Profiles in courage: Ian Smith
This may be the first part of a reoccurring series highlighting specific individuals who have displayed true, unquestionable courage standing up to the globohomo behemoth against unrelenting pressures, serving as a bit of a counter to the typical grim perspective pushed on this Substack. These individuals pay a price, often a big price, for their courage, and for standing up anyway they deserve to be applauded. Historical-level figures in this vein like Lee Kuan Yew and Ptyor Stolypin have been covered previously. If there were more people like these men, the world would be a much better place.
Ian Smith
You may or may not heard of Ian Smith; he was the New Jersey gym owner that stood up very early against governmental lockdown orders and later vaccine requirements during the CIA color revolution vote-by-mail-legalization-to-overthrow-Orange Man-fraud otherwise known as “COVID”. I followed his story closely at the time, was inspired by it, and continue to follow his ongoing activities. (He should have a Wikipedia page, but given Wiki is controlled by the FBI and CIA, I suppose he has been de-personed and is not considered a person of note, a very Stalin-esque tactic).
Smith recently came out with a book called “Find Your Hill: Worth Fighting For” which is available on Amazon or the book’s direct website. It offers an autobiography of Ian describing his upbringing, challenges, mistakes, things he learned along the way, along with his entrepreneurial spirit and provides a detailed account of his battle against the globohomo scumbag New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy to keep his gym open. It’s a great book, written in a simple, down to earth, very easy to read manner, and if you want to be inspired by overcoming adversity I highly recommend it.
Smith’s Story
Smith grew up like many young men do today: from a broken home. His father wasn’t in the picture at all, he lived with his mother and his step-father offered little to no guidance on life. Aimless, driftless, he engaged in lots of petty crime as a teenager and ultimately enrolled in college, where his results were mediocre. One day, at 20 years old, waking up from drinking heavily the night before, and without realizing he could still be drunk in the morning, he ran a red light and T-boned another car, killing a young man. He spent five years in prison for this, and experienced deep shame at what had happened. He said forgiveness first from the detective in charge of the case and then from the family members of the dead young man affected him deeply. The detective said as he sat before him sobbing in shame, “I know this does not make sense to you right now, but when I pulled up to the scene, I knew there were two fatalities, yet here you are. You are here for a reason. I do not know why, but that is your job to figure it out. Do not be afraid. You are going to need to find a way to forgive yourself to make sure two lives are not lost in this tragedy. Enough damage has been done. You have a responsibility to be better.” And when Smith was sentenced, a family member of the victim handed him a note that said, “We don’t hate you; we just hate what you did.” Powerful words; such forgiveness isn’t so easily imaginable in a non-Christian context…
After getting out of prison Smith enrolled and graduated from college and had various failed job experiences that left him angry and depressed, and back living with his mother. But he pulled himself up and got back to grinding, and he finally found his niche as a personal trainer, finding that he was able to grow his clients with his strong understanding of social media. He went from working people out around New Jersey (traveling to his clients) in the park with equipment from the back of his car to having his own gym with a long line of clients. That in turn led to him being given an opportunity to buy a failing nutrition store within a failing gym, and then the gym itself. Only nine months after his purchase, COVID hit…
Atilis Gym and COVID
Smith’s gym was shut down during the “two weeks to stop the spread” scam messaging at the start of the panic. After a month with no official reopening in sight, though, he saw that big “essential” business was still open and that the small mom and pop stores, which lived month to month, were going out of business. Enough was enough, he thought, and he reopened. But he didn’t do it quietly: he went on Tucker Carlson and announced he was reopening and was going to publicly defy the Governor’s shutdown order. Here’s the video of his initial appearance from May 2020.
