Peter Hitchens

The wicked Hitchens appears to have grown gills.

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“”Human rights do not exist. They are an invention, made out of pure wind.

—Peter Hitchens, 2022.

“”I can’t imagine what it’s like to have a sibling whom everyone adores when you’re the idiot brother everyone loathes, but I think Peter could well be able to weigh in on what that feels like.

—Matthew Perry.

Peter Hitchens (1951–) is an author and columnist for The Mail on Sunday, a British anti-progressive tabloid.

Simply put, Hitchens belongs to the hang 'em, flog 'em, the country is going to hell in a handcart school of British journalism that Fleet Street inflicts on its readership.

He is known for being a strong traditional conservative to the point where even the British Conservative Party (and particularly David Cameron) is considered too progressive, even going as far as to put them on the same level as the Socialist Workers Party. He was dismissive of UKIP, frequently denouncing them as a Dad's Army. His brother was the writer, atheist and skeptic Christopher Hitchens.

Early life

Ironically, Hitchens started his life (or at least his university life) as a member of the Trotskyist International Socialists, a forerunner of the Socialist Workers Party, saying that he "thought Marxism-Leninism had the answers to the problems of the world". He allegedly turned up late to a lecture declaring, "Sorry I'm late: I've been starting the revolution!" He is a great example of the quote "If a man is not a socialist by the time he is 20, he has no heart. If he is not a conservative by the time he is 40, he has no brain," even if a great many of the conservative utterances put the second conclusion in doubt. Hitchens became disillusioned with the left after visiting Warsaw Pact countries in the early 1980s as a journalist and finding what he saw at odds with what he was told as a member of the Labour Party.

Later life

He is the brother of the late post-Trotskyist Christopher Hitchens, who was known for his outspoken atheism (effectively disowning his brother for a time). Despite the friction between them, the two reconciled in later life and engaged in numerous public debates about religion together. When Christopher died, Peter wrote an affirming eulogy for him — despite their different views — titled "In Memoriam, my courageous brother".

Pet peeves

They say hating things is unhealthy. Hitchens tends not to agree... Some of Peter's pet hates are:

• Abortion
• Homosexuality
• Sex education and the teachers thereof: "State groomers are as bad as paedophiles" was the title of an October 2008 article. He also claims that it is the source of the "sexualisation of children," and has hinted that anyone who disagrees with that conclusion is effectively a paedophile.
• Birth control
• All politicians.
• Feminists
• Liberals and Leftists: "Every so often our new Marxoid ruling class make an exciting discovery. There's a long way to go (probably too long) before these smug, dogmatic dimwits realise that conservatives were right all along about everything. But we must always welcome even the smallest glint of intelligence among such unfortunate, delusional people."
• Unusually for a conservative, Margaret Thatcher, which means that, if he were an American, he may trash *gasp* Saint Reagan.
• "Warmists" - established scientific convention Global warming is happening.
• Winston Churchill- Nelson Mandela-, Barack Obama- and Princess Diana-worship, the latter two being "cults […] bereft of reason and hostile to facts" (Obama, he claims, is "the obedient servant of one of the most squalid and unshakeable political machines in America," as evidenced by "his sordid associates, his cowardly voting record, his astonishingly militant commitment to unrestricted abortion and his blundering trip to Africa.")
• The BBC (in fact television in general).
• Unlike most modern conservatives (who tend to pick and choose, and usually reserve out-and-out condemnation for hip-hop and forms influenced by it), all pop and rock music, in totality. He even implicated Engelbert Humperdinck in the Great Moral Decline of the 1960s. Many Mail readers who agree with most of his other views are out of sympathy with Hitchens on these issues. Ironically, though, many leftists would also sense the continuum he senses (which Richard Littlejohn and Jeremy Clarkson don't sense) between Led Zeppelin or the Rolling Stones and the modern British working-class appropriation of hip-hop — the difference, of course, is that they'd see it as a good thing.
• The loss of the British Empire
• "Green" issues
• Evolution
• Islam and Islamification
• Secularism and secularisation
• The British penal system
• Anything else he can blame on the left: "In Soviet Britain [for example], television watches YOU!" roadworks now seem to take five times as long as they used to. And when you come back to the country from abroad, it always takes ages to open the aircraft doors, which other countries manage in seconds. Does anyone know why these particular things have got worse?"
• Calls for nuclear disarmament
• For a long time, his brother (after a misunderstanding over a Marxist joke).
• Stephen Fry
• People who are smiling (?)
• Neoliberalism (no, seriously! He's even defended Jeremy Corbyn, although only to an extent)
• The metric system
• Decimalised currency
• The Good Friday Agreement
• Drugs, and the concept of addiction itself. He is on record as saying that the hundreds of scientists who can verify the existence of addiction are wrong purely because he personally doesn't understand it.
• GIFs on Twitter
• NOT RationalWiki (he even defends it against the other Wiki, from which he is life-banned, for being more honest in being biased against him.):

