Personally, I grew up on a single parent home, where I saw my mom get destroyed by her office work. The lack of unions, no external help and general misoginy, made her get super depressed, and became an alcoholic. In my teenage years I was almost lured by the manosphere communities, but got helped by a group of close friends that were left leaning. Most of them were anarchist, so I started with that. Slowly but surely, I started to understand how sick this system is, and it made me furious, but I never found a way to show my ideas. No political party represented my ideas, and I fell deeper in the anarchist rabbit hole. Yes, I was a hardcore anarkiddie, but I bite me back. When I needed them the most, they turned their backs on me, and fell into deep depression. And in seeking psychological help, my counselor recommended me going back to my roots. So I went back to videogames, japanese culture and most importantly, read again after years The Communist Manifesto. I still don’t know how to position myself in the left, but I know that I’m a Marxist, and that I want change. Stay safe, comrades.
“Elevatorgate” and especially Dawkins’ “Dear Muslima” letter made me step away from atheism as any organized movement. I’m still not religious, but the idea of standing with that bunch of euphoric reactionaries was unbearable by that point.
Yeah, I thought I had found a like-minded group of people who just wanted to understand the world better and educate people out of ignorance. Turns out they were far more interested in using their atheism as a way to be superior to everyone else.
“Atheism+” for all its faults was a sincere attempt to stand for something other than pretenses of smug superiority. So the reactionary “nonpolitical” assholes shot it down and stamped on its ashes.
I am actually in Atheism+
Exactly the same for me. Well, I would say I stuck with the movement a little longer, but only as part of the sliver that had no choice but to shift the focus of criticism towards our former atheist “allies,” the reactionaries and sex pests, which in turn made us the evil enemy SJWs, the fanatic feminists, the beta cucks, and the cringe white knights. While it was shocking how elevatorgate suddenly revealed this giant gaping rift in the community, and how full the entire atheist movement had been with the most disgusting of reactionaries, it was one of those things where in hindsight, all the misogyny, racism, white supremacy, etc. had been visible just beneath the surface all along, but had been easy to overlook as just a nasty patina sticking to the broader movement. Nah, turns out it was actually deeply intertwined with it.
I still think Rebecca Watson is cool (for anyone who doesn’t know but is interested, “elevatorgate” centered on her because she dared to say “guys, don’t do that” when referencing being hit on by a stranger very creepily when alone in an elevator at a convention, and was subsequently hounded, harassed, ridiculed, and derided even by the famous Dickie Dawkins). She still to this day puts out some banger videos sometimes. I will always have a soft spot for PZ Myers and his Pharyngula blog that I spent so much time on, finding community there because even then it was clear how ugly and toxic so much of reddit was. Pharyngula was like the last bastion where social justice was recognized as good and necessary, rather than demonized as something that needed to be snuffed out.
I’m also still an atheist. But that movement is dead, just as it fucking should be. Amusingly, but also sickeningly, the larger fascist-adjacent majority of it kind of morphed over time into things like Jordan Peterson’s cult, at least the parts that didn’t just fizzle out into the background noise islamaphobia and generic chuddery.
I should confess too, reading Christopher Hitchens (one of the “four horsemen”) was definitely a big stepping stone on the path towards my own radicalization. Though I wince to say it now, I did admire him back then and he wrote about being, or having been a Trotskyist, which was one of those little epiphanies that showed there were actually political positions to the left of “as left as it gets” liberal. Wanting to find out more about that is eventually what lead me to Lenin.
To be clear, I’m not saying that’s what radicalized me, though it was a small part of it. I’m mostly just commenting to respond to the New Atheist part of the discussion.
Sometimes when I brought that up, years later, someone would come out of the woodwork and rage at me about how that was “nothing” and “hysterical” or some other typical misogyny-coded belittling of the person creeped on in the elevator, and usually it’s paired with some crybully concern trolling about how it’s “it was just a proposal to get le coffee” which piously pretends that there’s no creepy context to timing or body language or position of the incident, and even after it’s pointed out a thousand times, it’s always “just to get le coffee” and totally not a thirsty Reddit New Atheist wanting le sexy sex with ungrateful le feemale that should have accepted the sex transaction because of superior intelligence genes and satisfactory bank statement.
Even bringing up Elevatorgate is like an invitation in a lot of online places to draw those creeps out. It’s like flypaper.