Welcome back to the Deep Dive. You know, usually
when we prepare for these, we have a stack of
books and articles that feel pretty distinct.
Yeah, you can sort them. You can sort them. You
have your politics stack, your literature stack,
your theology stack. But today, the source material
is just one giant, chaotic, brilliant pile that,
I mean, it just refuses to be categorized. It
really is a unique challenge today. We're talking
about Christopher Hitchens. We are. I think the
pile is the perfect metaphor for the man himself.
We're looking at a man who could quote W .B.
Yeats and Bob Dylan in the same breath, drink
a staggering amount of scotch without slurring
a word, and then proceed to eviscerate a political
opponent with a sentence so sharp it would leave
a scar. Eviscerate is absolutely the right word.
He wasn't just a writer or a journalist. He was
a polemicist in the truest, most classical sense
of the word. What does that actually mean, a
polemicist? I mean, he viewed debate as a form
of combat. It wasn't about finding consensus.
Not at all. It was about winning. It was about
the rigorous application of logic and rhetoric
to dismantle an opposing argument. For him, ideas
weren't just abstract things. They had real world
consequences and bad ideas needed to be destroyed.
Absolutely. And the Hitch, as he was known, though,
I'm not sure if he loved that nickname or just,
you know, tolerated it. He seemed to tolerate
it. He's such a fascinating figure because he
embodies this massive contradiction. I mean,
just look at the resume we're digging into today.
It's all over the place. It is. We have a British
born, Oxford educated intellectual who ends up
becoming this flag waving American citizen. A
very proud American citizen, too. Sworn into
the Jefferson Memorial. Right. And then we have
a guy who started his career selling socialist
newspapers on street corners as a Trotskyist
revolutionary. Yeah. And then ends up being one
of the most. most vocal, most articulate supporters
of the George W. Bush administration's invasion
of Iraq. Which, let's be honest, is a trajectory
that gave half his friends whiplash. And the
other half a migraine. A serious migraine, yeah.
He made people's heads hurt. Right. And that's
before we even get to the religion piece. Oh,
that's a whole other level. He writes the definitive
book on new atheism, God is Not Great, arguing
that religion poisons everything, while his own
brother, Peter Hitchens, is a devout... well
-known Christian author. It's Shakespearean.
It really is. The two brothers locked in this
public intellectual combat over the biggest questions.
It is. But I think the mistake people make with
Hitchens, and you see this in the critiques of
him, is assuming he just changed his mind at
random. Or that he was just a professional contrarian.
Exactly. That he was just trying to be provocative
for the sake of attention. Right. But when you
really go through these 18 books and the... thousands
of columns and essays he wrote, you start to
see a very specific, consistent thread. There's
a through line. There is. He wasn't jumping from
left to right. He was following a very specific...
anti -totalitarian moral compass he just he followed
it into territory that made everyone else deeply
uncomfortable that's the mission for this deep
dive really we want to get past the youtube compilations
of the hitch slap which are amazing to be fair
they are legendary and we will definitely talk
about them but we want to understand the engine
driving the man we're going to unpack his upbringing
that tragic pivot point with his mother his political
odyssey and his absolute unw wavering defense
of free speech. And I think we should clarify
why this matters to you, the listener, right
now. Because, look, Hitchens died in 2011. A
different world. A very different world. But
in an era where everyone is so terrified of being
canceled or saying the wrong thing or stepping
outside their tribe, Hitchens is a reminder of
what a public intellectual used to be. He didn't
care if you agreed with him. In fact, he seemed
to prefer it if you didn't. He lived for the
friction. He wanted the argument. It forces you
to ask yourself, do I believe what I believe
because I've really thought it through or because
it's what my team is supposed to believe? Hitchens
didn't have a team. He was a team of one. A team
of. one heavily armed with vocabulary. And a
lot of whiskey. Exactly. So let's rewind. Let's
go back to post -war Britain. Christopher Eric
Hitchens, born 1949 in Portsmouth. A naval town.
That's important. Very. And reading through his
memoir, Hitch 22, which, by the way, is one of
the best memoirs I've ever read, the prose is
just staggering. It's beautiful. You really get
the sense that his personality was this perfect
chemical reaction between his parents. It was
almost a schematic diagram of his psyche. On
one side, you have the father, Eric Hitchens.
