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Doing Justice to the Classics

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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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How Classics Made its Way into the “Freedom Convoy”

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This article is a collaboration between Pharos and Professor Katherine Blouin, who first documented this material. She is one of the editors of Everyday Orientalism, a publication that “reflect[s] on how history and power shape the way in which human societies define themselves through the ‘Other’”.

The “freedom convoy” was a Canadian protest that took place in several Canadian cities and border crossings and led to a month-long occupation of Ottawa in early 2022. Demonstrators opposed Canadian and American requirements that cross-border truck drivers be vaccinated against COVID-19. The protest was primarily initiated by an organization described by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as an “anti-public-health-mandate group,” but prominent leaders included anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists, white nationalists, and one former officer of a federal political party in Canada. Ordinarily we are only able to track the appropriation of Greco-Roman antiquity at such demonstrations if the demonstrators themselves invoke it publicly. But in the case of the “Freedom Convoy,” the work of public interest whistleblowers at DDoSecrets has revealed how those who privately support the convoy also take inspiration from the ancient world. 

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An All-White Dating Service and the Ancient World

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White Date is an all-white dating website that “invite[s] descendants of Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, Finno-Ugric, Baltic, and Italic folks worldwide [to] find a traditionally minded partner online.” Talia Lavin has written an extensive exposé about this site in her book Culture Warlords: My Journey into the Dark Web of White Supremacy, but even a glance at White Date’s front page reveals a predictable mix of thinly-veiled misogyny and racism, with messages such as “We follow classic roles, where strong men take the lead and graceful women play the game…wisely” and, “We are exclusive, not discriminatory. To learn about the difference, ask your local Country Club.” And although the site inclines toward a neo-Volkisch white supremacy that favors Vikings and Stonehenge as historical symbols, ancient Greece and Rome can be found on the site as well.

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The Fourth Year of Pharos: What is the Emotional Toll?

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Curtis Dozier, Director of Pharos

The end of November marked the four-year anniversary of the launch of Pharos: Doing Justice to the Classics. Each year around this time I’ve published a retrospective about how the site has grown and evolved during the past year. Since I’ve already done some of that in my announcement of our new front page and land acknowledgement, I’m going to take a slightly different approach this year and try to address a question I’m often asked when I tell people about Pharos. It’s a question I’ve had trouble answering, in part because how I answer it defines the significance of this work. (Don’t worry, I’ve put a quick retrospective at the end of this post).

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