Do I follow Sam Harris? No.

I get the impression a lot of atheists also tend to gravitate towards certain positions, such as political liberalism, secular humanism, religious skepticism, and skepticism and secularism in general. I make no comment on the causal links between them, and I don't deny that you can get a mixed bag among an atheist crowd, but my hypothesis is that if you were to survey a large sample of the world's atheists, you'd get a conspicuous statistical leaning towards positions like the ones I've mentioned.

That's pretty damn perceptive. Atheists do gravitate to all those, and I quickly came to the conclusion that new atheism was in fact promoting liberalism. However, then I realized that the reason why atheists were promoting those values was that they were promoting the culture they lived within, not a rational form of liberalism. They were cultural liberals, or worse, cultural protestants.

And you only have to begin examining the nature and history of liberalism to see that it isn't so rational, how could it be? Politics is within the realm of the human and not nature. It rests on 'values' and that is the blind spot so far of the enlightenment project.

Now, to get somewhere, please provide one of these thoughtful critiques we should embrace but sadly do not.

If you are genuinely interested, I recommend the works of John Gray.