The commander. The commander. That title alone
tells you so much, doesn't it? It says... everything.
It does. He was a career Royal Navy man. Very
stoic, very rigid, very much of that keep calm
and carry on generation. A stiff upper lip. Absolutely.
And he had this defining moment during World
War II where his ship, HMS Jamaica, helped sink
the Scharnhorst, which was a major Nazi battle
cruiser. A huge deal. A huge deal. And Hitchens
wrote about how his father viewed that as the
high water mark of his life. He essentially said,
sending a Nazi convoy raider to the bottom of
the sea is a better day's work than anything
I've ever done. Wow. Which is a heavy shadow
to grow up under. A very heavy shadow. That sense
of, I write essays, but my dad fought actual
Nazis. Exactly. The man of action versus the
man of words. But then you have the mother, Yvonne.
And she seems like she dropped in from a different
planet. Completely. Yvonne Jean Hitchens. She
was a Wren. part of the Women's Royal Naval Service,
which is how she met Eric. But deep down, she
was a romantic. You can feel it in his writing
about her. Oh, he adored her. She was stylish,
she was vibrant, and she felt suffocated by the
drab, gray existence of a naval base in Portsmouth.
Hitchens worshipped her. He says explicitly that
she was the one who introduced him to the idea
that life could be more. More than just duty.
More than just duty and discipline. She gave
him books. She gave him that cosmopolitan flair,
that sense that there was a world of art and
ideas out there. There's a line in the biography
where she says, if there is going to be an upper
class in this country, Christopher is going to
be in it. Exactly. She was aspirational. She
pushed him. She didn't want him to be the commander.
She wanted him to be a gentleman and a scholar.
But there was a secret heritage there, right?
Something that neither of them fully understood
at the time. A huge secret. Yeah. And this is
one of the most incredible details of his life.
This blew my mind. Hitchens, the world's most
famous atheist, didn't know he was Jewish until
he was 38 years old. 38. Yeah. It's incredible,
isn't it? He was a fully formed public intellectual
living in Washington, D .C., writing for the
nation. Mm -hmm. He had no idea. So how did it
come out? His brother Peter actually did some
of the digging, but apparently his grandmother
let it slip. His mother Yvonne was of Jewish
origin. Her ancestors were from Poland, Eastern
Europe. She had hidden it. Why? Well, you have
to remember the era. Post -war Britain. For a
woman trying to climb the social ladder, marrying
a Royal Navy commander, being Jewish wasn't seen
as an advantage. There was still a lot of casual
anti -Semitism, so she just erased it. So how
did Hitchens take that news? I mean, for a guy
who spent his life critiquing religion, specifically
the Abrahamic ones, finding out you're technically
part of the chosen people must have been a trip.
He was fascinated by it. Utterly fascinated.
He didn't find God, obviously. Of course not.
He didn't start going to synagogue, but he started
identifying as a Jew. He liked the term non -Jewish
Jew, which Isaac Deutscher used to describe people
like Trotsky or Spinoza. What does that mean,
a non -Jewish Jew? It's someone who is ethnically
or culturally Jewish, but secular. He felt it
connected him to a long lineage of cosmopolitan,
rootless intellectuals, people like Freud or
Einstein or Marx, people who were outsiders looking
in, who weren't bound by national or religious
dogma. So it fit his identity as a contrarian
and outsider. Perfectly. It gave him a deeper
connection to the history of Europe, and it certainly
complicated his feelings about the Middle East
later on, especially his critiques of Israel.
But the relationship with his mother... It doesn't
have a happy ending. It ends in this horrific
tragedy. And I feel like we can't really understand
the hardness in Hitchens without understanding
Athens in 1973. No, you can't. It is the pivotal
trauma of his life. It's the event that everything
else revolves around. So what happened? Hitchens
was young, just 24, starting to make his way
in the world as a journalist in London. His mother
had finally left the commander. She had run off
with a lover. A man named Timothy Bryan. And
he was a defrocked clergyman. Right. The irony
is just. The irony is thick. Yes. A former reverend
who had lost his faith in his standing. They
went to Athens, Greece to start a new life. But
Greece in 1973 was not a vacation spot. Not at
all. It was under the control of a military junta.
