[URL unfurl="true"]https://capitalresearch.org/article/dinesh-dsouza-meets-his-critics-part-6/[/URL]
Summary: CRC president Scott Walter recently interviewed Dinesh D’Souza on Zoom. In their wide-ranging talk they discussed D’Souza’s current projects, the ideological legacy of Fascism and Nazism, white nationalism, and Christopher Hitchens.
Debating Christopher Hitchens
WALTER: Interesting. Well, let’s go all the way back to that same mid-80s era. After you left the White House, you came to AEI with Chris DeMuth, a great man. And you also became the editor-in-chief of Crisis Magazine, which is still published. And one of your early things you did involved that mutual friend of ours Christopher Hitchens. You did an interview with him, and you outed him in a way that may surprise some people. Can you tell us just a little bit about that?
D’SOUZA: This was an interview I published in Crisis with Hitchens about the issue of abortion or the so-called pro-life issue, and it was an article in which Hitchens sort of came out on the pro-life side. This had emerged in a somewhat casual conversation I had with Hitchens where he had confessed to having moral anxieties about abortion. I had asked him at the time to reconcile those with his atheist position because in general one would expect that an atheist wouldn’t care that much about the abortion issue or would be by and large on the pro-choice side.
And Hitchens responded in a very interesting way. He said that precisely because he was an atheist and because this life was as far as he was concerned the only life, he thought it made it a special crime, a special horror that that life would be terminated at the outset. In other words, if you think of this life as one second in a large expanse of eternity and then if you take an unborn child and let’s say terminate its life, but it goes let’s say from a Christian point of view straight to heaven, then arguably the child has a destiny, an eternal destiny that redeems the horror of abortion in the present. But for Hitchens, he said there is no such redemption. There’s only this life. This is the one chance that you get. And I thought, “Wow, I’ve never quite heard anyone argue from this position.”
So I convinced him to do a sort of dialog about it. And in the dialog, I expected him to wimp out on the issue of laws against abortion. In other words, to express a moral concern for the unborn, but then to say well nevertheless I don’t want to impose my views on others, or I don’t support legislation that would actually make people abide by all this. But he didn’t. He actually said, “No, I agree that at the end of the day we need to have laws that would regulate abortion.” He didn’t come out for an outright ban, but he came out for regulation. And he also came out for regulation at the federal level.
In other words, the idea is that if this is a life, it makes no sense—just as it made no sense under popular sovereignty for the Democrats in the 1850s to talk about “Let each community decide for itself if it wants slavery.” The reason that made no sense, as Lincoln pointed out, is because you cannot exercise choice to deny choice. You cannot invoke the right of choice to suppress the choices of others. And so similarly here, what Hitchens was saying is that you can’t make it a decentralized decision. You need to have a federal law that starts with the premise that life deserves protection, constitutional protection and federal protection.
So all of this was in the Crisis article, and it landed as a bit of a bombshell for the Left because they weren’t expecting this. They’re used to a high degree of ideological conformity on this issue because it is such an important issue for them. I was very proud of publishing that article. I think it speaks well to Hitchens that he was brave enough to do it. And by the way, he never backed away from it, even though many people pressed him to disavow the article. He never did later. So Hitchens was a man that even from some distance we would have to admire and for whom I always had genuine affection
WALTER: Yes, and I can’t help noticing that this would be a case where it’s worth comparing him to Richard Spencer, who is quite fond of abortion for understandable reasons given his gruesome racial ideology.
Well, one last question on good old Hitchens. You and he definitely had some disagreeing moments in debates over the general question of atheism and theism. What do you think are one or two of his best arguments against you and one or two of your favorite rejoinders to him?
