Fuck all of these guys
There is no doubt but that the New Atheism was a channel that directed people towards right-wing, conservative, anti-immigration politics. Eiynah explains it all, and I think she’s right.
This link between New Atheism and the far-right is a dangerous and an under-discussed one. This has never been demonstrated so starkly as when Richard Dawkins tweeted out a recommendation for a book by fellow atheist Douglas Murray.
The day after the mass shooting in Buffalo that was explicitly motivated by great replacement theory, by ideas like there being an outright “war on white people,” Dawkins chose to tweet praise for a book titled The War on the West. He called it “utterly superb” and urged his nearly three million followers to read it with an open mind and “forget about labels like right wing”…Because surely, among us secular friends, we can overlook an inconvenient term like that, even in the aftermath of a mass shooting underpinned by the same ideology.
I’ve been listening to the audio version of Murray’s book myself, and it is reminiscent of the incendiary rhetoric of former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke. In his promotional podcast tour for this book, Murray talks repeatedly of an “outright war on white people.” He is losing patience, he says, done being polite with people who don’t “respect [his] ancestors, history and culture” – while disparaging other cultures for supposedly not contributing to “mathematical, scientific or artistic discoveries”. The combination of ignorance and arrogance is staggering, as this is patently, overwhelmingly untrue.
This is no dog whistle, it is an airhorn.
While I was attracted towards Dawkins’ ideas, at least I was never tempted by Murray. I was actively repulsed by Douglas Murray — he was just a garden variety Nazi wanna-be, fed on racist literature and never questioning it. It was one of the factors driving me away from New Atheism and the Dawkins fandom, evidence that he was losing it altogether with his fawning over Murray. Sure, Murray is an atheist — but he’s a cultural Christian atheist who values his local religion as a tool to bludgeon those foreign people with different traditions.
Of course, Douglas himself is no outsider to the atheist scene. He too is a well-known and prominent atheist figure, one who happens to lament the loss of Europe’s Christian heritage and the supposed identity-crisis caused by increased secularization. Despite this, he has been propped up in vocal anti-theist circles because, rather than consistency on the matter of critiquing religion, it is his views on Islam and immigration that are appealing to a certain crowd. Murray has a long history of cloaking extreme statements in a posh accent, his rhetoric has been described as gentrified xenophobia. Which is putting it mildly.
Remember Dawkins’ declaration that he was a “cultural Christian” because he like hymns and church bells, and hated Islam because it was “indecent”? That sounds like he’s been hanging out with Douglas Murray too much.
Any much is too much.
Let’s not forget Sam Harris, who has also been sipping from the chalice of Douglas Murray.
Harris often claims that ‘woke identity politics’ is destroying the path to a harmonious ‘colourblind’ world. But his actions and endorsements do not paint a picture of someone who truly prioritizes colour-blindness, as seen by his repeated promotion of race and IQ, or his endless propping up of Douglas Murray.
The War on the West is overflowing with racialized language. The first chapter is even called “Race.” It wouldn’t be unbelievable as a parody of a far-right book featured in The Onion. But colourblind Harris has been filled with praise, referring to it as a “fantastic read and a doubly fantastic listen.”
Interestingly, Harris’s attitude changes completely when it comes to anti-racists like Ta-Nehisi Coates whom he refers to on several occasions as a “pornographer of race”—not Douglas Murray who talks obsessively of race, or even Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve, a book funded by the white supremacist organization Pioneer Fund. In fact Harris is also a dedicated defender and promoter of Charles Murray, referring to him as a “deeply rational and ethical thinker” and “the intellectual who was treated most unfairly in my lifetime.”
Has anyone else noticed that all of the worst people associated with atheism have been gravitating together into one horrible toxic clump? And that they’re all making apologies for conservative Christianity nowadays?
