prepper survivalist
619 dunno why i did not see linkages before
SEE APOC END TIMES [ALSO SECULAR VERSION]
do xians fear or anticipate end of world armageddon?
see grift eg infowars? seeds fox?
ME VS WE hyper macho, militia, hyper capitalist, RW violence
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HMMN // KNS? //ANARCHO ACAPULCO DOKU
Shortly after the November election, Zani Sunshine filmed a TikTok video for her more than 400,000 followers about “what you need to do in order to be prepared for the madness.” With her long blonde braids tumbling over a simple gray zip-front pullover, Sunshine then outlined the fundamentals of what is widely known as “prepping,” or the work of proactively preparing for disaster, whether natural or manmade.
*This story was originally reported by Jennifer Gerson of The 19th. Meet Jennifer and read more of her reporting on gender, politics and policy.
In her post-election video, the veteran off-grid prepper emphasizes the need to gather shelf-stable food, store water, have a first aid kit and a trauma kit, take firearm lessons and prepare for an emergency exit, which requires a go-bag for each family member with enough personal supplies to last them 48 to 72 hours.
As of today, the nearly 2-minute video has been viewed 1.6 million times.
“The current political climate is definitely bringing people to my account,” said Sunshine, who often appears on her social channel in colorful, comfortable clothing. “People are really scared and my predominant demographic is Black women because Black women are like, ‘OK — what can I do to prepare my family? To think ahead?’”
A Black woman who lives off the grid with her husband and youngest child surrounded by greenery and birds in rural New Mexico, Sunshine may not fit the stereotype of a survivalist or prepper. Her easy, calm demeanor exudes through her popular videos in which she makes jokes with her husband or gathers eggs from her chickens. A self-described introvert, she playfully parodies TikTok trends as she shares preparedness advice and promotes her books, which focus on risk assessment, self-sufficiency and self-reliance.
A quick search for “prepping” on social media will turn up countless accounts detailing plans like those Sunshine discusses in her post-election video. The majority of these accounts are run by White men, often with military-adjacent aesthetics: Men with sweeping beards dressed in camo model their tactical gear in their doomsday bunkers.
But there are more and more people who do not fit that mold. Beyond those first search results are a small — but growing — community made up of people who look very much like Sunshine: Black women who are gaining social media prominence by influencing on preparedness, especially for an audience of other Black women. And given the current political climate, this audience has never been bigger or more invested.
In the r/preppers community on Reddit, the conversation is largely dominated by worry over whether President Donald Trump’s tariffs — amid the chaos of international talks and court rulings — will cause shortages of everything from toilet paper and toothpaste to basic food items. On this platform, people who have never prepped before describe loading up their SUVs at Costco, trying to anticipate what they most need in imagining a world with empty shelves. But for women like Sunshine, thinking about being prepared happened long before Trump took office for a second time — even if his reelection has also meant a marked increase in interest in her content. For the Black women who have been involved in prepping since before November 5, 2024, nothing about this moment feels surprising — it’s literally what they have been preparing for.
Sunshine is from Atlanta originally, and began making moves into prepping in the lead-up to the 2016 election between now-President Trump and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Feeling “that something was going to happen in society and that we weren’t going to be prepared,” she started doing the kinds of things she now advises her followers to do — buying an extra bag of rice when they go to the grocery store, picking up an extra flat of bottled water.
Five years later when COVID-19 hit, she felt compelled to make even bigger changes. She and her husband bought a travel trailer and with their youngest son, then 8, drove from Atlanta to New Mexico — where her husband is from — and bought land where they constructed a homestead. They now have their own septic system, a large solar system, a bigger, two-bedroom, full bathroom travel trailer, an additional guest trailer for visitors and a chicken coop.
Sharon Ross is another Black woman — and seasoned survivalist — who was thinking about preparedness well before Trump took office. Online, she is known as the Afrovivalist, a persona she often deploys as part of her preparedness consulting business.
Ross said that through her work, she is hearing from a lot of people of all races, ethnicities and ages who are reaching out for preparedness information. “White people saying, ‘I didn’t know this was going to happen. I shouldn’t have voted for that president,” she said of many of these calls from those newly concerned about shortages.
