Clay Martin is a former Green Beret who has, in his own words ‘killed other humans in a significant quantity, and basically led a life of violence few other humans can fathom’. In 2022, he tried psilocybin, turned into a werewolf, and started a Norse-pagan psilocybin church for veterans called the Path of the Barbarian Spirit. It aims to heal trauma, but also to awaken rage against the globalist elite. In the month when Rolling Stone published a fairly bland feature on psychedelic churches, it’s worth noticing quite how weird some of these churches are.
Inside the ‘Murder Machine’
Clay was born in 1980 in a poor part of the Texas panhandle, and grew up in a trailer with a father who was ‘a little bit of a psychopath’. In a 2025 podcast, Clay remembers being attacked by his father when he was in a psychotic rage, and fearing for his life. The incident still chokes him up. He was forced by his parents to join the Jehovah’s Witnesses for a few years, which put him off Christianity for life. He decided he needed to learn how to fight and be the scariest, baddest guy around, to protect himself from his father. He thinks a lot of soldiers, and a lot of Special Forces, come from violent childhoods:
It’s either you’re going to be a criminal, or you’re going to be an incredible MMA fighter, or you’re going to be some kind of Johnny Commando.
When he was 18, he joined the US Marines, and life got a lot better. The military was a much safer environment than home, it was a reliable structure, a community, and an outlet for his love of violence and tough-guy stuff. He discovered he was ‘extraordinarily good at violence’. He was posted in Panama for a while, and then deployed to Iraq when the Global War on Terror (GWOT) began. His first Iraq deployment was a disappointment - his unit was not involved in enough fighting. So he resigned from the Marines, joined the Army, and was recruited by the Green Berets.
He was an assaulter and sniper with the Commander’s In-extremis Force (CIF), a counter-terrorism Special Forces unit which ‘could arguably be described as the most vicious murderous bastards on the planet’, in his words. CIF were deployed to Baghdad in 2007 alongside the ICTF (Iraqi Counterterrorist Force), and were hitting 3 to 4 targets a night, seven days a week. Martin estimates the CIF suffered a one-third casualty rate over this period, with many of his comrades injured two or three times over a single deployment.
Around 2008–2009, he was involved in a bar brawl in the US in which people got hospitalized. His security clearance was suspended and he was assigned to teach recruits at Fort Bragg. He applied to be redeployed in Iraq or Afghanistan but wasn’t, and he retired from the military in 2013.
At that point, he fell apart:
I can see with retrospect being in the army and being commando fucking Johnny is the only glue that had kept all of my fucking terrible childhood in one piece. So now I am fucking absolutely losing my shit - it was like hitting puberty again, you know, emotions and fucking shit that you can’t fucking handle…l’d just do crazy fucking shit because I wanted to die but not enough to off myself - but I’ll fucking drink a fifth of Jack Daniels and go drive a goddamn car around the mountains as fast as I can.
Clay was not drawn to conventional talk therapy and was wary of anti-depressants: ’SSRIs turned my father from an angry unhappy person to a fucking raving ass lunatic. So, because of that, I would have never touched anti-depressants, not on your life.’
His first marriage collapsed and he ran out of money.
Prepping for civil war
Then things started to turn around. A health condition meant he was forced to give up drinking. He met another girl, got married and moved with her and her two daughters to Idaho. He became a Private Civilian Tactical Instructor, teaching fire-arms and survival techniques to crypto-bros. He also became a journalist reviewing guns for Guns America Digest. He decided he would try his hand at writing non-fiction and fiction. He read Stephen King’s On Writing, and wrote his first novel, Last Son of the War God, self-publishing it on Amazon in 2019. It reveals a taste for violent paganism, judging by the blurb on Amazon:
Mike Bryant has come to the wilderness to die. Tired of the trappings of modern life, his will to live has run out. But when he crosses paths with a group of warriors who challenge him, he suddenly finds purpose. Mike is no ordinary man. Frozen and given up for dead, an inner core of rage ignites a fury few have seen and lived. Deep in the White Cloud Mountains, a demon is awakening. The Last Son of the War God was forged in the storm of blood and fire. And now he’s angry. The War God has chosen his champion, one of his favorite sons. And by the time the dust settles, one thing will be clear. If you choose the War God as your deity, you had better have what it takes to measure up. Consequences are eternal.
While continuing to write fiction, Martin wrote a series of online articles on urban survival tactics and community defense that broke out far beyond the traditional gun community. Recognizing the massive demand for practical, non-academic survival advice, he compiled his military experience into his non-fiction guides, Concrete Jungle and Prairie Fire. Self-published in 2020 during the pandemic and civil unrest, these books became major hits—selling tens of thousands of copies, and garnering over 1000 positive reviews each on Amazon. The books offer more than practical survival and combat advice. They paint a picture of a coming civil war between Red and Blue states.
Blue Team has positioned itself remarkably well over the last seventy years. They have completed the long march through our institutions. They control the media, tech giants, popular culture and a significant portion of the Deep State, including entire Departments.
Clay, in these books, taps into a deep anxiety among some Americans about the globalist elite forcing wokeness, LGBTQ and trans rights and immigration onto Red states. Like former Navy Seal Shawn Ryan, Martin suggests that this leftist worldview is not just something he disagrees with - it’s demonic.
They do want you broke, dead, your kids raped and brainwashed and they think it’s funny. The tranny story-book hour of recent years has convinced me that literal demons walk the Earth and it is entirely possible we are for reals ruled by a global child sacrifice pedo cult.