His gym reopened to much interest and fanfare, getting both a huge amount of support as well as lots of hate comments and death threats. Governor Murphy took it as a direct challenge to his globohomo dictatorial rule, and he tried many different ways to shut down the gym - putting pressure on the city to revoke his business license, having him arrested, having his customers arrested, having the city mess with his sewer lines to lead to his toilets backing up, boarding up the door to his gym, fining him tens of thousands of dollars a day (!) trying to breach the veil of his LLC to bankrupt him personally, and having criminal contempt charges filed against him, among other pressure tactics. Here is a photo of Murphy so you can judge the physiognomy of this scumbag:
The appearance on Tucker, followed by additional appearances, was both a good and bad thing: it brought him to national attention and created a huge following for himself (proving how powerful the media is; plenty of other individuals who stood up to government tyranny such as Louis Uridel, Shelley Luther, Greg Anderson, and Danny Presti did not receive the same level of attention) but he became a symbol of the anti-lockdown movement whom the government then decided to destroy. He ultimately wracked up enormous legal bills fighting the government, which had unlimited money, had his bank account funds illegally seized, and quickly racked up $1,000,000+ in fines.
Here are some of his other appearances on Tucker:
Smith was ultra resourceful and never gave up. When the city took away his business license under duress, the gym became a “recreational center” with no charges, only donations. When the government padded up the front door of the gym, he took the front door off the building. When the government made it illegal for him to operate, he brought the entire gym equipment daily outside. Wow!
He credits the huge amount of positive feedback he kept receiving for his continued defiance; if no one had cared, his business would have shut down early and he could have been thrown in prison without much of a second thought. It was the lives that he kept touching as he traveled around the country, giving speeches, inspiring others, highlighting the plight of others, that gave the reinforcement and feedback for his courage to continue to defy scumbag Murphy’s tyranny.
The Impact
According to Smith, p. 206, “The path to change is always a long series of cause and effect. One person’s actions impact the next person’s, which leads to an exponential increase in the number of people involved. What started as a couple hundred people in the gym parking lot turned into an army of supporters. The game ends when enough people are inspired to stand up, meet resistance, and stay standing, until they run out of ways to enforce their tyrannical orders. In America, if we had not hit a critical mass of non-compliance, we would all be living under the same type of COVID policies that the Chinese have submitted to.”
And p. 211: “I traveled frequently during COVID, sometimes three times a month and had to show up at the airport three or four hours early just to be harassed [as he was put on the Secondary Security Screening Selection list for refusing to wear a mask]. I continued to fight with people over masking, being removed from flights even when I had an exemption [from a doctor who was not going along with the COVID hysteria], and more. Many would say, “just wear the mask, you are making a big deal over nothing” but I was unwilling to participate in the nonsense of pretending that masks worked. If there is no resistance to what is clearly wrong, they will continue to do wrong. You might as well make these people work for it, make their lives miserable for enforcing such lunacy. Eventually the enforcers get tired of the nonsense as well, and it starts to fall apart. If everyone complies, we go further down the path of illogical control and tyranny. Was it a pain the ass? Sure. Did it make my life uncomfortable and inconvenient? Sure. Will I do it again if they ever try that again? Absolutely.”
Smith’s point reminds me of an anti-tyranny cartoon I had seen a couple of years ago, which I dug up and which is as follows:
It also reminded me of a Alexander Solzhenitsyn quote from The Gulag Archipelago about the price of inaction, p. 828 of Volume 1:
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you'd be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur—what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked? The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!
If ... if ... We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more— we had no awareness of the real situation. We spent ourselves in one unrestrained outburst in 1917, and then we hurried to submit. We submitted with pleasure!…We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.
Remember that those who want to take away your freedom will never package their nefarious intent honestly or directly; they will always package their message as one of promoting safety, like they did with the scam Department of Homeland Security after 9/11. And a message of safety strongly resonates with the public, especially women. As Benjamin Franklin said, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
The CIA, Bill Gates, Lord Fauci COVID-fraud tyranny finally ended because, even though 80% of fooled American suckers got the first Death Jab (especially 100-110 liberal Redditor-types; those at the tail ends of the bell curve were much less likely to get it, especially PhDs), only 20% received the Death Jab booster. Because so few fell for the booster, our overlords decided to shift to their next scam. (Still, I’m bitter about it; globohomo got their rigged election, permanent fraudulent vote-by-mail, shut down a tremendous number of small businesses, printed $11+ trillion in 2020-2021 alone ($6 trillion of treasures and mortgage bonds purchased and $5 trillion in CARES Act funds) and gave much of it to their friends and allies which caused massive inflation, and no one has paid at all for it. They’re off to their next scam while Lord Fauci retires with tens of millions of dollars in his offshore bank accounts, permanent private security, and laughing at all the retards he fooled. Sure, globohomo didn’t get their permanent vaccine mandates or having to show vaccine passports everywhere forever - this time - but their strategy was a runaway success regardless).
