matter does, that cops are murdering people is reasonably countered by pointing out that we can still agree that cops have really tough jobs? He actually says that.

People at that conference applauded and cheered and laughed. Except, I noticed, Alix Jules and a few others scattered around the room. An amazing number of atheists thought that deplorable performance was commendable, including Seth Andrews. My estimation of Andrews has dropped significantly now.

The video already has a large number of positive comments! I’ll give you one example, representative of the kind of atheist who agrees with Smalley.

The skeptic-atheist community broke apart when Cultural Marxism was introduced into it e.g. third wave feminism, identity politics, intersectionality. New rules for behavior and speech were introduced. This ideology even demonised the most prominent and influential atheists like Dakwins or Harris as bigoted, racist, islamophobic white males.
As a counter movement, many skeptics became fiercely anti-SJW. There the division took place.

The “Cultural Marxist” remark gives it away. This is one of those pseudoscientifically racist people who whines about white genocide. That’s the audience for Smalley’s message. He doesn’t care.

Stephanie Zvan was there at the talk. She didn’t like it.

So what the hell did Smalley do in his talk? Start with what he didn’t do: He didn’t address a single one of Thomas Smith’s criticisms. He didn’t modify his thesis, and he didn’t change his examples. The Black Lives Matter/cops have tough jobs was in the talk just as it was in the post—worded differently, but still missing the point Smith notes. He didn’t actually call out the “Regressive Left” specifically, but that’s where his examples of bad behavior came from.

You see, we’re throwing people away in this movement for not being pure and perfect. We’re excommunicating imperfect people willy-nilly, and people are leaving atheism because it reminds them of their old churches that did this. Because, you know, people didn’t actually leave their churches over the god question, despite this being the basis for the atheist movement’s claim to any kind of broad rationality. No, they left because people were mean to each other. Petty mean.

What does he mean? He means holding people to account for things like retweeting white nationalists when those white nationalists make a point someone agrees with. Or at least that’s the part of the situation he mentioned. He left out the content of any retweets in the movement that might fit his description and didn’t talk about any hypothetical tweeter’s response to being criticized for making the error.

Yes. Objecting to racism is now “being mean” to some in the movement. We’re excommunicating people over mere sexism and racism! Not mentioned is that somehow the people being “excommunicated” are people at the top, like Dawkins and Harris, who haven’t gone anywhere, who are still lauded as the leading voices of the movement, who still get speaking gigs at atheist conferences, who are still turned to when the media needs a quote from an atheist.

Steve Shives points out exactly where this split in the community occurred. One flashpoint where the differences crystallized: Rebecca Watson and Elevatorgate. You remember that — when Watson, in response to a late-night suggestion in an elevator said “Guys, don’t do that”, and an angry horde of entitled assholes shrieked and sent rape threats, and an even larger group of atheists looked at the years of harassment and the quiet one-liner with David Smalley’s attitude and declared that both sides were equivalent and bad.

This is what is making the atheist movement irrelevant and ugly: that there are people who close their eyes to injustice, like David Smalley, and others who exploit that to turn the whole thing into foul nest of entitled asshats who prop up the status quo. Where once we were a radical force for a new perspective on humanity, now it’s a home for white nationalism and casual sexism and the same old dogmas, because too many of its advocates consider equality and human dignity trivial, petty concerns not worth calling out members for. It’s populated with people who cannot recognize the distinction between racism and criticizing racism. (You know who else, besides David Smalley, cannot do that? Donald Trump.)

Atheism has squandered its momentum on a defensive old guard and apologists for neglect of events happening in our world. I’m going to have to suggest that we all abandon it. Let’s find an organization that openly states that they want to dismantle the structures of white supremacy and sexist oppression.

Take a listen to James Croft. Humanism is a better future.

