I’m not on the side of Boghossian and Lindsay, OK?

Critical Race Theory is simultaneously a profound readjustment of how we see American history, and a trivial, obvious fact. Yes, the United States was founded by genocidal European colonizers who built their country on the backs of African slaves. Yes, the Founding Fathers were philosophical hypocrites who wrote elegantly and beautifully about liberty and freedom and human rights and then went home to rape black women. Yes, that lovely classical architecture and those white pillars were erected on an Indian burial ground by black slaves. Get used to reality and accept it and do something about it.

The only people who reflexively object to Critical Race Theory are the worst and whitest buffoons in the country. So who do we see eagerly marching up to the microphones and cameras to express their dissent from reality? Two representative white atheists with arrogance to spare and a history of whining about “grievance studies,” Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay.

Jesus fuck, it’s embarrassing to be an atheist anymore.

Their ignorance got exposed and ridiculed on air, and now Michael Harriot completes the disembowelment. This is a truly ugly execution. Jimmy and Petey really need to stay at home, hiding under their bed, from now on.

Lindsay and Boghossian are college professors who have turned whitesplaining into an academic field called Grievance Studies. Basically, they propose that social justice is just a bunch of whining from people who don’t want to be held accountable for their lack of agency, unlike our white brethren who are coasting off a quarter of a millennium of privilege and convulse into conniptions at the very mention of this country’s racist past.

That’s just the prelude. Marc Lamont Hill, the man in the middle, let the two insipid fuckwits dig their own graves for 10 minutes. I about died when Lindsay, thinking he was so clever, tried to go on the counterattack and tell Hill that he was made uncomfortable by the word “folk” because Germans used the word “Volk” in Nazi propaganda. What a maroon…but here, enjoy the idiocy for yourself:

Or just savor Harriot’s summary:

So when Lindsay and Boghossian began whitemanning using polysyllabic words to explain why all the negroes are wrong, they had no idea that Hill was a practitioner of the ancient African tradition of knowing what the fuck he’s talking about. The pair filibustered through two segments while Hill patiently allowed them to say the things they made up. When they were done, Hill surprised Pinky and No-Brain with why they would not be able to take over the world with their pseudo-intellectual tripe.

“Of course, we’re running out of time but I’m going to respond just so people don’t think I don’t have a response,” Hill said, before launching into an explanation that Critical Race Theory is only related to Critical Theory in the way that bullshitting is related to having someone slap the shit out of you; it’s not the same shit. They may have known that Hill was the author of six books and holds a Ph.D. in the subject on which they speculated, but they were unaware that Hill also holds the position that can only be described by the things he is not.

He is not one of their lil’ friends. He is not Boo Boo the fool. And, most importantly, if they thought they were going to overwhelm someone with their white-centric Critical Racist Theory, they should have known:

Marc Lamont Hill is not the one.

Bewildered, Lindsay could only respond by saying: “You actually know a lot about this.”

And then, with a smile, Hill invites them to come back on sometime to continue the discussion. He sure knows when he’s got some tasty fish on the line.

The insufferable pettiness of Anna Krylov

I just discovered an op-ed from 2021 written by Anna Krylov, the crusader against political correctness whose terrible paper I criticized on YouTube. It’s also a terrible opinion piece, but it is evidence that she is trying to launch a career that would appeal to the right wing, and also that she isn’t very thoughtful.

The piece is called The Politicization of Science and it’s the same ol’, same ol’. She starts off by giving her personal history — she grew up in the Soviet Union, in a town that was renamed multiple times in response to the shifting political rule, and she knew people who were denied educational opportunities because they weren’t sufficiently deferential to the powers-that-be. It’s deplorable stuff, and the stupid whims of the political class wrecked many aspects of Russian science. I can see where Krylov is sensitive to the problems.

Unfortunately, after the history lesson, it goes off the rails. She thinks the US is following the same path (and it may, but not for the reasons she cites.)

