Anti-religious prophet Sam Harris has, once again, exposed the conservatism at the heart of the so-called “New Atheist” movement.

In the November episode of his “Waking Up” podcast, Sam Harris spoke with seasoned neoconservative pundit Douglas Murray about Islam, liberalism and the refugee crisis. Harris frequently flexes his liberal bona fides, yet the two spent much of the conversation in agreement. The neuroscientist even called the right-wing writer “one of the best people on this topic."

The title of the episode alone, “On the Maintenance of Civilization,” says a lot. Harris is wont to argue that Muslims threaten the very fabric of Western civilization.

Most striking in the approximately two-hour-long discussion were comments Harris made about renowned left-wing intellectual Noam Chomsky and far-right Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson.

“Given a choice between Noam Chomsky and Ben Carson, in terms of the totality of their understanding of what’s happening now in the world, I’d vote for Ben Carson every time,” Harris said in the podcast, without hesitation.

“Ben Carson is a dangerously deluded religious imbecile… The fact that he is a candidate for president is a scandal,” Harris continued. “But at the very least he can be counted on to sort of get this one right. He understands that jihadists are the enemy.”

Anti-religious fundamentalism

Salon reached out to Chomsky for a response to Harris’ comments. Chomsky didn’t want to discuss Harris in detail, whom he accused of spreading “ignorant lies.”

In reply to Harris’ accusation that Chomsky would pursue a more perilous foreign policy than someone Harris readily admits “is a dangerously deluded religious imbecile” (and whose own advisers admit struggles with grasping basic facts surrounding international conflicts), Chomsky said, “A person who makes charges like that either provides evidence, or is telling us, loud and clear, that he merits only contempt. I presume that he provided no evidence.”

“I have no interest in Harris’ performances, which is why I’ve never bothered to comment on them, except in response to queries,” Chomsky added. “It’s not my affair.”

Chomsky is one of the most outspoken and principled voices on the American, or even global, left. He has always vigorously rejected dogma and steadfastly opposed violence and bigotry. It’s in fact his consistency, and his firm opposition to ideological conformity, that often gets him in trouble with not just conservatives and liberals, but even with fellow leftists.

Yet Harris will have none of this. Why? Because Harris is himself a fanatic. And although he’s a fanatic of the anti-religious stripe, he and Carson can find common ground in their anti-Muslim fanaticism.

Like fellow “New Atheists” Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins, Harris is not so much a secularist as he is an anti-religious fundamentalist. The difference between the so-called New Atheists and the “Old Atheists,” if you will, is that the Old Atheists did not adopt a knee-jerk contrarian zealotry. Old Atheists were opposed to all forms of fundamentalism, including the anti-religious variety; the New Atheists embrace it.

Chomsky, on the other hand, as a man of seemingly infinite reason and tact, doesn’t share the same scapegoated enemies as Harris and Carson. He sees beyond the charade both anti-religious fundamentalist liberals like Harris and religious fundamentalist conservatives like Carson gleefully promulgate.

It is such anti-religious fundamentalism that overrides New Atheists’ politics, placing them progressively (or rather, to draw on Harris’ terminology, regressively) further to the right.

Far-right apologism

This is by no means the first time Harris has expressed approval for far-right politicians. Harris’ remarks vis-Ã -vis Ben Carson are strongly reminiscent of his public insistence, in a 2006 op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, that “The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists.”

A little less than two years before speaking positively of fascists, Harris asserted in no uncertain terms, in an op-ed in the right-wing Washington Times, “It is time we admitted that we are not at war with ‘terrorism.’ We are at war with Islam.”

Like the fascists whose Islamophobic ramblings he deems sensible, Harris constantly speaks of the need “to protect [Western] civilization from its genuine enemies” — to quote his LA Times op-ed. And who exactly are Western civilization’s ostensible “enemies”? Harris insists they are “backward” Muslims (yes, he does use the word “backward”). In an article published in Truthdig in 2006, Harris wrote:

“Throughout Western Europe, Muslim immigrants show little inclination to acquire the secular and civil values of their host countries, and yet exploit these values to the utmost — demanding tolerance for their backwardness, their misogyny, their anti-Semitism, and the genocidal hatred that is regularly preached in their mosques.”

Such beliefs, that Muslim immigrants are little more than uncivilized savages, have led Harris to support fundamentally anti-liberal policies, such as racial profiling; torture, in some cases; and even, if he saw it fit, preemptive nuclear war.

Harris reminds one of the liberal intellectuals who steadfastly defended the internment camps Franklin Delano Roosevelt created for Japanese-Americans during World War II, in the name of “defending liberal values.” He is so blindly insistent on defending what he calls Western civilization that he never stops to consider, even for a moment, what exactly it is he means by Western civilization, and what exactly he is saving, from whom. After all, the genocide of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, the transatlantic slave trade, eugenics, Italian Fascism, and Nazism were all products of the West’s apparently irreproachable civilization. One can just as easily selectively emphasize the crimes of Western civilization as one can selectively emphasize the crimes of Islamic history.

Numerous other examples of similar comments can be found. Harris and his fans, who are themselves uniquely fanatic disciples, frequently insist such statements are taken out of context, yet they are anything but — and readers are welcome to look up the original sources and see for themselves.