Mel Gibson warned his longtime creative partner Randall Wallace that Satan would target them if they made “The Resurrection of the Christ,” Wallace recalled in a recent podcast.  Wallace, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter behind “Braveheart,” made the remarks during an appearance on Raymond Arroyo’s “Arroyo Grande” podcast while discussing the upcoming sequel to “The Passion of the Christ” and how the project came together.  “Having studied the Resurrection and being so consumed by it, I thought about it many times,” Wallace said, explaining that he first suggested a feature-length film about Christ’s resurrection while he and Gibson were promoting “Hacksaw Ridge” in 2016. Wallace said Gibson hesitated to respond. “He said, ‘If we do this, it can’t be for the money, and it can’t be to get back at people that have hated us or wronged us or been unhappy with us,’” Wallace recalled. Wallace said he agreed, then Gibson offered another warning.  “You know, Satan’s going to come after you,” he recalled Gibson saying. Wallace joked that he initially brushed off the warning. “I said, ‘Well, you know, Satan doesn’t really care about Baptists. It’s really good when Satan can get a Catholic. We’re a dime a dozen,’” he said, making Arroyo laugh.  Wallace said the conversation marked the beginning of their partnership on the screenplay. He said he proposed writing an initial draft before the two revised it together. Gibson previously said he, Wallace, and his brother Donal Gibson spent six to eight years developing the screenplay. In May, Gibson announced that production on “The Resurrection of the Christ: Part One” had wrapped and would premiere on May 6, 2027, with Part Two set to debut Memorial Day weekend 2028. Gibson’s 2004 film “The Passion of the Christ” grossed more than $610 million worldwide against a reported $30 million budget and received three Academy Award nominations. The film depicted the final hours of Jesus’ life and became one of the year’s highest-grossing films.   Wallace declined to reveal many details about the sequel but suggested audiences would see something new.  “The interesting thing is that, while in some ways — the ultimate movie — I want to keep it all secret about what’s going to happen,” he said. “But the ultimate movie, in some ways, will have elements that people have never seen before.” “It’ll be the most consistent telling of the overall belief, the awe and the mystery that Christians experience when they experience the Resurrection,” Wallace said.

A Missouri prosecutor was removed from office after she allegedly engaged in an affair with an illegal immigrant her office was investigating for sexual assault, then failed to prosecute him because of the relationship. Ray County Prosecutor Camille Johnston allegedly carried on a romantic relationship with the Mexican national, who had been living in the country illegally since 2019 and at one point lived with Johnston, according to court documents. It is just one of three affairs she’s accused of participating in that authorities say created multiple conflicts of interest. According to court documents, Johnston failed to disclose the relationship to the sexual assault victim, law enforcement, and employees in her office and “failed to bring any criminal charges because of her relationship with” the Mexican national. At one point, the illegal immigrant fled to Mississippi, where Johnston paid him a visit before they vacationed in Florida together, court documents allege. The prosecutor also drove her car to Mississippi in 2023 and gave the fugitive the title to her vehicle, according to court documents. Authorities caught up with him in 2024, arresting him in Ohio. The alleged sexual assault occurred while Johnston and the man were involved in the relationship, KSHB reported. The allegation is one of several accusations of misconduct against Johnston, including claims that she engaged “in an intimate and romantic relationship with a criminal defense attorney representing numerous criminal defendants” in cases brought by her office, Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway said in a press release Thursday. Johnston was eventually disqualified from prosecuting the sexual assault case, according to court documents. Hanaway accused Johnston of treating her office like her “personal playground.” “When an elected official treats public office like their personal playground, betraying the public trust, ignoring legal obligations, and putting self-interest first, removal isn’t a suggestion, it’s a necessity,” Hanaway said. “Johnston’s record reflects a sustained pattern of misconduct and willful neglect that has undermined the integrity of the prosecutor’s office and poses a serious threat to public safety. In Missouri, public office is public trust, not a personal entitlement, and no one is above accountability,” she said. In another alleged example of Johnston’s misconduct, the prosecutor engaged in “another romantic relationship” with a married domestic violence suspect, according to court documents. When an employee in her office learned of the affair, Johnston fired her, per court documents. Police later learned of the inappropriate relationship and requested that a special prosecuting attorney take over the case. Johnston was ultimately disqualified from prosecuting the domestic violence case.