For Ross, the wake-up call was Hurricane Katrina: She was living in Portland, Oregon, at the time and found herself glued to the news as the storm decimated New Orleans, and in particular the Lower Ninth Ward, a predominantly Black neighborhood. She watched as survivors — including many Black women — said they regretted not preparing and not thinking that anything was actually going to happen. She decided she needed to start preparing — stockpiling rice and beans and building up her supplies — for whatever might happen next. “It opened up my eyes to the fact that I wasn’t ready for something like that.”
Preparing for the next disaster — of any kind — feels even more imperative today, according to Ross. She remembers after the 2016 election when Trump’s “followers were so proud. You can obviously tell who was racist and who wasn’t. People started coming out of the woodwork,” she said, as she heard more and more racist slurs. It was what first inspired her to get firearms training.
And like Sunshine, the pandemic also changed everything for Ross.
As a member of the state of Oregon’s radiological emergency response team, Ross was required by her job to take the new COVID vaccine. She wasn’t comfortable doing so. “I woke up on my 57th birthday, prayed about it, and said, ‘I’m leaving my job.’” She bought land in rural Washington state and started establishing a homestead. Today, she has 66 acres of land, a chandelier hanging in one of her cabins — she has built several herself, in addition to a pantry and prep house — on her property. Her grandchildren are going to spend time on the land this summer, she said, to start to learn how to homestead themselves.
In her online life today, Sunshine sees the kind of fear she sensed during the pandemic. “With this new administration, people are even more scared and they actually ready to start getting prepared now, especially urban people, Black people, people of color — because traditionally, preppers have been White, you know, and other communities weren’t even really thinking about it. But now everything has changed and people are really, really deciding to do something about it.”
Sunshine said that on social media, she hears from a lot of people — namely Black women — who say how inspiring she is to them, women who reach out and share that because of her, they also bought land or developed a food storage system — and feel more secure and empowered for it. With her message that prepping is for everyone — that it can be accessible, doable, and not scary — she’s built a loyal and diverse audience who eagerly look to her for advice and guidance. They tell her that compared to other prepping accounts they encounter, hers helps them feel more calm and secure instead of scared.
It’s a different perspective than that of White preppers, Ross said. “We as people of color have went through the struggle, we knew, we saw it was coming, we believed every word that that person said about what he was going to do, but everybody else was too mixed up with the whole, ‘I don’t want a Black woman telling me what to do.’”
Sunshine said that since Trump’s reelection, she is encountering more racist comments on her social media channels, too. “People feel more emboldened,” she said. The kind of racism and “nasty comments” she encounters online are part of the very dynamic that she thinks is bringing even more Black women into prepping. “It’s just a different climate overall and people don’t feel safe … The unknowns have increased. The potential for everything going off the rails has increased.”
“As a Black woman, I am vulnerable,” Ross said of the climate today, especially in the predominantly all White rural community in which she lives. “If this continues, I feel like we're going to be hunted in the future — you know, back to slavery days.”
It’s part of why Sunshine said she wants more Black women to be knowledgeable about prepping — and realize it is for them, the same as she wants it to be for everyone, too.
“It provides a level of security. It decreases stress when you’re worried about everything that’s going on in the world, when you know that if everything were to go crazy outside your doors, that you can hunker down in your home for an extended period of time and have everything that you need,” Sunshine said. “So it’s not about being scared. There’s this hashtag I use for my business #preparednotscared — it’s all about decreasing the fear.”
NOW READ:Trump just got a wake up call as he tries to escalate his war on defiance
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an DN 5 25
An alliance between the far right and Silicon Valley oligarchs has given rise to a form of “end times fascism,” says journalist Naomi Klein, who details in a recent essay co-authored with Astra Taylor how many wealthy elites are preparing for the end of the world even as they contribute to growing inequality, political instability and the climate crisis. Klein says that while billionaires dream of escaping to bunkered enclaves or even to space, President Donald Trump and other right-wing leaders are turning their countries into militarized fortress states to keep out immigrants from abroad and ramp up authoritarian control domestically.
“There’s always an apocalyptic quality to fascism, but fascism of the 1930s and ’40s had a horizon” for a utopian future, says Klein. Today, by contrast, “we’re up against people who are actively betting against the future — not just actively betting against it, but fueling the fires that are burning this world.”