Fast forward to 2021–another century. The Cold War is a distant memory and the country shown on my birth certificate and school and university diplomas, the USSR, is no longer on the map. But I find myself experiencing its legacy some thousands of miles to the west, as if I am living in an Orwellian twilight zone. I witness ever-increasing attempts to subject science and education to ideological control and censorship. Just as in Soviet times, the censorship is being justified by the greater good. Whereas in 1950, the greater good was advancing the World Revolution (in the USSR; in the USA the greater good meant fighting Communism), in 2021 the greater good is “Social Justice” (the capitalization is important: “Social Justice” is a specific ideology, with goals that have little in common with what lower-case “social justice” means in plain English). As in the USSR, the censorship is enthusiastically imposed also from the bottom, by members of the scientific community, whose motives vary from naive idealism to cynical power-grabbing.

Wait, wait, wait: I had to stop at that claim that “Social Justice” (capitalized) has little in common with “social justice” (lower case.) That’s weird. I followed her citations to see where that’s coming from, and it’s all Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, and John McWhorter — sources that despise the idea of social justice, and have, shall we say, a rather uninformed and biased perspective. But now I was eager to learn about Western censorship.

Her examples are underwhelming.

Today’s censorship does not stop at purging the scientific vocabulary of the names of scientists who “crossed the line” or fail the ideological litmus tests of the Elect. In some schools, physics classes no longer teach “Newton’s Laws”, but “the three fundamental laws of physics”. Why was Newton canceled? Because he was white, and the new ideology calls for “decentering whiteness” and “decolonizing” the curriculum. A comment in Nature calls for replacing the accepted technical term “quantum supremacy” by “quantum advantage”. The authors regard the English word “supremacy” as “violent” and equate its usage with promoting racism and colonialism. They also warn us about “damage” inflicted by using such terms as “conquest”. I assume “divide-and-conquer” will have to go too. Remarkably, this Soviet-style ghost-chasing gains traction. In partnership with their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion taskforce, the Information and Technology Services Department of the University of Michigan set out to purge the language within the university and without (by imposing restrictions on university vendors) from such hurtful and racist terms as “picnic”, “brown bag lunch”, “black-and-white thinking”, “master password”, “dummy variable”, “disabled system”, “grandfathered account”, “strawman argument”, and “long time no see”. “The list is not exhaustive and will continue to grow”, warns the memo. Indeed, new words are canceled every day–I just learned that the word “normal” will no longer be used on Dove soap packaging because “it makes most people feel excluded.”

What does it mean that Newton was “canceled”? How? We still learn about his work, Newton still gets a prominent place in the history of science, and calling the laws he discovered “fundamental” seems more important than calling them “Newton’s.”

She cites a letter published in Nature expressing an opinion — you know, like Krylov is doing in the Journal of Physical Chemistry letters — that suggests some of the terminology used in computing is poor. In the 17 December 2019 issue of Nature, Carmen Palacios-Berraquero, Leonie Mueck & Divya M. Persaud say:

We take issue with the use of ‘supremacy’ when referring to quantum computers that can out-calculate even the fastest supercomputers (F. Arute et al. Nature 574, 505–510; 2019). We consider it irresponsible to override the historical context of this descriptor, which risks sustaining divisions in race, gender and class. We call for the community to use ‘quantum advantage’ instead.

The community claims that quantum supremacy is a technical term with a specified meaning. However, any technical justification for this descriptor could get swamped as it enters the public arena after the intense media coverage of the past few months.

In our view, ‘supremacy’ has overtones of violence, neocolonialism and racism through its association with ‘white supremacy’. Inherently violent language has crept into other branches of science as well — in human and robotic spaceflight, for example, terms such as ‘conquest’, ‘colonization’ and ‘settlement’ evoke the terra nullius arguments of settler colonialism and must be contextualized against ongoing issues of neocolonialism.

Instead, quantum computing should be an open arena and an inspiration for a new generation of scientists.

OK, if I were working in the field of quantum computing I’d take that into account, and I can see their point. All it is, though, is a strong suggestion in a scientific journal, exactly equivalent (although far less wordy) to what Krylov was doing…but she is oblivious to the comparison. It’s terrible that anyone would talk about the uses of language, but only when the interpretations differ from Anna Krylov’s.

Another example she gives is a set of recommendations from the “Words Matter” Task Force at the University of Michigan. I confess, there’s a lot in there that I find silly and pointless, such as discouraging the use of the phrase “brown bag lunch” (yeah, that’s what color paper bags are!), but others are worthwhile, such as avoiding the word “crippled” to refer to broken systems, or let’s call “man-hours” “person-hours”. It’s all very bureaucratic, but it’s not censorship or oppression.

