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Sept. 19, 2021 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole

01:46:17

Rachel Fulton Brown

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	- Welcome to the Deling pod with me, James Delingpoll.
	And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but I have actually been trying to get this special guest.
	She's been on my radar for quite some time because she ticks many of the boxes that I like on a podcast.
	You're a medieval scholar.
	You're a Tolkien fan.
	You're a Christian.
	I mean, we've got so much to talk about.
	So welcome to the show, Rachel Fulton-Brown.
	It's really good to have you on.
	Um, can I ask you first?
	I'm delighted to be here.
	And, and you tick me, you tick a number of the boxes that I've, I've read your books or at least some of them, like how to be right and watermelons and the Obama book.
	I think that was the first one I read.
	So yeah, no, that that's like ancient history now.
	Right.
	Well, it was prophetic, wasn't it?
	I mean, it's amazing.
	How could I have known that Obama was evil and going to be a really bad president?
	It's just... You know, it was a refreshing book for me to read.
	I was coming out of my Obama phase back in the day, right?
	And so, you know, my neighborhood is very favorable to him.
	Yeah, the community organizer came from your neck of the woods, didn't he?
	He did.
	Actually, you know, just since you mentioned Welcome to Obama Land, I'm sort of still slightly taken aback by how much my my Weltanschauung, if you like, has changed since I wrote that book.
	Because there was a section on Afghanistan and I was berating those countries that weren't participating fully in the wholly admirable Afghan venture or so I thought at the time.
	And now I think, why were any of us wasting our time there?
	It was purely a kind of CIA drugs operation.
	And we should, you know, I'm not a neocon.
	I hate the cabal.
	You know, we shouldn't be bombing funeral parties.
	You think about all the blood and treasure our country's expended there.
	But I was an innocent when I read that book.
	Well, I was with you then there too, right?
	I think the horror of realizing that that was the mistake that others have been saying all along that it was, but it's interesting when you're able to see things, when one is able to see things and when one isn't.
	I mean, now, by now, it's like what you said, it's a CIA drug operation that seems fairly clear of some sort, right?
	I didn't see it then either.
	I mean, I certainly, you know, sympathize with the concern for, you know, women being able to be educated, since I am one.
	But the sort of feeling of how we can be on, how there could be two wrong sides, and you're trying to pick between which of the wrong sides to go with.
	It's, yes, it's been an enlightening decade or so, I think.
	Well, we should talk about that more because clearly it sounds to me like you've had the scales falling from your eyes in the way that I've had.
	But I wanted to talk to you first about your Professor of Medieval History at Chicago University.
	Is that right?
	Yes, technically University of Chicago.
	I think it matters that you put them in that order.
	Like Cambridge University, which is it?
	It's University of Oxford and Cambridge University.
	That's right.
	Oh, so Oxford and Cambridge.
	I mean, I guess you probably just say Chicago, don't you?
	I don't know.
	Chicago is... Yes, we have to say UChicago.
	Yes.
	And it's kind of hard to say.
	I did actually, I will tell your audience, I have studied at one of those Oxbridge institutions.
	I am a member of Caius.
	OK.
	So when people tease me about, certain people have teased me about, you know, my university is older than yours.
	And I'm like, mine was founded in 1348.
	Yeah, that's, that's, that's at least keys, you know, gondolas.
	That's, that's, that's pretty good.
	Um, I've, I've only been to Chicago once.
	And actually I wrote about it in my watermelons book.
	Um, I went to one of the meetings of the, uh, what was the Heartland Institute, their, their annual, you know, Climate change, where they get all the scientists and stuff, and all the skeptics, and they have an interesting time.
	I love Chicago.
	I thought it was absolutely stunningly beautiful.
	But when I was there, it was really bright and sunny, and the lake was looking magnificent, and the architecture was looking fantastic.
	And I went around the museum, and it's a really good museum you've got there.
	But I imagine that there are elements of Chicago which are, it's a complete left-wing hellhole, isn't it?
	I love Chicago.
	And if you want me to get sort of misty and, you know, upset, it's when people badmouth my city, which I find sort of interesting, because it actually took me a long time to love it.
	I did my graduate work in, well, in Cambridge, but also at Columbia in New York City.
	And, you know, Chicago is always being compared to New York and how are we like and not like.
	It can take a long time to enjoy Chicago because it's so massive.
	And, I mean, if you were at the Heartland Institute, you were downtown at the Union Center.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Yeah.
	So that's, you know, Chicago downtown is just glorious and the lakefront and such.
	It's a hard city to sort of get to know.
	There's so many different neighborhoods.
	There's so many different parts of Chicago.
	I'm still learning, you know, sort of Hyde Park, where the University of Chicago is, is its own little place.
	And, you know, there's different neighborhoods on the north side, on the lakefront, and then the whole, you know, western suburbs, northern suburbs.
	When you're asking someone about, do you like Chicago?
	Well, Which city?
	Which part of it?
	It's many different cities all in one place.
	Yeah, well I know, I did come away thinking it was an absolutely beautiful place, but I never understand how people like you, people with your politics, still have a I mean have a place in academia in America?
	Is it because of this thing they call tenure?
	Is it just because you are unsackable?
	Because I imagine that almost every professor now in every American university is is thoroughly woke and and just you know really into gender and um critical race theory and all the all the other nonsense.
	I'm still not sure, right?
	I know how we poll in the sense that everybody polls politically Democrat and, you know, vote for Trump publicly and you get your colleagues angry at you over decades.
	You know, I honestly don't know.
	I know my own department and history.
	I've been in the department since 1994, so I've been here a fairly long time.
	And when I was hired, I think also I can say I've sort of survived partly because I'm really part of the old guard in the sense of people who hired me in 1994.
	We're still the old style leftists and liberals, as it were.
	It's like, you know, they'd look you in the face and argue about Marx with you and they wouldn't run away or say you were being offensive or, you know, I mean, it's literally I had one of my colleagues, Moishe Postone, he passed last year before last.
	He was literally a Marxist, right?
	It's like his focus was this Marxist thinking, you know, he'd give these incredible lectures on Marks's philosophy at a level that, you know, was hard to follow.
	Right.
	Isn't that the idea?
	It's meant to be hard to follow.
	Right.
	Well, it's meant to be hard to follow.
	But the thing is, he was he his his generation was willing to argue.
	Right.
	I don't know.
	My generation and a bit younger, it changed, right?
	People got a little more anxious.
	They got more sort of socially conformist as a community.
	I'm still not entirely sure who's on which side because people just don't talk.
	I think is, frankly, the reality that I found.
	So, you know, I'm perfectly friendly with most of my colleagues to this day.
	And, you know, to the most part, if I can sort of stay happy warrior and light and cheerful about it and a little mischievous and say, well, you know, I mainly want to talk about What it means to be Christian in an intellectual context, or isn't Milo wonderful, right?
	You know, they're anxious.
	Academia runs on peer review, and so they're always anxious about what each other thinks.
	And I think ultimately that is what is hardest to judge because they're just trying not to be, you know, thrown out, right?
	And it's also people, you know, it's like we're academics, we're intellectuals, we're used to getting the good grades in school, right?
	It's hard for people of our temperament and psychology to Feel like you've been rejected or gotten a bad grade.
	It just is, right?
	So I think a lot feeds into that.
	And then, of course, I do think my colleagues who promote gender studies and race studies and stuff think of themselves as good people, right?
	They feel like they want to be on the side of the underprivileged.
	And they haven't quite figured out that they're been in control of the institution for a while now.
	And so they are creating a sort of ironic problem in that they're now clearly the prejudices against the people that they claim are still privileged.
	Yeah, yeah, sure.
	It's that classic cry bully phenomenon where they want it both ways.
	They want to be oppressed at the same time.
	They are totally the masters.
	I mean, it's just...
	I mean, we won't keep it on Academe because we've got ideas and stuff to talk about, but I'm just curious because I do have a love of knowledge and learning and reading and history, and I wonder whether the time, because I...
	I hope we're going to get onto this, the total destruction of Western civilization.
	We're about to lose everything.
	I mean, I really feel that we are in, at best, the last days of the Roman Empire right now.
	It's the collapse of everything.
	There's even any room in academia now for kind of pure learning, where, for example, you know, my field of study, English literature, whether you can actually look at Shakespeare without sort of putting a feminist gloss on it or, you know, a kind of neo-Marxist gloss or whatever.
	Is there still space for pure, for learning, for learning's sake?
	Well, happily, I'm not in the English department.
	And the thing is, I do think English as a field has crippled itself, right?
	And I actually have a colleague in the department here in English, Lisa Ruddock, who has been writing about this for some time now.
	I mean, it's her field.
	It's her own field.
	She feels utterly distressed at the degree to which people come into a field wanting to study literature because they love literature, and then her version of things, and then they're trained to hate it.
	She, frankly, she's not Christian.
	She thinks of herself as Buddhist more than anything else, or at least she did the last time I talked to her.
	But, you know, she says it's soul-destroying, right, the way that the field has gone.
	What I have found though, in my own, the more I speak up and stay cheerful and things like that, the more I find there are, of course, young people out there, some in academia, some out in the world more generally, who want to enjoy great writing and have a love for beautiful craftsmanship.
	And my goal in my own teaching is find a way to do that, right?
	And my sort of my project right now, I don't know whether you're familiar with what I've been doing on Telegram and my social media, but my project right now is, you know, getting people to write iambic pentameter and say, it's like, how do you save the culture?
	Iambic pentameter!
	Which sounds like a joke, but I'm actually quite serious about it.
	If you want Shakespeare, you need to be able to read iambic pentameter.
	And the sort of training and skills is in fact what has been attacked most, right?