The regime of the colonels. It was a paranoid,
chaotic and dangerous place. And then Hitchens
gets the call. He gets the call that they are
dead. And it wasn't an accident. It was a suicide
pact. They were found in adjoining hotel rooms
in the Intercontinental. They had overdosed on
sleeping pills and Brian had also slashed his
wrists. It was a scene of complete despair. And
Hitchens had to go there by himself. He had to
fly to Athens alone to identify the body and
deal with the authorities. And because the political
situation was so volatile, his first thought
was actually, did the government do this? Was
she murdered? Of course. He arrives in this city
full of soldiers and tanks. He goes to the morgue.
I mean, he talks about seeing her body. He saw
the rope marks on the luggage where they had
tied the hotel room door shut from the inside.
That is just, it's a horror movie. It is. And
he said something very poignant about it later
in Hitch 22. He said that looking at the scene,
he realized that his mother had been trying to
escape. Escape her marriage, escape her unhappiness,
escape the grayness of her life, and she had
just run into a dead end. And he felt a sense
of guilt about it. A profound one. He felt he
failed to save her. He said it was the moment
his youth truly ended. And you can hear it in
his voice in later years. There is a kind of
callousness or a toughness that I think was forged
in that hotel room in Athens. A refusal to indulge
in sentimentality. It certainly explains his
hatred for what he called celestial dictatorships
or any regime that traps people. Any system that
promises a utopia and delivers a death pact.
But before the tragedy, he was already carving
out this path as a rebel at Oxford. And I have
to laugh at the academic record here. Christopher
Hitchens, one of the most well -read men of the
20th century, graduated with a third class degree.
A gentleman's third, as they might say. Explain
that to the American listener. A third is not
good. It's basically the lowest tier of passing.
It means you showed up, you did the bare minimum,
but you didn't really impress the examiners.
It's a sign that your priorities were elsewhere.
And his were. Oh, absolutely. The context is
vital. This was Balliol College, Oxford. In the
late 60s, the revolution was in the air. Vietnam,
civil rights, student protests. Hitchens wasn't
studying the official curriculum. He was devouring
the library. He was getting a different kind
of education. The real education. He was reading
George Orwell. He was reading Arthur Koestler's
Darkness at Noon, which became a key text for
him. He was reading Dostoevsky. He was educating
himself to be a writer and a revolutionary, not
an academic. He was also educating himself in
other ways. The outline mentions his sexual fluidity.
During this time. And I think for a lot of people
who see Hitches as this chain smoking, masculine
war reporter type, the fact that he was bisexual
in his youth comes as a surprise. It does. But
again, context is key in the British public school
and university system of that era. These all
male environments experimentation was. If not
open, certainly common. Right. It was almost
part of the boarding school culture. Exactly.
And Hitchens was very open about this later in
life, usually with a joke. He claimed to have
had relations with two male students at Oxford,
who later became ministers in Margaret Thatcher's
conservative government. That is such a Hitchens
detail. I slipped with the Tory government. Did
he ever out them? Never. He kept the name secret
until he died. He had a code of honor about that,
which is interesting. But he did joke that as
he got older. He got uglier. And as he put it,
only women would go to bed with him. So he viewed
it as a phase of his youth. He did. Something
he drifted out of. But he never apologized for
it or seemed ashamed of it. It was just part
of the story. So leaving Oxford, he plunges into
the world of political journalism. And this is
where the Trotskyist label comes in. I feel like
communist or socialist gets thrown around as
a catch -all term these days. But Hitchens was
specifically a Trotskyist. Why does that distinction
matter so much? It matters immensely because
it sets up his entire worldview for the rest
of his life. Leon Trotsky, as you know, was one
of the leaders of the Russian Revolution, but
he was eventually exiled and then assassinated
by agents of Joseph Stalin. Right. So Trotskyism
is a form of Marxism that is revolutionary, yes,
but it is deeply, violently anti -Stalinist.
It sees the Soviet Union not as a success, but
as a monstrous betrayal. So it's anti -authoritarian
communism. Precisely. Their slogan was neither
Washington nor Moscow, but international socialism.
So Young Hitchens hated American capitalism and
the Vietnam War. He was actually expelled from
the Labor Party for opposing the war too aggressively.