Where is Smith today?
After the fraudulent COVID scam died down, Smith eventually sold his business to his partner (who he had continued problems with) and ran for Congress, where he received about 40% of the vote in the primary against a globohomo Republican stooge. He was a political neophyte and wasn’t prepared for the nasty games that would be played; he had one drink at dinner and was pulled over and arrested for it and charged with DUI, highlighting his prior felony where he had killed a young man while drunk; after the primary, the DUI charge was dropped. Nasty games. But Smith correctly blamed himself for allowing himself to be put in that situation in the first place.
Now he is an author, entrepreneur, and he is headlining a cool event called the Freemen Forge. Here he is explaining it on Instagram, which sounds like a very cool event for like-minded people to interact, network and train together (regardless of the number of embedded FBI agents who will likely try to sneak in):
The website is here if you have interest in looking at it.
The conclusion
Ultimately Ian’s story is a story of empowerment and forgiveness. He made a lot of mistakes in his life, continues to make them, yet he learned to forgive himself (and have others forgive him), and he put his head down and got to work and didn’t give up, and ultimately has had a very positive and encouraging impact on others. He ends his book on a note of optimism and encouragement, p. 221:
“What would happen with a million more people in the gym, eating healthier, showing up at town councils and board meetings, spending and saving their money smarter, opening businesses, planting gardens, spending less time on their phones and more with their families, organizing community events and charity, and showing up during the election process? What if we scaled that million people down to just your town or your city? What would it look like if a thousand or even a hundred people in your community started doing that? What problems could we solve with that type of engaged citizenship?
This country is sick with victimhood, dependency, and apathy and the cure is excellence, autonomy, excitement. it starts with the individual. It starts with you. If you do not know where that starts of what that is, then ask yourself who or what is ‘worth fighting for’ - find your hill, as I call it. That looks like something different for each of us. There is not a how-to manual, and this certainly is not an attempt to write one. This is just the story of a regular guy who did his part to remind us of how powerful we all are…We the people…”
Amen, and God bless you Ian.
Lastly, his story reminds me of the wonderful Rudyard Kipling poem “If”:
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 worn-out 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!
Now if you were touched by Ian’s story, go buy his damn book and follow him on Instagram here and here!
Outstanding article and an uplifting story. Ian Smith is a true American hero and an inspiration. We are gonna need a lot more heroes before this is over.
You have gazed hard into this abyss and seen the true horror of what potentially awaits us, as have I. One of the greatest difficulties at this stage is 99% of the thoroughly propagandized population (normies and even the semi-red pilled) simply don't recognize the sheer immensity of the unmitigated evil* that is now in plain sight, for those of us with the eyes to see it. This is probably actually a good thing. It's a lonely world watching Satan striding the earth while most folk go about their lives as if nothing were amiss. Ian's example is important because he focused and fought for his livelihood and was not paralyzed into inaction by a doomer mindset. We must all seek to do likewise and focus on what we can do, rather than what we cannot.
*https://edwardslavsquat.substack.com/p/i-believe-we-are-facing-an-evil-that
In Diary of a Man in Despair Reck-Malleczewen describes how after the truly extraordinary example set by the White Rose martyrs in 1943, many other Germans turned against the seemingly all-powerful Nazi state. We are not 'there' yet, but the same principal applies, as demonstrated brilliantly in your cartoon.
The Brave New World that is being prepared for us is not one I will inhabit. I have therefore chosen my own hill to be de-personed upon, or worse if necessary. In the meantime I must content myself with trying to raise awareness of the nature of the dire peril everywhere and anywhere I can. Your blog is an important voice in that respect. Chapeau.
cogi non potest quisquis mori scit
Great idea for a series. The Left has villains, and use control of the media to turn villains into heroes.
The Right has real heroes. We need to know who they are. This woman would famous if she were a Leftist.
Hold The Line: My story from the heart of the Freedom Convoy, Tamara Lich