	What you said, it's like you have to do Finnish reading, you have to do Marxist reading, you have to do these readings of texts, which is to break them down.
	My project, I mean, it's in my teaching across all my Tolkien teaching, my history teaching, but now actually quite you know, focused on poetry, is encourage students to think about the craft of writing, of working with images, of working with historical narrative.
	And they love it, right?
	They respond to it.
	So I'm actually hopeful about, like, culture and civilization at large.
	I agree with you that certain academic disciplines have undermined their own project.
	Absolutely.
	I like your iambic pentameter idea.
	One thing I've been doing recently, which I commend to you, if you haven't, I recommend it to everyone, is I learn poetry.
	And one of the interesting... Sorry, my wretched thing keeps going.
	I hate it when it does that.
	One of the things when you learn a poem, there are these stages you go through where you can't quite remember the line or you misremember words and you misremember the order and stuff and you're going through the process of what Go away, Finn.
	You're popular.
	Yeah, I know, I know.
	You're going through the process of what the poet went through when he was writing the poem.
	And sometimes you misremember words, which were probably the words that came to the poet first, and then he rejected in favor of a better one.
	And you understand, you inhabit a poem in the way that you don't when you're just merely reading it a couple of times in order to write your essay on it.
	Really, really good.
	I think things like that are a way of preserving our culture in its pure, unadulterated form, uncorrupted by these kind of postmodern readings that I think happen in academe now.
	Right, and they're, I mean, they're, so I can name drop, I hope.
	One of my friends, Mark Bauerlein, who just retired from Emory in English, has written a lot about this too.
	And it's saying, you know, English as a discipline is losing majors.
	I mean, people just, I mean, English used to be, even in the United States, it used to be one of the giant Humanities majors, in terms of students taking it for their BA, and it's just shrunk.
	It's vanished, right?
	I don't think that means there's people out there that don't want poetry, right?
	I think it means that they recognize that the departments are not teaching it, and they go elsewhere, right?
	So I'm scooping them up.
	That you and I are both on unauthorized TV, right?
	And I have the videos that I've been doing there on Tolkien.
	My Tolkien class, I had a bit of a dip in popularity the last year or so because, well, you know, I kept speaking up.
	Well, some of it One, it's my, you know, talking about Milo for several years, which has been important.
	And, you know, that my blogging on Fencing Bear at Prayer has also been quite forceful, I suppose they would say.
	Yeah, but why is that?
	How is that lost?
	Surely you don't care about the dross that you're getting rid of.
	You just want the bullion.
	Oh, I don't know.
	Well, it's more that I had fewer projects of people writing poetry for me, right?
	So I think it'll come back.
	The last time I taught it, I had like 40 students and I've had in the past as many as 100, right?
	But per course.
	So 60 out of 100 are dropping you because they find you too kind of, you know, too much in the Milo camp?
	I doubt it.
	I think they're just nervous, right?
	Because there has been enough back chatter in Facebook groups among the students about me and my She's a white supremacist.
	And of course, if they like, look for three seconds, they realize, no, she's a Christian, which kind of wipes out the white supremacy argument.
	If you, if we can go there, if you want, but, um, so I don't know, but the, the, in my Tolkien course and, and in unauthorized right now, the most recent video from this summer was talking about the kind of projects that I had my students do in Tolkien, right?
	He famously imagined that, His writing would create a context in which people could do other artwork, right?
	So you sub-create and you make further creation stories and poetry and drama and music and things like that.
	Well, in my Tolkien course for campus, that's what the final project is for the students, that they can make something, right?
	And so, you know, I've taught it six times now on campus and that means hundreds and hundreds of poems and stories and Drawings and comic books and plays and a rock opera and cookbooks and costumes and art, you know, it's like this.
	It's like fanfic, is that what it is?
	It's fanfic.
	Yes, I just require them to make it, like, connected to his legendarium or, you know, rewrite the Notion Club papers or, you know, some way tie it in.
	But yes, and the thing is, all art is fanfic to a certain extent.
	I mean, you know, what I say about the work that I do, the art that I talk about in my scholarship from the Middle Ages, right, devotional Commentaries or liturgies or things like that.
	That's fanfic too on the Bible, right?
	It's like, you know, civilization thrives on our responding to the stories and wanting to write ourselves into them and become part of them.
	And I, you know, say I've had no trouble whatsoever getting students for Tolkien and encouraging them to write poetry.
	I mean, and they're in other majors, right?
	They'll be in science or, you know, math or economics or something like that, but they want to do Tolkien.
	Totally elective.
	They, you know, they have to take time out of their other, you know, degree projects to do my class and they will do it.
	So that's why I say I'm ultimately absolutely hopeful in the joy of art and creativity.
	It's just, it's not, it doesn't have a home in the places that tout being, you know, in charge of everything.
	Yeah.
	Tolkien, I'm a fan.
	Where do you think he sits in the Pantheon?
	Right, yeah.
	So, I mean, you think he's more, is he more than genre fiction?
	I'm very much with Tom Shelly in "Author of the Century." - Right, yeah.
	So, I mean, you think he's more, is he more than genre fiction?
	He's just like the boss. - Oh, he's absolutely the boss.
	But what I see him as, fundamentally, as he said, fundamentally Catholic, but he's writing within that metaphysical exercise of understanding creation, creativity, art, that he's a theological artist.
	How's that?
	Yeah, yeah.
	You know, C.S.
	Lewis does it to a certain extent in a different mode, but I don't know of anybody else in modernity who's been able to achieve it at Tolkien's level.
	I mean, James Joyce was trying, but his theological emphasis is obviously somewhat different.
	I mean, Tolkien is like the medieval authors whom he admired because he's trying to write Fantasy into the mythology that fits with the theology of a creator, etc.
	So in my videos and in my course, I talk about him in those terms, but I don't know really of anybody who's close in his imagination.
	I think you're probably right.
	I've just been reading C.S.
	Lewis's so-called sci-fi novel, That Hideous Strength.
	I imagine you must have read that.
	Oh, yeah, it's a powerful one.
	And I was struck throughout by the quality of his ideas.
	I mean, his insights into how the devil works, how he seduces you, you know, this obsession with the inner circle.
	I thought he captured the sort of the Luciferian project very, very well.
	I think it's a flawed work.
	I think it's got that kind of Maybe silly is not the right word, but there's something...
	You compare with the Lord of the Rings trilogy, say, which is a much more fully realized masterpiece.
	And I'm not saying that C.S.
	Lewis isn't very, very good, but Tolkien was able to synthesize his kind of vision of the world, his Christian allegory, his scholarship in a way that I don't think that C.S.
	Lewis ever quite managed in the same way.
	It's much more seamless with Tolkien.
	They were very different.
	They were very different writers as, like, the process was different.
	Lewis just wrote, right?
	He sort of stream of consciousness wrote, and I don't remember whether I'm remembering this or just inventing it, but I feel like Tolkien wants something like, you know, Jack needed to revise a few times, right?
	Lewis just wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote, and his out-butt was just enormous.
	Tolkien rewrote and rewrote and rewrote, right?
	He was a magnificent reviser.
	And again, in my videos, I talk about this, how if you look at his earlier work, which I think I'm changing my mind on it stronger than I'd appreciate it, but he starts with something and then revises and revises and revises.
	it.
	So it's got this distilled inside It's not perfection, right?
	Because he kept revising.
	And I think that that sense of always reaching for the... Like you were talking about with the poet, right?
	Tolkien was much more of a poet in many ways.
	He'd find a word and then find a better word and then revise.
	And so you can see his style transforming over his lifetime.
	Whereas Lewis...
	I have a respect for Lewis in a lot of other ways, with that hideous strength.
	What he's describing in the beginning of the book about the appeal of academia, if you want to understand why academia went wrong, that hideous strength is a great explanation, right?
	That desire to be part of, as you said, the inner circle, part of the power, will invite you to be part of this study group, this institute, this, you know, oh, so seductive.
	He got that absolutely right.
	Um, so they're different, you know, and I can, I can enjoy both of them, but I, I'm drawn more to, to Tolkien to reread.
	Yeah.
	Do you, I mean, do you, do you think he, do you think he knew how good it was?
	Oh, hang on.
	Can I, can I just, I was going to pause a second.
	I'm just, I I'm being hassled by my, by my boss.
	I could be in trouble.
	Hang on.
	Um, give me one second.
	People get, People get really pissed off.
	I was telling your audience all sorts of things.
	Well, that's good.
	I'm glad you did.
	No, I know.
	I should have.
	I realized I should have just kept talking, but the podcast.
	I know sometimes I'm listening to podcasts and I, and I'm following it very closely.
	What's being said.
	And suddenly some, they start obsessing about the, like I am now about the, the, the sound or whatever.
	And it's just, I'm thinking, get on with it.
	Nobody cares.
	Just carry on with your point.
	I don't know.
	I live in a house where other people use the phone, so I can't just turn it off for the duration.
	So anyway, I apologize for that.
	Where were we?
	So, yeah.
	Did he know how good he was?
	No, right?
	And this is one of the problems about, if you look at his bibliography, most of it was published after he died by Christopher, right?
	That he just kept, and Leaf by Niggle, his lovely little story about the problem of the relationship between art and practical work, right?
	He was very worried about that.
	So, you know Leaf by Niggle, right?
	The little allegory.
	Where Niggle is a painter and he's got this tree that he keeps working on and working on and working on, and his neighbor Parrish needs some help.
	You know, growing potatoes and with his wife and stuff like that.
	And they both die and they end up in purgatory effectively.
	And trying to understand the proper relationship between the sort of practical work of growing food and taking care of your neighbors versus wanting to make these beautiful stories and these beautiful images.
	Tolkien was always torn between the work he was theoretically supposed to be doing because he was a professor of Anglo-Saxon.