Of course he was. Of course. But he also hated
the Soviet Union. Yeah. He viewed the USSR as
a tyranny, a police state. So from day one, from
his earliest political identity, Hitchens is
positioning himself against the big brother,
whether that big brother is in the White House
or the Kremlin. That's the key, isn't it? If
you view him as left -wing, his later life makes
no sense. If you view him as anti -totalitarian,
it makes perfect sense. It's the only lens through
which his career is coherent. So he starts writing
for the New Statesman in London. He's known as
gauntly left -wing. He's reporting from Northern
Ireland, Libya, Iraq. He's seeing conflict up
close. He's building that journalistic credibility.
He's not just an intellectual in an armchair.
He goes to the dangerous places. And then in
1981, he moves to America. He lands at the Nation
magazine, which is basically the Bible of the
American left. It really is. And for 20 years,
he is their golden boy. He's their star columnist.
He's the guy attacking Reagan, attacking Kissinger,
attacking the first Gulf War. He is comfortable
in that seat. He's the radical voice from Britain.
He is. But then. September 11th, 2001. The day
the world changed. The day Christopher Hitchens
changed. Or rather, the day he felt the world
finally aligned with what he had been saying
all along. He used a word to describe his reaction
to 9 -11 that got him in so much trouble. He
said he felt exhilarated. Yes, exhilaration.
And people, understandably, read that as him
being happy about the death and destruction,
which was a grotesque interpretation. So what
did he mean? He meant that suddenly the gray
areas were gone. He felt that throughout the
90s, the West had been asleep, ignoring the rise
of Islamic extremism, treating it as someone
else's problem. He saw it as a moment of clarity.
A brutal, horrifying moment of clarity. He saw
a new enemy that checked all his boxes for evil.
He called it fascism with an Islamic face. Why
that term specifically? Because he looked at
Al -Qaeda. and the Taliban and eventually Saddam
Hussein's Ba 'ath Party. And he didn't see freedom
fighters or anti -imperialists. He saw totalitarians.
He saw people who wanted to control what you
read, what you wore, who you slept with, and
how you prayed. The same impulse as Stalin or
Hitler. To him, it was exactly the same impulse.
Fighting them was a moral and political necessity,
just as fighting Nazism was in the 1940s. And
this is where he loses the left. Because the
narrative on the left at the time was largely
we need to understand why they hate us or this
is blowback for American foreign policy. Correct.
And Hitchens had zero patience for that. Zero.
He viewed that as moral relativism, as masochism.
He thought the left had gone soft and had lost
its anti -fascist spine. And this leads to the
break with the nation. The big one. He famously
resigned because the editors there suggested
that John Ashcroft Bush's attorney general. was
a bigger threat to American liberty than Osama
bin Laden. Wow. And Hitchens just thought that
was deranged. He thought it showed a complete
lack of proportion. So he walked. And he walks
right into the camp of the hawks. He becomes
the most articulate, ferocious public defender
of the Iraq war. He wants Saddam gone. He did.
And it wasn't an abstract thing for him. He had
been to Iraq. He had visited Halabja where Saddam
had gassed the Kurds. He had seen the fear in
people's eyes. So for him, it wasn't about WMDs.
The WMDs were a secondary issue for him. He supported
the invasion, not because he loved George W.
Bush. He actually thought Bush was intellectually
incurious and kind of a simpleton. He wasn't
a fan. Not at all. But he believed removing a
genocidal dictator was a moral imperative. He
was a regime change guy on humanitarian grounds.
And this is when people started calling him a
neocon, a neoconservative. And he hated that
label, mostly. Sometimes he'd play with it, ironically,
but he always rejected it. He told the BBC in
2010, I still think like a Marxist. What on earth
did he mean by that? What he meant was he still
believed in history as a struggle between progress
and reaction. He still believed in secularism.
He still believed in internationalism. He still
believed in the Enlightenment. He just felt at
that moment in history, the American military
was the only force capable of protecting those
values against theocrats. So he saw it as a tool.
A blunt and imperfect tool, but the only one
available. It's interesting to look at his specific
political positions during this neocon phase
because they really don't fit the Republican
mold at all. I mean, let's take waterboarding.
