More Crowdfunding Woes

Seems BackerKit, Kickstarter as Well As GiveSendGo Bend The Knee...

At one point, GiveSendGo was the Go-To for those seeking freedom. They helped the Trucker Convoy when people began to send money through them, rather than GoFundMe or other similar services when those services shut them out.

Just today, I posted an article detailing how

Jon Del Arroz Comics

, award-winning comic book author, was banned from Kickstarter after submitting his Sci-Fi space marine title to tie in to the Ayla Rin Universe called The Emerald Array. The explanation? The vague “you violated community guidelines” rule. I offer some speculation and safe bets with decent odds in that article but only today did I find out that GiveSendGo shut down a campaign that we were going to use to raise funds to purchase land and get a physical location set up.

The reason? It had upset some in the community.

To those people, and we’re not sure who they are but this needs to be a hard truth spoken, it’s not about you. It’s not for you. It’s not something that you’ll ever have to worry about. It doesn’t belong to you.

What amazes me is that, here in the U.S., under our First Amendment, it is clear and I’ll share the verbiage here…

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The First Amendment is often associated with freedom of speech, however, it also covers peaceable assembly, petition to the government for a redress of grievances, establishment of religion and free exercise thereof which is where our primary focus would be for the context of this article.

Personally, I am not concerned with the feelings of someone upset by those of us at The Grove of Odin wanting to establish our church, hof, temple, whatever. To me, they are petty, tin-pot, armchair tyrants who think their fear is all that rates. In my singular opinion, these are people that are spineless to the point where they have to cut off an entire avenue for others to want a sort of homeland where they can physically gather, hold ceremony and, live a sustainable, self-sufficient life and even be buried there on sacred ground.

I have no respect for people who would do that.

If someone hopped on GiveSendGo to establish a Jedi Temple, to me, not my thing. I don’t take Star Wars that seriously but why deny someone else that?

This is where I truly want to land with this article. I became an ordained minister in September of last year and got my doctorate in Divinity soon after that. The reason? I was going to become a nightmare for my employer at the time. If anyone needed a religious exemption for another one of these arbitrary medical intervention mandates, I would stand in their way. I’ll do the same with my current employer as well. I’d do it for yours.

Keep in mind, even if the verbiage is solid and the reasoning sound, finding out it comes from some rando out there somewhere would give them reason to toss it out and deny it. Listen, don’t put it past your employer to do so. That being said, someone with an ordination under their belt holds a lot more weight. Being that I’ve only been a minister for just over a year now probably wouldn’t give me much more weight but more so than without it. Likewise, being part of an actual, legally-recognized and established church gives something like that even more weight.

Let’s also talk about some of the other things that would be available to Grove members and, it’s no different than a church of any other denomination. There would be wedding services, religious services, fellowship, funeral services, so on and so forth.

But the Grove represents more than just run-of-the-mill church services you’d expect. Similar to the Amish, it would be a community of people that would be able to use the land to stage Emergency Services like those desperately needed in North Carolina and Tennessee after Hurricane Helene, possibly even a place where a few families could retreat to and stay while things get sorted out back home, a potential bug-out location, if you will.

Food could be grown on the land, perhaps even cattle raised.

Living life as our ancestors did on some level is the end goal here. We can kick back and pontificate and muse about how our ancestors lived but the fact remains, we’re not getting any younger and we’re not currently setting the example for others.

Having that land would allow us to do that. It wouldn’t be easy. In fact, it might even be harder than it sounds, however, taking that from others is why I say I have no respect for those who did this. Being considerate in the matter only happens when we’re also considered. If that can’t be the case then consideration is off the table.

If someone is hurt or offended by me calling them a coward or cowards for doing such a thing, I don’t care. I can’t bring myself to give a single care in the world about their feelings in the matter. It was never about you or your feeling. I don’t care what your Sunday School teacher might have told you about us. Hanging around us would clearly show that you’ve been lied to and you bought it, hook, line, sucker.

Now here’s the most upsetting news I’m going to deliver. We’re not asking for your permission, consent or approval. It already astonishes me that we have to go through mountains of red tape (which

J. Ash Odinsson

has scaled for us) in order to exercise a basic, human right (I’m a free citizen of the U.S. and I’ve got all my permits to prove it) but make no mistake, The Grove of Odin as a physical piece of land with all that I have mentioned can and will happen and it will happen by rote, by choice, through fear, respect and all of the above, one way or the other. This isn’t a negotiation. This isn’t prognostication. It’s a foregone conclusion.

We at The Grove of Odin understand that there are people that do not like the religion we practice and that’s fine but we ask, politely, only once, keep it your problem, otherwise, we do have ways of compounding your problem if it is going to continue to become our problem.

GiveSendGo, siding with the spineless and cowardly as you have, we have lost a great deal of respect for you. You are no longer reliable as a sort of paragon of freedom that you once purported to be. You’re a private business that can do whatever you want, certainly. I, however, am well within my rights to say that you’re no better than those y to whom you’ve bent the knee and I hope that it feels good for now because it won’t later. We will still absolutely secure funding.

Dear Readers, if you have ideas on how we can procure the funds to purchase the land and then build upon it, we’d love to hear from you. There’s no accepting defeat here. It’s just going to happen. It might get delayed here and there, deferred but it will not be stopped. Our goals are written down and ready to execute. We need to eliminate one barrier of entry, that’s it. Just one for now whether we have to climb over it, walk around it or straight up blow it to hell and gone, it’s going to happen. Best to let it happen and decide to live your own lives if it’s not your thing.

Understand, that, when it comes to basic human rights, those who would deny them to anyone, especially a group of people, have never been, are not now and will never have my respect. Worse still, they put themselves into the direct line of fire each and every time they engage in their armchair despotic dipshittery.

We at The Grove of Odin value freedom above nearly all else. Liberty is humankind’s natural state and when you force someone into a situation, a structure that is unnatural to them, they will begin to do unnatural things. This is why we’re so bent on achieving that dream.

We’re insistent on that freedom. Nothing less will do.