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Pharos

Doing Justice to the Classics

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Ancient Greece and Rome in the Epstein Files

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Land Acknowledgement: Pharos is researched, written, and published online at Vassar College, an institution situated in the homeland of the Munsee Lenape people. Please read more.

Jefferey Epstein was a millionaire and child rapist, who was convicted in 2008 of procuring a minor for prostitution. He then died in prison in 2019 while awaiting trial for sex trafficking of children. In 2026, under pressure from even Republican lawmakers, the Trump administration’s Department of Justice began releasing Epstein’s emails and text message, photographs, and other documents — over three million pages in all — that detailed Epstein’s financial and social network, including his friendly relationships with many prominent men and women, including President Bill Clinton, former Harvard president Larry Summers, British royal Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Elon Musk, and President Donald Trump, who called Epstein a “terrific guy” who’s “a lot of fun to be with,” mentioning Epstein’s love of “beautiful women…on the younger side.” The Epstein files show that many of these people maintained their relationships with Epstein long after his 2008 conviction, and even continued to attend events Epstein hosted at his many properties, including his privately owned island in the U.S. Virgin Islands where he is alleged to have committed many sex crimes involving underage girls. 

Although media coverage has focused primarily on Epstein’s social network, the Epstein files also reveal much about Epstein’s politics and intellectual interests. To be sure, Epstein’s network transcended traditional political lines, but he maintained particularly lively correspondences with several right and far-right thinkers, including Steve Bannon, Peter Thiel, Yale Computer Science professor David Gelernter, and Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker. Racist pseudo-science and eugenics were among Epstein’s favorite topics, illustrating how misogyny and white supremacy go hand in hand. And as this Pharos guest article by UCLA’s Mo Basil Perkins (they/them) shows, the Epstein files also reveal Epstein’s deep fascination with Greco-Roman antiquity, making this notorious sex criminal a sobering illustration of how easily the prestige of “the classical” can authorize hatred and violence. –Curtis Dozier, Director of Pharos

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Megyn Kelly Compares America to Rome in Decline

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Land Acknowledgement: Pharos is researched, written, and published online at Vassar College, an institution situated in the homeland of the Munsee Lenape people. Please read more.

Megyn Kelly has come a long way from asking Donald Trump tough questions about his history of misogyny and being played by Charlize Theron in a film about being sexually abused by Fox News’ chairman Roger Ailes. Today, she presides over her own media empire including a show on SiriusXM that, Media Matters reports, has given her a platform to promote the white supremacist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, criticize the intelligence of Black women, paint immigrants as rapists, claim trans people are more likely to engage in mass murder, and endorse Trump’s use of governmental power to intimidate and prosecute political opponents. In fact, her show is doing so well that SiriusXM is giving her an entire channel.

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Latin Mottoes in State Flags Sanitize Colonial Violence

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Land Acknowledgement: Pharos is researched, written, and published online at Vassar College, an institution situated in the homeland of the Munsee Lenape people. Please read more.

In 2024, the state of Minnesota got a new state flag. It was a meaningful change since state flags encode how a place wants to see itself and its history. The symbolism of the old Minnesota flag celebrated the displacement of Dakota and Ojibwe peoples, who are shown riding away from land now occupied by European colonists, represented by a figure with a plow. That image whitewashes (literally) the history of the state where President Abraham Lincoln ordered thirty-eight Dakota to be hanged in the largest mass execution in United States History. Minnesota wasn’t alone in having a flag that sanitized or celebrated its violent past: although Mississippi abandoned a flag that celebrated the Confederacy in 2020, several state flags still contain Confederate symbols. However, these are only the most obvious examples of flags with hateful symbolism. In a nation with so much colonial violence in its history, all flags should be subject to such scrutiny. This includes the many state flags that feature Latin text.

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Who Needs Empathy? Why Some White Nationalists Condemn Western Civilization

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This post is part of a series on Elon Musk’s interest in Greco-Roman antiquity. Read part one: “When the Richest Man in the World Loves Classics.”

