As I said before, I think we're experiencing a moral crisis. But you can feel nothing but contempt for somebody who, because of their anxiety, actually distorts scientific facts. Sometimes metaphors are presented as scientific facts, when they're not. Ideas do everything that genes can't. We have an ability to hold ideas on the basis of their long-term value, and not their immediate survivability.
Ideas can also influence each other without being extinguished.
I agree with most of what you say. But if you look at my original suggestion of memes, they were really almost a rhetorical device for telling people that in spite of what they'd just read about the selfish gene, DNA was not everything. Memes provided a way of saying, Look, genes aren't the only self-replicating entities. Maybe ideas play that role. I'm not committed to memes as the explanation for human culture.