The problem is that brand of atheism was deeply liberal and reactionary, focusing way too hard on “factually incorrect thing is bad and dumb, stop being silly and weird by believing factually incorrect thing!” arguments and hinging too much on “religion say I can’t have my treats, how dare you tell me no for such a stupid reason!” motivations. Like it was more “theocrats are cringey because they believe silly wrong things, ew!” and “they’re telling me no, how fucking dare they!?!” than “theocrats are deranged monsters who hurt people, and that’s bad.”

The only thing that stops me from saying it was a psyop was because those same reactionary tendencies have always been a problem with American counter-culture and the broader left, where there’s all these chauvinist libertines who are full of themselves and want their treats and end up arrayed against the American mainstream because it’s a different brand of chauvinist and doesn’t approve of all their treats, but they’re still reactionary and just as aggressively oppose the left when that threatens or is perceived as threatening their status or treats in some way. I do think the pro-religious anti-atheist backlash against it was astroturfed, though, even as the neoreactionary movement sucked up a bunch of the chauvinist libertine atheists and turned them into nazi weebs who cosplay as tradcaths while wallowing in hentai.