Tyrant-proof your mind
Study the seven books that every tyrant hopes you don’t read
Be one of the few.
-
Stop complaining.
-
Get reading.
-
Save America.
Do you have what it takes to save the American miracle?
In an age of click-bait complaining and pathetic entitlement and ignorant activism, we need fearless American philosophers. We need tyrant-proofed American warriors.
We need rare Navy SEALs of the American mind. Folks devoted to understanding what caused the human miracle that is the United States of America, and brave enough to confidently teach the American way of freedom to their households and citizenship-seeking immigrants.
Public “educators” and higher ed professors can no longer be counted on to teach the way. As an academic, I had a front row seat to the anti-American intellectual circus of academia from 1999-2023. Turns out, when you stop teaching freedom and virtue, you get tyranny and vice. When you stop teaching what causes civilization, you get barbarians.
We need true schools of American freedom. Welcome to Odyssey U.
Your one life is too precious to live enslaved.
America is a human miracle — freedom and prosperity of unprecedented magnitude, and it’s not even close. Lots of ostensibly thoughtful folks have lost faith, but I haven’t. We can save it, but it will take work, and it’ll be hard, and the truths that will save us don’t care about our feelings.
Causes and effects are facts not emotions. And the American miracle was caused by specific ideas in action.
The choice: You can become a rare Navy SEAL of the American mind and lead your people to freedom, or you can drink the hemlock of our contemporary tyrants when they come for you. And they will come for you.
They came for Socrates. They came for Plato. They came for Aristotle.
They came for Moses, and Jesus, and the founders of America, and Charlie Kirk.
They came for Achilles, and for the Shire, and for Winston Smith.
They came for me. As the owner of a coffeehouse called Odyssey Coffee, two angry activists approached me in the wake of George Floyd’s death, and threatened, “You must publicly post in support of Black Lives Matter on Odyssey’s windows and websites, or else.” I did not. So they started a multi-day personal slander fest on the internet, ending with the public call: “Let’s slay this motherfu$&er.”
Tyranny. Contemporary tyrants. We don’t give tyrants what they want.
The tyrant exerts power for his own pleasure rather than the good of others. The tyrant forcibly uses human beings for his or her own purposes.
The tyrannical impulse is perennial and deeply human. It transcends time and space. And while most tyrants seize control in politics and higher education and popular culture, sometimes the most dangerous tyrants are within — desire, fear, covetousness.
Sometimes I am my own tyrant. And you are yours.
When we refuse to be forcibly used by a tyrant, the tyrant, lacking all rational benevolence, aims to kill. Mine said, “Let’s slay this motherfu$&er.” Socrates’s tyrants poisoned him with hemlock. Jesus’s nailed him to a cross. Frodo’s hunted him with Black Riders.
Will you see your tyrants coming? Will we see America’s tyrants before it’s too late?
Odyssey U gets us ready.
Ladies & Gentlemen: The tyrant-slaying seven.
1 The Bible
One God, a sinful imago dei, and a beautiful solution.
2 Homer
What is the life (and wife) worth living (and dying) for?
3 Plato
Human and citizen virtue incarnate.
4 Aristotle
What is the telos of an anthropos, together?
5 Founders
A tyrant-proof republic founded on divinely human wisdom.
6 Orwell
What do we get if we reject the American project, and give tyrants what they want?
7 Tolkien
The anti-tyrant epic for the freedom-loving remnant.
Plus: How to read like a philosopher
The five steps of philological analysis: language, structure, theology, anthropology, ethics.
Plus: Step by step checklists & exams
Exactly what to read, in what order, broken down into clear steps. With one exam question for each book.
Meet your first two tyrants: Agamemnon & Pharoah
“You’re a stumbling drunk with the eyes of a dog and the heart of a deer…You stay back from battle and steal prized possessions from any of your own soldiers who dare to oppose you in speech. You’re a king who devours his people…”
— Achilles to Agamemnon, Iliad 1 (My translation)
The King of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah, “When you act as midwives to the Hebrew women, and see them on the birthstool, if it is a boy, kill him.”…But the midwives feared God; they did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but they let the boys live.
— Bible, OT, Exodus 1:15-17 (NRSV)