Amid the controversy over Christopher Nolan’s odd diversity casting, the director’s biggest change to “The Odyssey” has been ignored. This is not the Odysseus of Homer. He is a man shaped by the later Western tradition, especially Christian ethics and Machiavelli’s vision of human agency. That shift may make him less recognizable to scholars of ancient Greece, but it turns him into a hero today’s audiences can understand. Three elements make “The Odyssey” feel timeless. First, it is about a journey home; the hero tries to return to the place where he began. Second, he succeeds, but his ordeal has permanently transformed him. Third, Odysseus is accompanied throughout his journey by the goddess Athena. She advises him, rescues him, and intervenes on his behalf. The film retains these aspects of the poem. Still, as film critic Roger Ebert is credited with saying, “It’s not what a movie is about, it’s how it is about it.” In Homer, the great flaw of Odysseus is hubris. In Nolan’s film, it’s moral injury. Some viewers have described Nolan’s version of Odysseus as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. But moral injury is the more accurate term. It overlaps with PTSD, but it’s not the same thing. Moral injury occurs when a person commits, witnesses, or fails to prevent an act that violates his moral convictions. In war, moral injury can arise when a person does something that violates his own ideals, loyalties, or sense of right and wrong. The result is lasting guilt. A combat veteran comes to see himself as corrupt, unworthy, or beyond forgiveness. In the film, Odysseus describes his guilt over the violence he witnessed during the sack of Troy. He is conscience-stricken about his Trojan Horse gambit. Odysseus took an object that appeared to be a gift of peace and used it as a weapon of deception. His stratagem allowed the Greeks to enter Troy, destroy the city, and slaughter its people. But the Trojan Horse is Odysseus’s crowning achievement. Homer’s Odysseus is a wily trickster, and a trickster would not be tormented by the fact that his trick succeeded. During his journey, he repeatedly deceives his own men for what he believes is the greater good, and these acts clearly trouble him. The war itself is remembered as grim and pointless. Men are drafted rather than rushing eagerly toward glory. This is not Homer’s moral universe. In the poem, the Greeks rape, rob, enslave, and pillage without displaying anything like modern guilt. We can tolerate this when reading an ancient text. It is harder to tolerate when those acts are placed directly before us on a movie screen. This may explain Nolan’s decision. Had he shown the violence of the original story without softening it, would the audience still have been able to sympathize with Odysseus? Consider what happens to the enslaved women accused of consorting with the suitors after Odysseus returns home. Odysseus orders them to be killed, and Telemachus hangs them. Homer does not present the scene as morally complicated. Their punishment is part of restoring order. Modern films sometimes allow their heroes to inhabit moral worlds very different from our own. Robert Eggers’s 2022 film “The Northman” asks us to sympathize with Viking characters who obey codes that most moviegoers today would find reprehensible. But “The Northman” was a mid-budget film. Nolan made a summer blockbuster that cost hundreds of millions of dollars. A blockbuster can’t afford to depict a hero from whom audiences recoil. Eggers could let his Viking be a Viking. Nolan needs his Greek warrior to be one of us. Yet such individuals lived in societies that existed before Christian morality reshaped the Western understanding of guilt, mercy, and the value of every human life. The moral injury that afflicts Nolan’s Odysseus belongs more naturally to the AD world than the BC one. In the film, Odysseus grieves for the men he lost and appears to blame himself for their deaths. But Homer presents that suffering as the result of pride, fate, divine anger, and human foolishness. The original story does not depict Odysseus as a man tormented by the fear that he has violated his own moral code. The difference is clear in the episode of the lotus-eaters. In Nolan’s film, Odysseus eats the lotus because he seeks mental relief, a kind of ancient Greek version of using psychedelics to treat combat trauma. In the poem, Odysseus does the opposite. He refuses to eat the lotus and orders his men away from it. The ancient Greeks lived within what is often called an honor and shame culture. Moral conflict was largely external. A man worried about his standing, his reputation, his obligations, and the favor or anger of the gods. Their moral psychology was not organized around the same kind of private guilt that later became central to Judeo-Christian ethics. Christian morality has become so deeply embedded in Western life that even secular people treat many of its assumptions as universal. They reject Christianity as a religion while continuing to believe that compassion is superior to force, that the weak and downtrodden possess inherent moral worth, that guilt should result from cruelty, and that forgiveness rather than retaliation is a sign of strength. Nolan can’t resist placing a Christian (or secular Post-Christian) moral code within a pagan hero. The film also gives him a more modern sense of control over his fate. He does not merely endure the will of the gods. He seems to believe that he can bargain with destiny and take responsibility for the outcome. This gives him an internal moral life that feels familiar to us. Nolan’s Odysseus is skeptical of supernatural power. “We can’t live by omens and sacrifices,” he tells his crew. “The gods help those who help themselves.” This is not quite the Odysseus of Homer. It’s closer to the modern man who believes that fate may set the conditions of life, but human beings