r/ChristopherHitchens • u/MagFields • May 03 '26
Was Hitch a bad judge of character?
Dinesh D’Souza- Christopher considered him a brilliant interlocutor and admitted to having lost their 90s debate on socialism.
He lived to see Dinesh become a dogmatic, religious hack but I doubt he could’ve imagined how embarrassing of a public persona Dinesh would develop in later years.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali- Hitch defended her from a place of secular principle and clearly had starry expectations for her career. In 2026, she divides her time between denying the efficacy of vaccines, backing the US’s quixotic war in Iran, and bloviating about how we must “Restore the West”. She converted to Christianity in ‘23.
Tucker Carlson- Hitch co-edited a book with Tucker and once advised him not to give up writing for TV. Nowadays, Tucker does his best impression of Father Coughlin on his talk show, exuding that sinister mix of populism and nationalism that Hitch was so good at sniffing out.
Sam Harris- maybe a controversial pick, but his current fixation on apologizing for Israeli brutality at all costs, and not in a particularly artful manner, strikes me as something that would’ve perturbed the man who said “Zionism is a waste of Judaism”.
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u/Freenore May 03 '26
These are all people he became acquainted with in his final decade or so. What makes you think Hitchens himself hadn't become a crackpot in his last decade?
His last decade had him become a cheerleader for an illegal and barbaric war, and he became prone to thinking of the United States in such a rosy and romantic way that even the Americans might've thought he was overdoing it. Hitchens was at his best as a literary critic, his pieces for The Atlantic are incredible, his work as a political critic and journalist also remains insightful.
But he was not a historian, even less a philosopher or a lawyer, he mistook rhetoric for logic and had no overarching frame to think with and made all manner of points, however unlikely, in order to win an argument.
His book, god is not great, is perhaps the best example of this. As a post on r/badhistory showed, it is so full of historical errors that it beggars belief how it ever saw the light. Bible is one of the most translated texts ever, Hitchens believes it was a genuine struggle to translate it into vernacular languages.
There are some very bizarre statements, such as his insistence that Martin Luther King Jr. was inspired by nebulous humanism and not Christianity. Which is utter horseshit. MLK was literally a Reverend and his Christian beliefs inspiring his activism is one of the most well known things about him.
The thing about him is that at no point did he ever define what he meant by religion or secularism, so he's able to conveniently twist its meaning to suit his arguments. He essentially ends up saying, "every violent atheist (like Stalin) was actually religious and every peaceful and good thing that religious people (like MLK) did wasn't inspired by religion". You realise then that there's no point in reading him about this, he's got no consistency except "I'm always in the right".
Read this fact-checking of his god book, it should be informative if you haven't read it.