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
We spend the rest of the hour with award-winning journalist and author Naomi Klein. She has a major new piece out, co-authored with Astra Taylor, for The Guardian newspaper. It’s headlined “The rise of end times fascism.” It looks at the apocalyptic fervor of the far right.
In it, they write, quote, “[T]he most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frenetically accelerating. That is not so far away from the more mass-market vision of fortressed nations that has gripped the [hard] right globally, from Italy to Israel, Australia to the United States: in a time of ceaseless peril, openly supremacist movements in these countries are positioning their relatively wealthy states as armed bunkers,” Naomi Klein writes.
She is also professor of climate justice at the University of British Columbia, founding co-director of the UBC Centre for Climate Justice. Her latest book, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World.
Naomi, welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us. If you can start off by talking about your piece and what exactly you mean by talking about the end times, fascism?
NAOMI KLEIN: Well, it’s very good to be with you, Amy.
This isn’t the most cheerful piece I’ve ever written, with Astra Taylor, a very close collaborator, founder of the Debt Collective. And we were trying to kind of map what is similar and what is different about the type of far-right politics that we’re seeing today. And I should say, the piece is not only grim. It also looks at what this can mean for a response to this particular form of fascism, because we can’t fight it if we don’t understand it. So, I think a lot of very good scholarship attempting to understand authoritarianism today, whether it’s Trump or figures like Duterte or Modi, have looked at similarities between these far-right figures and, say, Mussolini or Hitler, and have taken a kind of a checklist approach of looking at what is similar to the past, right? And I think there’s a lot of value in that. But the risk of it is that it doesn’t look at what is new and what is particular to our time.
Fascism always is an attempt by the right to resolve a crisis of its own era. Right? So, in the 1930s, they were attempting to resolve, you know, in Germany, the humiliations of the First World War, the impacts of the Great Depression, and to propose a unity in the face of that for the in-group. But our moment is different, and one of the things that makes it different — I mean, if you think about fascism in the 1930s, this is before the atomic bomb. It’s before they understood climate change. And we are in a moment where our elites, whether they admit it or not, do understand that our economic model — and I’ve written books about this and talked about it with you in the past — is at war with life on Earth, right? And they are barreling down this road of more and more extraction of fossil fuels, of all kinds of — you know, basically, anything they can extract from this Earth and turn into energy and money, particularly now with AI, which is a energy and resource hog — water, LNG, critical minerals, all of it.}:
So, we’re trying to understand how this is informing the kind of fascism that we’re seeing, and also we’re trying to understand what unites this kind of strange Frankenstein coalition that Trump represents, where he’s bringing together these — you know, the richest people in the world who have ever existed with many working-class people, so what binds the vision, right?
:{:{And what we cope with in this piece, or what we propose in this piece, is that they all have given up on this world. Like, they all have bought into a kind of apocalyptic fever — right? — whether it’s Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and their investments in outer space and sort of writing off this planet, whether AI, which is willing to sacrifice this animate world in order to build an artificial world, or whether it’s the more populist MAGA vision of the fortress nation-state — right? — which is thinking, “OK, we know more and more people are going to be coming. }:
We know that disaster is on the horizon.” I’ve listened to a lot of Steve Bannon for — you know, when I was writing Doppelganger, and it’s all very survivalist, right? You know, all of the commercials, pretty much, are selling, you know, gold, because the economy is going to collapse, you know, ready-to-eat meals for 90 days, because you never know what’s going to happen. So, it sees the nation and the in-group as being inside the bunker, and then it’s exiling the out-group to all of these lawless territories that you’ve been covering on the show. So, it’s not the same vision, but what it shares is this apocalyptic fever.}:
And then, of course, all of it is following a similar structure, like narrative structure, to the biblical Rapture. And, of course, you have people who believe in that within the Trump coalition, who are, you know, Christian Zionists, like Mike Huckabee and Pete Hegseth, who believe that the actual end times is coming, and they think it’s all going to go down in Israel. And all of the horror that you report on so well and so committedly on the show, these are all good signs if you believe in the Rapture, right? Because it means that the end is coming, and the faithful are going to be lifted up to a golden city in the sky. So, you know, what we’re looking at is like the religious version of that story, the the fundamentalist religious version of that story, where you literally believe you’re going to be saved and taken up to heaven, but also the secular vision, where your wealth protects you, or your citizenship protects you, and you get your own version of that golden, bunkered city.