That a capitalist company would not want to alienate potential customers by implying that they might be abnormal is also not censorship. She should be far more concerned that I’ve been trying to avoid the use of the “normal” word in my classes, replacing it with less judgmental words like “typical” or “common”. Is color-blindedness not normal? Should I imply that a few students in my class are abnormal because they’re not trichromatic? Krylov is even sillier than that U. Michigan list.

That’s the real problem here. Some people, mostly conservatives and Republicans, are trying to distract us with trivial, petty nonsense as far more serious problems are taking over this country. Sure, go ahead and complain that you’ll continue to defy the tyranny of the Left trying to rename “brown bag” lunches — but meanwhile, the Right is banning books, firing teachers who dare to mention that they’re not heterosexual, outlawing women’s health procedures, and making life a living hell for trans people. Those concerns don’t get mentioned by Krylov. Instead, she wants to damn anyone who tries to expand education to historically deprived groups by removing biases. All in the name of saving humanity.

The answer is simple: our future is at stake. As a community, we face an important choice. We can succumb to extreme left ideology and spend the rest of our lives ghost-chasing and witch-hunting, rewriting history, politicizing science, redefining elements of language, and turning STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education into a farce. Or we can uphold a key principle of democratic society–the free and uncensored exchange of ideas–and continue our core mission, the pursuit of truth, focusing attention on solving real, important problems of humankind.

Remember: the Unilever corporation removing the word “normal” from their beauty products is an example of “EXTREME LEFT IDEOLOGY.” Ron Desantis dismantling academic freedom and appointing a Discovery Institute hack to control a liberal arts college…eh, no big deal.

How I generally feel reading headlines

This headline — “Crisis: Socialist Woke Capitalism Bailout Ban Slammed” — sounds like the kind of confusing word salad you’d get from Fox News or James Lindsay or Chris Rufo or any of a thousand right-wing nutcases, so I have to a agree with the conclusion that it’s probably evil, yeah.

I don’t agree with the accelerationist scumbag composing the articles, though.

Twitter & entropic decay

Moderation matters. It’s human nature that some people don’t grow out of their immaturity and find satisfaction in destroying things, splattering obscenities everywhere, and relishing being purposeless disruptors — it is, apparently, what gives their life meaning, since they are failures at everything else — so policing comments is necessary. That’ll never change for as long as some people savor being terrible human beings.

Elon Musk’s Twitter is being stripped of moderators, rules, and any vestige of sanity in what I can only interpret as self-destruction. Musk is one of those useless vandals who finds virtue in wreckage, and by removing any effective moderation, we’re going to see a steady decay of useful content. Twitter is becoming as lawless and unregulated as Facebook, and now people are rushing to insert misinformation…now blessed with the sacred Blue Checkmark, which can be obtained by anyone for a mere $8/month.

Under Elon Musk’s new direction for Twitter, several anti-vaccine accounts with tens of thousands of followers are now verified by paying $7.99 a month for Twitter Blue.

Hey, if I were a quack trying to sell patent medicines that haven’t been tested and don’t work, that’s what I’d do: pay a pittance for a shingle I could hang for my dangerous advertising, so I could pretend to be a legitimate authority, and that’s what they’re doing.

But the tools are now being used to create a false sense of validity in order to spread dangerous falsehoods, including about vaccines. And groups on other platforms, like Facebook, continue to circumvent moderation by making minor changes to their names and the terms they use to promote anti-vaccine agendas.

Verified accounts are frequently seen as reliable and trustworthy, and Twitter’s algorithm gives them a higher ranking in search results, replies and follow recommendations.

“There’s a sense of legitimacy that comes with it,” said Barry. “By verifying this anti-vaccine account, they’re kind of verifying all of the misinformation it shares … it makes people think, ‘Oh, well, this is a verified account. This must be true.’”

They’re lying to circumvent any restraints on their propaganda, and they openly admit it! Machines can’t detect spotlights in a those silly robot verification tests on the internet, they sure can’t see a cunning liar, like this guy who is determined to spread vaccine misinformation on Facebook. Twitter is just lying there with its immune system demolished, it’s becoming as riddled with this nonsense as Facebook.

