Why Stone-Faced Fascists Keep Getting Antiquity Wrong: Online bigotry masquerading as a love of history in the fever swamps of Elon Musk’s X. (Bret Devereaux, Jun 04, 2026, The Bulwark)
HOMER IS BACK in the discourse on account of Christopher Nolan’s upcoming film, The Odyssey. The latest controversy began with Elon Musk, among others, protesting the supposed inaccuracy of casting Lupita Nyong’o as Helen, a fictional character, who among other fantastic elements is the daughter of the god Zeus and was laid as an egg by her human mother. On X, the debate has spiraled to include renewed criticism of Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation of the Odyssey, attacked for being “ideological,” which is to say that it attempted to more clearly portray the perspectives of the women in the narrative, as compared to earlier translations.
While it might seem unexpected that a 2,750-year-old poem (and a nearly decade-old translation of it) would become such a flashpoint in the culture wars of 2026, for scholars engaged in public education in the classics, it is all too unsurprising. Instead, the fight over Homer represents just another skirmish in the campaign mounted by bigoted very-online right-wing self-described “chuds” to claim Greek and Roman culture for their own fascist, or at least fascist-adjacent, ideology, which demands the exclusion of minorities, women, and LGBTQ people. […]
This type of traditionalism and pining for the past that is married to a kind of thick anti-intellectualism and a worship of action and violence for its own sake is hardly new. Indeed, as the Italian scholar Umberto Eco noted in his famous essay “Ur-Fascism,” the rejection of modernity for the sake of an imagined past, necessarily paired with irrationalism and a “distrust of the intellectual world,” is a core component of fascist ideology. In turn, that anti-intellectualism serves an ideology that, as Eco notes, valorizes violence for its own sake and can only understand heroism through the prism of violence. Once we realize this, it no longer surprises us that many of the followers of these accounts appear to believe that the Homeric hero Achilles was a real historical person or that they become enraged by any suggestion that he wasn’t. These accounts and their followers have a version of antiquity, an angry child’s version, simplified and flattened down, and they are profoundly hostile to learning anything that might disconfirm their ideological beliefs.
And the ideology, it turns out, is rancid. Here it is necessary to be blunt: Many of the accounts in this space are frequently misogynistic or racist bigots, intent on using the Greek and Roman past to justify that bigotry. Learn Latin, with 187,000 followers, asks, “Can the Latin language be used as an instrument of Western supremacy?” agreeing with those who answered in the affirmative. Roman Helmet Guy, with 120,000 followers, riffed off a scene from the Lord of the Rings films and declared it “Authoritarian. Ethnic Nationalist. Romanticization of the past.” Enlisting the heroic Gondorian king in the ranks of the chuds, he added, “If Aragorn were alive today, he’d be posting ‘Look what they took from you,’” using a far-right, if not white nationalist, slogan. They are hardly alone. When user The Hellenist told his more than 30,000 followers that “Blacks should support slavery” and “Christians and Jews are who tore us apart,” he faced little criticism or repercussions within the community; Daily Roman Updates, with 266,000 followers, responded, with nihilistic irony, that The Hellenist is “one of the best posters on this app.” And when Daily Roman Updates’ own followers told him that he was “not racist enough,” Daily Roman Updates cheerfully agreed, echoing the website’s owner, Elon Musk: “Vox Populi, Vox Dei.”
While not every account goes mask-off like this regularly, the less openly bigoted accounts in the ecosystem regularly follow, repost, and link to the more bigoted ones. The result is a radicalization pipeline in which users coming to X looking for information about antiquity are rapidly steered towards alt-right misogyny, racism, and authoritarianism.
Excluding homosexuality while idolizing Alexander and Caesar is sublime.