This is a famous story. Oh, this is Hitchens
at his journalistic best. The Bush administration
was arguing that waterboarding wasn't torture.
It was just enhanced interrogation. A nice little
euphemism. Hitchens being Hitchens said, well,
I can't write about this unless I know. He had
to experience it. So he commissioned Vanity Fair
to set it up. You're kidding. Not at all. He
went to a facility, signed the waivers, and had
trained men strap him to a board, put a cloth
over his face, and pour water into his nose and
throat. How long did he last? A few seconds.
He dropped the dead man's handle, the signal
to stop. Almost instantly. Wow. He wrote a harrowing
essay about it. He described the insoluble panic
of drowning, the feeling that you are absolutely
certainly going to die. And his conclusion was
blunt. He wrote, believe me, it's torture. And
he turned against the administration on that
issue immediately. Immediately and loudly. A
true partisan would have made excuses or defended
it. Hitchens experienced the truth and reported
it, period. And he had other views that didn't
fit. He supported the European Union. Huge supporter.
He despised nationalism. He thought Euroscepticism,
what eventually became Brexit, was just a petty
British version of small -minded fascism. He
wanted bigger unions, not smaller tribes. And
then you have abortion, which is maybe the most
complicated of all. It is so complex. He wasn't
a pro -life marcher. He didn't fit in with the
religious right at all. But he was, in his words,
ethically opposed to abortion in most instances.
Why? He believed in fetal personhood. He was
convinced by the science that from conception
the unborn child is a unique living human being.
He found the pro -choice argument that it was
just a clump of cells to be unscientific and
evasive. But he didn't want to criminalize it.
This is the nuance. He was very wary of that.
He didn't necessarily want to throw women in
jail. He wanted a cultural shift where society
recognized the gravity of the act. He talked
about a new compact where society would do everything
possible to support women so that abortion was
never the only option. It was a position that
satisfied absolutely no one. Which is classic
Hitchens. He's standing in the middle of the
road yelling at cars coming from both directions.
It really is. But if politics was one battlefield
for him, he opened up a second front that was
arguably even louder, even more controversial.
The war on God. The anti -theist. Let's define
that term. Most people say atheist. Hitchens
insisted on anti -theist. What's the difference?
It's a crucial distinction for him. It's a matter
of desire. An atheist looks at the universe,
sees no evidence for a God, and says, okay, I
don't believe. It's a statement of non -belief.
It's a neutral position almost. Exactly. An antitheist,
in Hitchens' view, looks at the concept of God
and says, I am glad there is no evidence. I am
actively relieved that this is not true. He's
relieved. Why? Because to Hitchens, the monotheistic
God, the God of the Bible or the Koran, is the
ultimate totalitarian. He called it a celestial
dictator. I think he also called it a celestial
North Korea. Yes, that was his favorite analogy.
He'd say, imagine a country where you can never
leave. where you are watched every minute of
every day, even in your dreams, where you are
convicted of thought crimes, wishing for your
neighbor's wife, envying their goods, and the
worst part, in a human North Korea, at least
you can die and escape the tyranny. In the Celestial
One, The surveillance and the torture continue
forever after death. He found the idea of a heavenly
father to be grotesque. He didn't want a father.
He wanted to be an emancipated adult. And he
compiled all of this into his magnum opus on
the subject, God is not great. How Religion Poisons
Everything. Not a subtle title. No, not a title
designed to make friends at a dinner party. It
was a massive bestseller, though. And the argument
was sweeping. He argued that religion is the
source of our worst tribal instincts. It's violent.
It's irrational. It's intolerant. It's allied
to racism and sexism. And he didn't just pick
on the easy targets like Islamic extremists.
No, he went after everyone. He went after the
Dalai Lama, calling him a hereditary king who
rules a feudal theocracy. He went after Jews.
Jewish fundamentalists in the West Bank. He went
after Christian faith healers. No one was safe.
And this is when he becomes known as one of the
Four Horsemen. The rock stars of the New Atheist
Movement. You had Hitchens, the journalist and
brawler, Richard Dawkins, the biologist, Sam
Harris, the neuroscientist, and Daniel Dennett,
the philosopher. They famously met at Hitchens'
apartment in D .C. for this long, boozy, unmoderated
discussion that was filmed. Yes, the Four Horsemen
discussion. It's on YouTube. I've seen clips
of that. The dynamic is fascinating because Dawkins
is this very proper, precise British scientist.
