WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:02.399 Welcome back to the Deep Dive. You know, usually 00:00:02.399 --> 00:00:04.440 when we prepare for these, we have a stack of 00:00:04.440 --> 00:00:08.300 books and articles that feel pretty distinct. 00:00:08.640 --> 00:00:10.960 Yeah, you can sort them. You can sort them. You 00:00:10.960 --> 00:00:12.679 have your politics stack, your literature stack, 00:00:12.880 --> 00:00:16.399 your theology stack. But today, the source material 00:00:16.399 --> 00:00:20.519 is just one giant, chaotic, brilliant pile that, 00:00:20.519 --> 00:00:23.140 I mean, it just refuses to be categorized. It 00:00:23.140 --> 00:00:24.600 really is a unique challenge today. We're talking 00:00:24.600 --> 00:00:27.260 about Christopher Hitchens. We are. I think the 00:00:27.260 --> 00:00:29.500 pile is the perfect metaphor for the man himself. 00:00:29.800 --> 00:00:32.240 We're looking at a man who could quote W .B. 00:00:32.259 --> 00:00:35.039 Yeats and Bob Dylan in the same breath, drink 00:00:35.039 --> 00:00:37.780 a staggering amount of scotch without slurring 00:00:37.780 --> 00:00:42.740 a word, and then proceed to eviscerate a political 00:00:42.740 --> 00:00:44.960 opponent with a sentence so sharp it would leave 00:00:44.960 --> 00:00:47.399 a scar. Eviscerate is absolutely the right word. 00:00:47.479 --> 00:00:49.979 He wasn't just a writer or a journalist. He was 00:00:49.979 --> 00:00:52.479 a polemicist in the truest, most classical sense 00:00:52.479 --> 00:00:54.280 of the word. What does that actually mean, a 00:00:54.280 --> 00:00:56.719 polemicist? I mean, he viewed debate as a form 00:00:56.719 --> 00:00:58.659 of combat. It wasn't about finding consensus. 00:00:58.859 --> 00:01:01.659 Not at all. It was about winning. It was about 00:01:01.659 --> 00:01:04.420 the rigorous application of logic and rhetoric 00:01:04.420 --> 00:01:08.760 to dismantle an opposing argument. For him, ideas 00:01:08.760 --> 00:01:11.760 weren't just abstract things. They had real world 00:01:11.760 --> 00:01:14.900 consequences and bad ideas needed to be destroyed. 00:01:15.159 --> 00:01:18.409 Absolutely. And the Hitch, as he was known, though, 00:01:18.569 --> 00:01:20.829 I'm not sure if he loved that nickname or just, 00:01:20.909 --> 00:01:23.030 you know, tolerated it. He seemed to tolerate 00:01:23.030 --> 00:01:25.480 it. He's such a fascinating figure because he 00:01:25.480 --> 00:01:28.340 embodies this massive contradiction. I mean, 00:01:28.359 --> 00:01:30.280 just look at the resume we're digging into today. 00:01:30.379 --> 00:01:33.140 It's all over the place. It is. We have a British 00:01:33.140 --> 00:01:36.700 born, Oxford educated intellectual who ends up 00:01:36.700 --> 00:01:39.359 becoming this flag waving American citizen. A 00:01:39.359 --> 00:01:41.500 very proud American citizen, too. Sworn into 00:01:41.500 --> 00:01:43.560 the Jefferson Memorial. Right. And then we have 00:01:43.560 --> 00:01:46.459 a guy who started his career selling socialist 00:01:46.459 --> 00:01:49.459 newspapers on street corners as a Trotskyist 00:01:49.459 --> 00:01:52.519 revolutionary. Yeah. And then ends up being one 00:01:52.519 --> 00:01:54.810 of the most. most vocal, most articulate supporters 00:01:54.810 --> 00:01:57.310 of the George W. Bush administration's invasion 00:01:57.310 --> 00:01:59.829 of Iraq. Which, let's be honest, is a trajectory 00:01:59.829 --> 00:02:02.370 that gave half his friends whiplash. And the 00:02:02.370 --> 00:02:04.370 other half a migraine. A serious migraine, yeah. 00:02:04.450 --> 00:02:06.950 He made people's heads hurt. Right. And that's 00:02:06.950 --> 00:02:08.930 before we even get to the religion piece. Oh, 00:02:08.930 --> 00:02:11.050 that's a whole other level. He writes the definitive 00:02:11.050 --> 00:02:14.409 book on new atheism, God is Not Great, arguing 00:02:14.409 --> 00:02:17.490 that religion poisons everything, while his own 00:02:17.490 --> 00:02:20.620 brother, Peter Hitchens, is a devout... well 00:02:20.620 --> 00:02:22.699 -known Christian author. It's Shakespearean. 00:02:22.919 --> 00:02:26.860 It really is. The two brothers locked in this 00:02:26.860 --> 00:02:29.539 public intellectual combat over the biggest questions. 00:02:29.780 --> 00:02:32.680 It is. But I think the mistake people make with 00:02:32.680 --> 00:02:34.620 Hitchens, and you see this in the critiques of 00:02:34.620 --> 00:02:37.180 him, is assuming he just changed his mind at 00:02:37.180 --> 00:02:39.520 random. Or that he was just a professional contrarian. 00:02:39.580 --> 00:02:41.639 Exactly. That he was just trying to be provocative 00:02:41.639 --> 00:02:44.060 for the sake of attention. Right. But when you 00:02:44.060 --> 00:02:47.379 really go through these 18 books and the... thousands 00:02:47.379 --> 00:02:49.659 of columns and essays he wrote, you start to 00:02:49.659 --> 00:02:53.900 see a very specific, consistent thread. There's 00:02:53.900 --> 00:02:55.939 a through line. There is. He wasn't jumping from 00:02:55.939 --> 00:02:58.659 left to right. He was following a very specific... 00:02:58.919 --> 00:03:02.419 anti -totalitarian moral compass he just he followed 00:03:02.419 --> 00:03:04.560 it into territory that made everyone else deeply 00:03:04.560 --> 00:03:07.180 uncomfortable that's the mission for this deep 00:03:07.180 --> 00:03:10.099 dive really we want to get past the youtube compilations 00:03:10.099 --> 00:03:12.500 of the hitch slap which are amazing to be fair 00:03:12.500 --> 00:03:14.680 they are legendary and we will definitely talk 00:03:14.680 --> 00:03:17.280 about them but we want to understand the engine 00:03:17.280 --> 00:03:20.780 driving the man we're going to unpack his upbringing 00:03:20.780 --> 00:03:24.759 that tragic pivot point with his mother his political 00:03:24.759 --> 00:03:28.840 odyssey and his absolute unw wavering defense 00:03:28.840 --> 00:03:31.659 of free speech. And I think we should clarify 00:03:31.659 --> 00:03:34.819 why this matters to you, the listener, right 00:03:34.819 --> 00:03:38.060 now. Because, look, Hitchens died in 2011. A 00:03:38.060 --> 00:03:40.729 different world. A very different world. But 00:03:40.729 --> 00:03:44.009 in an era where everyone is so terrified of being 00:03:44.009 --> 00:03:46.330 canceled or saying the wrong thing or stepping 00:03:46.330 --> 00:03:49.590 outside their tribe, Hitchens is a reminder of 00:03:49.590 --> 00:03:52.229 what a public intellectual used to be. He didn't 00:03:52.229 --> 00:03:54.310 care if you agreed with him. In fact, he seemed 00:03:54.310 --> 00:03:56.349 to prefer it if you didn't. He lived for the 00:03:56.349 --> 00:03:59.050 friction. He wanted the argument. It forces you 00:03:59.050 --> 00:04:01.229 to ask yourself, do I believe what I believe 00:04:01.229 --> 00:04:03.189 because I've really thought it through or because 00:04:03.189 --> 00:04:05.610 it's what my team is supposed to believe? Hitchens 00:04:05.610 --> 00:04:08.050 didn't have a team. He was a team of one. A team 00:04:08.050 --> 00:04:10.740 of. one heavily armed with vocabulary. And a 00:04:10.740 --> 00:04:13.819 lot of whiskey. Exactly. So let's rewind. Let's 00:04:13.819 --> 00:04:16.930 go back to post -war Britain. Christopher Eric 00:04:16.930 --> 00:04:20.170 Hitchens, born 1949 in Portsmouth. A naval town. 00:04:20.329 --> 00:04:22.709 That's important. Very. And reading through his 00:04:22.709 --> 00:04:25.470 memoir, Hitch 22, which, by the way, is one of 00:04:25.470 --> 00:04:27.769 the best memoirs I've ever read, the prose is 00:04:27.769 --> 00:04:30.310 just staggering. It's beautiful. You really get 00:04:30.310 --> 00:04:32.930 the sense that his personality was this perfect 00:04:32.930 --> 00:04:35.389 chemical reaction between his parents. It was 00:04:35.389 --> 00:04:38.470 almost a schematic diagram of his psyche. On 00:04:38.470 --> 00:04:40.990 one side, you have the father, Eric Hitchens. 