Faced with this existential threat, the former Green Beret tells his readers they need to prepare for civil war:
The streets are going to run red with blood one way or another and I have a vested fucking interest in making sure my team wins…the Blue team doesn’t have a fucking chance if they turn this into a shooting match.
He dedicates Prairie Fire to ‘Saint Rittenhouse, defender of the realm’, which presumably is a reference to Kyle Rittenhouse, an American teenager who shot three men during a riot in Wisconsin (he was acquitted for self-defence). But Martin insists being a lone fighter is not enough, you need to build a militia to survive the coming cataclysm.
Wrath of the Wendigo
In 2022 he published a novel called Wrath of the Wendigo. He says it was channelled from a spirit. It imagines the US in the near-future, when there is a civil war between a collection of red states called ‘Cascadia’, and the tyrannical woke-globalist blue states that now make up the United States of America. General Eric Hansen from Cascadia infiltrates the White House, is arrested and interviewed - for the rest of the book, General Hansen explains the history, vision and strategy of the Cascadian insurrection.
General Hansen says violent insurrection became necessary because the globalist elite stole the election in 2020 and used tyrannical power to force their agenda onto red states
It was a many-fold process. The first step was to slowly break their will and identity. In Europe, this was done by importing as many North Africans and Arabs as possible. Simultaneously using the natives’ tax money to support them, and using the paid-for police forces to protect them from retribution for crimes was genius. It was not only cost effective, it served as a humiliation ritual. Many European nations even made it illegal to speak out about it. Systematic rape gangs ran rampant in the capital cities of every ‘civilized’ European nation by 2015. Fully protected by the power of the state.
The United States is portrayed as having been corrupted by woke ideology. Cascadians are very against LGBTQ and trans rights, and in the opening chapters General Hansen refers to a trans woman as ‘it’, ‘he’ and ‘a daemon’. Cascadians also resist immigration, and what they see as the forced import of third-world immigrants into rural red states. Behind all this, Cascadians see a deeper evil at work - a demon-worshipping globalist paedo cabal.
Against this demonic evil, the heroic Cascadian resistance built up through ‘wolf lodges’ of warriors - similar to the Mannerbund or secret warrior lodges that were popular in 1900s Germany. General Hansen says: ‘What was needed was a grassroots secret society that could fly under the radar until it had grown strong enough to stand.’ The wolf lodges are pagan sects, made up of acolytes, disciples and then high priests: ‘a freshly minted Acolyte was given the simple guidance the Fanatic Sons took with them from the founding: “‘ Be the reason the forest is haunted.’”
Wolf lodges are the building blocks of a new society dominated by elite male warriors. Women in Cascadia are ‘shield-maidens’. They ‘bear and raise warriors’ and don’t have the vote. ‘We believe that the feminization of the Western polity was a large part of what doomed the West’, says General Hansen. ‘While we are never going to let them run our affairs of state, we are also never going to attempt to run their houses’. Cascadia at times sounds a bit like Afghanistan under the Taliban:
We have the Krypteia, a secret body tasked with policing morality and subversion. One of its tasks is picking young girls at random and keeping an eye on them…When a woman is to be wed or reaches her coming of age, a ceremony is held in public. One of the questions she must answer is how many lovers she has had. More than five is quite scandalous…
Cascadia is a pagan-shamanic society. The founder of Cascadia took part in a Native American vision quest in which he encounters the demon Wendigo and bends him to his will as a weapon of violent retribution. The Cascadians use pagan runes and embrace a violent form of nature-worship and social Darwinism: ‘Nature is beautiful, but it is also remorseless…You might think that is savage, but it is the way of nature.’ There is no after-life, but there is a blood legacy, or ‘orlog’, that you pass on to your sons: ‘The spiritual idea of eternal life paled in comparison to what he saw as the generational struggle to continue one’s DNA.’
In the novel, Cascadia is in a long and bloody civil war with the Democrat-ruled United States. The Cascadian resistance is led by right-wing veterans of the Global War on Terror:
this wasn’t some hairbrained scheme by hillbillies with dynamite in their overalls. It was a calculated plan executed by seasoned professionals, veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Law and order break down, the wolf packs rise up, and the Cascadians manage to fight off the better-equipped United States with the help of Russia and the FSB. They wage guerrilla war, including targeted assassinations of globalist billionaires - Klaus Schwab is taken out by a sniper, Balmer (Steve?) is crucified on his front-lawn, an ex vice-president (Mike Pence?) is killed by a swarm of drones, the entire Sun Valley gathering of billionaires is incinerated by white phosphorus, and 300 Somali immigrants are blown up on a bridge. When Cascadian forces are bombed by US Airforce pilots, Cascadian troops infiltrate a school where the pilots’ children are educated and murder every one. Anything goes in war, is the message.
Finally, at the climax of the novel, General Hansen is brought in front of the Satanic pedo globalist cabal, led by ‘Karl Rothschild’ and ‘Schumer’ (Chuck Schumer, possibly, the most-senior Jewish politician in the US government) . They try to perform strange magic on him to control him, but he takes them out with an ebola bio-bomb. As he dies, the hero is taken up to Valhalla by a valkyrie.
So that’s Wrath of Wendigo, which has 725 positive reviews on Amazon.
After that, Clay Martin tried psilocybin, turned into a werewolf, and established his psychedelic church for veterans, the Path of the Barbarian Spirit.