January 1, China Quietly WEAPONIZING Our Own Heritage While Hollywood Bows and Apologizes

Wyatt’s Take

• Christopher Nolan just admitted on camera that Hollywood can’t celebrate greatness anymore without forcing heroes to apologize first — and he said it to a Chinese academic in Beijing who came loaded with questions about whether we’ve abandoned our own civilization’s soul.
• While American universities spent decades tearing down the Great Books and calling them oppressive, China has been quietly building entire departments studying Homer, the Bible, and Western classics — mining them for the secrets that once made us strong.
• This isn’t about literature classes — it’s a civilizational war over who gets to lead the world, and Beijing knows that nations run on stories, which is why they’re studying ours while we apologize for ours.

Christopher Nolan sat down in Beijing recently to promote “The Odyssey.” But this wasn’t your typical press junket with softball questions and movie clips. A Chinese political philosophy student named Zhong Shu grilled him for nearly 20 minutes about Homer, hubris, the fall of Athens, and whether Hollywood has turned greatness into something that requires an apology.

The interview went viral for good reason. It was a masterclass — but not the kind Americans are used to seeing.

Zhong didn’t just ask about special effects or casting choices. She came prepared with Thucydides and challenged Nolan on whether he had “Christianized” Homer. She asked if the gods in his film were just projections of the human psyche. And then she cut to the heart of it all.

“We turn greatness into privileges and we demand apologies for it. That’s a fact of Hollywood,” Zhong stated before asking Nolan if he agreed.

Nolan didn’t dodge. He didn’t spin. He described it the way an engineer describes a load-bearing wall: This is simply how the mechanism works in our culture today. In a democratic age committed to equality, storytellers have to manage the audience’s built-in resistance to greatness. Do we have to apologize for that greatness?

“And the answer is yes, we do,” he said.

Think about that. The West’s most prominent living filmmaker just calmly conceded that his civilization can no longer receive a story about greatness unless greatness acknowledges wrongdoing first. And he delivered this admission in Beijing to an educated Chinese classicist who came prepared with provocations from our own civilization’s foundational myths.

This wasn’t a random interview. It was a snapshot of a much bigger conflict — a narrative cold war where each civilization is grappling with its relationship to the guiding stories of the past in an effort to determine which culture will lead the world in the future.

For years — with very little media attention — China has been quietly engaged in a narrative arms race with an American culture it believes is in decline. There’s a belief within the Chinese government that the modern West abandoned its own inheritance by deconstructing its foundational myths and values, and that now is the time to build where we have faltered. So for years, the Chinese have been mining the “classics” of Western Civilization for the insights that once gave us a civilizational advantage.

In November 2024, Beijing hosted the first World Conference of Classics: 600 participants and scholars, a congratulatory letter from Xi Jinping read aloud by the CCP’s propaganda chief, and a new Chinese School of Classical Studies established in Athens. Over the past decade, Peking University and Renmin have built classical studies programs too.

A key figure in China’s modern fascination with Western classical education is political philosopher Liu Xiaofeng, who spent the 2000s importing “Great Books education” into Chinese universities at precisely the moment Western universities were more focused on critiquing, subverting, and deconstructing these stories. Three of his students now run a classics division inside the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Here in the U.S., we’re finally starting to wake up. Even if Nolan’s interpretation of Homer’s epic myth is a matter of debate, the fact that he believed it was the right time to return to a 2,800-year-old story means something. Hollywood has been in a confused state of nostalgia for quite some time — prequels, sequels, reboots, sometimes deconstructing classic fairy tales and modern mythic heroes, other times celebrating them.

What’s undeniable is that the relationship to these stories of our past matters.

And it’s not just Hollywood. Throughout America, a new alternative to the SAT and ACT has been quickly gaining traction. Developed by Jeremy Wayne Tate and a bipartisan network of educators and philosophers, the Classic Learning Test puts understanding of the “Great Books” and foundational myths of the West on center stage.

Pete Hegseth, head of the U.S. Department of War, called it the new “gold standard” of tests and is working to make it the norm at West Point.

At the highest levels of government, among the two most powerful superpowers in the world, there is a shared admission: Civilizations run on stories. They are the operating system of a society. They give a people who are not bound by blood a shared identity, shared values, shared customs, and even a way to mark their days through shared holidays and mass cultural celebrations.

This is a lesson both nations learned about the “soft power” of story during the 20th-century Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The Cold War wasn’t just a conflict between two different economic theories. It was a civilizational collision between two different guiding stories about God, human nature, and the purpose of life, with the economics being downstream of those guiding stories.

Both sides in today’s new cold war know that the stories we tell about our past are essential to any sense of shared cultural identity and that they determine the direction of our future. Going back to the early 1990s, Chinese officials could see that the developing culture war in America was really a story war.

“Nihilism has become the American way, which is a fatal shock to cultural development and the American spirit,” was the famous conclusion that Chinese political scientist Wang Huning came to after an extensive tour of American universities.

The Chinese government believes so strongly that a civilization’s destiny is bound up with the foundational myths and stories of its culture that officials now forbid time-travel stories from primetime television out of fear that the very notion that these core myths could be critically reassessed could cause their civilization to self-destruct.

This gets to the tension in Nolan’s confession about our association of greatness with “privilege” and the underlying assumption that all power is inherently oppressive. That story has not always been part of our shared cultural identity. There was a time when we unashamedly celebrated a modern mythic character like Superman as the most powerful and greatest being on the planet, and didn’t ask him to apologize for anything, because we believed that virtuous character could shoulder the weight of that power.

Zhong was clever to probe whether Christian notions of repentance were somehow influencing Nolan’s take on Odysseus. Certainly, a central emphasis of historic Christianity has been “whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant,” but this is not what Nolan, by his own admission, was trying to communicate.

Jesus was not claiming that greatness was inherently a byproduct of some sin of “privilege” that requires repentance just for being great, but that the shape of greatness should resemble his own virtues and sacrifice. This is the central guiding story of Western civilization.

Whatever civilization rediscovers this truth first will be the one that averts civilizational armageddon and stands the test of time.

Wyatt Matters

While Hollywood elites trip over themselves apologizing for America’s heritage, our strategic rivals are studying that same heritage like it’s a blueprint for world domination. The folks in Beijing understand something our own cultural gatekeepers have forgotten: stories aren’t just entertainment — they’re the foundation of civilization itself. When you abandon your own foundational stories, you don’t just lose your past. You forfeit your future. And that’s a surrender Middle America isn’t willing to accept.