A few weeks ago, Elon Musk took a break from dismantling social security, violating the privacy of millions of Americans, firing veterans, and increasing, not decreasing, the cost of government. He spent his day off giving an interview to the popular podcaster Joe Rogan. Rogan has promoted COVID vaccine denialism and transphobia, and more than anyone else in media, helped Musk’s boss get elected president. Or is Musk the boss? In any case, during their interview Musk remarked that “the fundamental weakness of Western Civilization is empathy.” It’s not a terribly surprising thing to hear from the man who has shown contempt for people suffering from cancer or HIV/AIDS and who described the poor as “the parasite class.” But at the same time, it might be surprising to hear Musk criticize Western Civilization, given the fact that ancient Greece and Rome are often considered its “foundation.” Why would a man who plainly admires the ancient world so much have anything bad to say about Western Civ?

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When the Richest Man in the World Loves Classics

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Elon Musk is (as of now) not only the richest man in the world but also, thanks to President Trump’s embrace of him, one of the most politically powerful. He also loves Greco-Roman antiquity. That love received increased attention when Musk’s allies defended his use of a Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration by calling it a “Roman Salute,” a defense that makes his gesture just another example of his interest in ancient history and not an embrace of fascist politics. Pharos has already documented a notorious neo-Nazi making this same defense, and Sarah Bond and Stephanie Wong have recently challenged this latest attempt at sanitizing and normalizing the gesture. There’s nothing “Roman” about Musk’s salute, but he’s always used antiquity to promote the politics it represents. We don’t need to debate what the gesture “really” was or what it “really” means to see that Musk’s fascination with antiquity has always drawn on understandings of the past that are implicated in white nationalism.

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When Hate Memes teach History

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Land Acknowledgement: Pharos is researched, written, and published online at Vassar College, an institution situated in the homeland of the Munsee Lenape people. Please read more.

Nothing defines online communication in the twenty-first century like the meme. Perhaps surprisingly for a hypermodern medium, many memes incorporate images, myths, and themes from Greco-Roman antiquity; even the word “meme” is derived from an ancient Greek root for “imitation.” However ubiquitous and fun meme culture may be, it is far from benign. As Pharos has documented, the familiarity and prestige of Greco-Roman antiquity make it an attractive source of symbols and ideas for white nationalists to promote their racist politics. Inevitably then this appropriation extends to the realm of memes. In this post, we examine how two common meme templates have used aspects of Greco-Roman antiquity to promote white nationalist thought. 

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Another Politician Blames Fall of Rome on Homosexuality

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Land Acknowledgement: Pharos is researched, written, and published online at Vassar College, an institution situated in the homeland of the Munsee Lenape people. Please read more.

When Mike Johnson was elected Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, he was not well known on a national level. Since then, journalists have reported on many aspects of his politics and his career, including his promotion of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, his work as a l awyer for an organization that the SPLC has designated a hate group (and whose fundraising campaign Pharos has documented), and, most recently, his support for a group that promoted the debunked practice of “conversion therapy,” which attempts to convince or force gay people to conform to heterosexual norms. The same report also revealed that he’s one of those men who thinks about the Roman Empire. To be more specific, he thinks about how homosexuality caused its fall.

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A Homeric Warrior Against LGBTQ Rights

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Land Acknowledgement: Pharos is researched, written, and published online at Vassar College, an institution situated in the homeland of the Munsee Lenape people. Please read more.

Even before Florida Governor Ron DeSantis had begun ramping up his campaign for the Republican nomination in the 2024 Presidential Race, he had attracted national headlines with an aggressively reactionary political agenda that he calls his “war on woke.” He’s enacted an extensive anti-LGBTQ legislative agenda, reduced the influence of Black voters in Florida elections, opposed federal legislation protecting women from domestic violence, banned childrens’ books, defunded diversity and inclusion programs in state colleges, watered down the teaching of African American history, and defended (and allegedly participated in) torture at Guantanamo Bay, where he served as a Navy Judge Advocate General before running for congress. Most recently he has been willing to terrorize families of mixed-immigration status and risk a quarter of his state’s gross domestic product to bolster his anti-immigration credentials. With a candidate like this there’s no need to seek out times he’s said racist things or shared the stage with white nationalists: his record makes clear that he intends to run for President on the promise of homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, and anti-Black politics. And now his campaign is promoting his agenda using Greco-Roman antiquity.