:{:{AMY GOODMAN: You mentioned Gaza, and you just came from the Jewish Voice for Peace conference in Baltimore, where several thousand people gathered from around the country. Our latest headline, the Israeli military calling up tens of thousands of reservists as Israel’s security cabinet unanimously approved plans this weekend to expand its assault on Gaza, where Israel has already killed over 52,000 Palestinians — and that’s by far an undercount — in the last 18, 19 months. Israel has killed more than 2,400 Palestinians just since it shattered the ceasefire in March. This comes as Israel’s devastating blockade in food aid has entered its third month. Palestinian health officials say 57 Palestinians have already starved to death.}:
According to UNICEF, more than 9,000 children have been admitted for treatment for acute malnutrition so far this year. And aid groups, like Norwegian Refugee Council, blasting a new Israeli proposal to take control in distribution and put U.S. security contractors in charge. If you can talk, as you so often do, about what’s happening in Gaza and the West Bank and what the centrality of Israel in President Trump and the current U.S. government — although it was also the past, President Biden’s worldview and approach to foreign policy?}:
NAOMI KLEIN: So, I don’t think there is a single answer to understanding what the driving forces are. And this is what we’re trying to get at, is that there’s a kind of an overlap of these different apocalyptic worldviews. Some of them are religious, and some of them are secular, right? So, I think that people who subscribe to this, like, literalist version of the Rapture believe that all of this is good news, in the sense that, according to the story that they believe in, that the Israelites have to return to Greater Israel. Those are the preconditions for the return of the Messiah. They have to rebuild the Third Temple. So you have this convergence of interests between the religious extremists and the Netanyahu government, who are absolutely committed to rebuilding the Third Temple. They really want to do it. They want to destroy Al-Aqsa. This is why so much attention is focused on it.
But then, you know, does Trump believe that? I don’t think Trump believes that. I mean, what he views for Gaza is he sees resources. He sees money. He sees a private, you know, resort.
AMY GOODMAN: Resort.
NAOMI KLEIN: Exactly. But this is something I’ve been saying from the beginning. I think the interests have been fairly consistent in terms of what the end goal is, which is a depopulation of Gaza, pushing Palestinians out, whether through death or whether through forced exile, whether through ethnic cleansing. And under the Biden administration, there was a denial that that was what was going on. And under the Trump administration, it’s all out in the open. So, you know, this is what is going on.
Now, what the reason for that is, I think, differs. But this is what — part of what we’re getting at in the piece, Astra and I, is that there is a confluence of interests in terms of what Israel represents. Some of the supporters of the Trump administration in the tech industry are talking about wanting freedom cities, for instance, these privatized, corporate cities. And they talk about this as tech Zionism. They have a lot of admiration for the idea that Israel was created, they say, you know, from a book, Theodor Herzl’s books. And they said, “Well, why can’t we start our own country, our own private countries? Why do we have to — you know, why do we have to abide by the rules of the nation-state?”
So, I think part of the support for Israel isn’t just our classic understandings either of Jewish Zionism or Christian Zionism, although that’s absolutely going on. It’s also this idea of a very technologically advanced startup country, right? Israel has marketed itself that way. And a lot of these tech companies want to do that in San Francisco. They want to push everybody out who doesn’t agree with them, who’s poor, who have more needs, and create their kind of corporate, privatized utopia. So, you know, I’m not saying this is a coherent agenda. I’m saying that there’s a lot of overlapping stories that follow a similar structure and share similar goals, if that makes sense.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, yes, I mean, the overall issue, obviously, is hard to make sense of.
NAOMI KLEIN: Mm-hmm, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: And most Trump’s supporters are neither wealthy nor are they Christian Zionists. So, why are they backing this whole approach?