00:04:41.269 --> 00:04:43.670 The commander. The commander. That title alone 00:04:43.670 --> 00:04:45.759 tells you so much, doesn't it? It says... everything. 00:04:46.100 --> 00:04:49.360 It does. He was a career Royal Navy man. Very 00:04:49.360 --> 00:04:52.420 stoic, very rigid, very much of that keep calm 00:04:52.420 --> 00:04:55.500 and carry on generation. A stiff upper lip. Absolutely. 00:04:55.819 --> 00:04:58.439 And he had this defining moment during World 00:04:58.439 --> 00:05:02.399 War II where his ship, HMS Jamaica, helped sink 00:05:02.399 --> 00:05:05.300 the Scharnhorst, which was a major Nazi battle 00:05:05.300 --> 00:05:08.680 cruiser. A huge deal. A huge deal. And Hitchens 00:05:08.680 --> 00:05:10.879 wrote about how his father viewed that as the 00:05:10.879 --> 00:05:13.509 high water mark of his life. He essentially said, 00:05:13.610 --> 00:05:16.110 sending a Nazi convoy raider to the bottom of 00:05:16.110 --> 00:05:17.689 the sea is a better day's work than anything 00:05:17.689 --> 00:05:21.189 I've ever done. Wow. Which is a heavy shadow 00:05:21.189 --> 00:05:23.870 to grow up under. A very heavy shadow. That sense 00:05:23.870 --> 00:05:26.769 of, I write essays, but my dad fought actual 00:05:26.769 --> 00:05:29.810 Nazis. Exactly. The man of action versus the 00:05:29.810 --> 00:05:32.769 man of words. But then you have the mother, Yvonne. 00:05:32.930 --> 00:05:34.529 And she seems like she dropped in from a different 00:05:34.529 --> 00:05:37.750 planet. Completely. Yvonne Jean Hitchens. She 00:05:37.750 --> 00:05:41.699 was a Wren. part of the Women's Royal Naval Service, 00:05:41.800 --> 00:05:44.680 which is how she met Eric. But deep down, she 00:05:44.680 --> 00:05:47.079 was a romantic. You can feel it in his writing 00:05:47.079 --> 00:05:50.459 about her. Oh, he adored her. She was stylish, 00:05:50.540 --> 00:05:53.480 she was vibrant, and she felt suffocated by the 00:05:53.480 --> 00:05:56.879 drab, gray existence of a naval base in Portsmouth. 00:05:57.459 --> 00:06:00.279 Hitchens worshipped her. He says explicitly that 00:06:00.279 --> 00:06:02.040 she was the one who introduced him to the idea 00:06:02.040 --> 00:06:04.339 that life could be more. More than just duty. 00:06:04.540 --> 00:06:06.339 More than just duty and discipline. She gave 00:06:06.339 --> 00:06:08.759 him books. She gave him that cosmopolitan flair, 00:06:08.819 --> 00:06:10.879 that sense that there was a world of art and 00:06:10.879 --> 00:06:12.879 ideas out there. There's a line in the biography 00:06:12.879 --> 00:06:15.420 where she says, if there is going to be an upper 00:06:15.420 --> 00:06:17.560 class in this country, Christopher is going to 00:06:17.560 --> 00:06:20.060 be in it. Exactly. She was aspirational. She 00:06:20.060 --> 00:06:21.879 pushed him. She didn't want him to be the commander. 00:06:22.139 --> 00:06:24.100 She wanted him to be a gentleman and a scholar. 00:06:24.360 --> 00:06:26.680 But there was a secret heritage there, right? 00:06:27.120 --> 00:06:29.240 Something that neither of them fully understood 00:06:29.240 --> 00:06:32.019 at the time. A huge secret. Yeah. And this is 00:06:32.019 --> 00:06:34.199 one of the most incredible details of his life. 00:06:34.300 --> 00:06:36.839 This blew my mind. Hitchens, the world's most 00:06:36.839 --> 00:06:39.319 famous atheist, didn't know he was Jewish until 00:06:39.319 --> 00:06:42.040 he was 38 years old. 38. Yeah. It's incredible, 00:06:42.180 --> 00:06:44.319 isn't it? He was a fully formed public intellectual 00:06:44.319 --> 00:06:46.740 living in Washington, D .C., writing for the 00:06:46.740 --> 00:06:49.990 nation. Mm -hmm. He had no idea. So how did it 00:06:49.990 --> 00:06:52.230 come out? His brother Peter actually did some 00:06:52.230 --> 00:06:54.209 of the digging, but apparently his grandmother 00:06:54.209 --> 00:06:57.290 let it slip. His mother Yvonne was of Jewish 00:06:57.290 --> 00:07:00.430 origin. Her ancestors were from Poland, Eastern 00:07:00.430 --> 00:07:03.610 Europe. She had hidden it. Why? Well, you have 00:07:03.610 --> 00:07:06.790 to remember the era. Post -war Britain. For a 00:07:06.790 --> 00:07:08.970 woman trying to climb the social ladder, marrying 00:07:08.970 --> 00:07:12.089 a Royal Navy commander, being Jewish wasn't seen 00:07:12.089 --> 00:07:14.089 as an advantage. There was still a lot of casual 00:07:14.089 --> 00:07:16.790 anti -Semitism, so she just erased it. So how 00:07:16.790 --> 00:07:19.370 did Hitchens take that news? I mean, for a guy 00:07:19.370 --> 00:07:21.670 who spent his life critiquing religion, specifically 00:07:21.670 --> 00:07:24.670 the Abrahamic ones, finding out you're technically 00:07:24.670 --> 00:07:27.329 part of the chosen people must have been a trip. 00:07:27.509 --> 00:07:30.550 He was fascinated by it. Utterly fascinated. 00:07:30.930 --> 00:07:33.410 He didn't find God, obviously. Of course not. 00:07:33.550 --> 00:07:35.649 He didn't start going to synagogue, but he started 00:07:35.649 --> 00:07:39.459 identifying as a Jew. He liked the term non -Jewish 00:07:39.459 --> 00:07:42.139 Jew, which Isaac Deutscher used to describe people 00:07:42.139 --> 00:07:45.259 like Trotsky or Spinoza. What does that mean, 00:07:45.379 --> 00:07:48.600 a non -Jewish Jew? It's someone who is ethnically 00:07:48.600 --> 00:07:51.459 or culturally Jewish, but secular. He felt it 00:07:51.459 --> 00:07:54.279 connected him to a long lineage of cosmopolitan, 00:07:54.300 --> 00:07:56.980 rootless intellectuals, people like Freud or 00:07:56.980 --> 00:07:59.480 Einstein or Marx, people who were outsiders looking 00:07:59.480 --> 00:08:02.040 in, who weren't bound by national or religious 00:08:02.040 --> 00:08:05.300 dogma. So it fit his identity as a contrarian 00:08:05.300 --> 00:08:07.560 and outsider. Perfectly. It gave him a deeper 00:08:07.560 --> 00:08:09.439 connection to the history of Europe, and it certainly 00:08:09.439 --> 00:08:11.319 complicated his feelings about the Middle East 00:08:11.319 --> 00:08:13.540 later on, especially his critiques of Israel. 00:08:13.759 --> 00:08:16.949 But the relationship with his mother... It doesn't 00:08:16.949 --> 00:08:19.170 have a happy ending. It ends in this horrific 00:08:19.170 --> 00:08:22.170 tragedy. And I feel like we can't really understand 00:08:22.170 --> 00:08:25.269 the hardness in Hitchens without understanding 00:08:25.269 --> 00:08:28.949 Athens in 1973. No, you can't. It is the pivotal 00:08:28.949 --> 00:08:31.990 trauma of his life. It's the event that everything 00:08:31.990 --> 00:08:34.549 else revolves around. So what happened? Hitchens 00:08:34.549 --> 00:08:37.389 was young, just 24, starting to make his way 00:08:37.389 --> 00:08:40.210 in the world as a journalist in London. His mother 00:08:40.210 --> 00:08:42.690 had finally left the commander. She had run off 00:08:42.690 --> 00:08:45.159 with a lover. A man named Timothy Bryan. And 00:08:45.159 --> 00:08:47.080 he was a defrocked clergyman. Right. The irony 00:08:47.080 --> 00:08:50.379 is just. The irony is thick. Yes. A former reverend 00:08:50.379 --> 00:08:52.440 who had lost his faith in his standing. They 00:08:52.440 --> 00:08:55.519 went to Athens, Greece to start a new life. But 00:08:55.519 --> 00:08:58.480 Greece in 1973 was not a vacation spot. Not at 00:08:58.480 --> 00:09:01.039 all. It was under the control of a military junta. 