Good-day humans, welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas, and it wasn't always safe

for the one and only Christopher Hitchens to express some of his more dangerous ideas.

It was frequently quite hazardous, but expressed them nonetheless he did, ideas like the idea

that one of the worst people ever to walk the face of the planet was Mother

Teresa, the idea that former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger ought to be behind bars

in the International Court of Criminal Justice.

These are ideas that he held so fervently he even wrote books about each of them.

In fact, there probably isn't a contrarian provocative idea

that would get you uninvited or kicked out of polite dinner parties on both sides of the

political aisle that Christopher Hitchens didn't at some point countenance. That's what made him so

beloved and so loathed. If you're not familiar with Hitch,

his books have been profoundly important on me. He was one of the most incredible fiery, passionate,

articulate defenders of reason and smaller liberalism, and indeed before that, socialism,

that we've had.

Letter to a young contrarian was an extraordinary book.

God is not great, is an extraordinary broadside against religion.

And so many of his speeches and debates on YouTube that you can look up just show this sparkling, fascinating mind.

Today's guest, Matt Johnson, has written a terrific book about Hitchens' impact on the left,

and I suppose how sorely missed he is after a premature death in today's culture war debates in

particular.

Matt, today's guest, writes of Hitchens in an article about him on the Bullwark, which is a companion to this book, that Hitchens embraced the battle as an end in itself, not only to refine his own arguments, but also because, as John Stuart Mill understood, the open exchange of ideas is the foundation

of civil society. Can you think of a sentence that better describes my aspirations than the

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