must still decide what to do within them. The film makes this point through Athena. During a flashback to the sack of Troy, Odysseus sees a young Trojan priestess (portrayed by Zendaya) seized by Greek soldiers. The scene is intercut with soldiers beheading a statue of Athena inside her temple. The woman and the goddess become fused in Odysseus’s mind. The Athena who appears to Odysseus during the rest of the film is not a goddess intervening on his behalf. She is also the memory of an innocent woman. She represents his guilt, suggesting that what drives him is not divine guidance but his own conscience. This leaves the film suspended between realism and the supernatural. The gods might exist, but the characters are not their playthings. Human beings possess agency and bear responsibility for what they do. Calypso (Charlize Theron) identifies this quality in Odysseus when she tells him, “You’re a man who needs to control his fate.” Machiavelli explored the same tension five centuries ago. As he wrote in “The Prince,” “I judge that it might be true that fortune is the arbiter of half of our actions, but that she still leaves the other half, or close to it, for us to govern.” In this sense, Nolan’s “Odyssey” can be read as a vindication of Machiavelli. Writing in the 16th century, Machiavelli was not shy about his preference for the Roman pagan virtues of strength, glory, and real-world effectiveness over the Christian ideals of mercy, compassion, and otherworldly salvation. Both pagan and Christian morality can produce admirable lives, Machiavelli believed. But they cannot be obeyed fully at the same time. Each moral system asks something different of us, and each defines goodness in a different way. As the political philosopher and Machiavelli translator Harvey Mansfield wrote of pagan morality, “Men cannot afford justice in any sense that transcends their own preservation.” The most notorious metaphor in “The Prince” is as objectionable to modern readers as many scenes in Homer’s “Odyssey.” Machiavelli compares fortune to a woman: “It is better to be impetuous than cautious, because fortune is a woman; and it is necessary, if one wants to hold her down, to beat her and strike her down. And one sees that she lets herself be won more by the impetuous than by those who proceed coldly. And so always, like a woman, she is the friend of the young, because they are less cautious, more ferocious, and command her with more audacity.” The metaphor is repellent by modern standards. But its meaning is central to Machiavelli’s thought. Fortune favors those who act rather than wait, who impose themselves on events rather than submit passively to them. Nolan gives Odysseus this Machiavellian impulse. He does not trust omens, sacrifices, or the goodwill of the gods. He believes that fate can be bargained with and contested. Yet the film also gives him a Christian conscience that judges the methods he uses to contest it. This version of Odysseus feels modern and psychologically rich, but is not recognizably Homeric. In trying to make Odysseus morally legible to us, Nolan makes him less true to the world that created him. Perhaps Nolan softened Odysseus not because he misunderstood the ancient character, but because he understood the modern audience. *** Rob Henderson, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is the author of “Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class.” His Substack newsletter is sent each week to more than 80,000 subscribers. This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

Pandemonium erupted across the globe on Friday as hordes of desperate Disney fanatics turned theme parks and flagship retail locations into battlegrounds — all to snatch up a couple of tiny pieces of cardboard. The madness was sparked by the highly anticipated drop of two brand-new sets for “Disney Lorcana,” the mega-hit trading card game produced by Ravensburger. But instead of magical Disney memories, thousands of frantic collectors and ruthless scalpers unleashed pure bedlam at Walt Disney World in Florida, Disneyland in California, and Disneyland Paris, according to The Daily Mail. Incensed vacationers expecting a fairytale getaway were instead forced to dodge chaotic crowds, shouting matches, and total gridlock. Overnight lines snaked for miles, with desperate fans showing up as early as Thursday evening to stake out a spot for the prized packs, “Heroines Edition” and “Attack of the Vine.” At Disney Springs in Orlando, frantic crowds were seen sprinting through the complex while police scrambled to regain control of blocked intersections and aggressive drivers. Sweating fans blasted park management for a complete failure of crowd control as temperatures soared and tempers flared. “This is absolutely chaotic. This is nuts,” one outraged attendee raged online. “People are fighting with security. People are already succumbing to the heat.” Other frustrated fans complained of waiting over four grueling hours in the blistering sun only to leave completely empty-handed, pointing the finger at greedy reseller gangs who scooped up the limited inventory to flip for massive profits. Across the Atlantic, the scene was even uglier. Video from Disneyland Paris showed manic shoppers leaping over security barricades to bypass the queue, The Daily Mail reported. In England, the official Disney Store on London’s famous Oxford Street was forced to scrap the product launch entirely after violent mobs attempted to storm the front doors, triggering a heavy police response.