🔫 Disarm and Starve: The Oldest Play in the Tyrant’s Handbook

“For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds, casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ.”

2 Corinthians 10:4–5 (NKJV)

There is a pattern so consistent across history that it ceases to be coincidence and becomes a strategy. Whenever a ruling class wants to permanently subjugate a people, it does two things. It controls what they eat. And it takes away their weapons.

These are not separate policies. They are two blades of the same scissors.

Food as a Weapon of Control

When William the Conqueror imposed Norman rule on England, one of his earliest acts was the Forest Law—a sweeping prohibition on hunting game in the royal forests. The deer, the boar, the hare: these belonged to the king now. A peasant caught killing game could have his eyes gouged out, his hands cut off, or be hanged. The Normans did not do this because they needed the venison. They did it because high-protein animal food was power. A population that could hunt its own meat was harder to control than one dependent on the lord’s grain.

Scotland tells the same story. For centuries, the Highland aristocracy feasted on red deer, game birds, and wild salmon—the richest, most anabolic diet on the island. The common people were confined to porridge. Oats. Boiled, unsalted, eaten twice a day. Not because oats were nutritious—they were chosen because they were just enough to keep a man working without ever giving him the strength to resist. And today? Millions eat their morning oats religiously, convinced by a century of nutritional propaganda that this is health food. It is the diet of managed subsistence. It always was.

Go back further—to ancient Greece and Rome. The slave class was deliberately undernourished. Not starved to death, but kept in a state of low-grade depletion. Weak enough to be controlled. Strong enough to pull an oar. The ruling philosophers understood what we have forgotten: the body is political. A strong, well-fed man is dangerous. A malnourished, metabolically compromised one is manageable.

Now look at today. Butter is vilified by the medical establishment. Red meat is linked—via corrupt and industry-funded studies—to cancer and heart disease. Meanwhile, seed oils, the laboratory-synthesised byproducts of the petrochemical industry, are certified heart-healthy by every major dietetic body. The population is being poisoned not with a single dramatic toxin but with a thousand small ones, administered through processed food, contaminated water, synthetic cookware, and a medical establishment that has been thoroughly captured by pharmaceutical interests. And the great majority have no idea it is happening, because the same institutions that profit from their sickness control the information ecosystem that shapes their beliefs.

This is not incompetence. It is the Norman Forest Law, updated for modernity.

Chaining the Spiritual Meat

The same pattern runs through church history with eerie precision.

When the institutional church became corrupt—when bishops accumulated land, popes commanded armies, and the gospel was obscured behind a fog of indulgences and Latin liturgy—the first thing the clergy did was chain the Bible. Literally. Bibles were chained to pulpits, accessible only to ordained priests. The scriptures were not to be translated into the languages of common people. To attempt it was heresy. To succeed was a capital offence.

John Wycliffe translated the New Testament into English in the 1380s and died under the curse of the Church. Forty years after his death, his bones were exhumed and burned. William Tyndale translated the New Testament from Greek and the Pentateuch from Hebrew into English in the 1520s. He was strangled and burned at the stake. These men paid with blood to bring the Word of God—the spiritual meat—to ordinary people who had been kept in deliberate theological malnutrition for generations.

The pattern is identical. Control the food. Chain the Bible. Keep the people dependent, weak, and intermediated. A saint who can read Scripture for himself and eat well is more dangerous to corrupted power than an army.

The Second Amendment and the Porcupine

I grew up in South Korea and came of age in 1990s Britain, saturated in the liberal consensus of the Western academy. Gun ownership was, to my educated mind, simply barbaric—an American pathology, a relic of frontier violence with no place in a civilised society. I held this view with complete confidence. I was completely wrong.

What changed my mind was history.

Country after country, the path to despotism runs through the same checkpoint: civilian disarmament. The Ottoman Empire confiscated Armenian weapons before the 1915 genocide. The Soviet collectivisation that killed millions was preceded by the systematic seizure of firearms from the Ukrainian peasantry. Mao disarmed the Chinese people. The Khmer Rouge disarmed Cambodia. In each case, the removal of weapons from the populace was not a consequence of tyranny—it was its precondition.

The Epstein files—now in the public domain—have confirmed what many dismissed as conspiracy theory: that a significant portion of the global ruling class is bound together not merely by financial interest but by shared participation in crimes so monstrous that they guarantee mutual blackmail and silence. A satanic cabal is not a metaphor I use loosely. It is the most accurate description of what the evidence shows.

Against this, the Second Amendment is not a quirk of American culture. It is, at this moment in history, quite possibly the single most important legal provision in existence. Not because an armed citizenry can defeat a modern military in open battle—it cannot—but because of what I think of as the porcupine principle. The lion does not fear the porcupine. It can kill it. But the cost—the quills, the blood, the risk—is high enough that the lion walks past. Armed populations are not impregnable. They are simply expensive to subjugate. And tyrants, when calculating the return on their investment, prefer unarmed ones.

Every push for gun control—however genuinely well-intentioned by those who carry the messaging—serves this logic. Every law-abiding citizen disarmed by regulatory accumulation is one fewer quill on the porcupine.

The Weapons of Our Warfare

And us? What of the saints?

Paul was not speaking in metaphor when he told the Corinthians that our weapons are “mighty in God for pulling down strongholds.” He meant it operationally. We are in a war. The strongholds are real—ideological, spiritual, institutional. And we have been issued weapons capable of demolishing them.

But those weapons are only effective if we use them. And the enemy knows it.

The same logic that chains Bibles and confiscates guns operates in the spiritual realm. The church is pressured—subtly, persistently, from a thousand directions—to become tame. To be therapeutic rather than prophetic. To replace fervent, corporate prayer with programmes, counselling, and comfortable weekly gatherings. To treat fasting as an extreme practice for mystics rather than the standard discipline of the Christian life that Jesus assumed when he said “when you fast”—not “if.”

A church that does not fast is a church without one of its primary weapons. A church that does not cry out in prayer is a church that has quietly handed over its arms. It is disarmed—by comfort, by respectability, by the slow erosion of expectation that God still moves in response to desperate, persistent intercession.

We cannot afford to be disarmed. Not now. Not in this moment.

The Normans took the game. The aristocracy kept the venison. The clergy chained the Bible. The tyrants took the guns. The enemy pressures the church to put down its spiritual arms.

The answer, in every era, is the same: refuse.

Eat the meat. Read the Word. Keep your weapons. Pray without ceasing. Fast with purpose. Let the strongholds fall. And celebrate the heroics.