From New Atheists to Fascists

[Cassius Clay]

Very good summary of how internet atheists became Nazi-apologists.

https://thebaffler.com/latest/new-athei ... ign=buffer

For years we've all talked about how racist and sexist the atheist/skeptic movement is, but even a year ago, I wouldn't have predicted that they would devolve into this.

I've also seen some really in-depth analysis regarding how Nazis have been using "fandoms" to try to make far-right ideas more mainstream...since a lot of fandoms have a similar "white-male arrogance" problem(think Rick and Morty fan-base) that the new atheist movement has.

[Derived Absurdity]

Not bad, I guess. Didn't really delve too deep into the fascism/alt-right stuff outside of Molyneux.

The CitationsNeeded podcast had a good episode recently dealing with how terrible New Atheism is, only in relation to imperialism and militarism.

https://soundcloud.com/citationsneeded/ ... for-empire" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Anakin McFly]

This explains a lot of things I'd been wondering about, particularly how so many New Atheists are suddenly holding political positions previously associated with Christian fundamentalists, while still going on about REASON LOGIC EVIDENCE. Meanwhile the left seems to have become a lot more supportive of religion (in cases where it's not harming human rights), particularly in decrying of Islamophobia and in pushing for religious diversity. It's been a weird shift.

I've also seen some really in-depth analysis regarding how Nazis have been using "fandoms" to try to make far-right ideas more mainstream...since a lot of fandoms have a similar "white-male arrogance" problem(think Rick and Morty fan-base) that the new atheist movement has.

Nice, got a link?

I grew up in Back to the Future fandom and it was amazing, but somewhere along the way it started seeing an influx of white teenage boys declaring they were the True Fans and making remarks about how they were surprised to see so many females there because girls usually prefer romance and don't understand difficult things like science fiction. A lot of the old regulars left. Same with Star Wars fandom, and The Matrix. It particularly pissed me off that many of the new guys often knew far less about the fandom than the people they mocked for being fake geek girls and whatnot, and their enjoyment was often very shallow and fleeting vs the in-depth discussions that I used to see. The most devoted, obsessive (for better or worse) fans I've known have been mostly female. A couple of friends on the old BTTF message boards got close enough that they eventually crossed continents to get married. That kind of thing doesn't seem to happen any more, and in the current fandom environment I'm not sure it could.

[Cassius Clay]

Doesn't delve deep into the Nazi stuff but it does a good job at detailing the path from claiming to value "logic" and "skepticism" to Nazi-apologism.

@anankin Follow @norareed if you're on twitter: https://twitter.com/NoraReed. They've talked a few times about different ways the far-right have tried to infiltrate different fandoms...including their successes and failures.

[Anakin McFly]

I'm not really on Twitter (I drop by once a month or so) and don't follow people who tweet that frequently because it ends up overshadowing my feed. But I found this there, and wtf: https://www.thedailybeast.com/youtube-t ... him-a-nazi

Sometimes I almost start thinking that maybe those people may possibly be on to something, but hearing about them ranting about it IRL and everyone around them being baffled as they're accused of being "leftist pedophiles" emphasises how bizarre and actually obscure their views are, despite being seemingly all over the internet.