“”I find if very useful to see exactly how those who loathe me have managed to misconstrue and misrepresent my arguments while never wholly departing from a factual basis.

—Peter Hitchens

• Skimmed or semi-skimmed milk.
• The 'Special Relationship' between the UK and USA.
• The UK's Supreme Court
• Daylight savings time
• "Alleged comedian" Russell Brand (aka "The man in the hat")
• The reaction to the Coronavirus pandemic which he believes is rather foolish.
• Human rights
• His home country
• The TV series Sherlock, which he even blames for wrongful convictions.

Core beliefs

“”The left's real interests are moral, cultural, sexual and social. They lead to a powerful state. This is not because they actively set out to achieve one. It is because the left's ideas – by their nature – undermine conscience, self-restraint, deferred gratification, lifelong marriage and strong, indivisible families headed by authoritative fathers.

In a November 2007 column for The Mail on Sunday, Hitchens said that women who are raped should be denied anonymity, that he did not believe all "events now often depicted as 'rapes'" are "in fact rapes at all" and that many of these involved "men and women who have been engaged in a sexual relationship for some time" or who were "not specially chaste in their personal lives." He has also expressed the view that "some rapes are worse than others".

In his column, he has also expressed his view that a woman's place is in the home; that women should not have access to contraception such as the pill; that women should not have premarital sex and that women should not have the right to an abortion.

In September 2008, he accused the leader of the Conservative Party, David Cameron, of using "cheap tricks" by "exploiting" his disabled son Ivan, who suffered from cerebral palsy and a form of severe epilepsy and who later died, in order to "make us like him." In the same column, he dismissed ADHD as a "cult" with "no proof."

In a January 2009 column, Hitchens revealed that he does not believe that poverty exists in the United Kingdom but that it is a left-wing lie and that people in poverty suffer from "moral poverty" and are being punished because there is "an almost total absence of good examples in their lives" whilst the middle class are "better off because they are good." In the same column, he also supported an MP who called dyslexia a "lie," branding the belief in it a "cult" and anyone who suffers from it "the result of a colossal failure by our schools."

In February 2009, he again espoused his view that homosexuality is something that should be kept "in the bedroom." People are being "forced to say that we think homosexuality is a good thing, that homosexual couples are equal" and Hitchens does not believe "homosexual couples are just as good at bringing up children as the children's own grandparents." In his view, Britons are now "the subjects of some insane, sex-obsessed Stalinist state, compelled to wave our little rainbow flags as the 'Gay Pride' parade passes by." He has also repeated right-wing talking points about how public acceptance of gay people destroys traditional marriage. So, yeah, he's a homophobe. This actually makes his brother Christopher seem mild in comparison…

Hitchens has done much to fan the flames of vaccine hysteria, at one point ending every column for several months counting out the number of weeks that Gordon Brown (or was it Tony Blair? Or was it both?) had refused to tell him whether or not their children had received the MMR vaccine. Unbelievably, he still believes he was justified in taking Andrew Wakefield seriously and has spent much time in 2013 trying to justify himself on this front, without a moment's embarrassment or shame. On 29 September 2013, he came up with another not-as-bad-as justification for Wakefield's scaremongering in a column which generally resembled a grotesque self-parody; hysterical paranoia about the metric system and a smug, supercilious "joke" about Wales. He is right about the Blairites preferring David Cameron over the less neoliberal Ed Miliband, though.