00:09:01.419 --> 00:09:03.639 The regime of the colonels. It was a paranoid, 00:09:03.759 --> 00:09:06.360 chaotic and dangerous place. And then Hitchens 00:09:06.360 --> 00:09:08.360 gets the call. He gets the call that they are 00:09:08.360 --> 00:09:10.899 dead. And it wasn't an accident. It was a suicide 00:09:10.899 --> 00:09:13.500 pact. They were found in adjoining hotel rooms 00:09:13.500 --> 00:09:15.919 in the Intercontinental. They had overdosed on 00:09:15.919 --> 00:09:18.480 sleeping pills and Brian had also slashed his 00:09:18.480 --> 00:09:21.240 wrists. It was a scene of complete despair. And 00:09:21.240 --> 00:09:23.879 Hitchens had to go there by himself. He had to 00:09:23.879 --> 00:09:27.059 fly to Athens alone to identify the body and 00:09:27.059 --> 00:09:29.419 deal with the authorities. And because the political 00:09:29.419 --> 00:09:31.740 situation was so volatile, his first thought 00:09:31.740 --> 00:09:34.259 was actually, did the government do this? Was 00:09:34.259 --> 00:09:37.070 she murdered? Of course. He arrives in this city 00:09:37.070 --> 00:09:39.570 full of soldiers and tanks. He goes to the morgue. 00:09:39.590 --> 00:09:42.429 I mean, he talks about seeing her body. He saw 00:09:42.429 --> 00:09:44.309 the rope marks on the luggage where they had 00:09:44.309 --> 00:09:46.330 tied the hotel room door shut from the inside. 00:09:46.470 --> 00:09:50.230 That is just, it's a horror movie. It is. And 00:09:50.230 --> 00:09:52.070 he said something very poignant about it later 00:09:52.070 --> 00:09:54.870 in Hitch 22. He said that looking at the scene, 00:09:54.950 --> 00:09:57.190 he realized that his mother had been trying to 00:09:57.190 --> 00:10:00.139 escape. Escape her marriage, escape her unhappiness, 00:10:00.159 --> 00:10:02.460 escape the grayness of her life, and she had 00:10:02.460 --> 00:10:04.399 just run into a dead end. And he felt a sense 00:10:04.399 --> 00:10:07.820 of guilt about it. A profound one. He felt he 00:10:07.820 --> 00:10:10.539 failed to save her. He said it was the moment 00:10:10.539 --> 00:10:13.399 his youth truly ended. And you can hear it in 00:10:13.399 --> 00:10:16.000 his voice in later years. There is a kind of 00:10:16.000 --> 00:10:18.919 callousness or a toughness that I think was forged 00:10:18.919 --> 00:10:22.440 in that hotel room in Athens. A refusal to indulge 00:10:22.440 --> 00:10:24.840 in sentimentality. It certainly explains his 00:10:24.840 --> 00:10:28.340 hatred for what he called celestial dictatorships 00:10:28.340 --> 00:10:31.639 or any regime that traps people. Any system that 00:10:31.639 --> 00:10:34.059 promises a utopia and delivers a death pact. 00:10:34.279 --> 00:10:36.460 But before the tragedy, he was already carving 00:10:36.460 --> 00:10:39.419 out this path as a rebel at Oxford. And I have 00:10:39.419 --> 00:10:41.700 to laugh at the academic record here. Christopher 00:10:41.700 --> 00:10:43.799 Hitchens, one of the most well -read men of the 00:10:43.799 --> 00:10:46.659 20th century, graduated with a third class degree. 00:10:46.860 --> 00:10:49.360 A gentleman's third, as they might say. Explain 00:10:49.360 --> 00:10:51.980 that to the American listener. A third is not 00:10:51.980 --> 00:10:54.559 good. It's basically the lowest tier of passing. 00:10:54.720 --> 00:10:56.679 It means you showed up, you did the bare minimum, 00:10:56.779 --> 00:10:58.440 but you didn't really impress the examiners. 00:10:58.539 --> 00:11:00.600 It's a sign that your priorities were elsewhere. 00:11:00.799 --> 00:11:03.320 And his were. Oh, absolutely. The context is 00:11:03.320 --> 00:11:06.899 vital. This was Balliol College, Oxford. In the 00:11:06.899 --> 00:11:09.860 late 60s, the revolution was in the air. Vietnam, 00:11:10.120 --> 00:11:13.019 civil rights, student protests. Hitchens wasn't 00:11:13.019 --> 00:11:15.139 studying the official curriculum. He was devouring 00:11:15.139 --> 00:11:16.899 the library. He was getting a different kind 00:11:16.899 --> 00:11:19.500 of education. The real education. He was reading 00:11:19.500 --> 00:11:22.159 George Orwell. He was reading Arthur Koestler's 00:11:22.159 --> 00:11:24.879 Darkness at Noon, which became a key text for 00:11:24.879 --> 00:11:27.399 him. He was reading Dostoevsky. He was educating 00:11:27.399 --> 00:11:29.879 himself to be a writer and a revolutionary, not 00:11:29.879 --> 00:11:32.019 an academic. He was also educating himself in 00:11:32.019 --> 00:11:35.679 other ways. The outline mentions his sexual fluidity. 00:11:35.980 --> 00:11:38.120 During this time. And I think for a lot of people 00:11:38.120 --> 00:11:41.220 who see Hitches as this chain smoking, masculine 00:11:41.220 --> 00:11:43.779 war reporter type, the fact that he was bisexual 00:11:43.779 --> 00:11:46.820 in his youth comes as a surprise. It does. But 00:11:46.820 --> 00:11:49.419 again, context is key in the British public school 00:11:49.419 --> 00:11:52.220 and university system of that era. These all 00:11:52.220 --> 00:11:55.639 male environments experimentation was. If not 00:11:55.639 --> 00:11:57.740 open, certainly common. Right. It was almost 00:11:57.740 --> 00:11:59.659 part of the boarding school culture. Exactly. 00:11:59.919 --> 00:12:02.539 And Hitchens was very open about this later in 00:12:02.539 --> 00:12:05.100 life, usually with a joke. He claimed to have 00:12:05.100 --> 00:12:07.460 had relations with two male students at Oxford, 00:12:07.639 --> 00:12:10.659 who later became ministers in Margaret Thatcher's 00:12:10.659 --> 00:12:12.799 conservative government. That is such a Hitchens 00:12:12.799 --> 00:12:15.360 detail. I slipped with the Tory government. Did 00:12:15.360 --> 00:12:18.299 he ever out them? Never. He kept the name secret 00:12:18.299 --> 00:12:20.740 until he died. He had a code of honor about that, 00:12:20.799 --> 00:12:23.539 which is interesting. But he did joke that as 00:12:23.539 --> 00:12:26.639 he got older. He got uglier. And as he put it, 00:12:26.700 --> 00:12:29.320 only women would go to bed with him. So he viewed 00:12:29.320 --> 00:12:31.539 it as a phase of his youth. He did. Something 00:12:31.539 --> 00:12:34.679 he drifted out of. But he never apologized for 00:12:34.679 --> 00:12:37.039 it or seemed ashamed of it. It was just part 00:12:37.039 --> 00:12:40.059 of the story. So leaving Oxford, he plunges into 00:12:40.059 --> 00:12:42.240 the world of political journalism. And this is 00:12:42.240 --> 00:12:45.100 where the Trotskyist label comes in. I feel like 00:12:45.100 --> 00:12:47.679 communist or socialist gets thrown around as 00:12:47.679 --> 00:12:49.740 a catch -all term these days. But Hitchens was 00:12:49.740 --> 00:12:52.379 specifically a Trotskyist. Why does that distinction 00:12:52.379 --> 00:12:55.289 matter so much? It matters immensely because 00:12:55.289 --> 00:12:57.750 it sets up his entire worldview for the rest 00:12:57.750 --> 00:13:00.370 of his life. Leon Trotsky, as you know, was one 00:13:00.370 --> 00:13:01.690 of the leaders of the Russian Revolution, but 00:13:01.690 --> 00:13:04.009 he was eventually exiled and then assassinated 00:13:04.009 --> 00:13:08.090 by agents of Joseph Stalin. Right. So Trotskyism 00:13:08.090 --> 00:13:11.470 is a form of Marxism that is revolutionary, yes, 00:13:11.590 --> 00:13:15.450 but it is deeply, violently anti -Stalinist. 00:13:15.850 --> 00:13:19.509 It sees the Soviet Union not as a success, but 00:13:19.509 --> 00:13:22.879 as a monstrous betrayal. So it's anti -authoritarian 00:13:22.879 --> 00:13:25.879 communism. Precisely. Their slogan was neither 00:13:25.879 --> 00:13:28.600 Washington nor Moscow, but international socialism. 00:13:28.899 --> 00:13:31.679 So Young Hitchens hated American capitalism and 00:13:31.679 --> 00:13:33.700 the Vietnam War. He was actually expelled from 00:13:33.700 --> 00:13:35.759 the Labor Party for opposing the war too aggressively. 