{"id":2632500,"date":"2026-07-20T07:17:02","date_gmt":"2026-07-20T11:17:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/we-are-living-through-an-era-of-cultural-destruction\/"},"modified":"2026-07-20T07:20:54","modified_gmt":"2026-07-20T11:20:54","slug":"we-are-living-through-an-era-of-cultural-destruction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/we-are-living-through-an-era-of-cultural-destruction\/","title":{"rendered":"We Are Living Through An Era Of Cultural Destruction"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">18<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fwe-are-living-through-an-era-of-cultural-destruction%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=2632500&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>The <a href=\"https:\/\/amzn.to\/3YuVZYV\" >article discusses recent cultural shifts exemplified<\/a> by the reception of Christopher Nolan\u2019s film <em>The Odyssey<\/em>, which has been criticized for modern and woke casting choices but <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/trump-rips-into-the-real-disgrace-of-un-three-very-sinister-events\/\" title=\"Trump Rips into the &#039;Real Disgrace&#039; of UN: &#039;Three Very Sinister Events!&#039;\">ultimately received positive reviews<\/a>. Though, many critics view Nolan\u2019s adaptation as a form of cultural destruction rather than faithful retelling, noting significant thematic deviations from Homer\u2019s original story that suggest a modern reinterpretation infused with guilt and political agendas. similarly, reboots like Netflix\u2019s <em>Little House on the Prairie<\/em> are accused of stripping away conventional values to serve liberal narratives, effectively betraying the original stories and pushing revolutionary ideologies.<\/p>\n<p>The article expands this critique to broader societal actions, highlighting the systematic removal and defacement of confederate monuments and symbols, which is seen as part of a larger campaign to erase and rewrite history. This includes melting down statues to forge new symbols like \u201cRooted,\u201d representing a racialized reinterpretation of the past. The author argues that such cultural destruction frequently enough precedes or leads to violence, as symbols are targeted, defaced, or replaced to consolidate ideological power.The piece warns that this process of erasing memory-referred to historically as *damnatio memoriae*-is part of a broader effort to dismantle cultural and national identity, ultimately aiming to replace or destroy the people themselves if they resist this revolutionary wave.The call to action emphasizes the importance of resisting this ongoing cultural purge to preserve heritage and community.  <\/p>\n<p class=\"readmore\">\n    <button onclick=\"showReadMore()\" id=\"readmorebtn\">Read more&#8230;<\/button>\n<\/p>\n<hr id=\"line\">\n<span id=\"more\"><\/p>\n<div>\n<p>It was difficult to peruse social media last week without seeing a steady stream of reactions and reviews of Christopher Nolan\u2019s <em>The Odyssey<\/em> \u2014 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.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019re told. The DEI casting is just a blip in an otherwise stunning film. Yes, there\u2019s some deviations from Homer, some inventions and rewriting by Nolan, but nothing that really offends.<\/p>\n<p>And yet, even reading the positive reviews, one senses that Nolan\u2019s 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, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/opinions\/2026\/07\/15\/nolans-gorgeous-odyssey-makes-controversies-evaporate\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">raved about the film<\/a> for The Washington Post, calling it \u201ca gorgeous rendition of a story that never gets old.\u201d But even Klavan notices that some of Nolan\u2019s thematic changes depart dramatically from Homer. Nolan\u2019s Odysseus, writes Klavan, \u201cis racked with remorse over his role in the Trojan War, whereas Homer\u2019s story is more about the savage but righteous fury of the warrior who must tame that anger and reintegrate himself into domestic life.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Other, less enthusiastic reviewers have more deeply analyzed these deviations from Nolan\u2019s source material and exposed them for what they are. Writing for Compact Magazine, John Byron Kuhner <a href=\"https:\/\/www.compactmag.com\/article\/the-white-guilt-of-christopher-nolans-odyssey\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">concedes<\/a> that the material is Homeric, but \u201cthe 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\u2019s White Man\u2019s Burden taking up his abode in the conscience of a Bronze Age Greek.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This is not to say that giving Odysseus survivor\u2019s guilt and post-traumatic stress disorder isn\u2019t a plausible, if hopelessly modern, interpretation of Homer\u2019s poem, and Kuhner concedes as much. But it\u2019s not how Homer told the story. Writes Kuhner: \u201cHomer carefully begins Odysseus\u2019s journey on Calypso\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>So yeah, maybe casting black actress Lupita Nyong\u2019o as the legendary \u201cwhite-armed\u201d 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\u2019s reinterpretation of major themes in <em>The Odyssey<\/em>, which doesn\u2019t just change the visual presentation of the material, but its meaning. What it amounts to isn\u2019t just artistic license, but deliberate deconstruction.<\/p>\n<p>Today, we see this everywhere. Consider the recently released Netflix adaptation of Laura Ingalls Wilder\u2019s beloved <em>Little House on the Prairie<\/em>. As my colleague Elle Purnell <a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2026\/07\/15\/netflixs-little-house-on-the-prairie-is-a-betrayal\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">writes in these pages<\/a>, the \u201creimagined\u201d series is a betrayal of the source material. In the series, \u201cthe Ingalls have become a convenient vehicle on which showrunner Rebecca Sonnenshine has piled high her own characters, plot, and political agenda.