	He was supposed to be writing, you know, scholarly studies of old stuff.
	Yeah.
	And his desire to be working within the story that he created.
	I understand that, right?
	I keep, you know, I'm supposed to be writing history and I keep writing these meditations on how to pray from within and, you know, my colleagues don't know what to do with that because it's like, that's not history, you know, but I want to understand, right?
	That I think Tolkien, he kept rewriting because he felt like he hadn't yet grasped that, you know, perfection, that beauty that he knew was there.
	And in Leaf by Niggle, you know, Niggle eventually, you know, is given the gift of the mountain, the tree that he was trying to describe, draw himself.
	But he could never achieve it in life, right?
	I think Tolkien never felt like He wouldn't have said that the Lord of the Rings was perfect, and we think it, you know, it's pretty close, but he kept trying to figure out more parts of it later.
	Yeah.
	After it was finished.
	I was just wondering, how much do you think Tolkien, well I think it's fairly obvious in Lewis, certainly with that hideous strength, I mean Lewis clearly understood That there are people out there who are in the service of Satan and it is real and that this is a real problem.
	I mean, I was amazed with that book when it was written about 1954 or something that even even back in the 50s things that I thought were just more recent developments that they were they were very prevalent then.
	Oh yeah.
	And, but, you know, I think of Lewis and Tolkien as of a piece because they used to hang out in the, was it the Eaglin Child, I think?
	That was the vulture and fetus as we used to call it.
	The bird and the baby, come on.
	And do you reckon that Tolkien sort of foresaw what was coming, what we're experiencing now?
	Well, just as Lewis was aware of the sociological problem at the day, Tolkien spent a lot of his career fighting the lit-lang battle, right?
	In the sense of whether you study, you focus on the philology and the study of literature and the kind of word history that was his expertise, versus what I think now we would call I mean, it certainly wasn't active in the 50s.
	That was more new criticism into the 50s and 60s.
	But Tolkien would recognize the problem that we're having with the SJWs and the gender studies and the cultural Marxist and things like that because it was already a feature.
	at the time, right?
	It's like whether you're studying literature as something that you're wanting to... I don't... It's not just appreciate the mechanism, it's appreciate the craftsmanship.
	You know, like, again, what we were talking about, it's like the word choices, the real significance in the history of every single word in our language, and the, you know, dialect choices.
	I mean, Tolkien... One of the lovely things in Lord of the Rings is how Every character, you can tell his social classes, education, his age, his, you know, character from the very specific style that he speaks in, right, for example.
	I think Tolkien I guess he wouldn't be surprised because he was on the front lines of that battle all along, too.
	And Tom Shippey talks about this in, I think, both of his books, Road to Middle Earth and Author of the Century, about how Tolkien spent a lot of his academic career fighting curricula, right?
	Fighting different curricular battles and sort of what counts as the degree and which path, you know, the students are going to be allowed to take.
	in their studies and things like that.
	So yes, it's not a new problem.
	Right, right, right.
	Okay, so we've got the thing you hinted at there, the culture wars.
	But it seems to me that the culture wars have now been superseded in the last 18 months, say, by a much bigger battle.
	Oh yeah, the ring.
	Yeah, the ring.
	That's exactly what I'm getting.
	I mean, we know that Sauron is real, that the forces of darkness are real.
	I mean, I've had my Christian awakening in the last six months.
	You know, I was a… Oh!
	Welcome home!
	Oh, totally!
	I mean, I was raised Church of England.
	I went to a school where you… Um, went to chapel, um, you know, seven days a week and twice on, twice on Sundays.
	So, you know, cultural Anglican and I may, I took my children to church because I thought it was very important.
	This is, this is part of your culture.
	This is your heritage.
	You know, every author, uh, every English literature, every writer would have been familiar with, with the Bible stories and, and, and not to be aware of this, you know, it's a de-deracinating thing and you can't have that.
	This is your culture.
	But what I hadn't got...
	Because nobody really explained it to me.
	The bit that really excites me about Christianity is that God is real, and that the devil is real, and it's the kind of the supernatural side of things, which I think that the Church, certainly the Church of England, and I think to a degree large swathes of the Catholic Church as well, they're slightly embarrassed by this element, that there is this kind of supernatural being.
	And, and he's, he can get medieval on your ass, so to speak.
	You know, he doesn't, he doesn't tolerate sinners.
	If you, if you acknowledge your sins, but, but he doesn't like bad people and he's not, he's not a kind of touchy feely.
	He's, he's not into Gaia worship, for example.
	He's not into all the, all the things that do.
	So, so it's very exciting for me to talk at the same time.
	You have just opened a big door and I'm happy to sail through it.
	Well, you see, at the same time, I'm very conscious that I want people to join the club.
	And what I don't want is to frighten people off by going, oh, he's talking about Christianity.
	OK, let's stop now.
	Right.
	But tell me about, were you always a Christian or is this a newish development in your life?
	Oh no, I've always been a Christian.
	I'm newer as a Catholic, which is sort of institutionally an interesting place right now.
	We have some problems.
	But I primarily think of myself as Christian, and I grew up Christian, and my scholarship was always a pursuit of deeper understanding as a Christian.
	I actually grew up in the Presbyterian Church, and as I tend to say, it's like, Presbyterians... Calvin read a lot more medieval exegesis than people realized, and he particularly liked Bernard of Clairvaux's commentaries on the Song of Songs, or his sermons on the Song of Songs.
	So there's a sort of hidden mysticism, I think, in some Protestant...
	understanding that we're not always aware of.
	But the thing that Presbyterians really love is scripture, right?
	And focusing on studying scripture.
	And I sort of carried that into my undergraduate studies because I did a lot of work in religious studies and New Testament and history of Christianity.
	But there was always this something missing, right?
	And I think what you've just described is so the reality of Not just God, but of the spiritual world, angels and demons.
	And also what I've been describing now is the mythology, right?
	Which I think a better contrast would be between the Logos and the Mythos.
	Of our understanding and, you know, most modern people are pretty good on logos in the sense that they like reason, and they like, you know, abstract philosophical argument, at least, you know, potentially, but we're really and what you said about the, you know, the church being embarrassed by it.
	We're really embarrassed by the mythos part.
	We're embarrassed by.
	thing that grabs your joy the story that you find yourself in the the sort of imagery and symbolism and the interconnection between you know liturgy and experience and all of that and it's very hard for me to like I've been working on unpacking all of this in a variety of contexts, but this, I think, is what Tolkien tapped into.
	It was the desire for meaningful story, right?
	And you could say it's like parable or allegory, but mythos is the best.
	Great word for it, I guess.
	It's that story that you find yourself in.
	For example, in Lord of the Rings, when Sam has that moment on Cirith Ungol, the stairs, right?
	He looks up and he sees the star, he sees Arendelle, and recognizes that he and Frodo are in the same story, right?
	It's like, that's the same star that's the Silmaril that Beren got back from Morgoth, that Morgoth stole from Fëanor, that Fëanor made with the light of the two trees.
	And we're in that story, right?
	And I get chills just describing it.
	That is, for me, the experience of Christianity as a sort of problem of we're in that story.
	We're in the story of creation, from creation to revelation.
	We're in the story of the incarnation, that moment that God, the author, enters into the story.
	And that sort of frisson of realization that It's real and that's that's what Tolkien said and on fairy stories that we are it you know the gospel is the greatest fairy story ever told and it's the one that we most wanted to find was true.
	Yes.
	All of that. - Yes.
	Well, it is true, isn't it?
	It is true, yes!
	I mean, it's really exciting.
	It's quite hard to convey to people.
	Because after all, we've had so much So much brainwashing from the system.
	Certainly, I mean, since throughout most of the 20th century, and probably even the late 19th century, this was going on, you know, the melancholy long withdrawing rule of Christianity.
	It's been secularized.
	And the mystery has been removed.
	And I think a lot of priests don't believe in God.
	I mean, they... I agree.
	Which is, they're kind of missing the treat, aren't they?
	They're missing the fun part.
	Well, I agree.
	It's secular, and what it is is they care more about what other people think than praising God.
	Academia is the problem in microcosm for everything.
	You're so worried about the world.
	You're so worried about being considered intelligent.
	Particularly, it's the Enlightenment.
	You know, and the Enlightenment, you talk about mind spells, right?
	The word Enlightenment is actually a 19th century word for what they thought they were doing in the 18th century, but this, we are the ones who are enlightened by reason now, and it's, no, they were darkened, right?
	They were insisting that only human reason was sufficient to understanding reality.
	It's like, wait, you say that out loud, it's like, are you nuts?
	You really think that our little minds are capable of understanding all of reality?
	I don't think so.
	And we've been under that delusion, I think, for several hundred years now.
	And the trick, the main trick, is to convince yourself that it's embarrassing to fall on your knees before the Creator and say, The stuff you made is amazing.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Right?
	I'm looking at my dog, right?
	I have a puppy that we got this last spring.
	It's the corgi.
	Who could make that?
	It's the corgi, right?
	Who could make a corgi?
	They're gorgeous and delightful and joyous.
	And if you just study the animals, I was, what was I reading?
	I can't, now I can't remember what it said.
	People who are interested in animals also tend to be interested in angels, which is a kind of interesting sort of, you don't expect it, right?
	You think, oh, if they're just interested in angels.
	People can be interested in angels as like demonic and want to like control them and, you know, get power from them and stuff.
	But if you're interested in our situation as, you know, speaking animal creatures, right?
	Between animals and angels, you're going to be interested in a whole range of creation.
	If you're interested in just this world and being in control of it and being sort of machine-like, mechanistic, what I see is you're just going to have this sort of flat reality, right?
	It's like everything's just material, everything's controllable.
	You're missing out.