Harris is very cerebral and meditative. Dennett
is the careful philosopher. And then you have
Hitchens who just wants to fight. He's the brawler
of the group. He's the one who... Relishes the
public combat. He loved the public debate. He
would go into the Bible Belt, stand on a stage
in front of a thousand hostile Christians, and
somehow charm them while telling them their entire
worldview was evil. He had this famous challenge
he would issue to the audience. The Hitchens
Challenge. He'd ask from the stage, name me one
moral action performed by a believer that could
not have been performed by a non -believer. And
usually the room goes quiet. It does. Someone
might shout, charity. And he'd say, atheists
give to charity. Bill Gates is practically an
atheist. Someone says, love thy neighbor. And
he'd say, I can do that without a divine commandment.
It's called empathy. But then he'd drop the second
half of the challenge. The hammer, he'd say.
Now name me a wicked action performed specifically
because of religious faith. And then the floodgates
open. Suicide bombings, genital mutilation, burning
witches, the Inquisition. withholding medical
care from a sick child because it's God's will.
He argued that while good people do good things
and bad people do bad things, for a good person
to do a truly wicked thing, that takes religion.
He even took this to the very top. He debated
Tony Blair. The former prime minister of the
United Kingdom. After Blair had left office,
they cacked a huge concert hall in Toronto. And
the topic? The resolution was, be it resolved,
religion is a force for good in the world. Blair,
who is a very skilled debater and a devout Catholic,
argued for the community aspect, the charity,
the comfort it provides. And Hitchens. Hitchens
just dismantled the entire history of the church.
The Crusades, the persecution of Galileo, the
silence during the Holocaust. At the end, the
audience, which had been split at the beginning,
voted. And Hitchens won. By a landslide. By a
landslide. A writer defeated a world leader in
a debate on God. It was a remarkable moment.
It's staggering. But Hitchens didn't just attack
abstract concepts like God. He was a true iconoclast.
He liked to smash sacred cows. He loved it. And
there is no cow in the 20th century more sacred
than Mother Teresa. This is the one that always
makes people gasp. You can criticize the Pope.
You can criticize the president. But Mother Teresa,
she's a saint, literally. The Catholic Church
made her one. Not to Hitchens. He wrote a book
about her called The Missionary Position. A double
entendre that he was very, very proud of. And
he called her a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and
a fraud. What on earth was his case? Because
that sounds insane to most people. His case was
based on her own theology of suffering. He actually
went to her clinics in Calcutta. He expected
to see a modern, clean hospital. given the millions
she received in donations. But that's not what
he found. Not even close. He found a place with
very little actual medical care, where needles
were rinsed in cold water and reused, where people
with treatable diseases were left to die, and
where pain relief was almost non -existent. But
she had all that money. Exactly. And Hitchens
asked, where is the money going? It wasn't going
to buy morphine or build better facilities. It
was going to build convents to spread the religious
order. He argued that Mother Teresa believed
suffering was a gift from God, that seeing the
poor suffer was like kissing Jesus on the cross.
So she wasn't trying to alleviate poverty. Hitchens
argued she wasn't a friend of the poor, she was
a friend of poverty. She celebrated it. He found
that morally repulsive. He also pointed out her
friends. Right. She took money from the brutal
Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti. She took over
a million dollars from Charles Keating, the American
fraudster of the Savings and Loans scandal. I
remember that. And when Keating was on trial,
she wrote a letter to the judge asking for leniency
for her friend. Hitches wrote a reply letter
to her, published it, and said, if you want to
help, give the stolen money back to the people
Keating defrauded. Did she? She never replied.
The money was never returned. It's a devastating
critique. And then there's the other major figure
he turned on, Bill Clinton. This was personal.
Hitchens and the Clintons moved in similar circles
in Washington. But when the Monica Lewinsky scandal
broke, Hitchens lost his mind. He despised Clinton's
triangulation, the way he would say anything
to stay in power. He wrote the book No One Left
to Lie To? He did. But the real breaking point,
the thing that made him a pariah, was the betrayal
of Sidney Blumenthal. Sidney Blumenthal was a
top aide to Clinton and, at the time, Hitchens'
friend. Yes. They were having lunch. And Blumenthal
told Hitchens privately that the White House
strategy was to paint Monica Lewinsky as a stalker,
to discredit her mental health and smear her.