00:13:35.899 --> 00:13:38.120 Of course he was. Of course. But he also hated 00:13:38.120 --> 00:13:40.360 the Soviet Union. Yeah. He viewed the USSR as 00:13:40.360 --> 00:13:44.279 a tyranny, a police state. So from day one, from 00:13:44.279 --> 00:13:46.639 his earliest political identity, Hitchens is 00:13:46.639 --> 00:13:48.720 positioning himself against the big brother, 00:13:48.799 --> 00:13:50.440 whether that big brother is in the White House 00:13:50.440 --> 00:13:52.519 or the Kremlin. That's the key, isn't it? If 00:13:52.519 --> 00:13:54.539 you view him as left -wing, his later life makes 00:13:54.539 --> 00:13:56.580 no sense. If you view him as anti -totalitarian, 00:13:56.700 --> 00:13:59.340 it makes perfect sense. It's the only lens through 00:13:59.340 --> 00:14:01.659 which his career is coherent. So he starts writing 00:14:01.659 --> 00:14:03.679 for the New Statesman in London. He's known as 00:14:03.679 --> 00:14:05.860 gauntly left -wing. He's reporting from Northern 00:14:05.860 --> 00:14:09.200 Ireland, Libya, Iraq. He's seeing conflict up 00:14:09.200 --> 00:14:11.480 close. He's building that journalistic credibility. 00:14:12.039 --> 00:14:14.000 He's not just an intellectual in an armchair. 00:14:14.120 --> 00:14:17.320 He goes to the dangerous places. And then in 00:14:17.320 --> 00:14:20.879 1981, he moves to America. He lands at the Nation 00:14:20.879 --> 00:14:23.399 magazine, which is basically the Bible of the 00:14:23.399 --> 00:14:26.500 American left. It really is. And for 20 years, 00:14:26.659 --> 00:14:29.759 he is their golden boy. He's their star columnist. 00:14:29.799 --> 00:14:32.179 He's the guy attacking Reagan, attacking Kissinger, 00:14:32.360 --> 00:14:35.000 attacking the first Gulf War. He is comfortable 00:14:35.000 --> 00:14:37.480 in that seat. He's the radical voice from Britain. 00:14:37.600 --> 00:14:42.070 He is. But then. September 11th, 2001. The day 00:14:42.070 --> 00:14:44.370 the world changed. The day Christopher Hitchens 00:14:44.370 --> 00:14:46.750 changed. Or rather, the day he felt the world 00:14:46.750 --> 00:14:48.470 finally aligned with what he had been saying 00:14:48.470 --> 00:14:51.110 all along. He used a word to describe his reaction 00:14:51.110 --> 00:14:53.090 to 9 -11 that got him in so much trouble. He 00:14:53.090 --> 00:14:55.870 said he felt exhilarated. Yes, exhilaration. 00:14:55.889 --> 00:14:58.750 And people, understandably, read that as him 00:14:58.750 --> 00:15:00.710 being happy about the death and destruction, 00:15:00.950 --> 00:15:03.730 which was a grotesque interpretation. So what 00:15:03.730 --> 00:15:06.450 did he mean? He meant that suddenly the gray 00:15:06.450 --> 00:15:09.440 areas were gone. He felt that throughout the 00:15:09.440 --> 00:15:12.980 90s, the West had been asleep, ignoring the rise 00:15:12.980 --> 00:15:15.379 of Islamic extremism, treating it as someone 00:15:15.379 --> 00:15:17.639 else's problem. He saw it as a moment of clarity. 00:15:17.899 --> 00:15:21.139 A brutal, horrifying moment of clarity. He saw 00:15:21.139 --> 00:15:23.720 a new enemy that checked all his boxes for evil. 00:15:24.039 --> 00:15:27.379 He called it fascism with an Islamic face. Why 00:15:27.379 --> 00:15:29.600 that term specifically? Because he looked at 00:15:29.600 --> 00:15:32.980 Al -Qaeda. and the Taliban and eventually Saddam 00:15:32.980 --> 00:15:36.200 Hussein's Ba 'ath Party. And he didn't see freedom 00:15:36.200 --> 00:15:39.440 fighters or anti -imperialists. He saw totalitarians. 00:15:39.440 --> 00:15:40.980 He saw people who wanted to control what you 00:15:40.980 --> 00:15:43.120 read, what you wore, who you slept with, and 00:15:43.120 --> 00:15:45.580 how you prayed. The same impulse as Stalin or 00:15:45.580 --> 00:15:47.919 Hitler. To him, it was exactly the same impulse. 00:15:48.100 --> 00:15:50.340 Fighting them was a moral and political necessity, 00:15:50.580 --> 00:15:53.480 just as fighting Nazism was in the 1940s. And 00:15:53.480 --> 00:15:55.740 this is where he loses the left. Because the 00:15:55.740 --> 00:15:57.580 narrative on the left at the time was largely 00:15:57.580 --> 00:15:59.740 we need to understand why they hate us or this 00:15:59.740 --> 00:16:02.259 is blowback for American foreign policy. Correct. 00:16:02.720 --> 00:16:06.059 And Hitchens had zero patience for that. Zero. 00:16:06.580 --> 00:16:10.320 He viewed that as moral relativism, as masochism. 00:16:10.519 --> 00:16:13.019 He thought the left had gone soft and had lost 00:16:13.019 --> 00:16:15.779 its anti -fascist spine. And this leads to the 00:16:15.779 --> 00:16:18.980 break with the nation. The big one. He famously 00:16:18.980 --> 00:16:21.019 resigned because the editors there suggested 00:16:21.019 --> 00:16:24.169 that John Ashcroft Bush's attorney general. was 00:16:24.169 --> 00:16:26.490 a bigger threat to American liberty than Osama 00:16:26.490 --> 00:16:29.429 bin Laden. Wow. And Hitchens just thought that 00:16:29.429 --> 00:16:31.769 was deranged. He thought it showed a complete 00:16:31.769 --> 00:16:34.210 lack of proportion. So he walked. And he walks 00:16:34.210 --> 00:16:36.669 right into the camp of the hawks. He becomes 00:16:36.669 --> 00:16:39.389 the most articulate, ferocious public defender 00:16:39.389 --> 00:16:42.029 of the Iraq war. He wants Saddam gone. He did. 00:16:42.509 --> 00:16:44.309 And it wasn't an abstract thing for him. He had 00:16:44.309 --> 00:16:46.669 been to Iraq. He had visited Halabja where Saddam 00:16:46.669 --> 00:16:48.789 had gassed the Kurds. He had seen the fear in 00:16:48.789 --> 00:16:51.690 people's eyes. So for him, it wasn't about WMDs. 00:16:51.730 --> 00:16:54.590 The WMDs were a secondary issue for him. He supported 00:16:54.590 --> 00:16:56.690 the invasion, not because he loved George W. 00:16:56.769 --> 00:16:58.970 Bush. He actually thought Bush was intellectually 00:16:58.970 --> 00:17:01.149 incurious and kind of a simpleton. He wasn't 00:17:01.149 --> 00:17:03.889 a fan. Not at all. But he believed removing a 00:17:03.889 --> 00:17:06.549 genocidal dictator was a moral imperative. He 00:17:06.549 --> 00:17:09.589 was a regime change guy on humanitarian grounds. 00:17:10.240 --> 00:17:12.279 And this is when people started calling him a 00:17:12.279 --> 00:17:16.079 neocon, a neoconservative. And he hated that 00:17:16.079 --> 00:17:19.319 label, mostly. Sometimes he'd play with it, ironically, 00:17:19.460 --> 00:17:21.819 but he always rejected it. He told the BBC in 00:17:21.819 --> 00:17:25.460 2010, I still think like a Marxist. What on earth 00:17:25.460 --> 00:17:28.119 did he mean by that? What he meant was he still 00:17:28.119 --> 00:17:31.420 believed in history as a struggle between progress 00:17:31.420 --> 00:17:34.559 and reaction. He still believed in secularism. 00:17:34.619 --> 00:17:37.400 He still believed in internationalism. He still 00:17:37.400 --> 00:17:39.819 believed in the Enlightenment. He just felt at 00:17:39.819 --> 00:17:42.119 that moment in history, the American military 00:17:42.119 --> 00:17:44.880 was the only force capable of protecting those 00:17:44.880 --> 00:17:47.819 values against theocrats. So he saw it as a tool. 00:17:47.960 --> 00:17:50.559 A blunt and imperfect tool, but the only one 00:17:50.559 --> 00:17:52.750 available. It's interesting to look at his specific 00:17:52.750 --> 00:17:55.990 political positions during this neocon phase 00:17:55.990 --> 00:17:58.589 because they really don't fit the Republican 00:17:58.589 --> 00:18:00.710 mold at all. I mean, let's take waterboarding. 00:18:00.789 --> 00:18:02.690 This is a famous story. Oh, this is Hitchens 00:18:02.690 --> 00:18:05.009 at his journalistic best. The Bush administration 00:18:05.009 --> 00:18:07.009 was arguing that waterboarding wasn't torture. 