Gideon’s Army
On choosing, and being chosen
So he brought down the people unto the water: and the LORD said unto Gideon, Every one that lappeth of the water with his tongue, as a dog lappeth, him shalt thou set by himself; likewise every one that boweth down upon his knees to drink.
I owe the inspiration for this piece to
, who first articulated this metaphor to me in a different context. It’s my hope that this essay will prod him to share his own very interesting thoughts on this theme.It’s been a rough few years.
With zero warning outside of those few of us who lurk on the chans to monitor the Internet’s id, the planet locked down under threat of an unprecedented pandemic.
We all know what happened. I won’t re-litigate it here. It’s almost boring to talk about it now. We all know that it was all fake and ghey, the mother of all psychological operations. The world was shut down, and we were imprisoned in our domiciles – in some cases literally, in most cases as a fait accompli as everywhere worth going had been locked up and wrapped with caution tape. Socially distanced in solitary confinement, our devices were used to feed an unending doomscroll of panic porn into our optical nerves, shutting down our neocortices and leaving us at the mercy of the nudge units and behavioural insight teams yanking on our lizard brains in service of a global criminal network of would-be technodeities with man boobs and terrible fashion sense.
We’ve been tested as never before.
And yet, despite all of this, some of us resisted. The bad cat put it very well:
They threw everything they had at us. Every dirty psychological trick, every form of underhanded emotional manipulation, every vile tool from the social engineer’s sociopathic toolbox.
Most of the species fell for it. They believed everything, and went into deep panic. Many still haven’t come out. To this day you see people driving alone wearing masks, which they’ll no doubt continue wearing until enough plastic fibres seep into their lung tissue from their life-saving facial filters that they die from COPD. Most have come to their senses somewhat, but they still lined up in droves to get their armful of magic science juice.
The consequences of that mass experiment in horizontal gene transfer are still being worked out. They don’t look good. The hideous implications are beginning to dawn on the globalists’ experimental subjects, and the mood is turning ugly. As well it should.
Meanwhile, those who were most vocal in their support for injecting the entire human species with a novel genetic potion, who demanded this be done whether people wanted it or not because omigod there’s a virus won’t someone please think of the old people! are having their psyches shattered in real time by cogdis slamming like a pickaxe through their self-image as the smartest good little boys and girls in the room, and the nasty reality that they were wrong, about everything ... while those awful, ultra-extreme-alt-right-wing QAnon conspiracy theory-believing malinformation-spreading hate-speaking sexist misogynist racist homophobic epistemological terrorists were, well. You know. Correct.
It’s a beautiful thing to watch the midwit regime flatterers sputter and short-circuit, a gleaming line of silver around a very dark and very threatening cloud.
The point I want to make here though, is this:
If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’re in that small, select group that withstood all of it.
You resisted the propaganda telling you to be afraid of the virus, and you went outside.
You shrugged off the social pressure to wear a mask everywhere you went, and breathed freely, and smiled.
Most importantly, you refused the jab.
They tried to bribe you with cash payments, lottery tickets, and free burgers. You said no.
They tried to shame you into it. Sure, you might not be at risk from the Coof of Doom, but think of grandma. Think of fat people. Think of immunocompromised children.
You still said no.
They banned you from restaurants, live music venues, international travel.
Still, you refused.
Your friends and family, lost to the psycho-sorcerors, ostracized you.
Yet you held firm.
They came for your jobs, careers you’d invested your entire lives in. Many of you caved at that point, as well you might if you had families whose security depended on your paycheque, and you got the injection under protest; those of you who did this have earned a special kind of respect, for there’s a heroism in taking a sip of the poison chalice when the evil duke has threatened to throw your children into the streets to starve.
Yet many of you still refused.
“Do what you will,” you told the black wizards and their horde of misshapen goblin enforcers, “Lock me up as you will, ostracize me as you will, exile me as you will, impoverish me as you will, even murder me as you will. Nothing you can do will make me comply.”
You understood the essence of free will, the fundamental lie that tyranny is based upon. If you’re willing to give up everything, there is nothing a would-be tyrant can do force compliance.
“Kneel, or it shall be your head.”
“Then take it.”
The tyrant may then take your head, but he did not and could not make you kneel.
Maybe you understood this without being told. Maybe you read the Stoic philosphers, or were inspired by the Christian saints. Maybe you’re just ornery. In any case, now that you’ve been through this, you understand this basic law of creation at the bone-deep level that only experience can bring.
It is impossible to compromise the free will of any entity that refuses to let you do this. They have to agree; they have to let you. If they don’t, there’s nothing you or anyone else can do about it.
So now, here you are.
You’ve been tested as few have ever been tested before.
All of us have, and most of us have been found wanting. As the bad cat said, there’s no shame in failing a test with a 10% pass rate.
But there is glory in passing it, and I want you to bask in that glory for a moment, for you now stand among the elect.
Having passed through this purifying inferno, you now know your inner strength of spirit with certainty. Before this, you might have suspected, or hoped, that your soul would be made of such an adamantine alloy, but you couldn’t know.
Now you do.
Perhaps we should thank the tyrants for stealing these years from our lives; after all, they made us what we are now. Personally, I think we should thank them with gibbets and gallows, but I’m old school that way.
In any case, you’re not alone in this.
Look around at the battlefield, littered with the fallen and crowded with those kneeling in surrender, and see all those still standing proud and defiant amidst the carnage and cowardice.
Those are your brothers and sisters in Gideon’s Army now.
You’re a motley crew of vagabonds to be sure. We all drew our Will to Resistance from different wells.