NAOMI KLEIN: Well, it’s not clear the extent to which they actively back it, but I think that they see a kinship in the ethnostate — right? — because a lot of Trump supporters are becoming increasingly Christian nationalist about the United States. And this has been carefully fostered by figures like Steve Bannon. And so, when they look at Israel, they see a country that is openly an ethnostate that is fortressing itself in a sea of its enemies, you know, and they want to do something similar. And they’re sharing technologies. They’re sharing, you know, legal precedents, tools. So, there’s a — you know, there’s a kinship. And, you know, we’re seeing this now with India with its attacks on Kashmir, following us, you know, using similar techniques that, you know, Israel has used in Gaza. So, there is a kind of a solidarity of the ethnostates. And they are sharing — you know, they’re even trading trinkets of golden pagers and swapping chainsaws. You know, this is something that we — I think, you know, when you’re inside the crucible of it here in the United States under Trump, it’s hard to see the extent to which this is an international project on the right, and they are influencing one another.
AMY GOODMAN: And what does unite them, you know, this whole fortress mentality, is this hatred of immigrants. You have —
NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: — President Trump just saying he doesn’t even know — he’s not a lawyer, so he doesn’t know if he has to uphold the Constitution, he said.
NAOMI KLEIN: Right. I mean, this is what I’m trying to get at about the awareness that we are in an age of consequences, that when you don’t act in the face of the climate crisis for decades, when scientists have been warning you, that more and more of the world becomes uninhabitable, and, lo and behold, people move to try to find safety in the face of wars, in the face of economic deprivation and in the face of ecological disasters.
And so, that fortressing of the nation-state — and this is what I think, you know, Israel’s come to represent, just as a very small nation that is extremely fortressed — right? — whether it’s with the high-tech walls, the Iron Dome. Trump says now, “I want not an Iron Dome, but a golden dome.” Right? That —
AMY GOODMAN: Here.
NAOMI KLEIN: Here. That all of this is, whether it’s stated explicitly or not —
AMY GOODMAN: And a military parade that’ll cost tens of millions —
NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: — of dollars, even as he slices and dices the government, on his birthday, in June.
NAOMI KLEIN: Right. So the pattern is protecting the in-group and exiling and cleansing the out-groups. Right? And so, that, I think, is — you know, if there is support among the MAGA base for Israel, it’s less out of a love for Israel than more out of an identification, like they are doing what we want to do here.
AMY GOODMAN: You write many things in your piece, and I just want to go to one of them. You say — in talking about Musk’s apocalyptic vision, you talk about, and also detailing the end times fascism, this whole issue of the rise of the city state, the corporate city state. I think this is a new concept for many. They’re not going to know what you’re talking about.
NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: In southern Texas, Starbase, just this group of people, who are mainly workers at SpaceX, have just voted to make a city right there?
NAOMI KLEIN: Mm-hmm, yeah. And we’ve had sort of — I mean, the idea of a company town is not entirely new, right? And Disney had Celebration, Florida, and there are lineages to this, right? Colonial lineages to this. You know, I live in Canada, which started as the Hudson’s Bay Company, right? So it was a company before it was a country. So there is some precedent for this.
But I think what this is — I’ve been following this out of the corner of my eye, Amy, because this is where libertarians have been going for a while. There was an — Peter Thiel has been obsessed with this idea. It’s increasingly being called exit, so exiting the nation and just starting your own country, where you can set your own tax level, you can make your own regulations.
AMY GOODMAN: Or not.
NAOMI KLEIN: Or not. And countries — and these little corporate countries will compete with one another to try to attract capital, right? So, in a way, it’s an extension of the free trade zone — right? — where this is, in a way, like a denationalized country within a country. But Trump started to float this in 2023, the idea that he would create 10 freedom cities, on the campaign trail. I don’t think his base much knew what he was talking about. But now you have all these lobbyists who fully intend to take him up on it. And we’re starting to see the beginning of this with this SpaceX city.
AMY GOODMAN: So, you also write about El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, the notorious prison, CECOT, where so many hundreds of people have been sent from the United States, and at the same time, in the last 24 hours, President Trump saying he wants to reopen the notorious Alcatraz —
NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: — an island in San Francisco. If you can talk about the prison as a model for what Trump wants to put forward, and particularly in relation, as we see motivating so much, to immigrants?
