I tend not to look at these guys like Dawkins and Harris as left or right but more as just people that are primarily only going to appeal to a small segment of society. This makes them interesting to read or listen to for Peter and I but I honestly think they make very little impact on any sort of "mainstream" thinking. They tend to get the most attention when they take on something they know will poke a hornet's nest. When they are not doing this I think most of the world ignores them. The issue with poking the hornet's nest is once you have done that, and guys like Dawkins and Harris have done it several times, then you become known just for those things that you said that upset some people. Obviously Dawkins, Harris, and others in the article have said much more than just the comments that drove certain segments of society crazy on occasion. 

In the internet age though we love simple definitions of people so, we don't or won't in most cases go beyond 40 characters of text. 

With Dawkins, because I've paid more attention to him, I always could see that his attempt to take on religious belief systems with scientific analysis was doomed to just be a mess. You can't penetrate a person's religious belief system with facts or science and so all of the "smack down" videos on Youtube of Dawkins or Hitchens or whomever tearing apart some religious person or leader with reality...well...they might be fun but all they do is cement where people already stand. In other words, they get attention but they go nowhere really in changing people's minds or they change very few.

With Dawkins my fascination with him was as an evolutionary biologist did he think that we, as a species, could evolve better bullshit detectors so we might become on the whole better decision makers...or are we as Hunter Thompson might have said, doomed.

In these times, of Trump and his age of lies, we do seem doomed. Trump took burying people in bullshit to levels we've never experienced and he appears to have an army of state and federal elected Republicans still working to destroy any concept of truth or reality in his followers. This has destroyed the Republican party as any sort of relevant political party and left us basically a single party country. At least 6 months removed from Trump as president this is where we stand.

Adding to the problems for guys like Dawkins or Harris or really anybody that puts statements out there in the public realm is that the Right wing media have become experts at using/warping/twisting just about anything anybody says to fit their agenda. So, it is fairly easy for them to make something someone says align with whatever nonsense they are peddling to their viewers. 

In Peter's thread title above he mentions the Mainstream Right and the Far Left. Well, what is the "mainstream" now on the right? If you are a centrist Republican, well, you are now as removed from the Republican "mainstream" as Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Obama or anybody named Clinton. I should point out those are all centrist Democrats and so are only barely removed from being a centrist Republican. 

In the political realm we have the right, left and the center. The problem is determining where the center is when the right has drifted so far into madness and insanity that when a guy like Biden wants to come across as a centrist he needs to slide way over to the right to even get close to any sort of center of the political spectrum. The Republican slide into lunacy and bullshit under Trump has left us with not just a dead Republican party but also has totally warped where the "center" was or should be.

I pay as much attention to the "far left" as I do to the "far right" which is to say pretty much none. What I would say about the far left is their impact is essentially nonexistent in comparison to what the supposed mainstream right has been able to accomplish. When you have a party that appears to be able to eliminate reality from their voter's worlds...well...you have a problem of epic proportions.

I'm not trying to give far leftists a pass I just think that their societal impact is just to be a punch line to a lot of jokes. They are not winning hearts and minds and on the political spectrum they sit as the least impactful bunch of the entire lot. They don't institute policy, they don't have a loud voice in the media, and they don't even have much impact on the Democratic party...we primarily elect centrists that run the party,