What primarily killed New Atheism?

[Sestak]

Most posters in here have it right; the initial new atheist movement was essentially completely successful in its cultural aims. The second wave of it wasn’t really “killed”, it never really was alive to begin with. The leaders of the initial movement (the ones who cared about remaining as public figures; does anyone even know what Daniel Dennett is doing these days?) pivoted to other stuff. Over time most atheists got bored of this and left or actively thought “what the fyck is this” as they sought new targets.

Regarding Harris specifically, I don’t think he personally believes in that stuff but it doesn’t particularly matter in terms of what he does as a commentator; most of the internet commentators he’s connected to now are more clearly alt-right adjacent. To more cleanly separate himself from those sorts of people would mean losing substantial amounts of viewers/listeners and he’s made it clear he doesn’t care enough to do that. You can argue what you want about what initially caused this - I will note that around 2014-15 algorithms on YouTube and other content websites started agressively pushing/recommending alt-right content - very easy to jump from content about someone like Penn Jilette (someone who’s an adamant atheist but never cared for any sort of alt-right politics) to a Milo Yiannopolous or a Sargon of Akkad. This sort of implicit affiliation surely didn’t help.