NAOMI KLEIN: Well, this is an incredibly bleak vision. So, repression is always a huge part of any kind of fascist project, right? You need to contain the out-group. You need to disappear the out-group. So this part of it is not new. But I think what is so worrying to me is that Trump was elected promising all kinds of things to his base, right? He promised to eliminate inflation. He promised to bring these great jobs home. He’s not delivering on any of that. So the sadistic part of his project is really all he has to offer, right?
I think one of the most chilling things I’ve ever seen in the United States was Trump sharing that video at his hundred-day rally of just pure sadism, of just looking at prisoners, as entertainment, being shaved, being shackled, being paraded. And he’s not delivering on the price of eggs. And he’s not delivering on the jobs, by the way, because he’s throwing all in— he’s going all in on AI. So the jobs that are coming back seem to be mainly for robots. It’s not actually for his base. And so, this scales up the need for the sadism and these spectacles, right? And I think that that’s what something like Alcatraz represents. He’s a TV producer, first and foremost, right? He’s producing spectacles. And the less he has to offer economically, tangibly, materially, the more he leans on the sadism.
AMY GOODMAN: You write, “The governing ideology of the far right … has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism. … Our task is to build a movement strong enough to stop them.” What would that movement look like, or what do you see is being formed right now?
NAOMI KLEIN: You know, what we’re doing in this piece by laying out the bleakness of the vision — and when I say “bleakness,” you know, I think it’s beyond something we’ve seen before, because there’s always an apocalyptic quality to fascism, but fascism of the 1930s and '40s had a horizon. Like, after the apocalypse, people were being promised a future, a pastoral, peaceful little piece of land where they could live out their lives, you know? Even though Trump talks about a golden age, there really isn't a future that the base believes in, you know? And this is what I’ve learned by consuming far too much MAGA media, Amy. They envision a future of endless war, right? And this is why they’re bunkering down. This is why they’re buying ready-to-eat meals to last. This is why they’re buying gold and crypto. They think the whole thing is going down. So —
AMY GOODMAN: And why Elon Musk is trying to have so many children, at least 14 at this point. But he’s actually explicitly texted it, saying, “We’ve got to do this much faster,” as he proposed to one of the women he has children with, saying, “We’ve got to start using surrogates.”
NAOMI KLEIN: So, they don’t believe in the future, is the bottom line. And that is — you know, I think I’ve been in a lot of progressive spaces in recent months where we’ve talked about building these very broad coalitions, including with people who we don’t entirely disagree with. I’ve never encountered a potential coalition more broad than the idea of: How about if we believe in this world? How about if we believe in the future? Because we’re up against people who are actively betting against the future, right? Not just actively betting against it —
AMY GOODMAN: Twenty seconds.
NAOMI KLEIN: — but fueling the fires that are burning this world, actively fueling it. So, I think that if we have the courage, really, to look at the bleakness of what they believe in, which is an apocalyptic future, then we have our work cut out for us of being the people who actually believe in this realm, in this world, in the beauty of creation and of each other.
AMY GOODMAN: Naomi Klein, I want to thank you for being with us, award-winning journalist, author, columnist. We’ll link to your piece with Astra Taylor, “The rise of end times fascism.” I’m Amy Goodman. This is Democracy Now!
NOW READ:Trump’s clown car cabinet is driving off a cliff
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The Oath Keepers were among the far-fight groups involved in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol Building. And on May 25, 2023, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that two prominent figures in the militia group — founder Elmer Stewart Rhodes III and Kelly Meggs — had been sentenced to federal prison on seditious conspiracy charges.
But the Oath Keepers remain active in 2024. During an early November interview with Wired, Oath Keepers ally Jim Arroyo described preparations for a possible civil war.
Arroyo told Wired, "The election can certainly trigger a civil war, no different than it happened in any number of countries around the world. I'm training people to survive a civil war, to get out of the way, to stay home, stay off the grid, have enough supplies."
READ MORE:[Inside a Georgia election official’s months-long push to make it easier to challenge the 2024 results
Jim Arroyo and his wife Janet Arroyo operate the Yavapai County Preparedness Team, an Oath Keepers spinoff in Arizona. And both of them, according to Wired reporters David Gilbert and Tess Owen, believe that Democrats are planning to steal the 2024 election from GOP nominee Donald Trump.
Jim Arroyo told Wired, "They want to take him out so that he can't get back in the White House."