Which is a pretty gross smear campaign. It is.
A few months later, during the impeachment trial,
Blumenthal denied under oath that the White House
was spreading these rumors. So he lied to Congress.
He perjured himself. And Hitchens was watching
at home on C -SPAN. He realized his friend was
lying to the country. So... Hitchens did the
unthinkable. He contacted the prosecutors and
submitted a sworn affidavit contradicting his
friend. He snitched. The D .C. social scene exploded.
They called him a snitch, a traitor, a Judas.
He lost so many friends. The Washington Post
barred him from parties. But he stood by it.
Absolutely. He maintained that truth is more
important than friendship. He said he lied under
oath. I will not let a friend get away with that.
It shows how rigid his moral code was. It was
absolute. It's that same rigidity we see in his
defense of free speech. If there is one thing
Hitchens is a saint of, it's the First Amendment.
He was a free speech absolutist. There was no
but. He famously said, That really needs to be
on a t -shirt. It was his North Star. And this
really came to a head with Salman Rushdie. The
fatwa. 1989. Yes. The Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran
issued a death sentence against the novelist
Salman Rushdie for writing the book The Satanic
Verses. It was a terrifying moment. Books were
burned. Translators were stabbed to death. And
a lot of people on the left, they hesitated.
They did. You heard people saying, well, Rushdie
shouldn't have insulted Islam. Or he knew what
he was doing. He was being provocative. Blame
the victim argument. Exactly. Hitchens went nuclear
on those people. He was ashamed of his colleagues.
He saw this as a foreign theocrat ordering the
murder of a British citizen for the crime of
writing a book. It was an attack on the very
idea of literature. It was an attack on the Enlightenment.
He became Rushdie's fiercest defender. He organized
readings. He went on TV constantly. He argued
that there is no right not to be offended. He
believed that if you allow people to be silenced
because someone, somewhere, claims to be offended,
you have given up the entire game of civilization.
It connects back to the anti -totalitarianism.
You cannot allow a cleric in Tehran to decide
what can be published in London. Precisely. It
was the same fight, different battlefield. We've
talked a lot about the fighter, the debater,
the polemicist. But what about the man? Because
for all this conflict, by all accounts, he seemed
to have a lot of fun. He lived incredibly hard.
He was a creature of the night. He smoked Rothman
cigarettes constantly, one after another. He
drank an amount of Johnny Walker Black Label
that, as he put it, would stun a mule. He had
that famous quote about his writing process.
I burn the candle at both ends. It gives a lovely
light. But also, I write when I drink. He believed
the alcohol was fuel for the prose. I can't imagine
that. Me neither. He would host these dinner
parties that went until 4 a .m. arguing about
poetry and politics, and then he would wake up
at 8 a .m. and file a perfectly written 1 ,000
-word column. He had a constitution of steel.
Until, of course, he didn't. Yes. You can't burn
the candle at both ends with a blowtorch forever.
We have to talk about the brother, Peter, briefly,
too, because that relationship feels so central
to the man behind the microphone. It's the Cain
and Abel of British journalism. It really is.
Peter Hitchens is two years younger. He's also
a brilliant pugnacious writer, but he's a deep
conservative and a devout Anglican Christian.
Complete opposites. Polar opposites. And they
stopped speaking in 2001. They had a massive
falling out. Peter wrote an article calling Christopher
a Stalinist for his support of the Iraq war.
Ouch. That's a low blow for an old Trotskyist.
The lowest. They didn't speak for years. Eventually
they reconciled, but they would still debate
on stage. And it was fascinating to watch because
they had the same voice, the same cadence, the
same wit, but they reached completely opposite
conclusions on everything. What did Christopher
say was the difference? Someone asked him that
once, and he said, quite simply, that the only
real difference between them was the belief in
God. He thought all of Peter's other political
views flowed from that one belief. Which brings
us to the end, to mortality. In June 2010, Hitchens
is on a book tour for his memoir, Hitch 22. He's
at the absolute top of his game, and then he
wakes up in a hotel room in New York. He described
the feeling as being chained to his own corpse.
