Nolan’s central trick: “Nolan has smuggled the core of Judeo-Christian ethics into the center of The Odyssey.” Zeus’s Law in Nolan’s Odyssey is more similar to the Christian and Jewish golden rule than ancient Greece’s Xenia. The problem with the modern right isn’t that they haven’t obeyed the golden rule, it’s that they detest it. Cruelty toward the weak, the poor, the stranger, the immigrant…is glorified. Trump’s policies are built on the logic of tribute, not compassion, love, or reciprocity.
To Homer, Odysseus’s trick, using their common religious beliefs to fool the Trojans and to destroy Troy and slaughter its people…to Homer, Odysseus was a hero, but to Nolan, it was a great crime and that Odysseus needed redemption.
In Homer’s time, slaughtering innocent people wasn’t bad as long as they were the other. After Jesus and eventually the enlightenment and eventually applying these principles to societies…we don’t believe slaughtering people is okay just because they aren’t us. Using our common moral principles to trick each other is not heroic. We believe that from a long chain of history, but that chain’s strongest seed was Jesus.
Nolan made the Odyssey about the values of Jesus. Not the values of the ancient Greeks. Not the values of Homer. Not the values of Trump.
The modern right cares about power and the need for cruelty. Jesus cared about love.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=livIbni7x7o
Much of the historical context of The Odyssey was wrong, but some of it was fairly right.
Even the ancient Greeks would create their own spins on their own classic works and add different themes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7h-0GUgDzk
The Greeks created their myths, and works of art based on those myths, over hundreds of years. They’d make new versions of old myths and change some of it, and other Greeks would complain that they weren’t true to the original.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOy1gZP7SDA
“author and host of “The Rest is History’ podcast, took to X to say he thought it was “the best cinematic adaptation of a Greek myth I have ever seen.”
He also shared a Guardian article of positive reviews, swiping at people criticizing the film without having seen it.”
The richest man in the world made the inciteful retort of calling the historian a cuck.
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-tom-holland-the-odyssey-online-feud-christopher-nolan-2026-7?fbclid=IwY2xjawS7SKZleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETF2U1Z6SzlhUGZXYXg3OHZoc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHsa0lZCBHE_vJgiuIWNSQ3p9HLh4VRUqZ8LZNL4m_837hkZbCCt9e_POK1rC_aem_xoelR6_Av3Y-yJZpksczBQ&utm_campaign=mrf-business-marfeel-headline-graphic&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&mrfcid=202607086a4e64eb2030e4342b9ace4e
“Trump’s tariffs, framed as industrial policy to reindustrialize the country, protect workers, and lower prices. Instead, tariffs have quietly consumed much of the manufacturing sector’s profits. This is unsurprising. Most U.S. imports are inputs used to make American goods. Tariffs, therefore, are taxes on American manufacturing.
Empirical work by the Kiel Institute shows that foreign exporters absorb only a trivial share of the cost. Roughly 96 percent of the burden is passed to American buyers. U.S. households and businesses—not foreign firms—overwhelmingly covered the roughly $200 billion in customs revenue collected in 2025. Companies we import from responded not by cutting prices but by shipping fewer goods to the U.S. As Kiel economist Julian Hinz put it, the tariffs amounted to an “own goal” that raised costs, compressed profits, and weakened the very industries they were meant to protect.
…
Tariffs did not restore competitiveness or pricing power. They jacked up costs and made American production less attractive at the margin.”
https://reason.com/2026/01/29/from-georgias-film-subsidies-to-intels-collapse-industrial-policy-keeps-failing/
“Superman has always been about politics. The superhero’s creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, originally wrote the character as a rebuke to Nazi racial ideology. The Kryptonian boy emigrated from his homeland in a way that paralleled the Jewish experience and became the greatest defender of “truth, justice, and the American way.”
So it’s no surprise that audiences have been trying to figure out the political message in the latest Superman movie. After all, the backdrop of the film is a war between the fictional nations of Boravia and Jarhanpur that Superman is trying to stop.
…
Supervillains used to be foreign enemies. Now the villain is a defense contractor who wants to start a regime change war.”
https://reason.com/2025/07/18/superman-is-about-the-anti-war-vibe-shift/
“big problem with Donald Trump’s signature plan to create a National Garden of American Heroes. And, for once, it has nothing to do with culture-war bickering about just who should be included in the national statue display.
Instead, artists, curators and critics who have reviewed the recent request for proposals have a more practical worry: America doesn’t have enough quality sculptors or museum-caliber foundries to make this happen on Trump’s speedy timeline.”
We do need a badass national statue garden, but Trump shouldn’t be in charge of it. It should be based on bipartisan agreed upon heroes.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/05/31/trump-sculpture-garden-american-heroes-china-00372297