With Peter Hitchens trending for his, um, controversial claim that the science on which self-isolation is based is just “speculation” and that we should all go to the pub, I thought I’d take a look at some of Hitchens Minor’s greatest hits. Feel free to contribute more.

1) An “error-riddled” booklet arguing that the UK was wrong to go to war with Hitler and that Hitler won the war anyway because the EU https://www.newstatesman.com/Peter-Hitchens-Phoney-Victory-World-War-II-Delusion @RichardEvans36 @NewStatesman

2) An inability to understand how UN investigations work leading him to be credulous towards a series of ridiculous conspiracy theories exonerating the Syrian regime from its brutal war crimes
https://al-bab.com/blog/2018/09/peter-hitchens-and-imaginary-battle-over-chemical-weapons-reports @Brian_Whit

3) He scorned Syrians & chemical weapons exports on Twitter for lacking his superior knowledge — then it turned out he didn’t know where the chemical weapons attack was. (Khan Sheikhoun is in Idlib, making his tweet quite funny.)

4) Another body of science he thinks is junk is that which evidences human-caused climate change

5) So if climate change and the Corona Virus don’t pose an existential danger to Britain, what does?

Cannabis.

I’m sure you’ve got your own examples. Here’s a thought: imagine being the bar staff if everybody is self-isolating except for Peter Hitchens’ readers & Brendan O’Neill’s and you’ve got to go to work serving them and listening to their brave dissenting opinions...

By the way, maybe at some point I’ll finish this thread about how believing in one conspiracy theory seems to make you more likely to believe in another. https://twitter.com/bobfrombrockley/status/1238911314099134466

Hitchens update 1/3: At the time of year, PH traditionally uses his column & blog to tell us again how triggered he is by the politically correct madness that is British Summer Time; we just have to indulge his harmless rage. 2020, and his contrarianism matters a little more:

2/3 Today’s piece exhibits PH’s fundamental scientific illiteracy. First, he blurs together different teams at Imperial, collapsing an epidemiological study w/ an engineer’s modelling. Second, he can’t (or pretends not to) grasp that predictions change *as our behaviour changes*.

3/3 and PH shows too he never read the Imperial study he attacked. It already gave a <20,000 scenario *if* measures were taken to flatten the curve: the 20,000 wasn’t a revision but a clarification. (The 5,700 figure is from a different source, and has already been withdrawn.)

What part of the name and profile of “Wide Awake Goy” did Peter Hitchens look at and think “This is someone I should engage with on Twitter”? The Venn diagram overlap between Hitchens fans, antisemites, Syria chemical weapons deniers and COVID19 skeptics is a pretty big one.