Facebook group admins, like Tiago Henrique Fernandes, reconstitute banned groups by using slightly different names, like DSN Official instead of Died Suddenly News, while keeping the same focus on anti-science messages.

Fernandes coaches members not to write certain words that will be picked up by moderators, he explained on a recent show produced by Children’s Health Defense.

Facebook’s algorithms look for keywords – like vaccine, shot and mRNA – to flag potential problems.

“I basically train the members to … get away from that kind of language and get more into undercover, what I call ‘carnival talk’ – that way the algorithms can’t figure it out,” he said.

Group members often refer to the vaccines as food – “cookie”, “peaches”, “cheeseburger” – or use purposeful misspellings, especially for purported side-effects like seizures (“see jures”) or cancer (“can sir”).

One phrase that is picking up steam in the anti-vax world is “died suddenly”, which may be used in official media reports to talk about any sudden death, making it harder to moderate automatically.

This is one of the reasons I bailed out of Facebook — too much garbage being peddled to profit Mark Zuckerberg, and too many stupid or evil people thriving in the stew of dishonesty. Next on the social media chopping block: the disintegrating carcass of Twitter, which is now making life easy for frauds.

The vaccines to prevent severe disease and death from Covid-19 are extremely safe and effective, with millions of people around the world vaccinated.

Even so, anti-vaccine propaganda has increased dramatically during the pandemic. Anti-vaccine activists “were prepared for a pandemic to happen”, and they were prepared to exploit it, Barry said.

Verifying anti-vax accounts and elevating their messages on social networks further entrenches anti-vaccine ideology in our culture, Barry said. “Anything that further legitimizes them, the extent of their influence gets even worse, and people don’t even realize that the origin of it is anti-vax.”

I’m afraid it’s more than passive neglect that’s creating the ongoing deterioration, though. I’m convinced that Elon Musk didn’t buy Twitter to save it, he can’t possibly be that stupid (or can he?) I think it was an active act of vandalism. He loves the attention he gets on the site, but simultaneously hates that it opens him up to criticism, so he’s destroying it in a stupid act of self-immolation. How else to explain that he’s letting anti-vaxxers flourish, has allowed Donald Trump and Jordan Peterson to return, and has let James Lindsay out of his cage?

There’s no reason for any of it, except to accelerate the descent into crepitude. It’s surprising because he didn’t have to spend $44 billion to do that, entropy and competition would have disintegrated it eventually, like MySpace, but he seems to be rushing to do in weeks or months what would have normally taken years or decades.

Could he please buy Facebook next?

Shermer’s brand of skepticism: rotten to the core

Michael Shermer <ick, spit> put out a call for an article for his worthless magazine defending CRT, and complained that no one would defend the theory (he didn’t look very hard, I guess). Aaron Rabinowitz answered the call and volunteered.

CRT, and what I believe is the moral panic surrounding it, is something I’ve written about in the past, so I reached out to Mr. Shermer, who told me he already had a CRT overview article “that mostly summarizes the history of the movement going back to its postmodernism roots (and before)”, which he described as “mostly neutral, albeit slightly critical on the consequences of accepting fully the belief in system racism by POC.”

Would you like to read this “mostly neutral” article? Don’t bother.

I later found out that that “article” is actually the CRT chapter from James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose’s book Cynical Theories, two individuals who played a significant role in developing and mainstreaming the CRT moral panic.

You all remember James Lindsay, right? There’s a man descending into oblivion, recently banned on Twitter. Here’s all you need to know about Lindsay.

At the time, in 2018, Lindsay insisted he was a “left-leaning liberal,” a fellow traveler of the erstwhile anti-woke collective that once called it itself the “Intellectual Dark Web,” and he was praised and promoted by some of its leading figures as an important and brave public intellectual.

But in 2022, he’s a Trump-supporting, Big Lie-espousing, vaccine-denying, far-right bigot who thinks Sen. Joe McCarthy “had it right” and “didn’t go nearly far enough” during his infamous (and near-universally repudiated) witch hunts of suspected communists during the 1950s.

And, perhaps most notably, he helped popularize the “Ok Groomer” epithet (and hashtag) on Twitter, feeding the right wing’s moral panic about LGBTQ teachers.