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke last week at the Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism in Washington, D.C., to highlight instances of political terrorism around the globe. He offered a grim summary of “far-Left” violence in numerous Western countries over the last 75 years, noting that these particular acts of terrorism always seem to receive disparate, if not favorable, treatment from the media and governments at large compared to others. “A bomb planted by a neo-Nazi group was a nefarious and murderous act of evil,” Rubio said. “It is. But a bomb planted by a Marxist revolutionary, well, that’s just merely a tragic excess of idealism.” He is absolutely right, and it’s a problem that extends to how these matters are treated in court. Take the infamous “summer of love” riots in 2020 surrounding the death of George Floyd. Rubio said that “city governments all across the country simply refused to prosecute the people conducting these acts of violence and terror,” but something he did not mention is that in many cases the city governments actually paid some of the rioters for their trouble. The City of Denver on Wednesday is appealing to the Supreme Court and has requested a stay on a 2022 verdict requiring the city to pay more than $14 million to twelve plaintiffs involved in the 2020 riots who, based on the jury’s decision, were victims of excessive force from the police. Earlier in the week, the City of Denver approved a separate $2.9 million settlement to other protestors who were involved in the riots, and the city claims that in total $22 million has already been paid out in settlements related to the George Floyd lawsuits so far. In the request for a stay on the verdict, Denver argues that testimony was allowed in the trial by lay experts who were not present at the scene and who simply reviewed video footage of chaos involving unrelated plaintiffs and unrelated defendants in this case. This argument forms the basis of the appeal and is a compelling one. At the time of the original trial, the City of Denver had already incurred an estimated $4 million in property damage in the downtown area. These are staggering figures, but is Denver alone in this? Absolutely not. Several cases are still working their way through the legal system, but a conservative estimate is that well over $100 million has so far been paid out to protestors involved in the 2020 riots. An article from the Guardian in 2023 cites that at the time, at least nineteen cities had already agreed to payouts eclipsing $80 million. These cities included New York, Philadelphia, Denver, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Oakland, Milwaukee, Kansas City, Washington, D.C., and Portland. Notice a trend? Here is another article citing a $9.25 million payout to protestors in Philadelphia, and here is another citing a $2 million payout to two protestors in Atlanta. The list goes on and on. Justin Hansford, a professor at Howard University School of Law, called the total number of settlements “unprecedented.” “I have never seen a wave of settlements for police brutality like this in American history,” he said. The City of Seattle in 2024 agreed to pay $10 million to multiple protestors also found to be the victims of excessive force. Of note, Seattle also agreed to a settlement of $3.6 million to the business owners of the infamous CHAZ/CHOP area of the city. So, which is it? The police should allow violent criminals to take over entire zones of the city, or should they police them, using force when necessary, to restore public order? An estimated one to two billion dollars in property damages were calculated across the country as a result of insurance losses from the 2020 riots. Making these riots the most devastating loss to property due to civil unrest in the nation’s history. Add in the settlements paid out to these protestors over the last six years, and you arrive at truly astounding figures. Now, an important distinction. You may recall that earlier this year the Department of Justice under the Trump administration announced the “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” which could be used to pay restitution to people who were improperly targeted or prosecuted by the federal government in a politically motivated fashion. The media pounced and immediately announced that there was nearly unanimous and “widespread bipartisan backlash” against the fund. Why? Because the fund could be used for the utterly duplicitous act of paying out settlement money to the J6 rioters. Former Vice President Mike Pence stated, “The idea of creating a fund that could compensate people who assaulted police officers and vandalized the Capitol that day is totally unacceptable.” Former DOJ Inspector General Michael Bromwich called the fund “an attempted political payoff to criminals … and wide open to people who committed crimes of violence on Trump’s behalf.” Donald Ayer, the former deputy attorney general who served during the George HW Bush administration, said the fund is “outright theft.” “Trump and his DOJ have decided that they’re going to give money away to his supporters who will claim some sort of personal abuse when they, in fact, have been the abusers,” Ayer said. Oddly enough, there do not seem to be any statements from these individuals condemning payouts to the rioters from the George Floyd protests. On June 2, 2026, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced that the Anti-Weaponization fund was officially dead after pushback from both aisles of Congress, the media, the courts, legal scholars, etc. So, there you have it. There are other ways that the J6 rioters could be provided with restitution for the clear violation of their constitutional rights, but it is compelling to see just how differently these events were treated broadly by the media and politicians. The Trump pardons of many of the J6 protestors, while controversial, were arguably much more justifiable than just never prosecuting rioters in the first place, as Rubio noted of the 2020 protestors. We can all agree that it is frustrating for tax dollars to be spent on payouts for rioters of any kind, but to some of our leaders, I guess it just depends on which side of the aisle you are on.