Sixth Day of Xmas

On the sixth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me...

six signs for praying,

five 5-star reviews,

four pairs of shades,

three seals of love,

two friends-in-arms,

and a Fencing Bear in a MILO tree.

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Not long after Yiannopoulos’s defenestration from Simon & Schuster, Brown wrote a mournful post on Fencing Bear that compared Yiannopoulos’s fate to Christ’s ignominious death on the cross. (The post, titled “Mother and Son,” actually consisted of a quotation from a twelfth-century meditation on the sorrows of the Virgin Mary.) Jeffrey Cohen posted a screengrab of Brown’s post, which in turn got the attention of the New Republic’s Josephine Livingstone. She contacted Emilio Kourí, chair of the University of Chicago’s history department, to inquire whether Brown’s blog, linked on her Chicago faculty page, “could be considered part of her body of scholarship.” It was apparently a hint that Chicago ought to punish Brown for supporting Yiannopoulos. Kourí replied that Brown was “entitled to express her opinions and to publish them” and that “blogs are not part of any performance or promotion reviews in the History Department.” ... 

All this might resemble the high school mean girls’ freezing out the outsider at their cafeteria table. It might also resemble something more sinister: a vicious and tireless public campaign to destroy someone’s professional career as punishment for holding views at variance with the reigning take-no-prisoners progressivism. But Brown hasn’t retreated from the combination of belligerence and humor with which she regards her white nationalism–obsessed colleagues. “We as medieval scholars have been trying for a hundred years to create a better perspective on what the Middle Ages were like,” she told me. “You think, really, that we’re going to have any effect on some guys who want to dress up like knights? That’s my answer to my colleagues who keep having these conferences—that there’s no need to worry about white supremacists taking over medieval imagery. It’s like we haven’t even dealt with Mark Twain yet.”

—Charlotte Allen, “In the Academic Sandbox: A Skirmish in Medieval Studies,” First Things, June 2019

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For Milo’s and my story in full, see Milo Chronicles: Devotions 2016-2019, now available in hardcover on Amazon or direct from the publisher at Castalia House. For my skirmishes in academia, see Milo’s Middle Rages, with a foreword by Mark Bauerlein, available in paperback on Amazon and direct through the publisher at Castalia House. Milo talked about my book on the TheRalphRetort #Killstream (December 3, 2019) on DLive.tv.

For Milo’s and my continuing adventures training souls in virtue, see The MILO Chronicles.