He couldn't breathe. He knew something was terribly,
terribly wrong. It was esophageal cancer. Stage
four. And the irony was just cruel. It was the
same cancer that had killed his father, the commander.
Did he blame the lifestyle? He knew. He never
said, why me? He said, why not me? He knew the
cigarettes and the scotch had a price and the
bill had come due. But he didn't retreat. He
didn't go quietly into the night. He turned his
dying into his final assignment. He did. He started
writing a column for Vanity Fair called Topic
of Cancer. He reported from the land of the sick,
what he called Tumorville. And he was adamant
about the language we use for illness. He hated
when people said he was battling cancer. He loathed
that. Why? He said, I'm not battling it. The
cancer is inside me. It's fighting me and it's
winning. He thought the war metaphors put the
burden on the patient to be brave or to be a
warrior. He wanted to be honest about the indignity,
the loss of his voice, the pain. And he was treated
by Francis Collins. This is another one of those
incredible Hitchens paradoxes. Francis Collins,
the director of the NIH, one of the top geneticists
in the world, and also an evangelical christian
a very devout one he wrote a book about his faith
and he and hitchens became friends hitchens let
collins sequence his genome to try experimental
treatments how did that work hitchens respected
the science he didn't respect collins faith but
he respected the man and his intellect It showed
that even at the end, he could separate the idea
from the person. They could argue about God and
then go back to analyzing his DNA. Now we have
to address the rumor because whenever a famous
atheist dies, there is this whisper campaign.
Every single time. Did he recant? Did he find
God at the end? A man named Larry Taunton wrote
a book implying that Hitchens was flirting with
Christianity in his final days. But Hitchens
actually predicted this would happen. He knew
it was coming. He called it. He wrote in his
final book, Mortality, If I convert, it's because
it's better that a believer dies than that an
atheist does. He was warning us. What did he
mean by that? He meant that the religious would
claim his conversion as a victory no matter the
circumstances. So he said if he starts talking
about God on his deathbed, it's because the cancer
has gone to his brain or the medication has made
him delirious. He wanted it on the record that
the sane, lucid Christopher Hitchens remained
an atheist. And his close friends, like Richard
Dawkins and David Frum, they all confirmed that.
He was lucid until the end, and he was godless
until the end. He died on December 15, 2011,
at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. In his
last words, recorded by his friend Andrew Sullivan,
were haunting. Capitalism downfall. Capitalism
downfall. What do you make of that? Was that
the old Trotskyist coming back for one last curtain
call? I think so. Or maybe he was just looking
at the news on TV. But it fits him perfectly.
He didn't go out whispering a prayer. He went
out analyzing the geopolitical structure of the
world. His body was failing, but his mind was
still on the argument. So now, all these years
later, what is the legacy? We don't really have
anyone like him today. We don't. And that's the
loss. Even his enemies respected his mind and
his courage. Tony Blair called him a complete
one -off. Dawkins called him a valiant fighter.
There is now a Hitchens Prize given to writers
who show that same commitment to free expression
and truth, regardless of the consequences. It
feels like today we are so siloed. You're either
on the left or the right, and you have to buy
the whole package. You have to agree with every
single point. Hitchens reminds us that you can
pick and choose. You can think for yourself.
You can be a Marxist who supports the Iraq War.
You can be a Jewish atheist. You can be a civil
libertarian who defends the free speech of his
own enemies. That's the lesson, I think. Hitchens
believed that the search for truth, the argument
itself, was more important than whatever conclusion
you reached. He didn't want you to agree with
him. He wanted you to think. He wanted to provoke
you into sharpening your own arguments, into
defending your own beliefs. And that's a good
place to leave it. A final challenge for you
listening right now, inspired by the Hitch. Are
you willing to hold an opinion that makes you
an outcast? An opinion that makes you the only
one in the room. Exactly. An opinion that might
lose you friends simply because you've looked
at the evidence and believe it is true. And if
you aren't, are you really thinking for yourself
or are you just repeating what you've been told?
That's a terrifying question. But he believed
it's the only one that really matters. Thanks
for diving deep with us. We'll see you next time.