Doing Justice to the Classics
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 […]
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 […]
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.
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 […]
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 […]
The opening months of 2021 witnessed a surge in violence against Asian Americans, most visibly the murders of Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Delaina Ashley Yaun Gonzalez, Soon Chung Park, Hyun Grant, Suncha Kim, Yong Ae Yue, and Paul Andre Michels in Atlanta in March 2021. One result has been new attention to the history of […]
Bronze Age Mindset is a book published in 2018 by someone using the pseudonym “Bronze Age Pervert” (abbreviated BAP in this article). Written in the ironic style characteristic of what used to be called the “alt right” but which is more properly recognized as the evolution of white supremacy, this self-described “exhortation” decries modernity as […]
VOX is an anti-immigrant, Islamaphobic, homophobic, and misogynist political party in Spain that in 2019 won enough votes to elect twenty-four legislators to Spain’s Congress of Deputies. In a body of 350 seats this is not enough to enact a legislative agenda but they now have a voice and legitimacy that they had previously lacked. Like […]
Cato the Elder was a Roman senator who is usually remembered as the preeminent advocate for traditional values in ancient Rome. He is best known for ending many of his speeches in the senate by saying “Furthermore, Carthage must be destroyed,” even if he had been speaking on a different topic, as a way of […]
“Culture Wars” is a store on the custom apparel website TeePublic.com that advertises itself as “designs in support of European culture and civilization.” Like another online apparel store that Pharos has documented, “Culture Wars” offers many shirts with classical images and themes that promote both coded and explicit racism, homophobia, and misogyny. But whereas the […]
