Pirate Guidelines

I saw a post on X the other day. About how it started, eleven years ago, when the gamers took on the games journalists and fought them for their games.

“I was there Gandalf!” cried Alexander Macris, friend of the Dragon Common Room and Contemplator on the Tree of Woe.

I wasn't there, not yet, but I soon would be. Not that I knew it when I posted “Three Cheers for White Men” on my Fencing Bear at Prayer blog, ten years ago this coming June and eleven days before The Candidate rode down the golden escalator and the world came to an end.

My world as I knew it ended on January 17, 2016, when a colleague in medieval studies noticed my Three Cheers and brought them to the attention of the Medieval Feminist Scholarship Facebook page, but it wasn't until September that same year that I boarded the ship of the Gamers by writing about Milo Yiannopoulos's campus speaking tour.

I kept a detailed log of our adventures, which you can still read on my blog.

It all seems so very long ago now, and yet, as if it were yesterday. I have been listening to podcasts to help me sleep, and sometimes when I wake up, the algorithm has sent me places I had never dreamed I would visit. This morning, for example, I awoke to an interview with an ex-porn star talking about how an encounter with a teller in a bank turned his life around. The other morning it was an FBI interviewer talking about how he plans his operations. Three days ago it was Jordan Peterson talking with Charlie Kirk about how Kirk started Turning Point USA.

And that's when things got really weird.

I was there, in March 2017, when Professor Peterson described Milo as a trickster and praised his courage in the face of attack. I was there, fifteen months later, in June 2018, when Bari Weiss asked Professor Peterson whether Milo was not, in fact, a racist, to which Professor Peterson replied: “I haven’t followed Milo that carefully.” I was there—and I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

Fast forward to the other morning, and the rescripting was complete. Milo, both Professor Peterson and Mr. Kirk remembered, had been there, there in the battle, there in the fray. “Too bad Milo fell off the edge of the world, but he had a pretty rough go of it,” Professor Peterson commented, more sad than critical, as if there were nothing he could have done to help. “He had a lot of trauma. A lot.”

If you have been following the voyages of the Mosaic Ark, you know that we drakes have a soft-spot for pirates, particularly Captain Jack Sparrow. Jack may be the worst pirate you have ever heard of—but you have heard of him! Probably all sorts of nasty things, because he is, after all, a pirate. But have you heard the backstory of why he was branded a pirate by the East India Company? Or about how he stood up to the slavers?

It's a curious thing, having been there. Having the ship’s logs to prove what you knew at the time. Having the screenshots and pdfs and videos to prove who was there and who stood for the truth when the slavers came with their checks. And then to hear, almost casually, about how what you know happened... didn’t. Not really. Not when the bankers keep control of the checks. Not when the interviewers know how to set a scene for proving that you, Jack, were the pirate. And they were the Good Guys, not you.

“I remember,” says Elrond, remembering the battle that the Last Alliance fought against Sauron, all those many centuries ago.

“I remember,” says Fencing Bear at Prayer. “I was there.”