	The Flatlands, Fearlands, Flatland mythology is a pretty good one, right?
	If you have the That mathematical flat that we just live on this single plane?
	No!
	The sphere drops through and you're not going to be able to see it.
	No, I feel the same way about horses, which I think are a kind of sign of God.
	I just think, how weird is it that we live on this planet, where are these animals, which are much, much more powerful than us, and they eat grass, which is quite useful, rather than, you know, flesh or anything, and they're really strong, and yet at the same time they are to the degree that you can sit on their backs, and you can jump over hedges, and they really love it.
	It gives them great pleasure, and you have this bond with them.
	Now, that's just weird, I think.
	I mean, imagine a world where horses didn't exist, and if somebody described this creature that can do all this, they'd go, no, that's just like, that would never happen.
	It would just be crazy.
	Interesting you say about animals and angels because I've always been into my wildlife and stuff, but I'm also really interested in angels.
	In the last month, I have spoken to two people who've seen angels.
	And in both cases, they absolutely wanted to assure me, look, I don't do drugs and I'm really not the sort of person who sees angels.
	They were not, I don't think they were even, you know, Christians or one of them was a lapsed Christian, but they were absolutely adamant that they described it.
	I mean, have you met people who've seen angels?
	I haven't, no.
	That's new to me.
	But you believe them, yeah?
	You believe in them?
	I do believe in them and in the sense that, I mean, we're definitely beset by evil ones, right?
	That, say, going back to with the ring and what the ring is and that's sort of what's been happening in the last year and a half.
	I do think, so you could sort of jokingly or You know, conspiracy theory level ask who's in charge of what's going on right now?
	And I will unjokingly answer Satan in the sense that, you know, people's willingness to give in to lies is extraordinary, right?
	Yes!
	We're suffering under right now is everybody making these little bargains, right?
	Oh, I'll do that, you know, obviously the COVID stuff, right?
	I'll wear this mask and then I'll be safe.
	It's like that's a magic trick, right?
	It's literally a magic trick.
	You're going to perform something that we can prove, you know, experientially and experimentally doesn't work and yet you'll do this ritual because it gives you this sort of Assurance, right?
	But recognizing that every single one of those steps in these rituals that we've been pushed through for the last year and a half is always making a bargain of if I, you know, I'll be safe, right?
	Okay, one, Lewis's Aslan is not a tame lion is the best phrase that came out of his stories, right?
	It's like, God said he's going to take care of you, but you have to trust him first, right?
	And you have to sort of be willing to say, no, I'm not going to make a bargain with the devil in order to be a little bit safer here.
	I'm going to fling myself into reality and trust that God means for me to live, right?
	And that's what I say, the sort of thing that people are suffering under most over the last year is this failure to Um, not just have faith it's like the, you know, medicine will be available or, you know, we'll figure something out but have faith that You'll be taken care of by God.
	It's very interesting.
	Yes.
	And I think, you know, Sauron wants you to be afraid and feel like there's nothing you can do.
	And the temptation, the ring temptation is also, oh, if we could just grab the ring and figure out some way to battle Sauron with it.
	Yeah.
	Then you were Boromir, right?
	Then we want control too, right?
	That's to be resisted.
	We need to resist that.
	Yeah.
	It's a bit like the book I'm reading at the moment, Raskolnikov rationalizing himself that it's okay to batter the woman to death with an axe because you're going to use the money to do something Napoleonic and great.
	You're absolutely right.
	I've argued before that people who don't understand that this is a battle between good and evil, and that good and evil are real, and that they are ultimately manifestations of the devil and God, don't really understand what's going on right now.
	It's all very well saying, yeah, there are people motivated by greed and stuff, but they're missing that key Element of understanding, I think.
	I agree.
	And going back to thinking about, you're thinking about the horses, right?
	That, you know, animals have wills, um, and they have, you know, purposes of their own and such.
	And when you were talking about how, you know, it's joyous to ride the horse and he enjoys it too, right?
	It's like, he wants to jump over hedges.
	He, he loves you.
	Yes.
	He wants to be, I mean, the dogs, right?
	It's the norm.
	It's extraordinary that dogs love us as much as they do.
	Yeah.
	But, you know, you have to work with the horse.
	One of my friends who rode horses talked about how, you know, it's like, and what you said, the animal is enormous, right?
	You have to work with him to do the things that you do together.
	And, you know, I have to work with my dog to get him to, you know, Have the routines that we do or, you know, play in the way that he does and that what the demonic is, is this desire to be in control of other wills.
	That's always what Tolkien was showing with the Lord of the Rings, right?
	What Sauron, what the ring can do is bind other wills and force them To do things, right?
	It makes everyone slaves.
	It makes you all puppets.
	This, to me, is what the demonic element of everything we're under.
	The masks and the mandates and the do this, do that.
	It feels demonic because it's ultimately about forcing everyone into being controlled, right?
	It will fail because God means us to have free will, but the people give in to it because they're afraid.
	It's like the devil can't get you unless you consent.
	Yes.
	It's really, really important to remember that.
	And so it's what Sauron tries to do with the ring is make everybody afraid, right?
	He's all powerful, right?
	And the reality is what they want to do is feel that they can make you do stuff.
	It's really that simple.
	Yeah, I think that I've obviously in the last few months been trying to kind of work out what it is that, what was the spark that made me realize that, you know, that, you know, made me realize that God is real and that Jesus come to save us and all that.
	And I think it was sort of several insights.
	One of which is that God is truth and God is beauty and we are drawn to these things naturally.
	But the other countervailing force was that my realization that the devil is real and that the snares he sets in our way that this the world is the realm of Satan.
	Is that right?
	I mean, it's the realm of the Prince of Lies.
	It's a kind of testing ground.
	Yes, and that's why the Enlightenment is clearly a Luciferian spell.
	Right.
	He can present as an angel of light.
	It's interesting all of the light imagery.
	To be on camera, I've got a ring of light that I look at.
	How much light magic we're being subjected to willingly, right?
	It was like we can use these things.
	Art is always both a tool and temptation, and Tolkien is good on that as well.
	Like the elves making things love the materials they're working with, but the fall, Fianor's fall, for example, is becoming possessive of their craftsmanship, right?
	What What we're under right now is this light spell, right?
	It's like with the movies or with our computers and our phones and everything.
	You're being fed images constantly.
	And that light magic, it's definitely working on our souls.
	And we're doing it willingly, right?
	It's like nobody's forcing you to look at these objects or to go to the movies or to be caught up in those stories.
	But they are dangerous because they work on your soul.
	Are we in Plato's cave as well?
	I mean, I know that's pre-Christian, but... I'm not sure, right, because...
	It works as a metaphor for trying to show people things that you have a different vision of.
	I think it works on that level, yes.
	I'll tell you what I'm thinking of.
	There are the people in the cage looking at the shadows on the wall, unaware of the light behind them and the world outside.
	But who is projecting these shapes onto the wall of the cave?
	These are surely the kind of...
	The deceivers.
	I mean, you know, Hollywood obviously is one of them.
	The TV industry is another one.
	The music industry is another one.
	They're seducing us with these images and these sounds and They are, I think so.
	And then you have the, sort of going back to the beginning of our conversations, like why art matters so much, right?
	Why stories matter so much?
	Why poetry matters?
	That they are, and this is, I'll just keep referencing Tolkien because he was so powerful.
	I think you should.
	Yeah, totally.
	I shouldn't have mentioned, Plato was a bloody lefty anyway, wasn't he?
	He was in massive status.
	Yes!
	Yeah.
	Go away, Plato.
	He's also good on mythos and logos.
	Plato understood the power of mythos, but he also felt, you know, he wanted his philosopher kings to be in control of it, right?
	Which is the diabolical level.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Wanting to control the stories.
	So, you know, the devil and this Tolkien's brilliant on the nine Lindelay, right?
	With Morgoth and his His male core and his discord in the music, right?
	The problem with everything is we are given absolute free will to work with God's will, but that means we can also work against it.
	And our turning away from God's will is turning towards the darkness, right?
	And Morgoth's temptation, Sauron's master's temptation is to To think that we can control it somehow, always back to that problem of control.
	So, Hollywood and the storytellers and stuff, they're using something good, which is our willingness and our desire to be in the story.
	They're then using it to pervert our focus.
	So the story that we should be wanting to participate in is the liturgy, right?
	We should, right?
	God wants us to, you know, sing with the angels in joy at creation.
	If you grew up going to even song all the time, right?
	You sing the psalms and you're singing out of joy of the creation.
	That's That's the art that gives us joy and lifts us up.
	The art that Hollywood makes typically is tapping into that desire to be in the liturgy, but obviously tend to, you know, turning it to the corruption of our souls, um, with all the sex magic, with all of the, I mean, I've been reading a lot on this.
	I really want to go there, but you know, the alchemy of the alchemy of inversion is very, very powerful in, in most of those stories.
	Oh, what in Hollywood stories?
	Oh yeah.
	Oh, I'm gone.
	You've been reading up about it.
	Give me some examples.
	Well, I mean, this is where I really understood the new Afghanistan, such as I was reading Jay Dyer's books on Hollywood.
	Jay is out there as an orthodox apologist now, and I haven't really followed him on that, but his works on Hollywood and the problem of the way the stories in the movies are themselves You know, working on you, trying to convince you of things and particularly sort of projecting possibilities that then, weirdly enough, we're all living through right now.
	So we've seen how many movies that we've seen over the last decades about, you know, a great pandemic that's going to come and we're all going to end up in this crisis mode.
	Oh, look, it's happened.
	Right.
	So it's the, you know, they're sort of making possible storylines that we then find ourselves living in.
	Well, on a sort of more personal level, it's, you know, you're making storylines about sin.
