A writer who responded to the New Zealand massacre by noting that "everything [shooter Brenton] Tarrant identifies as qualities of a disintegrating Western civilisation is true" and an academic who runs a fan blog dedicated to right-wing speaker Milo Yiannopoulos are some of the "distinguished visiting speakers" being promoted by the controversial Ramsay Centre.

The Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, which recently signed an agreement with the University of Wollongong to begin offering a new Bachelor of Arts in Western Civilisation, has come under fire for including The American Conservative editor Rod Dreher and University of Chicago academic Rachel Fulton-Brown on its 2019 lecture series speakers list.

An academic who runs a fan blog dedicated to right-wing commentator Milo Yiannopoulos, who was banned from Australia following his comments on the New Zealand massacre, is on the Ramsay Centre speakers list. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

In an article on Tarrant's manifesto, a 74-page document which was published online and sent to New Zealand politicians in the minutes before Mr Tarrant killed at least 50 people in a mosque in Christchurch, Mr Dreher writes: "It’s a chilling document, for a couple of reasons. First, it’s grounded in both paranoid, racist grievance, and legitimate, realistic concerns.

"You may think that declining numbers of ethnic Europeans is a good thing, or something that has no particular moral meaning. But it really is happening," Mr Dreher writes in the article that was published on Friday afternoon under a screenshot from a video of the massacre filmed by Tarrant and disseminated online.