00:18:07.190 --> 00:18:10.910 It was just enhanced interrogation. A nice little 00:18:10.910 --> 00:18:13.869 euphemism. Hitchens being Hitchens said, well, 00:18:13.910 --> 00:18:16.470 I can't write about this unless I know. He had 00:18:16.470 --> 00:18:19.109 to experience it. So he commissioned Vanity Fair 00:18:19.109 --> 00:18:21.930 to set it up. You're kidding. Not at all. He 00:18:21.930 --> 00:18:24.569 went to a facility, signed the waivers, and had 00:18:24.569 --> 00:18:27.130 trained men strap him to a board, put a cloth 00:18:27.130 --> 00:18:29.750 over his face, and pour water into his nose and 00:18:29.750 --> 00:18:32.210 throat. How long did he last? A few seconds. 00:18:32.809 --> 00:18:35.549 He dropped the dead man's handle, the signal 00:18:35.549 --> 00:18:39.019 to stop. Almost instantly. Wow. He wrote a harrowing 00:18:39.019 --> 00:18:41.819 essay about it. He described the insoluble panic 00:18:41.819 --> 00:18:44.559 of drowning, the feeling that you are absolutely 00:18:44.559 --> 00:18:47.640 certainly going to die. And his conclusion was 00:18:47.640 --> 00:18:50.599 blunt. He wrote, believe me, it's torture. And 00:18:50.599 --> 00:18:52.299 he turned against the administration on that 00:18:52.299 --> 00:18:55.019 issue immediately. Immediately and loudly. A 00:18:55.019 --> 00:18:57.460 true partisan would have made excuses or defended 00:18:57.460 --> 00:18:59.960 it. Hitchens experienced the truth and reported 00:18:59.960 --> 00:19:02.220 it, period. And he had other views that didn't 00:19:02.220 --> 00:19:04.759 fit. He supported the European Union. Huge supporter. 00:19:04.980 --> 00:19:07.940 He despised nationalism. He thought Euroscepticism, 00:19:08.259 --> 00:19:10.819 what eventually became Brexit, was just a petty 00:19:10.819 --> 00:19:13.720 British version of small -minded fascism. He 00:19:13.720 --> 00:19:16.039 wanted bigger unions, not smaller tribes. And 00:19:16.039 --> 00:19:18.680 then you have abortion, which is maybe the most 00:19:18.680 --> 00:19:22.680 complicated of all. It is so complex. He wasn't 00:19:22.680 --> 00:19:25.220 a pro -life marcher. He didn't fit in with the 00:19:25.220 --> 00:19:28.980 religious right at all. But he was, in his words, 00:19:29.339 --> 00:19:32.140 ethically opposed to abortion in most instances. 00:19:32.400 --> 00:19:35.640 Why? He believed in fetal personhood. He was 00:19:35.640 --> 00:19:37.720 convinced by the science that from conception 00:19:37.720 --> 00:19:40.579 the unborn child is a unique living human being. 00:19:40.819 --> 00:19:43.400 He found the pro -choice argument that it was 00:19:43.400 --> 00:19:45.700 just a clump of cells to be unscientific and 00:19:45.700 --> 00:19:47.839 evasive. But he didn't want to criminalize it. 00:19:47.940 --> 00:19:50.549 This is the nuance. He was very wary of that. 00:19:50.670 --> 00:19:52.750 He didn't necessarily want to throw women in 00:19:52.750 --> 00:19:55.309 jail. He wanted a cultural shift where society 00:19:55.309 --> 00:19:57.609 recognized the gravity of the act. He talked 00:19:57.609 --> 00:20:00.369 about a new compact where society would do everything 00:20:00.369 --> 00:20:02.950 possible to support women so that abortion was 00:20:02.950 --> 00:20:05.140 never the only option. It was a position that 00:20:05.140 --> 00:20:07.539 satisfied absolutely no one. Which is classic 00:20:07.539 --> 00:20:09.000 Hitchens. He's standing in the middle of the 00:20:09.000 --> 00:20:11.220 road yelling at cars coming from both directions. 00:20:11.480 --> 00:20:13.960 It really is. But if politics was one battlefield 00:20:13.960 --> 00:20:16.279 for him, he opened up a second front that was 00:20:16.279 --> 00:20:18.619 arguably even louder, even more controversial. 00:20:18.940 --> 00:20:22.079 The war on God. The anti -theist. Let's define 00:20:22.079 --> 00:20:24.839 that term. Most people say atheist. Hitchens 00:20:24.839 --> 00:20:27.599 insisted on anti -theist. What's the difference? 00:20:27.779 --> 00:20:30.059 It's a crucial distinction for him. It's a matter 00:20:30.059 --> 00:20:33.480 of desire. An atheist looks at the universe, 00:20:33.819 --> 00:20:38.019 sees no evidence for a God, and says, okay, I 00:20:38.019 --> 00:20:40.900 don't believe. It's a statement of non -belief. 00:20:41.000 --> 00:20:44.599 It's a neutral position almost. Exactly. An antitheist, 00:20:44.619 --> 00:20:47.759 in Hitchens' view, looks at the concept of God 00:20:47.759 --> 00:20:51.200 and says, I am glad there is no evidence. I am 00:20:51.200 --> 00:20:53.359 actively relieved that this is not true. He's 00:20:53.359 --> 00:20:57.019 relieved. Why? Because to Hitchens, the monotheistic 00:20:57.019 --> 00:21:00.039 God, the God of the Bible or the Koran, is the 00:21:00.039 --> 00:21:02.119 ultimate totalitarian. He called it a celestial 00:21:02.119 --> 00:21:04.140 dictator. I think he also called it a celestial 00:21:04.140 --> 00:21:06.480 North Korea. Yes, that was his favorite analogy. 00:21:06.680 --> 00:21:08.980 He'd say, imagine a country where you can never 00:21:08.980 --> 00:21:11.490 leave. where you are watched every minute of 00:21:11.490 --> 00:21:13.950 every day, even in your dreams, where you are 00:21:13.950 --> 00:21:16.130 convicted of thought crimes, wishing for your 00:21:16.130 --> 00:21:18.730 neighbor's wife, envying their goods, and the 00:21:18.730 --> 00:21:22.349 worst part, in a human North Korea, at least 00:21:22.349 --> 00:21:25.789 you can die and escape the tyranny. In the Celestial 00:21:25.789 --> 00:21:28.460 One, The surveillance and the torture continue 00:21:28.460 --> 00:21:31.599 forever after death. He found the idea of a heavenly 00:21:31.599 --> 00:21:34.220 father to be grotesque. He didn't want a father. 00:21:34.299 --> 00:21:36.660 He wanted to be an emancipated adult. And he 00:21:36.660 --> 00:21:39.299 compiled all of this into his magnum opus on 00:21:39.299 --> 00:21:42.410 the subject, God is not great. How Religion Poisons 00:21:42.410 --> 00:21:45.529 Everything. Not a subtle title. No, not a title 00:21:45.529 --> 00:21:47.569 designed to make friends at a dinner party. It 00:21:47.569 --> 00:21:49.890 was a massive bestseller, though. And the argument 00:21:49.890 --> 00:21:52.509 was sweeping. He argued that religion is the 00:21:52.509 --> 00:21:55.289 source of our worst tribal instincts. It's violent. 00:21:55.369 --> 00:21:58.109 It's irrational. It's intolerant. It's allied 00:21:58.109 --> 00:22:00.650 to racism and sexism. And he didn't just pick 00:22:00.650 --> 00:22:03.390 on the easy targets like Islamic extremists. 00:22:03.589 --> 00:22:05.970 No, he went after everyone. He went after the 00:22:05.970 --> 00:22:08.170 Dalai Lama, calling him a hereditary king who 00:22:08.170 --> 00:22:10.730 rules a feudal theocracy. He went after Jews. 00:22:10.799 --> 00:22:12.960 Jewish fundamentalists in the West Bank. He went 00:22:12.960 --> 00:22:15.599 after Christian faith healers. No one was safe. 00:22:15.819 --> 00:22:17.599 And this is when he becomes known as one of the 00:22:17.599 --> 00:22:20.000 Four Horsemen. The rock stars of the New Atheist 00:22:20.000 --> 00:22:22.579 Movement. You had Hitchens, the journalist and 00:22:22.579 --> 00:22:25.240 brawler, Richard Dawkins, the biologist, Sam 00:22:25.240 --> 00:22:27.680 Harris, the neuroscientist, and Daniel Dennett, 00:22:27.759 --> 00:22:30.180 the philosopher. They famously met at Hitchens' 00:22:30.279 --> 00:22:34.180 apartment in D .C. for this long, boozy, unmoderated 00:22:34.180 --> 00:22:36.500 discussion that was filmed. Yes, the Four Horsemen 00:22:36.500 --> 00:22:38.460 discussion. It's on YouTube. I've seen clips 00:22:38.460 --> 00:22:42.200 of that. The dynamic is fascinating because Dawkins 00:22:42.200 --> 00:22:45.779 is this very proper, precise British scientist. 