At the dawn of what is now called the New Atheist movement, I proudly called myself one, seeing myself as an ally in the fight against religious obscurantism. I now feel embarrassed by being identified with that label and distance myself from it. This is not because of what the label itself might signify. Labels (and language) are malleable and transitory and the meaning that I ascribed to it, that it meant that I believed that at a fundamental level, science was incompatible with anything at all supernatural which, inter alia, means that there are no gods of any kind, is something I still believe.

The problem is that New Atheists are now identified not by any definition but by a group of people who wrapped themselves with that label in the early days and thus is now associated with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens, along with those who later chose to be aligned with them. Three of them (Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens) have been revealed to have deplorable political and social views unconnected to the ones that attracted me. I now feel that the New Atheist label cannot be reclaimed from those associations and so feel compelled to abandon it in order to avoid being grouped in with them and their views.

Dennett and Hitchens have since died but others have joined with Dawkins and Harris to become part of the culture wars, moving away from dealing just with science and religion and going on to attack postmodernism and so-called ‘woke’ ideologies that they attack in the name of science. In the process, they have started to espouse deeply reactionary views and seem to now be more at home with right wingers and even MAGA types, as can be seen by their vociferous opposition to what they consider to be censorship by the left and what they call ‘cancel culture’. Under the banner of defending free speech and science, they now defend those who have been condemned for their sexist, Islamophobic, racist, and transphobic views.

In a comment to an earlier post, Bébé Mélange pointed me to an excellent YouTube podcast by someone named Shaun that informed me of a book published in 2025 titled The War on Science: that has the subtitle Thirty-Nine Renowned Scientists and Scholars Speak Out About Current Threats to Free Speech, Open Inquiry, and the Scientific Process. This book seems to have brought together all the people with those deplorable views and given them a platform to advance them

My first reaction was shock that the book is edited by Lawrence Krauss! He is a notorious sex pest and friend and defender of Jeffrey Epstein. If that isn’t enough to make you gag, read this essay where, even though I thought I knew enough about Krauss’s awful behavior, he turns out to be an even worse. How could anyone still be publicly associating with Lawrence Krauss at all, let alone asking him to edit books? And furthermore, how could any self-respecting person, let alone a ‘renowned’ scientist or scholar, be willing to sign on to contribute to a book edited by him? I figured it must be a bunch of losers desperate to get some attention or people driven by some agenda that they think this book will advance.

And so it seems. The publisher’s blurb says that topics covered are: “Free speech, victimhood, ideology, corruption of academic disciplines, cancel culture, DEI, gender, and race, and what we can do.” When I saw that list, alarm bells went off. What would immediately strike the reader is that this is the typical laundry list of right wing grievances, all the dreary culture war issues focused on by right-wingers who feel that white cis heterosexual men are being unfairly displaced from their rightful place at the top of society. What is especially extraordinary in that although this book was released six months after Trump took office for the second time, it says nothing about the massively anti-science agenda that he and his ilk like RFK Jr quickly advanced, shutting down some research programs and starting others on seemingly ideological grounds and cutting grants and funding to organizations and researchers, all of which has resulted in large numbers of scientists leaving or being fired. It is as if the book emerged in an alternate universe in which Trumpism never existed.

The essays are being advertised as being written by ‘renowned’ scientists and scholars. The word renowned is highly subjective and whether someone is or is not is very much in the eye of the beholder. As far as my eye beheld, the list is underwhelming. I recognized only a handful of names and those too as popularizers (though there is nothing wrong with that) rather than for their science or scholarly work. You can read the full list and judge for yourself: Dorian Abbot, John Armstrong, Peter Boghossian, Maarten Boudry, Alex Byrne, Nicholas Christakis, Roger Cohen, Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, Niall Ferguson, Janice Fiamengo, Solveig Gold, Moti Gorin, Karleen Gribble, Carole Hooven, Geoff Horsman, Joshua Katz, Sergiu Klainerman, Lawrence M. Krauss, Anna Krylov, Luana Maroja, Christian Ott, Bruce Pardy, Jordan Peterson, Steven Pinker, Richard Redding, Arthur Rousseau, Gad Saad, Sally Satel, Lauren Schwartz, Alan Sokal, Allesandro Strumia, Judith Suissa, Alice Sullivan, Jay Tanzman, Abigail Thompson, Amy Wax, Elizabeth Weiss, Frances Widdowson.

What drives many of these authors is their anger with ‘wokeness’. That should immediately tell you that these people are aggrieved that they can no longer freely indulge in sexist, racist, and transphobic language and behavior without being called out on it. They seem to see being harshly criticized for their views as censorship by the left. It is telling that some of them (like Krauss and Ott) lost their jobs for creepy behavior towards women. I was surprised not to see torture-supporter and Islamophobe Sam Harris on the list of authors, since he seems like a natural fit for this bunch.

The video by Shaun is a detailed takedown of the book and its contributors.