Some are alethiologists – scientists of the spirit for whom science is not a mere profession, body of knowledge, set of procedures and methods, or worst of all a hollow and cynical game of status-seeking, but a passionate commitment to the light of truth and reason whose war cry is et pur, si muove. Their contempt for the transparent lies and naked fabrications of the false scientists powered their resistance, while their own incisive clarity in data analysis and scenario extrapolation provided an essential service in continuously reminding the rest of us that we’re not crazy, everyone else is.
Some are mystics – the hippies and reiki healers, the acupuncturists and astrologers, the tarot card readers and shamans, the conspiracy schizos raving about nanobots self-assembling in our bloodstreanms and soul-hacking 5G antennae. Their intuition guided them through this cognitive battlefield, leading them to the right answers for reasons that they themselves often cannot explain, reasons that strike others as batshit crazy nonsense ... yet still they were guided to the right answer.
Some are frogs – the rightist dissidents, the vitalist bodybuilders, the Nietzscheans and anarchs and armed libertarians, the civnat tradcaths and neopagan ethnonats, the loose online koryos of men in whom something primal and ferocious has been stirring for years now in rebellion against the enervating narcotic of the digital longhouse. They had long ago learned that the corporate media lies, the state lies, the mainline churches lie, and the captured academy lies most of all. They had learned to be suspicious, to trust the ancient instincts they had spent so long reactivating, and held strong even when prominent influencers from within their own networks made common cause with the enemy.
Most are simply ordinary people – fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, workers and students who for whatever reason said No, and held by it.
Whichever branch or MOS, you’re one of them, now.
One of the elect.
One of the very, very few who were tested, and found to be strong.
One of the heads of the Hydra.
Conscripted, whether you want it or not, in Gideon’s Army.
The question now is what comes next.
World War COVID is essentially over. It was a draw; the enemy got their product into billions of arms, but was stopped short of full victory, fell back, and is not likely to try again. In truth, their war machine is on its back foot; what gains they made were at the expense of a vast quantity of irretrievably immolated social capital, irreversibly turning the ratchet of lost credibility in the minds of their victims. The embarrassing clown show that just wrapped up at Davos is sign enough of that. They’re chattering at one another as though their plans are still plausible, even as they hide behind lines of soldiers of dubious loyalty and try to distract themselves with their thousands of sex workers.
Davos Man is done, he just hasn’t admitted it to himself yet.
The real question is: what do we do.
Because we are an army now. Leaderless and centreless, yes; less like a Roman legion, and more akin to a swarm of the Sea Peoples. But an army nonetheless.
What do we do with an army of millions of souls forged from spiritual steel?
Well.
The world is sick and broken.
In breaking it, those who broke it have lost the Mandate of Heaven.
They are no longer fit to rule.
The longer we pretend they are, the more broken the world will become.
Perhaps it’s just me, although I don’t think it is, but I think it’s time Gideon’s Army went on the offence.
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In between writing on Substack you can find me on Twitter @martianjohn1, and I’m also pretty active at Telegrams From Barsoom
almost had me thinking you were channeling this for a moment:
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with wornout tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on”;
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings—nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run—
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
I mentioned Aragorn's speech at the Black Gate recently, which I'll reproduce here:
"Sons of Gondor! Of Rohan! My brothers.
"I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me.
"A day may come when the courage of Men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields when the Age of Men comes crashing down, but it is not this day!
"This day we fight!
"By all that you hold dear on this good earth, I bid you stand, Men of the West!"
It's a fictional speech (as is King Harry's at Agincourt, lest we forget).
Some gray and bedraggled office drone (a creature in heavy supply these days) might just sniff at it and draggle onwards, his heart dying in his chest of cheap carbs and boredom.
Then there's the exotic panoply of pansies, boylovers, queef-sniffers and Halloween monsters, who will screech and howl until their gizzards burst about the chauvinism, the bigotry, the colonialism, the litany of secret -ists and phantom -phobes.
And finally there's the mass: an unimaginably vast and lazy river of human shapes, flowing from uninspired thought to unexamined action, tumbling over and over, heedless of any possible past or future, innocent not by virtue or form but by their own need to escape their need to escape, to bend the antennae inward, to Netfilx-and-chill.
And then there's the rest of us.
Thank you, Sir John, for reminding me. As you say, the past three years have visited many horrors on us, and many thieves. I try not to reveal too much personal information about myself, for reasons of strategy. But I will say this: someone very important was stolen from me early on. Not by the virus, but by the ensuing panic, and the outrageously unscientific rules that accompanied it. This person died in my arms. Or was dead in my arms, I guess, after my numerous attempts to revive her. Though I didn't realize it at the time, it forged something very hard and sharp in me, and I know I'm far from alone.
Thanks for reminding all of us of how such steel is made, and also that the forging process isn't the end but the beginning. I think we must all become something like Aragorn now. A lot of us have been comfortable just wandering alone in the woods, feeding ourselves with our hard-earned skills and feeling vaguely proud about that. But there's a very important call, and we all need to answer it now. Strike while the iron's hot, perhaps.
But thanks as well for this right here:
"So now, here you are.
"You’ve been tested as few have ever been tested before.
"All of us have, and most of us have been found wanting. As the bad cat said, there’s no shame in failing a test with a 10% pass rate.
"But there is glory in passing it, and I want you to bask in that glory for a moment, for you now stand among the elect."
When I read this, I shed a manly tear, that turned into an eagle, that flew off to Proxima Centauri!
Okay not really, but I did feel some measure of glory, at least for a moment. Maybe that's the best way to indulge; a sip and nothing more. But it was one helluva sip.
God bless, brother. Having you back in action is the best of all tonics.