Ten years later the hateful undertones of 300 have only grown more stark, and I think it’s finally safe to say out loud that Snyder’s film – however striking its visuals – is one of the ugliest, meanest, most morally irresponsible films of the last decade. It is an overblown assault on decency, encouraging exclusion and hate, and openly celebrating fascism and oversimplification. In the current political climate of exclusion, isolationism, and a presidential administration that seems hellbent on keeping Middle Easterners out of the country, 300 may prove to be the most divisive film imaginable.

Zack Snyder openly admitted in an interview with Entertainment Weekly that he deliberately tried to make Xerxes seem gay because he believed that this would make homophobic young men even more afraid of him. He is quoted as saying, “What’s more scary to a 20-year-old boy than a giant god-king who wants to have his way with you?”

In 2008, Alleanza Nazionale, a fascist party in Italy, literally used a panel of Leonidas from Frank Miller’s 300 in one of their propaganda posters with the caption “Difendi i tuoi valori, la tua civilta, il tuo quartiere,” which means “Defend your values, your civilization, your district.” It was a clear and unambiguous attempt to equate modern-day fascists with the Spartans in Miller’s comic book.

In the United Kingdom, members of the European Research Group (ERG), the extreme pro-Brexit faction of the Conservative Party, call themselves “the Spartans.” Peter Gainsford, whom I cited earlier in this article, points out in a blog post that some members of the same group also call themselves “the Grand Wizards,” indicating that they see the Spartans and the Ku Klux Klan as related entities.

Here in the United States, Steve Bannon, the co-founder of the far-right media outlet Breitbart (which Bannon himself has described as a “sounding board for the alt-right”) and former Chief Strategist to President Donald Trump, is reportedly obsessed with ancient Sparta. Julia Jones, Steve Bannon’s former writing partner, said in an interview with The Daily Beast in 2017:

“He [i.e. Steve Bannon] talked a lot about Sparta—how Sparta defeated Athens, he loved the story. The password on his [desktop] computer at his office at American Vantage Media in Santa Monica was ‘Sparta,’ in fact.”

Meanwhile, as I discuss in this other article I wrote, the phrase “μολὼν λαβέ,” which, according to a well-known apocryphal legend, was supposedly spoken by Leonidas to Xerxes at Thermopylai, has become an extremely popular and widely-used political slogan among gun activists, white supremacists, and other members of the far right.