	So you're making storylines about adultery or pornography, you know, pornography obviously does it.
	um you're making storylines about drug use you're making storylines about um you know political corruption and the more we watch those i mean this is this is the the the um objection christians from antiquity through the middle ages had about theater that theater is a kind of liturgy right ancient greeks did Their, their place that they, they were, you know, within the context of religious festivals.
	The Romans did their gladiatorial games.
	Those were also religious festivals, right?
	It's like the images that you're being impressed with by in, in the, the killing and the sex and the, you know, all of that.
	It's like it's working on your soul constantly.
	And that I definitely appreciate now better, I think, than I did in the past.
	Which unfortunately means that all of the movies that I enjoyed watching when I was growing up, I realized have this problem.
	Their mythological subversion.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	No, I get that.
	My church near me has got some fantastic objects in it, you know, all sorts of stained glass windows and stuff.
	Statues and things, but almost my favorite thing are the medieval wood carvings.
	They're probably late medieval, but they're still medieval and they're bestiaries and they've got kind of cats with fiddles and sort of demons and sort of memento mori sort of skeletons.
	And it's clear that in that period people were much more in tune with the numinous, that the divide between the earthly realm and the heavenly realm, and I suppose the hellish realm, were much more vivid in their imaginations.
	Am I just imposing my vision of how the Middle Ages were?
	Or do you think that that's how it was?
	That people were much more understanding that this is a kind of transitional realm between, you know, before we go to heaven again or hell?
	I think they were, but it was mainly because they had the monastic tradition.
	And that, I mean, one, that's the focus of most of my scholarship, right?
	I said I was interested as a Presbyterian in commentaries on scripture, and my first work, my dissertation work, my first book is on commentaries on the Song of Songs, the love song between a bride and a bridegroom, but in the Middle Ages they read it as the soul in God, or the church in God, or Mary in Christ, which is what I talked about in my first book.
	And those are all monastic, right?
	The monastic life was focused on singing the Psalms.
	Flat, you know, just straight up.
	And the Psalms are the place, if you think about it in Scripture, it's like, where is all this cool mythology?
	that Rachel's talking about.
	It's mainly in the Psalms because that those are one they're the the the communities addressed but also the first person addressed to God.
	But God is described more vividly in the Psalms than in like maybe in Daniel or Isaiah or Ezekiel some of the prophets right we're in Revelation but If you think back to the Psalms where you're talking about the Lord on his throne in the holy city and the response of the creation to the Creator, it's all there in the Psalms, right?
	And the monks spend their lives singing those chants, right?
	And then the laity, my second book, my first book is on the monastic tradition of these The focus on the Song of Songs.
	But my second book is on the Little Office of the Virgin Mary, which is the Psalms that are sung by the lay people in praise of her, but also therefore in praise of God.
	I think what happened throughout the Middle Ages, people have these texts in their heads, right?
	They have the sort of joy of singing praises to God every morning.
	They have a full range of descriptions of Him as Creator.
	They recognize all the creatures, like Psalm 8, just start there.
	It's this wonderful, you know, Domine Deus.
	I should be able to do it in Latin.
	It's the Lord, the Lord of, the Earth is the Lord, and all that is in it, right?
	Right.
	And you're singing with all of the creatures in praise of God.
	We've lost that, right?
	We've literally lost the prayer life that would anchor us in the true story.
	And so we're just beset by all of these other images, and we don't have protection against them, I think.
	And that's what the monastic life is also understood as, like battling demons, right?
	The monks sing the psalms.
	But I think, as we're talking just now, if you're saying these psalms constantly, You have a shield against all of the attacks that the demons are bringing because you know the true story and it's there like singing in your soul all the time.
	That is so interesting because you didn't know that I've started learning psalms and whenever I go for my run in the morning because this is my progression from learning poetry.
	Well I mean if you're doing the King James Bible it is poetry as well.
	Yeah, I'm just in the middle of Psalm 27 at the moment and, you know, for in the time of trouble he shall hide me in his pavilion.
	In the secret of his tabernacle he shall hide me.
	And it's just like, it's very reassuring.
	Because it's like, God is amazingly cool.
	He's just like, you know, once you commit to living with God and, you know, beholding the beauty of the Lord and stuff like this, there's no way you want to be.
	And He does amazingly cool stuff, like, you know, when your enemies come to, there's that weird line in Psalm 27 where, hang on, I'm just, It's very hard to do it to order, but where he talks about, um, when the wicked, even mine enemies and my foes came upon me to eat up my flesh, they stumbled and fell.
	And I was thinking, this is like the walking dead.
	Who are, who are these people who come to eat your flesh?
	It's a weird, it's a weird image, but, but he sorts it out.
	If you repeat these things, it does become a kind of protective aura.
	So, that's why I'd say in the Middle Ages they had it, right?
	Because both the monks and, you know, it's like you're in England, right?
	It's like all of the monasteries, well, one, that they were looted in the 16th century.
	I know.
	But you had this giant network of, you know, It's a 20th century term, but powerhouses prayer, right?
	This giant network of communities dedicated to singing the Psalms and then the laity modeling, wanting to model themselves on that prayer practice.
	started saying the Hours of the Virgin because it's a short sort of set of psalms.
	And what your experience is, I love that you're doing it while you're running, right?
	But the more you have those psalms just embedded in your mind and in your voice and in your heart, the more you're shielded.
	This is typically what I tend to recommend.
	It's like, what should you do?
	Read the Psalms!
	And that, going back to what we said, it's like you want to be enculturated into what our civilization is.
	That civilization, it's being grounded in those They're more than just prayers, right?
	They're songs to God, about God, that God, you know, enjoys hearing and that we are refreshed by if we participate in.
	And it's what the angels sing, as we understand it.
	Do you know what got me into all this?
	This is because I was mentioning about the different, all the different paths that led me towards Christ.
	I never know what the right phrase is, but you know, to get the religion thing.
	And one of them was this podcast I did with a guy called Jerry Marzynski.
	Have you heard of him?
	Okay, so he's this psychotherapist, I think.
	He worked a lot with prisoners in hospitals, and he worked with paranoid schizophrenics, and he established that the voices in their heads were real, that these were not hallucinations, that these are demons, and that some people are more susceptible than others.
	And one of the things he established is that the demons absolutely hate the 23rd Psalm.
	And I, so by way of experiment, I started using the Psalms and using prayers and stuff.
	And there was a time when I would have felt very, you know how Christianity has this kind of cringe reputation, you know, like we're encouraged to think of Christianity, you know, it's cool if you're a Buddhist or it's cool if you're, it's cool, really cool if you're a Satanist or you're a Wiccan.
	But Christianity is... Anyway, it really works.
	I wonder who's trying to make us think that.
	Yeah, well, yeah, well, exactly, exactly.
	But I tried out these psalms and what I found is that they banished the demons from me.
	I mean, I've been, you know, I'm not a paranoid schizophrenic, I've never been that, but I did I spent most of my life haunted by, I used to call them the humanities sometimes, I used to call them my demons.
	And these demons said, you know, you're so shit, James, I really, you know, you really are a worm, you know, it would be better off if you were dead.
	And, you know, like, like, I think a lot of us have a sort of sensitive disposition.
	I'll pray to these thoughts sometimes.
	And, I mean, I can't say that I'm any more organized than I was.
	You know, I've still got loads and loads of faults that really annoy me about myself.
	But what I don't get is this constant gnawing, these nagging voices in my ear.
	They just, they're just gone.
	The psalms and the prayers get rid of them.
	So, I mean, even on a practical level, Christianity is a good thing.
	Yes!
	And, you know, it keeps us joyful, which is what the demons really hate, right?
	No, that's lovely.
	Thank you for sharing that.
	No, no, no.
	I'm hoping to sort of introduce this topic in a way that's not going to kind of frighten the horses, so to speak.
	I don't want to sort of ward people off discovering it for themselves.
	I think we've all got different roots.
	Well, in the online world, in my telegram chat and things like that, what I'm encouraged by is there's lots of people out there who want to talk about Christianity.
	The hard thing and the frustrating thing for me is we end up in the denominational wars.
	Yes!
	Which drives me nuts!
	Me too!
	Me too!
	You're so right!
	Yeah, the two things... The denominational wars just, you know, depress me no end, and it's like, okay, so I am Catholic now, and I do care about being Catholic, and I mean, I'm frustrated with some of the things that have gone on in the Church, definitely, but the thing I will not do is start fighting over which institutional form is the perfect one, because that's a trap.
	That's an absolute trap.
	It doesn't mean that Paki Mama on, you know, in the Vatican is a good thing.
	No, that's not the same thing.
	It's this... I think we get trapped by the sort of external forms very easily, and then end up stuck in that.
	And then you never get out, right?
	Because you're constantly trapped by, well, the priesthood does this, and the scripture should be this, and I'm just going, Hail Mary!
	Because that demonic distraction is not going to help us.
	No, I'm totally with you.
	I mean, I am definitely not a Catholic at the moment.
	I mean, maybe I'll become one, I don't know.
	But I do say my Hail Marys because I quite like the... I quite like Mary as an intercessor.
	I mean, is that bad of me?
	Is that... she's a good thing?
	No, she's very happy.
	Do you see?
	She's with me, right?
	Yeah, yeah.
	I did see her, yeah.
	Hail Mary.
	Demons hate Hail Marys too, right?
	It's like, she's good at driving away.
	Because Hail Mary is what the angel Gabriel said at the moment of the incarnation.
	That's why the demons hate it so much.
	Because they're being reminded of our salvation.
	But then, of course, you get the Protestants.
	They say, you can only pray to God.
	You can't pray to these angels or saints.
	But I'm thinking, well, I don't see the conflict.
	They're intercessors.