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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 \u201cto explain that families like the Ingalls were bad for going west and stealing the Indians\u2019 land.\u201d Sonnenshine herself <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/fandompulse\/status\/2077747623549653307\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">has admitted<\/a> that the goal here is to \u201creckon with some of the things that are in the books that have been problematic for people.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>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 \u201creimagined\u201d and foisted on us as a piece of liberal propaganda. What it amounts to is a sustained campaign of cultural destruction \u2014 a war not just on the past, but on everyone in the present who venerates our cultural patrimony.<\/p>\n<p>The theater of conflict in this war is not limited to the arts but includes nearly every aspect of public life. Consider the left\u2019s never-ending war on Confederate monuments and symbols. Earlier this month the Washington Post <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/politics\/2026\/07\/10\/boston-firm-tapped-turn-confederate-statue-into-monument-racial-diversity\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">reported<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n<p>This is the iconic Lee statue that was removed from the city\u2019s Market Street Park in 2021. It had stood in the park for more than a century before Charlottesville\u2019s city council voted to remove it in early 2017. Controversy surrounding the statue\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p>In the ensuing years, statues and monuments all over the country would be removed or torn down by mobs \u2014 and not just statues of Confederates but also our Founding Fathers, Catholic saints, and nearly every conceivable figure from our nation\u2019s past. It wasn\u2019t 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 \u2014 and to forecast what would be done to anyone who resisted.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019s face, bright orange and melting, were widely disseminated. The purpose wasn\u2019t 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\u2019t on board.<\/p>\n<p>In some cases, it wasn\u2019t 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 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.latimes.com\/entertainment-arts\/story\/2025-10-21\/confederate-monuments-moca-brick-exhibition-redefined\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">cut up and welded back together in a grotesque, inhuman form<\/a> \u2014 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.<\/p>\n<p>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 \u201cRooted,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019re 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 <a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2020\/06\/23\/everywhere-statues-are-torn-down-by-the-mob-history-promises-people-are-next\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">once wrote<\/a> about mobs targeting a society\u2019s icons, \u201cThe symbols of a people never satisfy: People themselves must always come next.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s the key thing to understand about the era of cultural destruction we\u2019re 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\u2019 works into something useful for their revolution. Likewise, they might start with vandalism or defacement of statues and monuments, but eventually it\u2019s 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 <em>damnatio memoriae<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n<p>But it never stops with books or monuments. Eventually the revolutionaries get around to their real target \u2014 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\u2019t stop until all those who want to preserve their culture and heritage stand up and refuse to let the destruction continue.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>      John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Pagan-America-Decline-Christianity-Dark\/dp\/1684514444\/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Pagan+America&#038;qid=1695306441&#038;sr=8-1\"><i>Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come<\/i><\/a>. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nolan\u2019s The Odyssey sparks debate over cultural reinterpretation<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":518,"featured_media":2632501,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Nolan-Odyssey-1.png","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[33651],"tags":[5103,52371,51127],"class_list":["post-2632500","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-western-journal","tag-change","tag-culture-2","tag-society-2"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Nolan-Odyssey-1.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2632500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/518"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2632500"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2632500\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2632504,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2632500\/revisions\/2632504"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2632501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2632500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2632500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2632500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}