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Posted on 07/21/2026 5:10:00 AM PDT by MtnClimber
Turning beloved stories woke or repurposing destroyed monuments is the beginning of a process that ends with real violence.
t was difficult to peruse social media last week without seeing a steady stream of reactions and reviews of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey — a film that had already prompted, weeks before its premiere, mountains of derisive commentary for its purportedly woke casting choices, strangely modern costumes, American accents, and flat color palette.
But now that the film is out, reviews have been largely positive. Fears of a wokeified epic mocking the heroic age of the West turned out to have been overblown, we’re told. The DEI casting is just a blip in an otherwise stunning film. Yes, there’s some deviations from Homer, some inventions and rewriting by Nolan, but nothing that really offends.
And yet, even reading the positive reviews, one senses that Nolan’s film is not primarily an act of cultural transmission, of re-telling an ancient epic for a modern audience, but of cultural destruction. Spencer Klavan, a classicist and very smart guy, raved about the film for The Washington Post, calling it “a gorgeous rendition of a story that never gets old.” But even Klavan notices that some of Nolan’s thematic changes depart dramatically from Homer. Nolan’s Odysseus, writes Klavan, “is racked with remorse over his role in the Trojan War, whereas Homer’s story is more about the savage but righteous fury of the warrior who must tame that anger and reintegrate himself into domestic life.”
Other, less enthusiastic reviewers have more deeply analyzed these deviations from Nolan’s source material and exposed them for what they are. Writing for Compact Magazine, John Byron Kuhner concedes that the material is Homeric, but “the connective tissue and the overall shading suggests guilt, and in particular an imperial, tonally British version of white guilt. Think of it as the ghost of Kipling’s White Man’s Burden taking up his abode in the conscience of a Bronze Age Greek.”
This is not to say that giving Odysseus survivor’s guilt and post-traumatic stress disorder isn’t a plausible, if hopelessly modern, interpretation of Homer’s poem, and Kuhner concedes as much. But it’s not how Homer told the story. Writes Kuhner: “Homer carefully begins Odysseus’s journey on Calypso’s island, where he lives with a beautiful goddess and has no responsibilities yet is still unhappy, and ends it on Ithaca, where everything is a struggle and a responsibility: but that is where true satisfaction resides. Nolan has come to a different conclusion, however: It was a mistake to go to Troy. It was a mistake to win that war. And being king of Ithaca is not worth the responsibility. So Nolan ends the film with Odysseus and Penelope leaving.”
So yeah, maybe casting black actress Lupita Nyong’o as the legendary “white-armed” beauty Helen of Troy or Elliot (formerly Ellen) Page as one of the Greek heroes are relatively minor blips of wokeness in a sprawling epic. But the larger problem is Nolan’s reinterpretation of major themes in The Odyssey, which doesn’t just change the visual presentation of the material, but its meaning. What it amounts to isn’t just artistic license, but deliberate deconstruction.
Today, we see this everywhere. Consider the recently released Netflix adaptation of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s beloved Little House on the Prairie. As my colleague Elle Purnell writes in these pages, the “reimagined” series is a betrayal of the source material. In the series, “the Ingalls have become a convenient vehicle on which showrunner Rebecca Sonnenshine has piled high her own characters, plot, and political agenda.”
That agenda, no surprise, is to replace the themes of the original books. Instead of depicting Pa Ingalls as a model of self-reliance and masculine virtue, he is reduced to making land acknowledgements, paying reparations, and apologizing for infringing on Indian lands. Instead of a model of feminine poise and civilization in an untamed land, Ma Ingalls is a feminist scold. People like Sonnenshine do this because they hate these characters and they hate this story.
Their aim is to dissect and then repurpose the tale to serve a liberal, and ultimately revolutionary, agenda. Indeed, as Purnell notes, the basic betrayal at the heart of the show is that it repurposes the story “to explain that families like the Ingalls were bad for going west and stealing the Indians’ land.” Sonnenshine herself has admitted that the goal here is to “reckon with some of the things that are in the books that have been problematic for people.”
There is of course nothing problematic in the books and nothing to reckon with. People use language like that when they want to destroy a work of literature and wear it like a skinsuit. Everyone who consumes pop culture in the 21st century recognizes this for what it is. Nearly every beloved myth or story from western culture has been “reimagined” and foisted on us as a piece of liberal propaganda. What it amounts to is a sustained campaign of cultural destruction — a war not just on the past, but on everyone in the present who venerates our cultural patrimony.
The theater of conflict in this war is not limited to the arts but includes nearly every aspect of public life. Consider the left’s never-ending war on Confederate monuments and symbols. Earlier this month the Washington Post reported that a Boston firm has been selected to create a monument to racial diversity in Charlottesville using bronze from the melted-down statue of Robert E. Lee.
This is the iconic Lee statue that was removed from the city’s Market Street Park in 2021. It had stood in the park for more than a century before Charlottesville’s city council voted to remove it in early 2017. Controversy surrounding the statue’s planned removal led to the Unite the Right rally later that year, at which opposing camps clashed and a woman, Heather Heyer, was killed when a car driven by a protester plowed into the crowd.
In the ensuing years, statues and monuments all over the country would be removed or torn down by mobs — and not just statues of Confederates but also our Founding Fathers, Catholic saints, and nearly every conceivable figure from our nation’s past. It wasn’t enough to destroy these images, though, because the point was not simply to remove them from public spaces but to show complete cultural dominance over those who wished to preserve them — and to forecast what would be done to anyone who resisted.
