Social Justice Warrior is often meant as a pejorative. The insult is applied by everyone from Rightwing crank sites like Breitbart to people who aren’t as religious but share a few opinions with the Religious Right -the new Alt-Right. The Alt-Right centers nativism even over religion as an integral part of its identity.
A trait that is shared by many Christian Republicans who chose immigrant and Muslim basher Donald Trump over the bona fide Evangelical Ted Cruz for president. They chose Trump, the would be wall-builder, knowing full well that he proudly boasts of infidelity and mispronounced Second Corinthians as “Two Corinthians”. They chose him in part because of what they see as his tough talk on all immigration with an emphasis on Muslims. (Every religion should be open to fair criticism but that doesn’t include calls for discrimination)
But it doesn’t matter! As Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Church, in Dallas, and a Fox News personality, said at a forum in March: “I couldn’t care less about the president’s tone or his language… I want the meanest, toughest, son-of-a-you-know-what I can find in that role, and I think that’s where many evangelicals are. The leaders just don’t get it.”
Unfortunately, the political motivations of the pre-desegregation 1940s are still alive in the ostensibly integrated new Millenium. A fact that did not go unnoticed by atheist Youtuber and satirist Edward Current. His video “Stop Talking About Race! (1946)” is a brilliant piece of satire of racial justice denialism. [youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oipMuAxZsW8[/youtube]
Disappointingly, he triggered the Youtube comment section’s irrational and angry Alt-Right hornet’s nest. We need a new phrase like Poe’s Law, which states that actual creationist comments are indistinguishable from satire, to designate how hard it is to tell a nonbeliever’s Alt-Right post from a Religious Right’s anti-social justice post.
Aron Ra and I know how that feels because we have a front row seat as members of the Youtube Atheist Community that support social justice. It’s astounding to even see pseudoscientific ideas from the 1800s recycled from people who are self-identified skeptics. Amazing how the hit dogs holler when you talk about racism in general terms.
Fellow Patheos blogger Martin Hughes has also faced a backlash for calling attention to racial justice and social justice denialism in the Youtube Atheist community. It has been heartwarming rather than disheartening to see the support he has gotten from Patheos Atheist and atheist bloggers. Atheists are people and they can choose to be moral without god beliefs. If you aren’t racist why be defensive against freethought about racism in general?