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Making Misogyny Timeless on the Incel Wiki

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Land Acknowledgement: Pharos is researched, written, and published online at Vassar College, an institution situated in the homeland of the Munsee Lenape people, who lived here for thousands of years before the arrival of European colonists and continue to live today as the Stockbridge-Munsee community in Wisconsin, the Delaware Tribe and the Delaware Nation in Oklahoma, and the Munsee Delaware Nation in Ontario. Please read more.

This post was researched and written by Tao Beloney ’23, Pharos Staff

Content and Link Warning: This article discusses misogyny, sexual violence, and mass violence. It documents many claims that the Incel Wiki makes about women by linking to archived versions of pages there. Clicking on these links will not generate traffic for that site but will bring you, in some cases, to pages that proudly advocate bigoted ideas and violence against women.

Incels, or “involuntary celibates,” are an online subculture consisting almost entirely of men who consider themselves unable to find sexual or romantic partners. This subculture was launched into the national consciousness after the 2014 Isla Vista shootings. The shooter, Elliot Rodger, had been an active member of an early online incel community and left behind a lengthy manifesto that turned him into a martyr for the then-burgeoning movement. Since then, they have been responsible for dozens of deaths, including several mass shootings. Online, incel communities are characterized largely by bigotry and nihilism, with particular vitriol directed towards women, and incel communities have a high overlap with other hate  groups as well as a complex ideology of their own. The Incel Wiki, created in 2018 after a fight with Wikipedia editors over the content of Wikipedia’s article on incels, serves as a repository and rehabilitation effort for this ideology. The Incel Wiki projects inceldom back into history by looking for historical figures to claim as “protocels” (Jesus Christ is a notable example, despite evidence that Mary Magdalene may have been his lover) and look to historical authors for precedents to their modern ideas. And, of course, a look at their “Timeless Quotes on Women” page reveals that they find justification and precedent for their ideology in antiquity just the same as many of the other hate groups that Pharos documents.

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The Biggest Name in White Nationalist Classics

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Land Acknowledgement: Pharos is researched, written, and published online at Vassar College, an institution situated in the homeland of the Munsee Lenape people, who lived here for thousands of years before the arrival of European colonists and continue today as the Stockbridge-Munsee community in Wisconsin, the Delaware Tribe and the Delaware Nation in Oklahoma, and the Munsee Delaware Nation in Ontario. Please read more.

Steve Bannon is back in the news, but not in the same way he was when Time wondered if he was the second most powerful man in the world. Now he’s facing prison time for contempt of congress and a trial in New York on charges of money-laundering, fraud, and conspiracy, crimes for which Donald Trump pardoned him at the federal level. At this remove Bannon’s legacy is also increasingly clear: few people have done more to introduce white nationalist ideas into mainstream American politics. As editor in chief he made the website Breitbart “the platform for the Alt Right;” at its peak it reached a vastly wider audience than any other mainstream or extremist political publication. Breitbart’s founder described Bannon’s previous political role as “the Leni Riefenstahl” — that is, the Nazi party’s propagandist — “of the Tea Party,” itself a racist movement that made open xenophobia central to mainstream conservative politics in the United States. After Breitbart, Bannon walked in the innermost circles of Amercian political power as the senior White House advisor to President Trump and played a role role in the drafting of the xenophobic “Muslim Ban.” And a year after leaving the White House, he told a gathering of nationalists in France that they should wear the label “racist” “like a badge of honor.” Back in the United States, he now hosts a podcast that has been described as “a watering hole for far right figures” and a “dangerous fantasyland of election lies.” 

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