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David Brooks column has set twitter media peeps talking about, oh God, Hitchens again. And cancel culture. Oh God. So I'm reprinting my 2004 summary of Hitchens agonistes.  Just cause. Comrades one and all.... There's a rather genteel exchange between  Doug Ireland and Christopher Hitchens  in this week's LA Weekly. It begins, unpromisingly enough, with Ireland writing: "My old friend Christopher Hitchens will be in Los Angeles on Saturday, March 15, for a debate at the Wiltern Theater." The phrase "old friend" pops up with distressing frequency whenever anti-war media people start writing about Hitchens. It's the friendship that blinds them, perhaps, to the kind of figure he is. This kind of transplant from the left to the right is a familiar figure in times of violent reaction. In France in the thirties, Drieu de la Rochelle moved from a radical branch of the Communist party to Nazi sympathizer, leaving behind a similar trail of "old frien