Hence some of the more prominent statues were melted down, and the process of destruction was filmed and broadcast for all to see. Notably, images of the Lee statue’s face, bright orange and melting, were widely disseminated. The purpose wasn’t just to demoralize anyone who objected to the destruction, but to suggest that resistance is futile, that this history is being wiped out, that there is no future in America for those who aren’t on board.
In some cases, it wasn’t enough to remove or even melt down a statute. Instead, a mockery had to be made of the thing. In Los Angeles, a bronze equestrian statue of Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson was cut up and welded back together in a grotesque, inhuman form — a deliberate act of defacement and mockery and perversion. It was part of an entire exhibition of removed or defaced Confederate statues put on by the Museum of Contemporary Art last year.
The melted down Lee statue in Charlottesville takes this one step further. Instead of removing or defacing or chopping up the monument, Charlottesville is going to use the melted down bronze from the Lee statue to create a new work called “Rooted,” with a design centered on the baobab tree, a pan-African symbol of wisdom, longevity, and connection. The message here is that the disfavored past and its cultural symbols and figures will not just be destroyed but replaced, figuratively and literally, by the new order. It is the equivalent of disinterring and scattering the bones of your enemies simply to desecrate their graves.
All of this comes with a not-so-subtle threat of violence. Indeed, real-world violence is the final object of the cultural destruction. The left first whipped up violent mobs that tore down statues. Then they rioted in the cities. Now they’re chopping up the statues to make trophies out of them, broadcasting what they plan to do to their enemies once they amass enough power. Any student of history knows this. What begins with book-burning and statue-smashing always leads to real violence. As my friend Christopher Bedford once wrote about mobs targeting a society’s icons, “The symbols of a people never satisfy: People themselves must always come next.”
That’s the key thing to understand about the era of cultural destruction we’re living through. The revolutionaries of the left might start by censoring books or authors they dislike, but eventually they appropriate those stories and transform those authors’ works into something useful for their revolution. Likewise, they might start with vandalism or defacement of statues and monuments, but eventually it’s not enough and they melt the statues down and recast them into something that demonstrates their cultural and political power. The ancient Romans called this damnatio memoriae, the condemnation of memory, and it was a political tool employed when there was a change of emperor: the previous order is destroyed, it will not be remembered.
But it never stops with books or monuments. Eventually the revolutionaries get around to their real target — people. Like stories and statues, the people themselves must be transformed, and if they refuse then they must be destroyed and replaced. That process is playing out right now, all around us, and it won’t stop until all those who want to preserve their culture and heritage stand up and refuse to let the destruction continue.
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Thank God for President Trump!
Here’s my rant of the day; as Ayn Rand taught, progressives despise beauty, morality, order, success, etc. They will tell you Big Mike is a beautiful fashion icon and ignore Melania, they will force feed you disgusting rap music and non-attractive people in entertainment where beauty has always been the standard, and quislings will continue to eat it up.
Yep. Nope.
They are collecting the old tires and planning the necklace fires.
I saw the DSA Co-Huggy on FNC this morning. The boy is a real latin lover Romeo with a French poodle haircut. I can’t wait until we get the order to start shootin’ these commie SOBs.
“FNC”
Fox News Channel, I believe
Like stories and statues, the people themselves must be transformed.
One must always remember how it turned out for Rome.
Hopefully, no substitute for a crystal ball:
https://www.trackaipac.com/endorsements
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I would go for bombing Facebook and google data centers.
“as Ayn Rand taught, progressives despise beauty, morality, order, success”
Good summary.
They despise life itself and worship death.
“Internationalism, illustrated by the Bolshevik and by the men to whom all countries are alike provided they can make money out of them, is to me repulsive.”
Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr., August 12, 1919
“The Fabian Society was named—at the suggestion of Frank Podmore—in honour of the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus (nicknamed Cunctator, meaning the “Delayer”). His Fabian strategy sought gradual victory against the superior Carthaginian army under the renowned general Hannibal through persistence, harassment, and wearing the enemy down by attrition rather than pitched, climactic battles.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabian_Society
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Iaa3t-zORp4?feature=share
When they go on insisting that it’s a “must-see” film, that’s when I want to watch something else. There is no need to watch any film except for the industry’s need to have you as their loyal customer.
Retire if you can.
Spend down your money.
Think of yourselves as Jews in 1932 Germany.
Make sure your young ones learn a foreign language and a skill another country would want.
“...non-attractive people in entertainment...”
Just about every film and TV show today. Look at the cast of The Odyssey for what they tell us is beauty. Anything to win an Oscar award from Saddam and Hollywood Gomorrah.
Yes.
The African tree will display the Afrocentrism of the nWo while purging history to appease the choice groups.
The mixing of violent and seditious Hollyweird films trickle down to the populace where they become embedded and a norm.
A good example are all the “Joker” spinoffs where mayhem, violence, upheaval, riots, killings by irate citizens turn everything into an ANTI-ESTABLISHMENT overthrow of everything good, moral and proper.
Destroying statues, protesting against Jews and Israel (who were brutally attacked on 10/7/2023) is a sign that the society is unravelling and Hollyweird is playing a large role in rewriting history.
Chanting “Globalize the Intifada” is a sure sign that the Muslim Brotherhood having infiltrated our college campuses very effectively.
LGBT agendas and the polluting of kids’ minds is how radical Socialism, Communism and Fascism take hold. We are in the midst of this epic battle. Do we have the mettle to fight back?
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