Doing Justice to the Classics
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 […]
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 today as the Stockbridge-Munsee community in Wisconsin, the Delaware Tribe and the Delaware Nation in Oklahoma, and […]
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 […]
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 […]
On October 6th, 2021 Pharos Director Curtis Dozier joined Rebecca Futo Kennedy and Jackie Murray at Villanova University’s Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest for a roundtable discussion on the topic of “White Supremacy and Classical Athens.” The event was part of the center’s “Turning Points in History” series for 2021-22.
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. Please read more. On September 22nd, 2021, Pharos Director Curtis Dozier delivered a lecture entitled “Hateful Classicism: Greco-Roman Antiquity […]
The “1st Amendment Praetorians” are a group that describes itself as “protect[ing] the Republic and anyone who is willing to stand up on her behalf to voice their opinion or bring attention to something they’ve found, like voter fraud.” This reference to a persistent and racist lie about the 2020 election signals the this group’s […]
At the end of 2015, as the white supremacist “Alt Right” movement had begun to attract mainstream attention, one of its leaders, Richard Spencer, released a video that he wrote “expresses our fundamental values at NPI and Radix and our conception of identitarianism” (NPI is the white supremacist think tank that Spencer leads and Radix […]
