I think the most I have seen along those lines is people going please don't take the ten commandments down from our local court house and maybe it would be fine to allow teachers to pray if they don't ask the students to pray along with them. not particularly authoritarian to me.
edit: wait I also remember that a county got upset when in response to them not wanting to take it down some rich assholes from the church of satan commissioned a big expensive statue of a demon to be put along side it. can't remember if it got removed or not.
I've seen a lot of posts on Facebook and other places by people on the Evangelical Right who think they could fix everything with the US school system if they were allowed to lead/force kids to pray in school like the 'old days'.
These are usually Boomer-Silent gen folks who think literally everything wrong with the US today can be traced back to people not being religious/Christian enough.
And they rarely ever consider other religions right to pray either, or consider other religions as part of American society.
I've been around the sorts who would be classified as the evangelical right, and most of the time they are pleasant enough. However when they let the mask slip about what they want to do with religion and modern society, it proves that the authoritarian tendencies of that segment of the population never went away, they just know they don't have the power to enforce their wishes.
You've provided the Salem Witch Trials which is basically puritans being puritans and so old and so divorced from modern religion that it's basically a Leftist talking point to show you're not one of us knuckle dragging believers. You cite prayer in school and I really don't know why you wouldn't prefer that over BLM/LGBTQAARP propaganda. At least the Bible has wisdom in it, what does Ibram Kendi have, hmm?
Salem Witch Trial still resonate with the modern US culture, whether you like it or not, and you keep trying to pretend only 'recent' things count as evidence. i'm not going to play that game.
I presented evidence, you dismiss it because you don't think it is relevant/is 'too old', despite the fact the stuff still exists in US pop culture as warning against religious groups taking power for a good fucking reason.
As for Leftist propaganda vs forcing religion back into schools, it's that I don't want either and will fight against both with equal vigor.
Also, never read Kendi, who is a socialist moron who tries to hide behind his Muslim faith.
Both examples are hogwash. So yes, I need something more than recycled New Atheist talking points. Have you not noticed just how utterly terrible and bottomless the Left's "morality" is? How it's schizophrenic and and lashes out at everything? I would take Christendom over that any day of the week.
You do not get to define what evidence counts and what does not, just because the examples are ones used for decades as warning against religious zealotry in politics and culture.
Just because the Left has issues with commies, does not suddenly mean the Salem Witch Trials and Scopes Monkey trial do not matter to public perception of of the religious authoritarians on the Right.
You don't want them to matter, that is clear, but they do, and they always will with regards to religion in the US.
So tough shit.
Better yet, let's turn this back to the original point of the thread. Have you ever "de-radicalized" someone, Bacle? Have you ever won someone over and brought them into the fold by saying "Wow, that Fuentes, he's such a dickhead."?
Oh, I have tried, and gotten nothing but grief for it, because I'm a rare moderate/independent in a Hard-D area, and with mostly Hard-D family, so there have been very few who it even seemed worth the drama to try to convert/inform.
Even the GOP friendly folks in my area are more Boomer-cons who just want the pre-Trump GOP back.
However, I can definitely say not being willing to call out people like Fuentes and co. does make it harder to convince people on the fence that the Right doesn't tacitly condone what they say.
And it is the people on the fence, the swing voters, who matter most in elections.