Scott Alexander also wrote a good piece on this over on SSC. A really important part of the picture for understanding the demise of New Atheism, it seems to me, is recognizing how the rise to dominance of social media in online spaces starved the atheism debate of its oxygen. https://twitter.com/samueld_james/status/1386703742083416067

Also the 'gender' of the dominant online spaces shifted and with that their norms. New Atheism and its preferred approach were always very male—combative, unflinching commitment to reality, hard sciences, facts over feelings, resistance to socially lubricating dogmas.

In the c.2005 Internet, there was plenty of room for this, much less so in the c.2015 Internet. The new social Internet is a more female dominated place, where the reigning values are social ones and combative object-level truth claims seem gauche and unwelcome.

People like Dawkins, who once seemed edgy, are now seen as cringe, as the social awkwardness of their approach to beliefs becomes apparent. Evolution, the pet doctrine of the New Atheists, now seems dangerously reactionary, misogynist, transphobic, racist, and even fascist.

It is increasingly irrelevant whether atheism or any other doctrine is *true*. What matters is what the social effect of the doctrine is. This is much of the reason why 'social justice' took the place of atheism as THE online issue.

This shift took place in atheism itself c.2012, with a drift away from focus upon the external and object-level questions that once animated the movement to a fixation on internal community issues, many of them having to do with the treatment of women in the 'atheist community'.

Atheism Plus was an indicator of what the succeeding ideology would look like, with its focus on 'social justice'—which seldom involves philosophical discussions of theories of justice, as object-level truth is not really the point—and the need to affirm individual identities.

Of course, this shift in the movement went directly against the sort of male ethos that most used to drive the, now old, New Atheism. Highly combative debate on object-level truth was out. Facts over feelings and DESTROYING in debate now is associated with guys like Ben Shapiro.

The stifling of such discourse and social control through questionable dogmas is now a left wing thing. The guy who would have been New Atheist back in 2002 is now a Quillette reader who is a fan of Jordan Peterson.