Red pill

There was a time Classicists feared their subject was endangered because not enough people were taking it up. That fear has now been supplanted by anxieties over its manipulation by far-right groups and individuals with insalubrious intentions, like the white supremacist organization that employs images of the Roman gods and heroes to encourage its followers to ‘protect your heritage’. And this is just the tip of the Zuckerberg. In Not All Dead White Men, Donna Zuckerberg examines the abuse of Classics by by those who, in the political equivalent of the perceptual choice in The Matrix, have taken the ‘Red Pill’. Zuckerberg defines Red Pillers as ‘a group of men connected by common resentments against women, immigrants, people of color, and the liberal elite’.