Doing Justice to the Classics
Simple announcement of appropriations online
In the year since we announced our “Onomasticon of Classical Pseudonyms and Avatars,” it has become one of the most visited pages on Pharos. In this update to the database, we’ve added four new pseudonyms from some of the largest hate sites that Pharos has documented: A Breitbart “Virgil” who reviewed Gibbon’s Decline and Fall […]
Joseph Sobran was a prominent American journalist and anti-Semite who, according to one obituary, “shared many of the ideas of the European far right from the early 20th century, in particular the belief that Jews are an alien, nearly monolithic and subversive force whose main goal is to destroy Western Civilization.” He came to the […]
A xenophobic news aggregator called Western Voices World News reposted an article from the New York Post concerning New York City’s strongest-in-the-nation Human Rights Law. In September 2019 the city explicitly affirmed that the law protects New Yorkers from being harassed because of their accent, for speaking a language other than English, or from being called […]
Thanks especially to the work of Sarah Bond and Myke Cole, the general public is increasingly familiar with white supremacists’ fetishization of Classical Sparta as a supposedly racially pure, hyper-masculine, hyper-militarized model for the totalitarian ethnostate they seek to bring about. Sparta is the ancient touchstone for hate groups that Pharos documents most frequently. What […]
No fewer than three recent mass shooters have said they found inspiration in the French intellectual Renaud Camus’ theory of “the Great Replacement,” a xenophobic and racist claim that “European” or “white” culture is being “replaced” through immigration. Camus outlined this theory in a 2011 book entitled Le Grand Remplacement that he later rewrote and translated into English as You Will […]
Since 2017, Pharos has documented many examples of hate groups appropriating ancient Greece and Rome in support of their politics. Our articles may give the impression that it is only outsiders to the discipline of Classics who enlist that history in support of hate. But today we turn to a Classics professor who actively promoted […]
Richard Spencer is one of the most prominent white supremacists in the United States, whose various media platforms have published numerous articles that invoke Greco-Roman antiquity in support of racism and anti-Semitism. But Spencer himself has also made ancient Rome a model for his hateful vision: in a speech at the 2013 American Renaissance conference […]
The Alliance Defending Freedom is an American non-profit organization that, under the guise of promoting and protecting “religious freedom“, opposes gender equality, promotes homophobia and transphobia, and works to restrict or reduce the civil and legal rights of gay people. The SPLC has categorized them as a hate group for “supporting the recriminalization of homosexuality […]
Gates of Vienna is a xenophobic and Islamophobic website that has been in existence since 2004. The anti-racist group Hope Note Hate calls it “one of the most influential counter-jihad sites in the world” and lists its founder, Edward S. May, as one of the “top 16 players on the international Islamophobia scene.” Most of […]
In May 2019, Pennsylvania state representative Stephanie Borowicz drew criticism for posing for a photograph with a member of the militia group “American Guard” at a rally. Such reports of elected officials having ties to white supremacy or granting influence to members of hate groups seem to be increasingly common. When the report of Rep. […]