Right. That’s the guy Shermer believed to be a credible and objective source. Sort of says it all, I think.

Rabinowitz was working on the piece, communicating with Shermer on the content as it progressed. He’s a stronger man than I am, because if I got a message like the one below where Shermer brags about being a “social liberal” and promoting his own crappy book, I would have noped right out of there, even before I found out where his sympathies actually lie.

Then, predictably, Shermer abruptly pulled the plug on the article. You won’t find it in Skeptic magazine.

But good news! Rabinowitz got it published in The Skeptic, a UK magazine which isn’t a Shermer vanity rag. You definitely should read that rather than our corrupted American version. Rabinowitz is quite clear in naming some of the most rabid of the CRT opponents, and curiously, they’re all people who have have been prominently featured in Shermer’s magazine and podcasts.

While Rufo has received the lion’s share of credit for inciting the CRT moral panic, Lindsay et al’s anti-woke activism served as the social and ideological springboard for the CRT moral panic, because it gave the impression that the movement grew out of concerns expressed by self-identifying heterodox liberals. Shermer even personally promoted Lindsay and Boghossian’s grievance studies appearance on Joe Rogan, an episode full of easily debunked misinformation.

Given these facts, CRT activists might reasonably conclude that it would be harmful to lend credibility to an outlet that could use it to offset further unsupported attacks. That was certainly my largest concern in deciding whether to write this piece, which was originally commissioned by Skeptic Magazine in response to my conversation with Shermer. Ultimately, I lean towards engagement, even when the chance of persuasion is likely to be low, but we don’t have remotely enough evidence to decide on the best approach to engaging with individuals and organisations that appear caught up in a moral panic.

I believe the original question was actually something of a dog whistle, aimed largely at other critics of wokeness. It served to signal that CRT advocates can’t defend the theory, and that they are too ideologically captured to admit defeat, so they instead avoid debate entirely. Douglas Murray made this accusation explicitly in his recent interview on Shermer’s podcast, around 40 minutes in. He claims it is a major red flag that CRT advocates like Kendi and DiAngelo are unwilling to engage in public debate. In the interview both men credulously repeat one of Rufo and Lindsay’s most absurd accusations: that the woke are too fragile and fanatical to risk open debate.

I don’t consider it a red flag to refuse to debate, since there is good reason to question the efficacy of such debates. However, if you do consider it such a warning sign, it’s disingenuous not to highlight that Rufo and Lindsay also routinely deride and avoid debate, to the extent of actively blocking people who attempt to engage them in good faith. Lindsay and Boghossian have claimed that social justice advocates are such “uniformly such dreadful conversationalists” that it’s pointless to engage with them, beyond learning how to counter their tactics. How could such well-poisoning be worthy of praise when it’s coming from the architects of the CRT moral panic, yet serve as a red flag when assessing CRT advocates? I think the most plausible answer is the existence of an ‘anti-woke’ in-group bias.

I don’t entirely agree with Rabinowitz, though: I lean away from direct engagement when the opposition is actively harming people, and is already being fed at the trough of right-wing media. I would think articles, like the one in The Skeptic, that are strongly criticizing the colossally malicious agents of far-right disinformation are OK, and are the kind of engagement I would consider productive, but I would never want to promote Rufo or Lindsay or Murray (or Michael Fucking Shermer) with a face-to-face event, or one where some scumbag is using my words to promote an illusion of balance when they’re actually promoting lies and fear.

Blogs are dead! Long live the blogs!

I’m beginning to wonder if I’m doing PR wrong (no, I know am). This article by Aaron Rabinowitz on the scourge of anti-“Woke” activism had me wondering if I’ve really missed an angle.

Our story begins on January 24th of 2021, with the formal launch of the UK based Counterweight website, billed as “the home of scholarship and advice on Critical Social Justice ideology”, and committed to “individualism, universalism, viewpoint diversity and the free exchange of ideas”. Counterweight is one of many anti-woke activist organisations that has popped up in the past year to provide resources for organising against wokeness. Despite providing scant evidence that there was a substantive problem their organisation would address, Counterweight’s debut was uncritically covered by several news outlets, including The Daily Mail, Russia Today, The Daily Telegraph, and The Times – the latter two of whom felt Counterweight’s launch warranted front-page coverage. Counterweight’s founder, Helen Pluckrose, was invited to give numerous interviews in the mainstream media.