	They're not They're not, you're not, you're not praying to, you know, and I, I'm afraid to say that I like, um, Sanctae Michael Arcangelae, um, Defendenos in Proleo, Contra Liquitia Metinsidias Diaboli.
	I mean, how could you not like that?
	It's powerful, isn't it?
	It's great.
	And the thing is, if the angels are real, they are given to us to help us, right?
	So why wouldn't you, you know, call on them to, to be part of your army?
	Right.
	You want to be part of their army.
	Right.
	And we want to follow Michael as our commander.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	He's the he's the boss of the of the army, isn't he?
	The army of the yes.
	And so.
	So, yeah, you're right.
	The interdenominational schisms are immensely tiresome.
	And the other the other really tiresome thing is the kind of the worthiness The, and the kind of, you can't, if you're a Christian, you can't say this, you can't, you can't think that, you know, or they get, they police, I've noticed this, I did a podcast with a guy, he's not a Christian, who I think is absolutely awesome, I love him, Cliff High, I don't know, I mean, he's, he, do you know Cliff High?
	You know, Cliff High is really down the rabbit hole.
	I mean, he's just absolutely, you know, we're talking aliens, he thinks.
	And I think there's probably an element of truth in this, that there are these creatures in another dimension, which are the kind of insectoid things, which are kind of mind controlling us anyway.
	And there were... I would say those are demons, but... Yeah, that's the thing.
	That's the thing.
	It's a very good point, what you're saying there.
	So he calls them mantids.
	And there are comments below, you know, where it's on YouTube, and they're from Christians, and they're saying, this man is talking the language of the devil, or he's talking, you know, it's misleading, it's whatever.
	And I'm thinking, how do you know?
	I mean, as Christians, we believe in this incredible supernatural force.
	We believe in the devil.
	We believe in angels.
	We believe in demons.
	And you're saying what?
	Okay, so there's a special type of demon which can't exist because it doesn't get mentioned in the Bible.
	What is this?
	You've just... Oh, yeah.
	Yeah, anyway.
	So there's a great Dominican theologian, Oxford Aidan Nichols, who I do enjoy reading a lot.
	And there's a good book that he has on the problems with introduction to Catholic theology's history.
	It's not an easy book, but The Shape of Catholic Theology.
	And he's talking at one point about what it means to be a theologian.
	On the other hand, I don't do theology.
	I can recommend a great book on Tolkien's metaphysics from a Thomistic perspective called The Flame Imperishable, which I really enjoyed.
	But for the most part, I don't do theology either, because I find that the sort of focusing on the explanation Distracting and problematic, but anyway father father Nichols is talking about how most theologians will have a Sort of thing that they focus on like a theology of grace, or I suppose I mind closest would be wisdom, right?
	I tend to focus on Mary as wisdom and look at the problem of understanding God through wisdom, but maybe love is your focus or Reason or something like that, so they'll have this this focus on particular theme, but that's like in the face cards in a in Deck of cards, right?
	It's like the Jack, right?
	It'll be your focus, right?
	And then there'll be, um, you know, the actual revelation of scripture maybe is, um, I think he said that was the Queen and then... But the point is, at some point you're going to have something that trumps all of those, which is God himself, which has not been fully revealed, right?
	All we know is what God has shown us.
	That's it, right?
	And that's what that revelation is.
	What we've been shown so far.
	But that doesn't mean God's shown us everything about God.
	How could he?
	We probably couldn't understand it anyway.
	So the limit on revelation that people are placing is rather interesting.
	It's like Scripture is the only thing.
	It's like, well, then you're saying that's the only way that God's revealed us to it?
	No.
	In fact, he came incarnate as Christ, right?
	And that, therefore, is outside, you know, bigger than even what he's written down in scripture.
	And then there's God himself, which is, you know, certainly beyond, to presume that we've been given the fullness of absolutely everything God could tell us about himself.
	Ah!
	No!
	That's impossible.
	Yeah.
	But on the other hand, what he has shown us is true, right?
	And so to sort of get down through that saying God showed himself to us in Christ.
	And you know, some of what was shown to us in those terms is written down in the scriptures.
	And when we focus on that, we understand some aspect of God.
	But that's still only, you know, still limited.
	It's still not the fullness.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Where are you on what we're going through now?
	I mean, do you think this is the final battle?
	No.
	You think it was just... But...
	Now, again, I'm thinking about it.
	I tend to over footnote.
	My books tend to be half footnotes.
	I read my scholarship, right?
	I think Box Day was saying this, but Revelation is always true, right?
	The book, right?
	The book of Revelation.
	You could say we're trying in time to understand something that is shown to us of heaven, which is what Revelation is.
	So, to say we know We don't know what the end of time is yet.
	I think, and this is actually in my first book, my From Judgment to Passion, I talk about the focus that people had on the year 1000.
	It's very interesting.
	We just passed the year 2000 and people are projecting things happening at 2033.
	And I'm like, well, that's interesting.
	That's the second millennium of the crucifixion.
	So certainly something could interesting, interesting could happen.
	In the year 1000, it focused people's attention on the possibility of the Second Coming, and it changed their prayer life.
	They became much more focused on the devotion to Christ and His humanity.
	I show this in my first book.
	They were wrong about it being the end of time, but the thing is, the end of time is... Eternity is not the same thing as the end of time, so we're always in contact with Revelation.
	Right.
	And but the opposite side of that is we want to have the satisfaction of feeling like we get to see the end of the story.
	And that, I think, is what people's desire for.
	I think there's a desire to say, oh, yeah, we're at the end of time now.
	It's all going to happen.
	We're going to get to be there at the last battle.
	Sure.
	Yeah.
	You want to be you want to be because you want to know the end.
	Actually, I'm not sure.
	Well, that's good.
	I think I'd rather lived in a unicorn world that existed before.
	Look, let me play devil's advocate.
	But I think the thing is, we all get our own end.
	Right.
	And this is where Vox is great.
	It's like the ride never ends.
	Right.
	The conflict is going to be with us.
	This is what we have.
	Right.
	Your moment, your test is going to come and you better stand.
	Right.
	God has been very, very clear.
	It's where Frodo says, you know, it's when he says to Gandalf that, you know, I wish I hadn't been born in this time.
	And Gandalf says, you know, right.
	I think that's the key moment of Lord of the Rings.
	But we get this one.
	This is ours.
	And how we behave in this moment is our great battle.
	So, yes, it's both right.
	It's neither the end of time and it is at the same time.
	You see, I would have to differ with you.
	I mean, I envy Tolkien, because although he obviously went through the hell of the First World War, A, he got the experience of just like amazing camaraderie and stuff.
	But more importantly, he came out the other side and had, you know, he sort of had a rich, fulfilled life, which he wasn't going to become the slave of the technocratic elite, which is the threat that's hanging over us.
	But playing devil's advocate with your point about, you know, my argument that this time it's different.
	You mentioned that a few years ago you too thought that Afghanistan was a kind of noble venture to, you know, liberate women or whatever crap we were fed by the propaganda machine.
	I know, it seems ridiculous now.
	It just seems so stupid.
	Why did we fall for that shit?
	Why did we believe in weapons of mass destruction?
	Just absolute horseshit stuff we were fed.
	Why did we ever trust the media?
	But we did.
	I think that so many more people are awake now.
	There has been a great awakening.
	And it seems to have happened for a reason, and lots and lots more people are turning to God.
	I mean, you must have noticed this.
	A lot more Christians around, a lot more people open about it.
	It's a cool thing now.
	So, if we're not living in extraordinary times, how do you explain this phenomenon?
	Oh, well, I didn't say we weren't living in extraordinary times.
	I just don't, I, I, maybe I projected what you were asking that people have asked me.
	me, it's like, do you think this is, you know, we're looking for the number of the beast and the great battle and things like that.
	Oh, that's obviously turning black.
	That is what, you know, Christ cautions us against of, you know, the father knows the Yeah, yeah, I know that.
	We're not allowed to know it's not for us.
	Yeah, I get all that.
	Yeah.
	But, of course, we're living in extraordinary times, right?
	And that's, it's like we, it's, well, as a historian, it's like there's always, you know, time is always extraordinary.
	There's always, I think you and I, you and I are close in age, right?
	It's like, okay, so we had a long period without A giant crisis, right?
	We lived in Unicode.
	It was great.
	We lived in Unicode, but you know, there's some part of me that's like, cool, we finally get it, right?
	We are in the trenches right now.
	Yeah, we bloody are.
	We absolutely are.
	And, you know, you and I at Unauthorized with Vox and Owen, I don't know how much you watch our fellow... I know he's very much watched.
	But here's the thing.
	Had we been in the trenches, we would have had the smell of cordite, which sort of dulls the senses and, you know, had the chance to feel like we were doing something.
	Instead, what do we do?
	We're making podcasts and we're writing books.
	Exactly, yes.
	It's a bit virtual, as you say.
	I think yes.
	In that sense, we are really living in this sort of spiritual moment.
	The spiritual realm of virtual... You and I are having this conversation.
	We're physically close to each other.
	And that puts us in danger.
	Absolutely.
	There's a danger of being caught up in those illusions that the demons will cast for us.
	The social desire to be in communication, I think, been weaponized against us.
	All of the social media and everything.
	It should have been a good thing, right?
	And it turned foul.
	Sorry?
	There's no devil.
	There's no demons in this particular corner that we're sharing at the moment.
	It's great.
	You know, you've got Mary.
	That's because we said our songs before we showed up.
	Yeah, well, that's true.
	We all ran away.
	We hope.
	That's true.
	I think we are a safe space.
	Yeah.
	Right, so I think the First World War had, you know, the trenches were that generation's challenge and test, and this is ours.
	Yes.
	I mean, do you agree that the First World War was a blood sacrifice in the way that 9-11 was a blood sacrifice?
