I remember when James Randi exposed the supposed psychic faith healer, Peter Popoff by revealing that he was receiving secret radio messages from his off-stage accomplices. That was smart skepticism. That was when we could say “Sunlight is the best disinfectant!” and argue that putting these frauds under a spotlight was a good and effective move in discrediting them (never mind that after that setback, Popoff is still bilking gullible people out of their money with the same schtick). It’s the kind of activity I imagine as a fruitful approach for skeptics to take, and it’s as old as Houdini.

But now imagine a different flavor of skepticism, in which Randi had instead given them a literal spotlight, putting them up on a podium, shining a bright light on them, aiming cameras at their faces, and then letting them do their spiel, pretending to “heal” audience members, and all the while he sat back with a smug look on his face. Then he sits them down and has a sincere face-to-face talk with them, praising their people skills, agreeing with them that science doesn’t have all the answers, suggesting that their showmanship provides “food for thought”. Then, when he gets criticized for fluffing a fraud, he declares “Sunlight is the best disinfectant!”

Would anyone else see the problem with that? Because, while I can’t imagine Randi pulling such a shady stunt, that is exactly what Bill Maher does every week. He provides a platform for awful people under the pretense of bringing nonsense into the daylight, but he never really confronts any of them. He certainly never confronts them effectively.

So this week Maher brought an anti-vaxxer and a far right propagandist onto the stage.

The latest edition of Real Time featured the “edgy” funnyman jousting with Dennis Prager, the right-wing propagandist behind PragerU (a conservative, fact-averse YouTube-video factory posing as a university whose greatest hits include an anti-immigrant manifesto by Japanese internment-defender Michelle Malkin; a spiel about how police actually don’t discriminate against black men; and a whole lot of “War on Christmas” content), and Dr. Jay N. Gordon, one of the leaders of the anti-vaxx movement who once defended not administering the measles vaccine to his patients by calling it “a benign childhood illness.”

First up was Dr. Gordon, and lo and behold, Maher not only declined to challenge the controversial pediatrician’s anti-vaxx views, but agreed with them.

“You know, to call you this crazy person—really, what you’re just saying is slower [vaccinations], maybe less numbers, and also take into account individuals,” said Maher, in response to Dr. Gordon’s comments that vaccines may cause autism. “People are different. Family history, stuff like that. I don’t think this is crazy. The autism issue, they certainly have studied it a million times…and yet, there’s all these parents who say, I had a normal child, got the vaccine…this story keeps coming up. It seems to be more realistic to me, if we’re just going to be realistic about it.”

“Maybe is my whole point with this. We just don’t know so much,” Maher added, calling vaccines “the beginning of the debate” and saying that he’s “concerned about what happens down the road.” (Virtually the entire medical community is in agreement that vaccines don’t cause autism.)

Next came Dennis Prager, who joined USC journalism professor Christina Bellantoni and former Obama undersecretary Richard Stengel for the panel portion of the show.

“The Russia collusion thing didn’t turn out to be anything,” offered Prager in a stunning denial of reality. No pushback from Maher. Russia “didn’t undermine our democracy” during the 2016 election,” offered Prager in a stunning denial of reality. Minimal pushback from Maher. There was some silly back-and-forth sniping about whether or not Trump is a fascist, whether or not he was guilty of a quid pro quo with Ukraine, Hillary Clinton’s email server (because of course), and the two closed things by suggesting that the allegations against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh may have been false.

These people love to come on Maher’s show because they know he won’t challenge them in the slightest — their crazy ideas will even be normalized, treated as just the usual bit of banter. Maher occupies this strange middle-ground where he gets to pretend to be controversial and edgy, simply by sharing the screen with a wide range of views, but he doesn’t expose anything. What he provides isn’t sunlight, but a kind of murky twilight in which every idea blurs into a dim ambiguity, and in which he gets defended by everyone, atheist, skeptic, conspiracy theorist, quack, because he’s got them all fooled into thinking he’s on their side.

Skeptics: your whole raison d’etre is the idea that you’re harder to fool. So why do you put up with this charlatan?

It’s become a common refrain that what modern evangelicals do is not true to the spirit of Christianity, that it’s somehow a betrayal of Jesus’s message. Here’s a fine example of that kind of apologetics.

We need to be really clear on something, because there seems to be confusion out there lately:

This isn’t Christianity.

They may use the word and steal the iconography and cop the aesthetic, but that is where the resemblance diverges and where the similarities end. There remain no other commonalities with which to rightly associate the two.

This isn’t Christianity.

It is spiritual misappropriation: the violent hijacking of something helpful and weaponizing it in order to do the greatest amount of damage in the shortest amount of time. It is a hostile takeover of something beautiful and grossly disfiguring it to terrorize people with.

Then there’s the usual quoting of the Beatitudes, yadda yadda yadda. Fine. I like the attitude. I too would like to see a Christianity that followed principles of love and charity, and sure, there is stuff written in the Bible that supports that view. Of course, there is also stuff in the Bible that advocates murder and war, tribalism, misogyny, homophobia, and all kinds of cultish behavior. Cherry-picking can be a good approach when you’ve got a contradictory mess like all these holy books, so keep it up, positive Christians! The cafeteria is open, you don’t need to eat everything that’s dished out!

But I would also point out that finding some nice words in a book is not sufficient to describe what people do. The KKK will kindly inform you that they’re just about securing the existence of their people and a future for white children, and isn’t that nice? The Nazis loved “Kinder, Kuche, Kirche“, good old fashioned values of home and hearth. If you just quote that, you could say they were good Volk, and the atrocities weren’t really representative.

The good Volk in that photo above can also quote the Bible and will eagerly profess their devotion to their Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, and will take communion and pray regularly and sing Christian hymns and baptize their children and go to their grave confident that they will be resurrected in heaven. They are Christians. Definitely Christians. They sure as fuck aren’t atheists, and many of them hate Muslims and Hindus, so what else could they be? They are bad people with twisted values, but perfectly Christian all the same. Rebuke them for their betrayal of human decency, not for their flavor of Christianity.

By the way, speaking of hijackings…love and charity and cooperation and art and music and childhood and niceness are all entirely human properties, and I rather resent it when someone clasps their holy book to their bosom and suggests that these things come from their god…or at least, their version of a god as correctly interpreted by their version of a church.

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?