So I took a look at this Counterweight bullshit, looking at it for content and structure. Content: it has a small stable of contributors who write essays on an irregular schedule. It looks like they get a new post every few days. It’s basically nothing but a multi-author blog — it’s not even as active as Freethoughtblogs, and is kind of the inverse of our goals. Structure: here’s a big difference, with the front end loaded with all kinds of explicit material defending their anti-“Woke” agenda — basically, their ideology is made primary and loud. The Freethoughtblogs entry page is just a table of our authors and their most recent articles. One other content difference is that they must have some minimal essay length, while we don’t, so often here you’ll get a short blurb, while there you can reliably get a solid couple of paragraphs of hatred and ignorance.

And yet, somehow, Helen Pluckrose starting a gussied-up blog site gets write-ups from various well-known, if conservative, newspapers? We didn’t do good PR, I guess, because here you’ll find more and better essays written by genuinely individualistic people who are not hog-tied by the status quo. We also don’t have to struggle to hide our hideous opinions.

That’s what Aaron’s article is mostly about: the Counterweight started up with James Lindsay on board, and then Lindsay tweeted out a bunch of grossly anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, like this.

Oops! Quick! Get his name off the masthead! But let’s keep all the links to his New Discourses website, and continue to encourage people to read Lindsay, just with a little implausible denial. They don’t mind a little anti-Semitism and racism at the Counterweight, they just want it slightly less prominently labeled. While Freethoughtblogs would explode with anger if someone here favored anti-Semitism, and they wouldn’t be quietly tucked away, we’d do a lot of brutal self-examination, and carry out a public execution, so I guess that’s another difference.

OK, if we had a lot of money (we don’t, we dribble on month to month), I guess I’d do a major makeover, call this place Freethought Magazine or some such (“The Journal of Social Justice Studies”?), and turn the main page into a menu-driven summary of freethought and social justice, but keep all the same writers and list their contributions even more prominently, and catch the eye of the NY and LA Times, maybe a few other major liberal publications. It’s kind of obvious that calling it a blog network made it more easily dismissable.

New Atheism is dead…does that make this abuse of a corpse?

The current crop of New Atheists take a brutal beating. Phil Torres takes the approach of looking at the atheists who get all the attention today, and asking whether they were actually good moral people who represented the ideals of atheism well.

The answer is “No.”

So if you want to read about how the atheists who rode the glory train of the atheist resurgence 10 or 15 years ago to fame and fortune now are doing, check it out and be depressed. The faces of the New Atheism are Sam Harris, Michael Shermer, Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins, James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, David Silverman, and Steven Pinker, and if just that list is harrowing enough, wait until you read the dissections. To make it even worse, they’re all converging on the Intellectual Dark Web, which ought to be renamed the New Fascism.

What’s sad is that the New Atheist movement could have made a difference — a positive difference — in the world. Instead, it gradually merged with factions of the alt-right to become what former New York Times contributing editor Bari Weiss calls the “Intellectual Dark Web” (IDW), a motley crew of pseudo-intellectuals whose luminaries include Jordan Peterson, Eric and Bret Weinstein, Douglas Murray, Dave Rubin and Ben Shapiro, in addition to those mentioned above.

Flash this image to see how fast a ‘free speech warrior’ will block you.


At the heart of this merger was the creation of a new religious movement of sorts centered around the felt loss of power among white men due to the empowerment of other people. When it was once acceptable, according to cultural norms, for men to sexually harass women with impunity, or make harmful racist and sexist comments without worrying about losing a speaking opportunity, being held accountable can feel like an injustice, even though the exact opposite is the case. Pinker, Shermer and some of the others like to preach about “moral progress,” but in fighting social justice under the misleading banner of “free speech,” they not only embolden fascists but impede further moral progress for the marginalized.

When I think back to that period when we were all giddy with the possibilities of a strong atheist movement, there are many other names that come to mind of eloquent, activist atheists who got left behind by that glory train — people who I thought were fantastic representatives of a progressive atheism. Think about Greta Christina, Mandisa Thomas, Jey McCreight, Lauren Lane, Rebecca Watson, Monette Richards, Sikivu Hutchinson, Annie Laurie Gaylor, and a few hundred others who should now be the names and faces we see on CNN whenever they go looking for a representative atheist perspective. They’re still around, but not getting the attention they deserve. Instead, Richard Dawkins is still the figurehead of atheism, with those other guys getting an occasional nod. I wonder why? Are the people on my list missing something? Or is it just their estrogen vibe?

