Hitch vs Chomsky is something from another era, but I agree with the point Barty makes that their style of contention and presentation is at the root of the new online culture wars. I’ve always thought that you could find a fine thread running from Orwell’s Tribune column to Hitchens’ Nation column to Johan Hari’s Independent column to Owen Jones’ Guardian column. A declining style that attempts to match critical rhetoric with political commitment, but eventually just devolves into a form of self-fashioning and opinion peddling. The style got increasingly shrill in the 2000s and Hitchens had a large role to play in this, but the template and the emotional pitch added to the youth of its primary exponents now adds an extra dimension of hysteria. Also, the expansion of media outlets and their relative inability to offer any secure employment or even pay people properly has created the situation where young writers have to desperately promote themselves on social media in order to secure work. This has simply added grift to hysteria.