- Joined
- Feb 19, 2017
Ironic how so many supposedly "freethinking" and "enlightened" people became so cult-y after GamerGate and Orange Man Bad happened.
(and who is "Shoe"?)
I was gonna say Shoe0nHead but someone else beat me to it.
Tbh, I think a lot of the "freethinking" atheists who became SJW's and Woke Leftists kinda got blindsided by the rise of Woke because for so long, the main group of vocal moral guardians in the United States were Protestant conservatives like Jack Thompson, Jerry Falwell, Jack Chick, Pat Robertson, John Todd, Jesse Helms, and the like.
A large chunk of the GOP actively pandered to these kinds of people and while you did have Democrats like Joe Lieberman, Tipper Gore, and Hillary Clinton who'd crusade against anything they deemed to be "immoral", the majority of these were from the more center-right "Blue Dog" wing of the Democratic Party.
These were the killjoy moralizers that drove a lot of young people to just rebel and go full euphoric. It didn't help that you had guys like Kent Hovind who didn't read the Bible that much and could lose a debate to the average Redditor asshat.
And during the Bush years, they got an unexpected ironclad status for a few years after 9/11. Everyone forgets than even Hollywood booed Michael Moore for opposing the War On Terror at one point and while Michael Moore is a braying jackass, he was right about the Global War On Terror and the Patriot Act being a bad idea.
So a lot of Generation X'ers and Millennials honestly believed that only right-wingers could be the fun-hating moral guardians and that anything left-leaning was automatically good and enlightened.
This whole Woke Leftism thing really began to take off after the '08 Great Recession as a way to defang the Left and make them into unwitting pawns for our corporate overlords.
Some of these liberal atheists were quick to glob onto it and we got Atheism+, while the other skeptics thought it was just a lefty reskin of the same Evangelical moralizing they opposed during the 90's and 2000's.
The Skeptics all panicked and largely went BreadTuber after 2016 because of Orange Man Bad, but also IMHO, because Trump had picked Mike Pence as his running mate to increase Evangelical voter turnout after Cruz lost. That spooked a lot of people in liberal and secular circles.
There was a lot of fears in certain circles that Pence would be the real "power behind the throne" within the Trump Administration as opposed to the Uniparty snake in the grass he actually was, and so a lot of those formerly anti-SJW Skeptics suddenly went full Woke.