Fencing Bear at Prayer

I joined Zaklog the Great and Travis for a discussion of C.S. Lewis’s “Re-adjustment” “with digressions including Milo Yiannopoulos, Alan Moore’s  Watchmen , and the destruction of language.” Watch at Zaklog the Great . Re-adjustment   I thought there would be a grave beauty, a sunset splendour In being the last of one's kind: a topmost moment as one watched  The huge wave curving over Atlantis, the shrouded barge  Turning away with wounded Arthur, or Ilium burning.  Now I see that, all along, I was assuming a posterity  Of gentle hearts: someone, however distant in the depths of time,  Who could pick up our signal, who could understand a story. There won't be.   Between the new Hominidae and us who are dying, already  There rises a barrier across which no voice can ever carry, For devils are unmaking language. We must let that alone forever.  Uproot your loves, one by one, with care, from the future, ...

You remember this interview, right? Back in summer 2016, just after Milo had been banned from Twitter for trolling Leslie Jones over her trawling for sympathy over the bad reviews of Ghostbusters, ABC sent an interviewer to London to find out wtf Milo thought he was doing. ABC: “Are you a troll?”  Milo: “Of course.”  ABC: “What is trolling? How you do you look at it?”  Milo: “I like to think of myself as a virtuous troll, you know. I’m doing God’s work.” The ABC interviewer was incredulous. A virtuous troll? Surely, this was yet another of Milo’s despicable not-funny jokes. How could saying that a woman looks like a dude be virtuous?  Would Milo say that to her face? Milo [nodding]: “Yeah, probably. I probably would.” Go, watch. The expression on the interviewer’s face is priceless. But, of course, he never lets Milo explain, just calls Milo an idiot, and moves on to ask why Milo didn’t stand up for Jones against the whole of the internet—implying tha...

Earlier this summer, I was invited to spend a day at the Charlemagne Institute for Defending and Advancing Western Civilization  talking with the Alcuin Interns on three major themes in medieval history. We talked about Charlemagne , monasticism , and the conquest of Constantinople in 1204 . Our texts were Einhard’s Life of Charles , Jocelyn of Brakelond’s Chronicle of the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds , and Geoffrey of Villehardouin’s Chronicle of the Fourth Crusade . I also spoke about the website for my online course at Unauthorized.tv . Assigned texts Einhard and Notker the Stammerer,  Two Lives of Charlemagne , trans. Lewis Thorpe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976); new edition, trans. David Ganz (London: Penguin, 2008) Jocelyn of Brakelond,  Chronicle of the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds , trans. Diana Greenway and Jane Sayers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989) Joinville and Villehardouin, Chronicles of the Crusades , trans. Caroline Sm...

It has been quite the summer for those of us in Milo’s Telegram chat. First, there was the Great Sticker Fest using pictures of Milo. Then came the Advent of Awoo and the Evening of Whack-a-Mole, not to mention the daily surprise of waking up to thousands of new comments from the Night Shift Down Under. There have been new friendships formed, long conversations about the merits of furries, song nights and pet parades. We have been at times the Fag Palace complete with Court (I played the Queen Mother) and GloboHomo, Inc. (President of the Board of Directors). We have had singing competitions and reading competitions. We have enjoyed chatting with Milo. And then came Sharia Tuesday, and we were suddenly all too aware of how complicated the game had become. It began innocently enough. Well, as innocently as the first time Adam shared an apple with Eve. What would happen if Milo told the women in the chat that they could not post for 24 hours? What would the conversation be li...

“For over 1,000 years of the Western tradition, up to the dawn of printing, reading great books meant training for reading the Scriptures, not because the clergy did not want people thinking for themselves – remember, we are also told that the clergy didn’t want the laity even reading the Scriptures, which raises the interesting question of who was buying all those books – but rather because they wanted people to grow in virtue and wisdom through engagement with the living Word.” Transcript of my lecture for the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation. Given August 14, 2019, in Sydney, Australia. Full text at ABC Religion & Ethics . For my continuing adventures as a conservative in academia, see MedievalGate .

Short answer: no! Long answer: my address to the Canadian Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship in May . Wait for the Q&A—we had a lively discussion! With thanks to JustRightMedia for their work recording the conference! For a complete list of my video and podcast appearances, see Bear On Air .