00:22:46.319 --> 00:22:49.940 Harris is very cerebral and meditative. Dennett 00:22:49.940 --> 00:22:52.059 is the careful philosopher. And then you have 00:22:52.059 --> 00:22:54.619 Hitchens who just wants to fight. He's the brawler 00:22:54.619 --> 00:22:56.730 of the group. He's the one who... Relishes the 00:22:56.730 --> 00:22:59.490 public combat. He loved the public debate. He 00:22:59.490 --> 00:23:01.609 would go into the Bible Belt, stand on a stage 00:23:01.609 --> 00:23:03.970 in front of a thousand hostile Christians, and 00:23:03.970 --> 00:23:06.390 somehow charm them while telling them their entire 00:23:06.390 --> 00:23:08.990 worldview was evil. He had this famous challenge 00:23:08.990 --> 00:23:10.789 he would issue to the audience. The Hitchens 00:23:10.789 --> 00:23:13.690 Challenge. He'd ask from the stage, name me one 00:23:13.690 --> 00:23:17.369 moral action performed by a believer that could 00:23:17.369 --> 00:23:19.829 not have been performed by a non -believer. And 00:23:19.829 --> 00:23:23.150 usually the room goes quiet. It does. Someone 00:23:23.150 --> 00:23:26.119 might shout, charity. And he'd say, atheists 00:23:26.119 --> 00:23:28.759 give to charity. Bill Gates is practically an 00:23:28.759 --> 00:23:31.519 atheist. Someone says, love thy neighbor. And 00:23:31.519 --> 00:23:33.980 he'd say, I can do that without a divine commandment. 00:23:34.059 --> 00:23:37.119 It's called empathy. But then he'd drop the second 00:23:37.119 --> 00:23:39.559 half of the challenge. The hammer, he'd say. 00:23:39.740 --> 00:23:42.519 Now name me a wicked action performed specifically 00:23:42.519 --> 00:23:45.079 because of religious faith. And then the floodgates 00:23:45.079 --> 00:23:49.279 open. Suicide bombings, genital mutilation, burning 00:23:49.279 --> 00:23:51.859 witches, the Inquisition. withholding medical 00:23:51.859 --> 00:23:53.960 care from a sick child because it's God's will. 00:23:54.119 --> 00:23:56.180 He argued that while good people do good things 00:23:56.180 --> 00:23:59.000 and bad people do bad things, for a good person 00:23:59.000 --> 00:24:01.920 to do a truly wicked thing, that takes religion. 00:24:02.220 --> 00:24:05.200 He even took this to the very top. He debated 00:24:05.200 --> 00:24:07.640 Tony Blair. The former prime minister of the 00:24:07.640 --> 00:24:09.859 United Kingdom. After Blair had left office, 00:24:10.099 --> 00:24:12.779 they cacked a huge concert hall in Toronto. And 00:24:12.779 --> 00:24:15.099 the topic? The resolution was, be it resolved, 00:24:15.500 --> 00:24:18.759 religion is a force for good in the world. Blair, 00:24:18.880 --> 00:24:21.200 who is a very skilled debater and a devout Catholic, 00:24:21.500 --> 00:24:23.799 argued for the community aspect, the charity, 00:24:23.859 --> 00:24:25.799 the comfort it provides. And Hitchens. Hitchens 00:24:25.799 --> 00:24:27.960 just dismantled the entire history of the church. 00:24:28.119 --> 00:24:31.680 The Crusades, the persecution of Galileo, the 00:24:31.680 --> 00:24:34.680 silence during the Holocaust. At the end, the 00:24:34.680 --> 00:24:36.519 audience, which had been split at the beginning, 00:24:36.579 --> 00:24:40.200 voted. And Hitchens won. By a landslide. By a 00:24:40.200 --> 00:24:43.319 landslide. A writer defeated a world leader in 00:24:43.319 --> 00:24:45.940 a debate on God. It was a remarkable moment. 00:24:46.039 --> 00:24:49.480 It's staggering. But Hitchens didn't just attack 00:24:49.480 --> 00:24:53.160 abstract concepts like God. He was a true iconoclast. 00:24:53.400 --> 00:24:56.680 He liked to smash sacred cows. He loved it. And 00:24:56.680 --> 00:24:59.299 there is no cow in the 20th century more sacred 00:24:59.299 --> 00:25:01.480 than Mother Teresa. This is the one that always 00:25:01.480 --> 00:25:03.640 makes people gasp. You can criticize the Pope. 00:25:03.700 --> 00:25:05.900 You can criticize the president. But Mother Teresa, 00:25:06.000 --> 00:25:08.680 she's a saint, literally. The Catholic Church 00:25:08.680 --> 00:25:10.859 made her one. Not to Hitchens. He wrote a book 00:25:10.859 --> 00:25:13.099 about her called The Missionary Position. A double 00:25:13.099 --> 00:25:15.400 entendre that he was very, very proud of. And 00:25:15.400 --> 00:25:18.380 he called her a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and 00:25:18.380 --> 00:25:21.839 a fraud. What on earth was his case? Because 00:25:21.839 --> 00:25:25.099 that sounds insane to most people. His case was 00:25:25.099 --> 00:25:28.079 based on her own theology of suffering. He actually 00:25:28.079 --> 00:25:31.039 went to her clinics in Calcutta. He expected 00:25:31.039 --> 00:25:34.230 to see a modern, clean hospital. given the millions 00:25:34.230 --> 00:25:36.529 she received in donations. But that's not what 00:25:36.529 --> 00:25:39.650 he found. Not even close. He found a place with 00:25:39.650 --> 00:25:42.470 very little actual medical care, where needles 00:25:42.470 --> 00:25:45.730 were rinsed in cold water and reused, where people 00:25:45.730 --> 00:25:48.269 with treatable diseases were left to die, and 00:25:48.269 --> 00:25:50.269 where pain relief was almost non -existent. But 00:25:50.269 --> 00:25:53.470 she had all that money. Exactly. And Hitchens 00:25:53.470 --> 00:25:56.470 asked, where is the money going? It wasn't going 00:25:56.470 --> 00:25:58.769 to buy morphine or build better facilities. It 00:25:58.769 --> 00:26:00.750 was going to build convents to spread the religious 00:26:00.750 --> 00:26:03.460 order. He argued that Mother Teresa believed 00:26:03.460 --> 00:26:05.920 suffering was a gift from God, that seeing the 00:26:05.920 --> 00:26:08.920 poor suffer was like kissing Jesus on the cross. 00:26:09.240 --> 00:26:12.059 So she wasn't trying to alleviate poverty. Hitchens 00:26:12.059 --> 00:26:14.119 argued she wasn't a friend of the poor, she was 00:26:14.119 --> 00:26:16.900 a friend of poverty. She celebrated it. He found 00:26:16.900 --> 00:26:19.240 that morally repulsive. He also pointed out her 00:26:19.240 --> 00:26:22.180 friends. Right. She took money from the brutal 00:26:22.180 --> 00:26:25.400 Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti. She took over 00:26:25.400 --> 00:26:27.839 a million dollars from Charles Keating, the American 00:26:27.839 --> 00:26:29.940 fraudster of the Savings and Loans scandal. I 00:26:29.940 --> 00:26:32.359 remember that. And when Keating was on trial, 00:26:32.539 --> 00:26:36.140 she wrote a letter to the judge asking for leniency 00:26:36.140 --> 00:26:39.259 for her friend. Hitches wrote a reply letter 00:26:39.259 --> 00:26:42.299 to her, published it, and said, if you want to 00:26:42.299 --> 00:26:44.799 help, give the stolen money back to the people 00:26:44.799 --> 00:26:47.940 Keating defrauded. Did she? She never replied. 00:26:48.200 --> 00:26:50.799 The money was never returned. It's a devastating 00:26:50.799 --> 00:26:53.319 critique. And then there's the other major figure 00:26:53.319 --> 00:26:56.660 he turned on, Bill Clinton. This was personal. 00:26:57.519 --> 00:26:59.779 Hitchens and the Clintons moved in similar circles 00:26:59.779 --> 00:27:02.359 in Washington. But when the Monica Lewinsky scandal 00:27:02.359 --> 00:27:06.039 broke, Hitchens lost his mind. He despised Clinton's 00:27:06.039 --> 00:27:07.839 triangulation, the way he would say anything 00:27:07.839 --> 00:27:10.200 to stay in power. He wrote the book No One Left 00:27:10.200 --> 00:27:12.599 to Lie To? He did. But the real breaking point, 00:27:12.660 --> 00:27:14.480 the thing that made him a pariah, was the betrayal 00:27:14.480 --> 00:27:17.039 of Sidney Blumenthal. Sidney Blumenthal was a 00:27:17.039 --> 00:27:19.359 top aide to Clinton and, at the time, Hitchens' 00:27:19.440 --> 00:27:22.750 friend. Yes. They were having lunch. And Blumenthal 00:27:22.750 --> 00:27:24.829 told Hitchens privately that the White House 00:27:24.829 --> 00:27:27.730 strategy was to paint Monica Lewinsky as a stalker, 00:27:27.769 --> 00:27:30.410 to discredit her mental health and smear her. 00:27:30.549 --> 00:27:33.210 Which is a pretty gross smear campaign. It is. 00:27:33.349 --> 00:27:35.809 A few months later, during the impeachment trial, 00:27:36.049 --> 00:27:38.369 Blumenthal denied under oath that the White House 00:27:38.369 --> 00:27:40.890 was spreading these rumors. So he lied to Congress. 