	These were all kind of satanic rituals, really.
	Oh, yes.
	Oh, yes.
	Oh, absolutely.
	And the kind of blood sacrifice we're living through right now, the more I'm reading about medical malpractice over the last year and the refusal of studying alternative treatments for COVID.
	That's up at the level of demonic sacrifice.
	Yeah, totally.
	The hospitals, I mean the NHS has a different system, but the hospitals in the United States chose to take the federal money that they were being given for counting COVID patients as opposed to actively exploring alternate treatment protocols.
	That is, I mean, it's as evil as sending those young men over the top at the SOM.
	Yes.
	You know, we need to do this.
	It's a sort of blood sacrifice.
	And now that they're injecting the vaccines into the young men who are dying, particularly the athletes that are dying, that's, yes, that's up there with blood sacrifice.
	It's extraordinary.
	I mean, we're just returning to the theme of the prince of the devil is the prince of lies.
	And we are surrounded by the most blatant lies.
	I mean, politicians in England, and I know it's the same in America, they are absolutely they don't even bother.
	They don't even pretend to be to be engaging with reality now with any kind of truth.
	They they lie with just as if it doesn't matter.
	As if there's no consequences.
	It's extraordinary.
	And the medical profession, which you and I grew up thinking, well, the doctors make us better.
	Doctors care about us.
	They've got all these magic potions that can heal us.
	But they're not.
	They're not healing us at all.
	I mean, I'll tell you what.
	Well, you may have.
	I grew up as the daughter of a surgeon.
	Who is a professor of surgery who spent his life telling me the only reason doctors can do anything is because the body heals itself.
	Which is why- I wish my dad was still alive, right?
	Because he understood the hubris that modern medicine was falling into, very much so.
	And this, I mean, the thing that I'm most upset about is this refusal to acknowledge that you should go to a doctor and be given choices of treatment and an explanation of known risks, right?
	And they did not do that.
	Or just a bit of Ivermectin would be fine.
	Right, exactly.
	I mean, maybe you choose to be on a ventilator, which doesn't work and will kill you, but to be told that that's the only treatment that you're even allowed to consider?
	No, that is this failure of... we should have been given the choice of how we worked with God in fighting the illness, and we weren't.
	You know how we Christians know that everything, you know, it's all there in the Bible, and up to a point.
	I mean, it obviously doesn't mention aliens, but one of my favorite lines, physician heal thyself.
	Jesus knew what he was talking about.
	He didn't say, go thou and find thyself a doctor who's going to inject you with experimental gene therapy.
	He said, Right.
	But the primary thing has been taking away people's choice, right?
	And saying, no, you have no choice.
	You must submit to this particular medicine.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I've got some friends staying.
	I'm going to go and say goodbye to them in a second, because that's kind of how I roll.
	I just get my timing wrong with my podcasts.
	But I wanted to ask you briefly, how's Milo doing?
	I haven't seen him for a while.
	Oh, well, you had his big announcement in March, right?
	That he is officially ex-gay.
	Yeah.
	Which caused some... Does that happen?
	...furore on the internet.
	Does that happen?
	Do people become ex-gay?
	With a lot of prayer.
	Yes.
	Yes.
	And recognizing He's writing now for Church Militant, and he's been writing some very powerful pieces about... We're talking about how we were subjected to the spells and such just by Hollywood, but the sex magic that is being practiced in the gay community is very, very powerful, right?
	And certainly several years ago when Milo talked about the abuse that he had growing up, he's now become much clearer about the effects that that kind of abuse when you're younger has on your soul.
	Yes.
	And he's very, I mean, he's got some hard-hitting stuff.
	He's writing about that very clearly.
	He's got a number of pieces in Church Militant.
	He did a really good interview with Michael Voris a couple months ago about understanding the way in which that those lies feed into you so that you end up with this fiction that you are just that, right?
	That you're born gay.
	And he recognizes now that that's not, in fact, true.
	And his long-term goal is to set up a community for prayer and, I guess, conversion therapy.
	Like a monastery.
	Reparative therapy.
	Well, maybe like a monastery.
	Yeah, I'm not quite sure how.
	I love that idea.
	Milo the abbot.
	Abbot Milo, well, yes.
	He's always been Catholic and he's always understood himself as Christian, but he has, over the last year or so, really been praying hard and it's helped him see some things that he wasn't able to understand more clearly.
	So pray for him!
	And the battle is only intensifying.
	I'm clearly going to have to get him on the podcast.
	I mean, if he still does.
	That would be great.
	Does podcast.
	Well, yeah, I know.
	I just knew you were a friend of his.
	It's been really exciting having you on the podcast.
	I hope the conversation didn't meander too much.
	And we didn't even touch the surface of the middle.
	Oh, one more thing, actually.
	One of the topics that Was it Cliff High or was it, it might have been Catherine Austen Fitz.
	You know about plague laws and stuff, and that actually plagues historically have been used as a way to introduce these new regulations which stop freedom of movement, enable the big government, the state, to kind of control everything.
	And one of them suggested that even the Black Death they thought was a, somehow it had been created by the Cabal of its day.
	Have you got any thoughts on that?
	Can one, could one engineer a plague?
	I don't know.
	I don't know.
	I don't know with the Black Death.
	And Owen actually, he wanted me to talk about that too.
	And I realized I need to think about it because I do know the history of what goes on at that moment.
	And one of the commonalities is it comes out of Asia, right?
	It comes out of the Mongolian steppes, probably.
	And because with you wrote the rodents apparently and it spreads because the Mongols have conquered the whole of the continent and so the trade routes are really open, right?
	So there's there's a you know, the movement of peoples that we end up with these these plagues and moments of great global mobility is obviously Not an accident.
	Um There was a level of biological warfare in it, and the way that the Genoese contracted the plague to start with is because the Mongols who were besieging them at Kaffa threw diseased heads over the wall.
	Of course they did, yeah.
	Right, so people certainly knew about spreading disease.
	I don't know.
	I mean, I'm definitely on the conspiracy theory level of thinking something has been engineered that we're fighting right now, and they are certainly using whatever it is to create economic and political lockdown.
	And so I could certainly go that far in hypotheticals.
	This is kind of how we know Satan's always in charge of the world.
	Governments like having control of their people.
	And to think about the way in which that has both furthered peace, town governments trying to create control over who gets to live inside the cities, managing waste, dealing with the movement of
	you know commerce and such like that there's a whole nother topic you'll just have to i i will say so so when you talk about poetry can i do my my my um self promotion you totally can you can promote whatever you want to i'm really i'm really bad at this and i have been criticized for it and it's not i just i kind of i like the chat And I'm really bad at promoting my, you know, my Patreon and stuff, because I know that's kind of the most important thing.
	You just want to be in the conversation.
	OK, so this is the poem that my Telegram chat wrote over the last year.
	We're working on a new one, if you want, the Christian story for kids about liturgy and animals.
	But this is our Alexander Pope homage with satire against the seekers of fame.
	Right.
	It's a... Yes?
	There are five stories in it.
	Well, it's an overarching poem.
	There are five stories in it that Fama, the goddess Fama, fame, is having a court and she has invited all...
	Big Fama.
	Well, we wrote this last year, you know, and all of this is starting to come true, right?
	That she has all of her sycophants at her party, and the Green Knight shows up and challenges them that they're all, in fact, just, you know, Centrists, right?
	And so she sends them off on quests and they have a variety of adventures.
	The Hollywood Landers, the Cuomo Brothers, the Lady Priest, the Rainbow Boys and the Pregnant Girl, and they all convene again at the end in the Masonic Lodge in the Ondas Hotel in London.
	We did a lot of research for this.
	I'm loving this!
	It's... when I said iambic pentameter, that we wrote it in iambic pentameter, some of it actually scans, in the style of Alexander Pope's Dunciad, which was his satire of journalists in his day, right, in the early 18th century.
	And one, there was a sort of spooky level of the more we wrote the poetry, the more our story started becoming real, because we were like, Researching it with real characters to be satirized and then pointing back out to the world.
	Things keep happening like, you know, Cuomo was in our poem and look what happened to him in the last few months.
	You're asking what Milo just did a big, long piece.
	It was so long they published it in three parts on Church Milliton about Pete Buttigieg and his partner adopting these kids.
	Well, we have a character, you know, one of our quests in there is a gay couple who Want to surrogate mom for their babies.
	What happens with that?
	So now I'm at the level of you write poetry and it starts coming true.
	And that's a kind of dangerous magic of itself, right?
	Art and life in correspondence.
	So get Centrism Games and you'll find out.
	No, that sounds really good.
	Can I ask you one more question?
	You're the one who has to go somewhere.
	Yeah, no, but they've gone now anyway.
	I heard them drive off.
	This is a very medieval thing.
	It's like Bernard of Clairvaux saying, I've got guests.
	I have to stop with my sermon right now.
	Is that what he said?
	He does.
	The guests have arrived.
	I have to say you're channeling Bernard of Clairvaux.
	I'm very into that.
	I like kind of noises off.
	I like dogs and stuff and I mean the phone is annoying.
	Yeah.
	One thing I've noticed again in the last 18 months is that my constituency has altered.
	It's like some of my people who really like my stuff and listen to me would have considered themselves on the far left.
	And I was wondering whether you'd had a sort of similar experiences of your sort of your journey, that the stuff you understand now are completely different.
	When did you go down the rabbit hole, if you have gone down the rabbit hole?
	It's the layers of rabbit hole, right?
	I think that the red pill rabbit hole started right in 2012 or so, right?
	It's like your Obama book was helpful to me in that moment.
	That, you know, Obama was obviously in my neighborhood, friends with people that I was in, you know, my department with and, you know, obviously the black neighborhood that I live in was very happy to have him.