He says that (like me) he was enthusiastic about the New Atheists when they first appeared on the scene before (like me again) becoming deeply disillusioned. Although the video is four hours long (!) it is utterly engrossing, as the speaker has a droll style of delivery and mixes dry wit into his carefully documented exposes of the essays and their authors. Below the video. he also helpfully gives a detailed timeline of the topics covered and the sources he used so you can go directly to those parts.

One of the views that the book strongly advocates is that sex is binary, that there are just men and women, and that there is no such category as transgender. (There is a lot of transphobia in the book.) The section of the video on transphobia that begins at the 1:29:31 mark is particularly nauseating, showing how people like Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, and Alan Sokal argue that transgender is a creation of postmodernist wokeness and that sex categorization is entirely binary. But arguing for the binary nature of anything requires stating both necessary and sufficient demarcation criteria so that you can definitely put anything into one or other category, never into both and never into neither. They struggle mightily to find such criteria since the usual markers such as genitals and chromosomes clearly fail to meet the need since there are cases that cannot be classified as either. Dawkins is a big proponent of finding such criteria although he immediately undercuts his own argument by qualifying his binary criteria, by saying that males and females ‘mostly’ and ‘usually’ and ‘mostly’ having the characteristics. As Shaun points out, that will not do. If you are arguing that something is binary, you cannot allow for any exceptions, however few, and there are several.

Finally they end up deciding that the male-female gamete size distinction is what distinguishes men from women, with women producing large immobile gametes (ova) and men producing small mobile ones (sperm). But here too the existence of exceptions such as intersex people undermines their argument. Dawkins argues that such cases are very few but as Shaun says, the existence of even one exception destroys the binary claim. The desperation of Dawkins and his transphobic allies to find something, anything, that will support their case that sex is binary, even in the face of counter-examples, is reminiscent of the way that flat-Earthers and creationists keep shifting the goalposts whenever the weaknesses of their case is pointed out.

If you do not have time to watch the whole video, Sarah Jones in an article titled How the New Atheists Joined the MAHA War on Science provides a similarly scathing review of the book that covers some of the same ground as Shaun, though not in as much detail.

Krauss and his collaborators have identified an “emerging threat” to science and inquiry, as he writes in an introduction to the book. What threat? Wokeness, of course. Universities prize diversity over merit, while hysterics confuse words with violence and brave truth-tellers risk cancellation.
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Most contributors, Krauss included, have railed against DEI, and critical race theory, and social justice for years. Now their arguments are shaping policy, and the casualty isn’t creationism but science itself.
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There are nearly 40 chapters in The War on Science, all pockmarked by omissions, misrepresentations, and, sometimes, obvious lies. Each section of the anthology addresses a different facet of the woke threat to reason, but a few common obsessions emerge: Genitals and what people do with them, Israel, DEI, and various professional insults — it’s all here, boomer Facebook on every page.

Jones expands her critique to look at the origins of the New Atheist movement and how it has became part of the Trump and MAGA movement.

The long road to MAGA and the present war on science winds through the work of New Atheism, at least in part. To be an atheist, as I am, a person concludes there is no God. Atheism is not a political position on its own, even if it does have ideological implications, but New Atheism is something else altogether. As the historian Erik Baker wrote for Defector last year, the brand, or tendency, was “about science,” not theology, and it was political from the start. Their first enemies were not creationists “ but a group of atheist Marxist biologists” in the 1970s, as Baker wrote. The conflict was ideological. Sociobiologists said that our genes explained our behavior, choices, and capacity to reason. Opponents like the late biologist Stephen Jay Gould identified sociobiology as biological determinism by another name and linked it to eugenics.
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The Palestine exception to free speech existed well before October 7, 2023, and trans adults and youth have experienced authoritarian repression for years. By the time Krauss and his contributors started to put this cursed anthology together, conservative-run states were forcing queer teachers into the closet and forcibly detransitioning trans minors. Some families had already fled across state lines to get health care for their children. Teachers had lost jobs and faced extra scrutiny and harassment for teaching about civil rights, or the real history of slavery, and for assigning books some parents didn’t like. If that did not register to Krauss and his collaborators as a noteworthy war on inquiry or expression, perhaps that’s because they agreed with it. Put another way: If trans people don’t deserve the right to expression, there’s nothing to see here — move along. The writers are too caught up in their resentment to acknowledge reality; they do not grasp their own role in the global rise of the illiberal right. They want a debate as long as they dictate the terms.

What is irritating is that this bunch of losers is peddling their abhorrent views in the name of science. Krauss is particularly guilty of playing the scientist card to lend credibility to his views, most famously defending Epstein by saying that “as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people” even after Epstein was found guilty of soliciting prostitution from a minor. Some of them may have scientific credentials but they are peddling the same old dreary culture war tripe of right-wing ideologues. By wrapping themselves and their deplorable views in the cloak of science, these people are tarnishing science, not defending it.

It is possible that Dawkins, Harris and others who have been closely identified with New Atheism started out with better views and then went astray for some reason but it is also possible that they always had reactionary views on various social issues but that it was only after they began to see themselves as public intellectuals and branched out into talking about things other than religion that those views were revealed.