During the interview, Jim Arroyo claimed that the left is uniquely violent in the United States — and the Wired reporters noted the violence of January 6, 2021. But Jim Arroyo believes the debunked conspiracy theory that the January 6 rioters were undercover leftists.
Jim Arroyo told Wired, "The main concern right now is the potential of civil unrest because of the election. Whoever wins, one side's going to be pissed off, and the other side, the radical-left side, is going to be more pissed, and they're more known for burning cities to the ground when they don't get their way."
READ MORE:['Trump is toast': Why Michael Moore is 'confident' Harris will win
*Read Wired's full interview with Jim Arroyo at this link (subscription required).
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no lnx vix mma
Viral right-wing homesteading influencers are demonizing migrants and pushing nativist conspiracy theories
Homesteading content and groups are popping up across right-wing social media platforms
WRITTEN BY JUSTIN HOROWITZ
PUBLISHED 03/13/24
Several viral right-wing homesteading and farming influencers are pushing anti-immigrant conspiracy theories and demonizing migrants to their hundreds of thousands of followers across social media.
These conspiracy theories come as the broader right-wing media are increasingly attacking migrants, whipping up hysteria over a flimsy “migrant crime” narrative, and Republican lawmakers are advocating for laws that make it easier for Americans to kill undocumented people.
The homesteader lifestyle, which these influencers proudly promote and base their content on, is not exclusively a right-wing phenomenon. “Crunchy” culture, which is the foundation of the homesteading movement, is deeply rooted in anti-government sentiment and “anti-modernism,” which strives for independence from the mainstream. The movement broadly disavows cultural relevance and focuses on life and survival without government interference, often choosing to settle in rural areas with plenty of room to grow food, graze animals, and raise children.
Subscribers to this movement promote self-sufficiency, and some advocate for traditional gender norms as well, aligning themselves with the adjacent “tradwife” sect that has been gaining popularity within right-wing circles for romanticizing antifeminism.
A faction of these influencers also produce content around doomsday preparation and the supposed upcoming collapse of society, which often leans into deep conspiratorial thinking.
Homesteading culture is not new within the greater right-wing ecosystem. In fact, as author Kathleen Belew explains, radical right-wing groups like the Ku Klux Klan have used back-to-basics living and “opportunistic social movements” to recruit new devotees in the past.
As homesteading becomes a viral phenomenon, influencers have learned to make and promote their content across social media platforms, including YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. Several homestead influencers have hundreds of thousands of followers and subscribers across social media.
Right-wing video platform Rumble — a cesspool of white nationalist propaganda and antisemitism — even has a “homesteading” category landing page that is bustling with content.
There are many popular homesteading groups on Gab, an alternative social media platform and safe haven for extremists. The movement has also been discussed on platforms like 4chan, which is a favorite among mass shooters, and other right-wing social media platforms like Gettr and Truth Social.
Examples of right-wing homesteading influencers pushing anti-immigrant conspiracy theories and attacking migrants:
The Prepared Homestead
Homesteading influencer Travis Maddox, who uploads content under the username The Prepared Homestead online, uploaded an anti-immigrant rant riddled with conspiracy theories to his YouTube channel.
During his diatribe, Maddox suggested that migrants cross the border “to destroy America,” “replace” American voters, workers, and military members, and “potentially do us harm.”
Maddox’s claims align with the white supremacist “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which asserts that migrants are coming to replace white people in America and vote for Democrats. This conspiracy theory has previously motivated mass shootings against minority communities.
VideoCitationVideo from The Prepared Homestead, uploaded to YouTube on March 4, 2024
During another rant in which Maddox is seen wearing a t-shirt representing the far-right Three Percenters militia movement, the influencer pushed a conspiracy theory that President Joe Biden and his allies are bringing migrants into America for the “purposeful destruction” of the country.
Several members of the Three Percenters were charged for their roles in the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
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CitationVideo from The Prepared Homestead, uploaded to YouTube on March 5, 2024
The Patriot Nurse
Self-sufficiency and homesteading influencer The Patriot Nurse pushed the great replacement theory in one of her videos as well.
“They are allowing people to come in here, they are subsidizing people to come in here, because effectively they want more Democrat voters,” the influencer said. “They are trying to fix demographic issues from a population standpoint.”