Though rarely expressed in so many words, he has often shown a tendency to regard rural England (in which only a minority of the population has lived since the great expansion of the 19^th century) as inherently more English than urban England (even though England was the world leader in mass urbanisation). This probably has little to do with active racism; denying the Englishness of urban England is a historic tendency in English culture, as old as industrialisation itself, and probably the biggest reason why the Industrial Revolution was not followed by a complete constitutional revolution. The bias is deep-rooted and predates post-1945 immigration (which, with the partial exception of post-2004 Eastern European migration, has mainly affected the urban areas); while the immigration undoubtedly gave it a new lease of life in certain circles, it did not create it, and Hitchens appears to be more a romantic dreamer of a misty past than an active supporter of ethnic cleansing. It is, however, probable that he puts his "rural England more English than urban England" belief in code to avoid being accused of racism, though a case can be made against the view for other reasons; even if it isn't racist, there are different reasons why it is flawed and dubious.

In full stopped clock mode, he did oppose the Iraq War. He also claims to be "a lifelong trade unionist" who "favour[s] nationalisation of industry where it makes sense", especially the renationalisation of British railways, and has said that "While I'm not in favour of abandoning all nuclear weapons, I think Trident an absurdly elaborate and extravagant system."

Interview fiasco

In 2023, Hitchens sat down for an interview with podcaster Alex O'Connor in which the two would discuss drug decriminalization, secularism and the monarchy. However, during the interview Hitchens decided that they had discussed drugs for too long and maturely suggested they move on threw a bizarre tantrum for the next fifteen minutes wherein he accused O'Connor of luring him there on false pretences, declared that "I actively dislike you" and called him "rude, incompetent and extremely dishonest" and a "propagandist" before storming out of the room. He then took to social media to complain about how O'Connor "bored" him with "unoriginal" questions. This was not the only flareup, as Hitchens had previously called O'Connor stupid for comparing marijuana use to alcohol too many times. Evidently, Hitchens and Ben Shapiro have the same attitude towards interviews.

This incident also demonstrates Hitchens' inflated sense of self-importance. He made multiple references to his anti-drug book The War We Never Fought as if it was the single most important work ever written on the subject, as he has done in other interviews, and even suggested that its poor sales figures were because of a conspiracy to silence his enlightened views. When O'Connor said that he had read the book and still believed that drugs should be made legal, Hitchens immediately assumed that he must not have understood it (apparently believing his arguments are so persuasive that they are physically impossible to disagree with).

Books

Hitchens has written and published several books. Some of them have pretty scary blurbs, depending on who you ask.

• The Rage Against God

"An autobiographical and spiritual journey from atheism to faith in God through the power of reasoning. It states that faith is the best antidote to utopianism, encouraging men and women to act in the belief that there is a God and an ordered, purposeful universe, governed by an unalterable law."

• The Cameron Delusion

"The struggle between the main political parties has been reduced to an unpopularity contest, in which voters hold their noses and sigh as they trudge to the polls. The author explains how and why British politics has sunk to this dreary level. He also examines the Tory Party's record in government and opposition."

• Abolition of Liberty

"In this volume Peter Hitchens argues that the time has come to re-examine the criminal justice system root and branch — to cope with rising levels of violent crime, and to restore public faith in society's ability to defend itself."

• Monday Morning Blues

"The "Express's" most controversial columnist is well known for his disregard for fashionable opinion. This collection of columns and journalism provides a chance to enjoy (or confront) one of the greatest enemies of the modern left."

• Abolition of Britain

"Identifies various things that the author feels have gone wrong with Britain since the Second World War and makes the case for the 'many millions who feel that they have become foreigners in their own land and wish with each succeeding day that they could turn the clock back."