Our Ronin has certainly moved quite a lot of paper during this Dylanesque Never Ending Tour for god Is Not Great of his, an entire rainforest's worth in fact. And partnering up with other traveling mountebanks on occasion, like Dinesh D'Souza, has been instrumental in this. These joint book-sales of theirs, er, I mean these epic philosophical debates in the tradition of Lincoln and Douglas, have undoubtedly synergized, like two merging corporations, his book promotions with a great marketing gimmick, helping Hitch strike a bonanza of sales. And even more ominously, as our Popinjay lusts after glory more than riches, The Book Tour That Knows No End is having the alarming effect of planting Hitchens' vile name in article after article in the press on the New Atheism, to the point of maddening cliche. "The New Atheism is on the rise, authors like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, are... blah blah blah" etc.. etc. You know the story. Nearly every New Atheism article nowadays has to have the obligatory Hitchens reference.

Yes, with a little luck, Hitchens is on route to becoming the next Madalyn Murray O'Hair.

For earnest Atheists out there this should be our ultimate nightmare come to life, because, amongst other reasons, Hitchens as an atheist is a total fraud and in fact an outright agent of Abrahamism because of his collaboration with Christianist Republicans, America's Party Of God, his apologetics for them, and his advocacy of polices that are augmenting religion, like America's terrifying Overseas Contingency Operations (tremble at the mere mention of that euphemism!). Hitchens is analogous to Russian Orthodox clerics who decided during World War II to collaborate with the atheistic Soviet Union, a government that was actively and brutally repressing religion.

Chris' little book tour does not make up for this.

This April, in the latest episode in a whole franchise of sequels that even Hollywood executives would find offensive, D'Souza and Hitchens "crossed swords" once again, as D'Souza put it. Another apt analogy from one of Hitchens' partners, er, arch-adversaries. You can find the whole spiel on this gentleman's Youtube channel.



The Hitchens-D'Souza debates have become so repetitive, stale, hackneyed, and just plain disappointing, as they've consisted of almost nothing new whatsoever each time, that they leave one feeling an acute case of deja vu afterwords--yet the duo still are shamelessly performing these dog and pony shows, and there's even another one lined up for September.

In this week's debate, the demagogic D'Souza is admittedly infotaining, and there is a moment or two where he almost shows signs of potentially having something interesting to say. For instance, in his opening statement he argues that Africa, China, Korea, Brazil, and much of the Global South, are experiencing a massive resurgence of religion, particularly Christianity, so to the contrary, Christendom is not at a nadir, but a zenith.

D'Souza's contention here, while specious, at least has some substance to it, and the point is significant enough to warrant a response from the Atheist side. But does Hitchens even bother to refute it, let alone address it? Of course not. Hitchens always ducks any tough questions that are thrown at him, he usually just quickly changes the subject to belt out his usual boilerplate, or outright ignores them. How many debates have we had to suffer through with Hitchens just standing there and tacitly conceding some of D'Souza's most overreaching arguments? One would think that this would be like shooting fish in a barrel given that pretty much all of D'Souza's assertions are ballyhoo, red herrings and other types of fish stories, like D'Souza's ridiculous conceit that he's making a case for Christianity on purely rational grounds (as if one could make a case for the Resurrection without requiring faith).

Alas, our Popinjay is too busy showering all sorts of ludicrous praise upon the middling D'Souza to actually bother refuting his arguments. "Ingenious!" the Hitch coos repeatedly throughout the debate. "I can almost see why people hold it when I hear you talk!" purrs Hitchens after D'Souza makes some lame apologetic. "The best debater on any subject I've ever encountered!" the Popinjay squawks.

I think I'm probably not the only one out there who is getting sick to the stomach listening to these two slobber all over each other, to an extent that is truly worthy of the term ad nauseum.

Yes, the Preening Popinjay seems to be swooning over the demagogic D'Souza. Hell, maybe D'Souza is slowly converting Chris to Christianity, just like how he allegedly converted Hitchens to capitalism. Given how erratic and all over the map our boy is, who knows, maybe he will go God on us. He certainly does have that "can't beat 'em, join 'em" mentality, and a predilection for abruptly taking the diametrical opposite to his current view from time to time.

We wish D'Souza the best of luck on this. He can have his Hitchens. Chris is a cancer that is insidiously metastasizing throughout the Atheist movement and poisoning it from within, so he's all D'Souza's, if it was up to me.