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Why Liberals Should Fear, Fight, and Learn from ‘Conspiratorial Medievalism’
Medieval knights occupy a privileged place in the Western imagination. From Galahad and the Holy Grail to William Wallace of Braveheart fame, the lore of knights is studded with fierceness, physical strength, chivalry, and devotion. History teaches us some additional knightly truths: brutality, a taste for pillage and slaughter, and an above-the-law entitlement that came with serving both God and King as a hired sword.
But at a time when uncomfortable facts are about as popular as the bubonic plague, the truth about medieval knights is losing ground to a perverted feudal fantasy of present-day white supremacists. Their dream? A Caucasian Christian Camelot and serfdom, or worse, for everyone else.
Enter the Knights Templar, a medieval organization led by Christian warrior knights, who for two hundred years (AD 1118–AD 1312) straddled the fence between worthy and woeful in their battle to hold the Holy Land for Christianity and secure complete control of Iberia.
Whatever we might think of this endeavor, the Knights Templar were, excuse the bad pun, a killer brand and for their day, international influencers of the first rank. The Templars’ vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity gave them distinction. Their commitment to protecting Christian pilgrims in the Holy…