Organizations have the right to not invite Richard Dawkins — or me — to speak

A talk by Richard Dawkins on his newest book, Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist, was canceled by the radio station that was hosting it, KPFA, a public broadcasting station in Berkeley. Their reason:

We had booked this event based entirely on his excellent new book on science when we didn’t know he had offended and hurt – in his tweets and other comments on Islam, so many people. KPFA does not endorse hurtful speech. While KPFA emphatically supports serious free speech, we do not support abusive speech. We apologize for not having had broader knowledge of Dawkins views much earlier.

Richard Dawkins complains with, unfortunately, the kind of argument often used by the alt-right:

I am known as a frequent critic of Christianity and have never been de-platformed for that. Why do you give Islam a free pass? Why is it fine to criticise Christianity but not Islam?

Somehow, a minority community in America that is threatened with deportation by the government, is routinely condemned by talk radio and the likes of Breitbart, and that lives in fear of good Christian citizens who vandalize mosques and threaten violence (and sometimes, carry out violence) gets accused of having a “free pass”. That’s precisely the kind of blinkered nonsense that I can understand KPFA objecting to, so Dawkins is not helping his case at all. It’s also denying the fact that the New Atheists have been particularly specific in denunciations of Islam; Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the newest member of the “four horsemen”, has recommended converting Muslims to Christianity, so there clearly is a hierarchy of religions with Islam at the bottom, deserving special contempt. And Sam Harris, of course, is all about anti-Islamic sentiment, going so far as to suggest that using torture and nuclear weapons against them might be justifiable. Let’s not play the wide-eyed innocent, “what, me abuse Muslims?” game. Let’s not pretend that Dawkins has never made any hurtful, regressive comments on his twitter feed, or on my blog.

CFI handles it a little better, pointing out that Dawkins has, for instance, opposed Trump’s Muslim travel ban, and that this particular talk was to be about science, so his other views were irrelevant. I suspect that it would have been a good talk that I would enjoy, since it wouldn’t contain the regressive views I’ve found so exasperating in Dawkins. So, sure, you can make the argument that Dawkins is a speaker of considerable virtue, and that he wouldn’t be flaunting his vices in this talk.

But then they go too far.

“We understand the difference between a people and the beliefs they may hold,” said Blumner, “All of us must be free to debate and criticize Ideas, and harmful ideas must be exposed. It is incredibly disappointing that KPFA does not understand this.”

I am disappointed that CFI does not understand that this is not a free speech issue. Dawkins is free to debate and criticize ideas. He’s the best-selling atheist author in the world! He isn’t oppressed or censored in any way; his books are popular, they get translated into dozens of languages, he gets to appear on television, he doesn’t have to fear that he’ll be ejected out of the country or murdered for his views (people like Maryam Namazi or Taslima Nasrin do). KPFA, as the host of this talk, has the right to decide that they’d rather not.

I’m going to agree completely with Siggy on this matter. That Richard Dawkins has some controversial, even objectionable, views does not, in some weird reversal of free speech concerns, obligate every entity on the planet to host him on demand.

People are always thinking of these issues in terms of the speaker’s free speech, but if anything, it’s about the inviters’ free speech. If speakers have a right to platforms, where are all my speaker invitations, and why isn’t anyone standing up for my free speech?

It wouldn’t even matter if KPFA’s reasons for rejecting Dawkins were totally bogus, so all the spluttering about how he isn’t really anti-Islam is irrelevant. Making it a free speech issue is just using a bullhorn to yell about how you don’t understand free speech.

Dawkins (and I) might not particularly like the idea that this rejection was made so late that it was obvious, but it is within KPFA’s rights, and it does no major harm to Dawkins. This is a case where the appropriate response is to shrug and move on.

There have been two cases in just the past year where conference organizers have contacted me, asked if I’d be willing to speak at their event, and then later written to me and retracted the offer without explanation. I’m sure it was because there are vocal members of those groups who objected vehemently to my appearance, but it was done before the final list of speakers was announced, so the change was not publicized. And that was fine, I didn’t complain, I didn’t announce that my free speech was being violated, I didn’t try to argue that their reasons for cutting me were invalid. Conferences have that right.

Why doesn’t CFI understand this?