Think back just a decade, and what happened to atheism? A massive anti-feminist backlash that hounded so many good people out of the movement and left the assholes in charge. We still feel the repercussions.

At least some studies have shown that, to quote Phil Zuckerman, secular people are “markedly less nationalistic, less prejudiced, less anti-Semitic, less racist, less dogmatic, less ethnocentric, less close-minded, and less authoritarian” than religious people. It’s a real shame that New Atheism, now swallowed up by the IDW and the far right, turned out to be just as prejudiced, racist, dogmatic, ethnocentric, closed-minded and authoritarian as many of the religious groups they initially deplored.

Oh, what could have been…

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.

“Cheap Talk” skepticism

Oh, that is a useful term. As Aaron Rabinowitz explains, “Cheap talk skepticism occurs when someone expresses skepticism in a way that comes at little cost to them, though it frequently comes at a significant cost to others.” These are people who cultivate an environment in which they can make bold assertion and receive little pushback, who don’t actually invest something of themselves in challenging the status quo. And Rabinowitz delivers examples!

If there is any room for criticism in this explosion of cheap talk skepticism, I believe it should be focused on the individuals with the platforms that allow them both the time for proper skepticism and the obligation to skepticism properly. In the parts of the skeptical world referred to as the Intellectual Dark Web, there has been rampant cheap talk skepticism around both Covid and the recent American election. Under the umbrella of “distrusting institutions”, there has been such an absurd amount of “just asking questions” that Sam Harris felt compelled to very publicly “turn in his IDW membership card”. Unfortunately, Harris neglected to explicitly criticise anyone by name, which makes is hard to determine if his criticism was meant just for the brothers Weinstein, or if he was including folks like Maajid Nawaz, who he has frequently promoted and who I’d argue has been one of the worst of the cheap talk skeptics.

For example, here’s Nawaz retweeting Team Trump Twitter sharing a video from OAN (One America News Network), an unreliable right wing “news” organization, which they claim is evidence of election tampering. Rather than emphasise the high likelihood that the video proves nothing of the sort, Maajid’s response is “I see what this looks like & I hope I’m wrong” followed by “sensible people should agree that this entire controversy needs to be resolved ASAP & urgently”. That tweet is not an isolated event either, here he is unknowingly sharing election fraud conspiracy materials from the explicitly antisemitic Red Elephants website. Here he is getting strung along by Trump’s reality tv shtick . Here he is citing Ted Cruz’s election denialism as proof that Nawaz was “right all along”. I could continue, but the pattern is obvious, and it’s not unique to Nawaz. This is deeply irresponsible, but the cost of cheap talk skepticism will be born by the American electorate and not by Nawaz, who has since circled back around to claim the OAN video produced a state audit, but not to point out that Georgia found no significant fraud of the sort that Team Trump and OAN were claiming.

Nawaz has also engaged in cheap talk skepticism around Covid conspiracy theories, favorably retweeting a thread by a guy who thinks Covid is caused by 5G and directly quoting his claim about “the myth of a pandemic”. Similar cheap talk skepticism towards Covid and the Covid vaccine has arisen from Brett Weinstein and unsurprisingly from James Lindsay, given his ongoing business relationship with conspiracy theorist Michael O’Fallon. James recently attended a Sovereign Nation conference and a conservative event in California with Covid lockdown skeptic Dave Rubin. Rubin has attended several anti-lockdown events and posted cancel bait tweets implying that he’s hosting dinner parties in violation of social distancing rules. Again, the cost of their skepticism is far less likely to be born by them than by medical workers and vulnerable individuals, like my aunt Sue who suffered a stroke while being treated for Covid. Society doesn’t even condone the desire that they should directly experience the consequences of their skepticism. We’re forced to hope that their cheap talk remains cheap.

It’s a great term. Add it to your lexicon! One of the things skeptics and atheists have to do is police their own — we’ve been telling religious people to do that for years — and it’s only fair that we do the same for ourselves.