Transcript of remarks delivered at a celebration of Alexander Cockburn in Brooklyn earlier this month.

I’m honored to have been invited to speak here. But seeing as how everyone else is either a relative of Alexander’s or a personal friend, I’d like to talk about what his writing meant to someone who never met or corresponded with the man as well as someone who, as a dreaded Millennial, arrived on the socialist left during the Bush-Obama years thanks in large part to the brilliant polemics of Alexander Cockburn.

Everyone knows Alex’s great bit about his hate being pure. If you don’t know the story, it’s a tradition that Alex inherited from his editor Jim Goode who’d test Alexander’s morale and commitment to the good fight by asking him if his “hate” for the powerful was truly pure. Alex would then put the same question to his interns at the Nation. One such intern, a young Ed Miliband, soon to be the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, replied with shock that he did not, in fact, hate anyone. As Alex put it: “It’s all you need to know.”