00:27:41.170 --> 00:27:43.789 He perjured himself. And Hitchens was watching 00:27:43.789 --> 00:27:46.410 at home on C -SPAN. He realized his friend was 00:27:46.410 --> 00:27:49.460 lying to the country. So... Hitchens did the 00:27:49.460 --> 00:27:52.259 unthinkable. He contacted the prosecutors and 00:27:52.259 --> 00:27:54.819 submitted a sworn affidavit contradicting his 00:27:54.819 --> 00:27:57.960 friend. He snitched. The D .C. social scene exploded. 00:27:58.299 --> 00:28:01.099 They called him a snitch, a traitor, a Judas. 00:28:01.440 --> 00:28:03.839 He lost so many friends. The Washington Post 00:28:03.839 --> 00:28:06.099 barred him from parties. But he stood by it. 00:28:06.400 --> 00:28:08.759 Absolutely. He maintained that truth is more 00:28:08.759 --> 00:28:11.160 important than friendship. He said he lied under 00:28:11.160 --> 00:28:13.160 oath. I will not let a friend get away with that. 00:28:13.359 --> 00:28:16.319 It shows how rigid his moral code was. It was 00:28:16.319 --> 00:28:19.059 absolute. It's that same rigidity we see in his 00:28:19.059 --> 00:28:21.579 defense of free speech. If there is one thing 00:28:21.579 --> 00:28:23.599 Hitchens is a saint of, it's the First Amendment. 00:28:23.940 --> 00:28:25.960 He was a free speech absolutist. There was no 00:28:25.960 --> 00:28:41.559 but. He famously said, That really needs to be 00:28:41.559 --> 00:28:44.460 on a t -shirt. It was his North Star. And this 00:28:44.460 --> 00:28:46.809 really came to a head with Salman Rushdie. The 00:28:46.809 --> 00:28:51.309 fatwa. 1989. Yes. The Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran 00:28:51.309 --> 00:28:53.869 issued a death sentence against the novelist 00:28:53.869 --> 00:28:56.589 Salman Rushdie for writing the book The Satanic 00:28:56.589 --> 00:28:59.109 Verses. It was a terrifying moment. Books were 00:28:59.109 --> 00:29:01.470 burned. Translators were stabbed to death. And 00:29:01.470 --> 00:29:03.849 a lot of people on the left, they hesitated. 00:29:03.950 --> 00:29:06.230 They did. You heard people saying, well, Rushdie 00:29:06.230 --> 00:29:08.829 shouldn't have insulted Islam. Or he knew what 00:29:08.829 --> 00:29:10.690 he was doing. He was being provocative. Blame 00:29:10.690 --> 00:29:14.089 the victim argument. Exactly. Hitchens went nuclear 00:29:14.089 --> 00:29:16.549 on those people. He was ashamed of his colleagues. 00:29:16.750 --> 00:29:19.890 He saw this as a foreign theocrat ordering the 00:29:19.890 --> 00:29:22.390 murder of a British citizen for the crime of 00:29:22.390 --> 00:29:24.269 writing a book. It was an attack on the very 00:29:24.269 --> 00:29:27.390 idea of literature. It was an attack on the Enlightenment. 00:29:27.710 --> 00:29:30.990 He became Rushdie's fiercest defender. He organized 00:29:30.990 --> 00:29:34.109 readings. He went on TV constantly. He argued 00:29:34.109 --> 00:29:37.650 that there is no right not to be offended. He 00:29:37.650 --> 00:29:39.829 believed that if you allow people to be silenced 00:29:39.829 --> 00:29:42.799 because someone, somewhere, claims to be offended, 00:29:43.019 --> 00:29:45.400 you have given up the entire game of civilization. 00:29:45.880 --> 00:29:48.759 It connects back to the anti -totalitarianism. 00:29:48.799 --> 00:29:52.000 You cannot allow a cleric in Tehran to decide 00:29:52.000 --> 00:29:54.759 what can be published in London. Precisely. It 00:29:54.759 --> 00:29:56.859 was the same fight, different battlefield. We've 00:29:56.859 --> 00:29:58.900 talked a lot about the fighter, the debater, 00:29:59.019 --> 00:30:02.299 the polemicist. But what about the man? Because 00:30:02.299 --> 00:30:04.700 for all this conflict, by all accounts, he seemed 00:30:04.700 --> 00:30:07.039 to have a lot of fun. He lived incredibly hard. 00:30:07.450 --> 00:30:09.910 He was a creature of the night. He smoked Rothman 00:30:09.910 --> 00:30:12.529 cigarettes constantly, one after another. He 00:30:12.529 --> 00:30:14.690 drank an amount of Johnny Walker Black Label 00:30:14.690 --> 00:30:17.970 that, as he put it, would stun a mule. He had 00:30:17.970 --> 00:30:19.690 that famous quote about his writing process. 00:30:20.049 --> 00:30:22.089 I burn the candle at both ends. It gives a lovely 00:30:22.089 --> 00:30:25.670 light. But also, I write when I drink. He believed 00:30:25.670 --> 00:30:28.190 the alcohol was fuel for the prose. I can't imagine 00:30:28.190 --> 00:30:30.559 that. Me neither. He would host these dinner 00:30:30.559 --> 00:30:32.740 parties that went until 4 a .m. arguing about 00:30:32.740 --> 00:30:34.920 poetry and politics, and then he would wake up 00:30:34.920 --> 00:30:37.500 at 8 a .m. and file a perfectly written 1 ,000 00:30:37.500 --> 00:30:40.140 -word column. He had a constitution of steel. 00:30:40.519 --> 00:30:43.339 Until, of course, he didn't. Yes. You can't burn 00:30:43.339 --> 00:30:45.299 the candle at both ends with a blowtorch forever. 00:30:45.480 --> 00:30:47.700 We have to talk about the brother, Peter, briefly, 00:30:47.759 --> 00:30:51.019 too, because that relationship feels so central 00:30:51.019 --> 00:30:54.740 to the man behind the microphone. It's the Cain 00:30:54.740 --> 00:30:56.960 and Abel of British journalism. It really is. 00:30:57.299 --> 00:31:00.009 Peter Hitchens is two years younger. He's also 00:31:00.009 --> 00:31:02.789 a brilliant pugnacious writer, but he's a deep 00:31:02.789 --> 00:31:05.869 conservative and a devout Anglican Christian. 00:31:06.130 --> 00:31:08.230 Complete opposites. Polar opposites. And they 00:31:08.230 --> 00:31:10.009 stopped speaking in 2001. They had a massive 00:31:10.009 --> 00:31:12.549 falling out. Peter wrote an article calling Christopher 00:31:12.549 --> 00:31:14.869 a Stalinist for his support of the Iraq war. 00:31:15.230 --> 00:31:18.130 Ouch. That's a low blow for an old Trotskyist. 00:31:18.250 --> 00:31:21.059 The lowest. They didn't speak for years. Eventually 00:31:21.059 --> 00:31:22.900 they reconciled, but they would still debate 00:31:22.900 --> 00:31:25.299 on stage. And it was fascinating to watch because 00:31:25.299 --> 00:31:27.440 they had the same voice, the same cadence, the 00:31:27.440 --> 00:31:29.880 same wit, but they reached completely opposite 00:31:29.880 --> 00:31:31.900 conclusions on everything. What did Christopher 00:31:31.900 --> 00:31:33.960 say was the difference? Someone asked him that 00:31:33.960 --> 00:31:37.380 once, and he said, quite simply, that the only 00:31:37.380 --> 00:31:39.640 real difference between them was the belief in 00:31:39.640 --> 00:31:41.900 God. He thought all of Peter's other political 00:31:41.900 --> 00:31:44.420 views flowed from that one belief. Which brings 00:31:44.420 --> 00:31:49.410 us to the end, to mortality. In June 2010, Hitchens 00:31:49.410 --> 00:31:52.549 is on a book tour for his memoir, Hitch 22. He's 00:31:52.549 --> 00:31:55.069 at the absolute top of his game, and then he 00:31:55.069 --> 00:31:57.589 wakes up in a hotel room in New York. He described 00:31:57.589 --> 00:32:00.009 the feeling as being chained to his own corpse. 