	They're president.
	And, you know, he seemed to be a good thing when I first voted for him, although I had friends telling me, no, that that's not the case.
	But I'm not sure McCain was a better choice either.
	Right.
	It's like the fake binary is where I am now.
	Right.
	It's so right.
	It's like what Owen talks about the battery.
	Right.
	It's like these false these polls that are, in fact, the same thing driving each other.
	And I'd say something happened during Obama's first term where I just started feeling like everything was going sour.
	And obviously that didn't, my neighborhood didn't change.
	I've lived here since 94.
	My feeling of, wait a minute, this isn't right.
	The kinds of energy, I'd say, I can tell it this way, I wouldn't have articulated the kind of energy that I'm feeling.
	So that around the election in 2012, I just started reading.
	Intensely, right?
	I needed to understand why I'd gotten this strong sense of this isn't right.
	That's nine years ago, I suppose.
	I read very intensively in American history and economics and politics, things that I hadn't really attended to as a medievalist when I was writing about liturgy and monks and prayer and things like that.
	I'd say in the long run I realized I didn't move, right?
	I am exactly who I was all along.
	Interested in prayer, interested in story, interested in wisdom and Mary.
	But I appreciate now that the world that we were living in was not the one I thought we were.
	Right, that that so the the feeling of I'm going back now rereading Dune now because Jay Dyer had this very interesting passage in one of his Hollywood books about the movie Dune where he's referencing some people that were writing about Afghanistan and where it fit in the British Empire at the time in the 19th and 20th centuries and and it's like this is Dune this is this is
	The problem of empire imposing on this region because of its, I mean, whether the opium or the oil or the Silk Road or the, I then went and looked up Franco Pan's big book on the Silk Road and, you know, skim through it and say, yeah, yeah, yeah, same story, same story, same story.
	It's like that center of Eurasia and the crossing of the land routes.
	Which, Dune is, you know, it's interplanetary, so you don't have that feeling.
	But in our world, that desert in the middle of, between Europe and China, has always been a pivot.
	And what I see now, my most recent understanding, it's on the blog right now, just as maps, is we're in this tension between the land world, which is Eurasia, with Africa, the new world, you know, I mean, Americas are kind of still off in the world.
	Part of it, the land, the land world and the sea world, and the British Empire was obviously the sea world right it's the the European expansion takes place after.
	The land route closes thanks to the Black Death, thanks to the Chinese closing it off again.
	And so the Portuguese and the Spanish and then the French and the English start trading around Africa, trading across the Atlantic and so forth.
	And if you look at us, you look at our world history as, in fact, the tension between what goes across the Silk Road and what goes on those sea routes.
	That is what I understand now about what's going on in Afghanistan, right?
	And what China is doing right now and has been, and again I learned this from Vox, is the Belt and Road Initiative and all of the railroads and such.
	Look at the map of the railroads that China is, they want, if they want access to Afghanistan, makes total sense because they're running railroads across Asia.
	I think one of the high-speed ones are going to go from Peking to Beijing to Paris or whatever in two days or something.
	This is a major reconfiguration of the system, the world system.
	And that's what shut down with the Black Death in the 14th century, because all of those regions became I mean, China shut down, the Ming closed off everything, and they just stopped having as much contact.
	Europe has to go through its reset, as it were, after the depopulation with the plague, and then they end up going to the sea route, right?
	I think we're living, in world historical terms, we're living through a big reset geographically in these terms right now, and the switch over in Afghanistan is like a big hinge.
	Ah, okay.
	That's totally different.
	Is that good or bad?
	For Christians, it's just, you know, popcorn, right?
	It's like, don't get sucked into thinking you can control either, any of these, right?
	It's, you know, it's a good thing if the Chinese, there's millions of Christians in China, right?
	Are they not all being executed or sent off to camps?
	Right.
	So we pray for them that Christians are not of this world, right?
	We're not supposed to be trying to control this system.
	That's just not where our kingdom is.
	Right.
	Okay.
	I have been feeling that.
	You broke up there a little.
	No, you've been feeling No, I've been feeling that, this sense, yeah.
	Right, so just don't pick sides in this, right?
	But also, you know, as English speakers, we do have to sort of look at the empire and go, hmm, whose side were we on?
	Oops, right?
	Yeah, yeah.
	That's another kind of sort of shift in my perspective that has occurred in the last 18 months.
	I used to be, you know, rural Britannia.
	I'm not quite so sure.
	I think it's more complicated.
	Yeah, yeah.
	No, me too, right?
	I get that now, right?
	You were like, Marica.
	Marica!
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	I still kind of am, right?
	Marica, it's a good thing.
	Yeah.
	But you know, America is part of the British battle with the Spanish.
	I have been saying this for a long time, because I grew up in the Southwest, and so the British Empire was at odds with the Spanish Empire.
	1588 is a really important year, right?
	I've heard that.
	Well, that's the Armada, isn't it, that year?
	It's the Armada, right.
	1688 is also a really important year, because that's the year the Dutch took over.
	Okay.
	The glorious revolution, right?
	Of course.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Right.
	And 1788, you know, the year before that, 1789.
	These are very interesting moments.
	And I can do this each year.
	That's very interesting.
	Yeah.
	1988, what happened in the... I guess that's, well, Bush succeeded Reagan.
	In 1989, the wall came down.
	And I guess that's, well, Bush succeeded Reagan in 1989.
	The wall came down.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Hmm.
	Hmm.
	These are interesting patterns.
	We should not, as Christians, be trying to grab that ring, right?
	Whichever one it is.
	And how we best live in the world.
	as, I think, witnesses to Christ.
	And again, we will fall into sin if we start trying to think that, oh, but if we can just grab that, if we can just get, like Warhammer, right?
	If we can just get the ring, everything will be fine.
	That's not the answer.
	Tolkien was very clear about that.
	If we cast it into Mount Doom, surely we're doing the right thing.
	Right, but even Frodo wasn't able to do that on his own.
	That's the thing.
	Okay, well if you and I and Milo team up to throw the ring into Mount Doom, that's enough of this, isn't it?
	Go back to your shire and enjoy your horse.
	I would, do you know what?
	I would, I was very, I actually grew up in Tolkien country.
	I mean, I used to go to the Licky Hills, which I think, I think Tolkien would have known he was in that part of the world.
	The Licky Hills were outside, outside Birmingham, but that, you know, I used to go there at the weekends with my, with my dad and we used to go and Play hide and seek and stuff.
	I'm very conscious of the Shire and I do feel the calling of the Shire and I'd love to go to the Shire and not have Mordor invade it.
	But I feel that we have been invaded by Mordor.
	Well, you're right.
	And we've got Sharky on, you know, in the midst.
	And I think the sort of... And this is where Owen is actually very strong with Brittaria.
	And I think Vox is starting to come around to the understanding.
	It's like, we need to cultivate our local communities, right?
	That is where you build, right?
	You build your neighbors.
	I mean, we are called to love our neighbor and really consider that.
	We're called to live in the world.
	Loving our neighbors, and so I live in Chicago, right?
	I, you know, get out of the cities, it's like, well, I do, you know, because I live in the neighborhood, I, you know, my dog is my avenue to getting to talk to my neighbors, because I take him walks, and you talk to your dogs, and, you know, go to church, in your parish, have your parish, cultivate your potato growing, all of that is where we live.
	Right?
	And, you know, obviously don't let Sharky come in and take over your town.
	I think that that is what Tolkien is trying to show us.
	The hobbits do have to go home and then fight for their own place, but they have to have their own place.
	They have to live in the world, which is the opposite of the sort of globalist, living nowhere world, right?
	It's like they're telling us we can't fly anymore.
	It's like they're giving us a gift.
	Right?
	Saying, you know, we want to be in control of your ability to travel from, you know, no place to no place.
	Yeah.
	Oh, that's an interesting perspective.
	Yeah.
	- Yeah.
	- Yeah.
	- If we're coutiver Notre Jardin, isn't that what Voltaire said, end of Condé, I think? - Voltaire is one of the bad guys.
	We don't want to go there.
	Yeah, I know.
	I was thinking that, but as you said it, you know, it's actually, you may have been a bad guy, but on that particular moment, he was talking sense.
	Cultivate our own gardens.
	Yeah, cultivate our own gardens.
	And that really, really matters.
	Cultivate your local.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	I'm clearly going to have to get sort of goat rearing skills.
	And I mean, I'd quite like to, to have bees and I'd be very happy to just, just travel around.
	Yeah.
	Well, I mean, I don't, I don't need a car, you know, who needs a car when you've got a horse?
	Right.
	Okay.
	That's cool.
	Well, Rachel, it's been really good having you on the, have you, have you plugged all the things you want to want to plug?
	Do you have anything else you want to mention?
	I wanted mainly to tell you about our poem.
	Go look at Centrism Games.
	And you can get it in hard copy, released around the world, and I know people have bought it in the UK.
	I'm going to get it.
	I'm going to get it.
	I'm quite flaky at the moment because I'm having a kind of Lyme relapse, which makes my brain not as good as it is normally, which is really annoying.
	I kind of forget words, so I hope I haven't been too dull for you.
	Oh, I've enjoyed this very much!
	Well, I've liked it too, you know, in my sort of gaga world.
	So, may I gently remind my beloved listeners, please support me on Subscribestar and on Patreon because I can't do this stuff without your support, you know.
	I mean, I do need help and we know that the forces of darkness are so powerful and we've got to fight back somehow.
	So, Rachel Forte-Brown, thank you again, and similar to Milo, and we'll do another podcast sometime when we talk more about medieval stuff, because I think we haven't really, we've only dabbled so far.
	Excellent, thank you for having me.
	Good, no, that's cool.
	All right, thank you.
	Bye-bye.

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