00:32:00.470 --> 00:32:03.349 He couldn't breathe. He knew something was terribly, 00:32:03.349 --> 00:32:06.450 terribly wrong. It was esophageal cancer. Stage 00:32:06.450 --> 00:32:09.109 four. And the irony was just cruel. It was the 00:32:09.109 --> 00:32:11.009 same cancer that had killed his father, the commander. 00:32:11.230 --> 00:32:14.109 Did he blame the lifestyle? He knew. He never 00:32:14.109 --> 00:32:16.900 said, why me? He said, why not me? He knew the 00:32:16.900 --> 00:32:18.680 cigarettes and the scotch had a price and the 00:32:18.680 --> 00:32:20.720 bill had come due. But he didn't retreat. He 00:32:20.720 --> 00:32:22.960 didn't go quietly into the night. He turned his 00:32:22.960 --> 00:32:26.039 dying into his final assignment. He did. He started 00:32:26.039 --> 00:32:28.380 writing a column for Vanity Fair called Topic 00:32:28.380 --> 00:32:31.160 of Cancer. He reported from the land of the sick, 00:32:31.240 --> 00:32:34.400 what he called Tumorville. And he was adamant 00:32:34.400 --> 00:32:36.900 about the language we use for illness. He hated 00:32:36.900 --> 00:32:40.079 when people said he was battling cancer. He loathed 00:32:40.079 --> 00:32:42.460 that. Why? He said, I'm not battling it. The 00:32:42.460 --> 00:32:45.119 cancer is inside me. It's fighting me and it's 00:32:45.119 --> 00:32:47.880 winning. He thought the war metaphors put the 00:32:47.880 --> 00:32:50.400 burden on the patient to be brave or to be a 00:32:50.400 --> 00:32:53.640 warrior. He wanted to be honest about the indignity, 00:32:53.640 --> 00:32:56.759 the loss of his voice, the pain. And he was treated 00:32:56.759 --> 00:32:58.859 by Francis Collins. This is another one of those 00:32:58.859 --> 00:33:01.880 incredible Hitchens paradoxes. Francis Collins, 00:33:01.960 --> 00:33:04.460 the director of the NIH, one of the top geneticists 00:33:04.460 --> 00:33:07.359 in the world, and also an evangelical christian 00:33:07.359 --> 00:33:09.599 a very devout one he wrote a book about his faith 00:33:09.599 --> 00:33:12.819 and he and hitchens became friends hitchens let 00:33:12.819 --> 00:33:15.660 collins sequence his genome to try experimental 00:33:15.660 --> 00:33:18.799 treatments how did that work hitchens respected 00:33:18.799 --> 00:33:22.119 the science he didn't respect collins faith but 00:33:22.119 --> 00:33:24.880 he respected the man and his intellect It showed 00:33:24.880 --> 00:33:27.279 that even at the end, he could separate the idea 00:33:27.279 --> 00:33:29.940 from the person. They could argue about God and 00:33:29.940 --> 00:33:32.319 then go back to analyzing his DNA. Now we have 00:33:32.319 --> 00:33:34.359 to address the rumor because whenever a famous 00:33:34.359 --> 00:33:36.559 atheist dies, there is this whisper campaign. 00:33:36.759 --> 00:33:39.680 Every single time. Did he recant? Did he find 00:33:39.680 --> 00:33:42.700 God at the end? A man named Larry Taunton wrote 00:33:42.700 --> 00:33:45.660 a book implying that Hitchens was flirting with 00:33:45.660 --> 00:33:49.279 Christianity in his final days. But Hitchens 00:33:49.279 --> 00:33:51.119 actually predicted this would happen. He knew 00:33:51.119 --> 00:33:53.220 it was coming. He called it. He wrote in his 00:33:53.220 --> 00:33:57.539 final book, Mortality, If I convert, it's because 00:33:57.539 --> 00:34:00.339 it's better that a believer dies than that an 00:34:00.339 --> 00:34:03.380 atheist does. He was warning us. What did he 00:34:03.380 --> 00:34:05.660 mean by that? He meant that the religious would 00:34:05.660 --> 00:34:07.720 claim his conversion as a victory no matter the 00:34:07.720 --> 00:34:10.239 circumstances. So he said if he starts talking 00:34:10.239 --> 00:34:12.679 about God on his deathbed, it's because the cancer 00:34:12.679 --> 00:34:15.099 has gone to his brain or the medication has made 00:34:15.099 --> 00:34:17.579 him delirious. He wanted it on the record that 00:34:17.579 --> 00:34:19.860 the sane, lucid Christopher Hitchens remained 00:34:19.860 --> 00:34:22.500 an atheist. And his close friends, like Richard 00:34:22.500 --> 00:34:24.599 Dawkins and David Frum, they all confirmed that. 00:34:24.699 --> 00:34:27.179 He was lucid until the end, and he was godless 00:34:27.179 --> 00:34:29.760 until the end. He died on December 15, 2011, 00:34:30.059 --> 00:34:33.219 at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. In his 00:34:33.219 --> 00:34:35.980 last words, recorded by his friend Andrew Sullivan, 00:34:36.179 --> 00:34:39.420 were haunting. Capitalism downfall. Capitalism 00:34:39.420 --> 00:34:41.059 downfall. What do you make of that? Was that 00:34:41.059 --> 00:34:43.300 the old Trotskyist coming back for one last curtain 00:34:43.300 --> 00:34:46.039 call? I think so. Or maybe he was just looking 00:34:46.039 --> 00:34:48.380 at the news on TV. But it fits him perfectly. 00:34:48.639 --> 00:34:50.599 He didn't go out whispering a prayer. He went 00:34:50.599 --> 00:34:52.659 out analyzing the geopolitical structure of the 00:34:52.659 --> 00:34:55.199 world. His body was failing, but his mind was 00:34:55.199 --> 00:34:57.659 still on the argument. So now, all these years 00:34:57.659 --> 00:35:01.139 later, what is the legacy? We don't really have 00:35:01.139 --> 00:35:03.659 anyone like him today. We don't. And that's the 00:35:03.659 --> 00:35:06.800 loss. Even his enemies respected his mind and 00:35:06.800 --> 00:35:09.260 his courage. Tony Blair called him a complete 00:35:09.260 --> 00:35:11.980 one -off. Dawkins called him a valiant fighter. 00:35:12.880 --> 00:35:15.519 There is now a Hitchens Prize given to writers 00:35:15.519 --> 00:35:17.880 who show that same commitment to free expression 00:35:17.880 --> 00:35:20.940 and truth, regardless of the consequences. It 00:35:20.940 --> 00:35:23.019 feels like today we are so siloed. You're either 00:35:23.019 --> 00:35:24.739 on the left or the right, and you have to buy 00:35:24.739 --> 00:35:27.340 the whole package. You have to agree with every 00:35:27.340 --> 00:35:29.739 single point. Hitchens reminds us that you can 00:35:29.739 --> 00:35:31.139 pick and choose. You can think for yourself. 00:35:31.340 --> 00:35:33.619 You can be a Marxist who supports the Iraq War. 00:35:33.699 --> 00:35:35.960 You can be a Jewish atheist. You can be a civil 00:35:35.960 --> 00:35:38.440 libertarian who defends the free speech of his 00:35:38.440 --> 00:35:42.239 own enemies. That's the lesson, I think. Hitchens 00:35:42.239 --> 00:35:44.900 believed that the search for truth, the argument 00:35:44.900 --> 00:35:47.440 itself, was more important than whatever conclusion 00:35:47.440 --> 00:35:50.440 you reached. He didn't want you to agree with 00:35:50.440 --> 00:35:53.820 him. He wanted you to think. He wanted to provoke 00:35:53.820 --> 00:35:56.739 you into sharpening your own arguments, into 00:35:56.739 --> 00:35:59.260 defending your own beliefs. And that's a good 00:35:59.260 --> 00:36:01.920 place to leave it. A final challenge for you 00:36:01.920 --> 00:36:04.920 listening right now, inspired by the Hitch. Are 00:36:04.920 --> 00:36:07.300 you willing to hold an opinion that makes you 00:36:07.300 --> 00:36:10.340 an outcast? An opinion that makes you the only 00:36:10.340 --> 00:36:12.989 one in the room. Exactly. An opinion that might 00:36:12.989 --> 00:36:15.429 lose you friends simply because you've looked 00:36:15.429 --> 00:36:18.010 at the evidence and believe it is true. And if 00:36:18.010 --> 00:36:21.130 you aren't, are you really thinking for yourself 00:36:21.130 --> 00:36:23.190 or are you just repeating what you've been told? 00:36:23.349 --> 00:36:25.570 That's a terrifying question. But he believed 00:36:25.570 --> 00:36:27.250 it's the only one that really matters. Thanks 00:36:27.250 --> 00:36:29.210 for diving deep with us. We'll see you next time.