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Video CitationVideo from The Patriot Nurse, uploaded to YouTube on January 4, 2024
An American Homestead
Zachary Bauer, another homesteading influencer and the “lead educator” at An American Homestead, pushed a conspiracy theory about migrants in a video titled “Is Joe BIDEN Now ARMING Migrants?” on his page.
In the video, Bauer shows a clip of a woman who claims that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is giving “an exemption to illegal immigrants to be able to purchase firearms.” This is a false claim.
“This is intentional. This is meant to destroy our country,” Bauer said in response to the woman’s video, “That’s the sole purpose of this. … Is it a giant plan? Maybe.”
Video CitationVideo from An American Homestead, uploaded to YouTube on December 24, 2023
Riverside Homestead Life
Influencer Cohen Barsten of Riverside Homestead Life, who regularly shares political commentary on his YouTube channel, opened one of his videos by pushing a conspiracy theory that, in the future, Americans will be priced out of their homes and those homes given to migrants.
Video CitationVideo from Riverside Homestead Life, uploaded to YouTube on February 2, 2024
Appalachia’s Homestead with Patara
Patara Marlow, who uploads videos on YouTube under the channel name Appalachia's Homestead with Patara, suggested that migrants will bring disease into the United States.
“You were forced to, you know, take certain cocktails or you were going to lose your job. None of these people have been forced to do any of these things,” Marlow said. “I mean, let’s be honest, what Cooter Brown are they carrying?"
Marlow’s comments echo a false anti-immigrant narrative that right-wingers have used in the past to demonize migrants. Similar antisemitic conspiracy theories have been pushed about Jewish people spreading disease for centuries.
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VideoCitationVideo from Appalachia's Homestead with Patara, uploaded to YouTube on February 24, 2024
Right-wing homesteading influencers push other conspiracy theories and traditional gender norms:
Viral right-wing homesteading influencers push conspiracy theories about other topics, too.
For example, Gubba Homestead, a viral homesteading influencer, consistently shares a variety of conspiracy theories and tradwife-aligned content.
Video CitationVideo from @gubbahomestead on Instagram, uploaded on February 13, 2024
Video CitationVideo from @gubbahomestead on Instagram, uploaded on July 3, 2023
Bauer posted a video pushing a conspiracy theory about 5G cell service being “dangerous” and making people “so sick."
Video CitationVideo from An American Homestead, uploaded to YouTube on July 9, 2019
Maddox floated a conspiracy theory about transgender people and former first lady Michelle Obama.
“It’s possible that all this is happening, and maybe even this big transgender push, is so that when Michelle goes to run for president, and it becomes apparent that Michelle is a Mike, that it won’t be that big a deal,” Maddox said. “The shock would be over.”
Video CitationVideo from The Prepared Homestead, uploaded to YouTube on September 7, 2023
Popular right-wing media figures are promoting the homesteader lifestyle:
Right-wing media figures across the ecosystem are promoting the homesteader lifestyle. This includes personalities who have pushed conspiracy theories in the past.
Fox News hosts Will Cain and Pete Hegseth promoted homesteading during a Fox & Friends segment.
“Being self-sufficient is important,” Hegseth said. “My family moved out here to middle Tennessee largely because of enduring COVID, right? A lot of families did that — said, ‘I don’t want the government controlling my life.’”
Video CitationFrom the February 28, 2024, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends
Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy and Fox contributor Sean Duffy promoted homesteading on their Fox podcast, From the Kitchen Table: The Duffys. The pair hosted farmer and author Joel Salatin.
During the podcast, Salatin claimed that there is a “homestead tsunami” happening and that homesteading can fix “teenaged, adolescent problems” that he claims lead teens to become school shooters.
“Every school shooting, every one of these guys who has gone in and done a school shooting, they all felt bullied, they didn’t feel worthwhile,” Salatin said. “Self-worth comes from successfully accomplishing meaningful tasks.”
Joel Salatin claims that homesteading culture can stop teens from becoming school shooters
CitationFrom the December 6. 2023, of Fox Radio's From the Kitchen Table; The Duffys
Turning Point USA host Alex Clark promoted homesteading on her podcast The Spillover during an interview with a suburban homesteader.
“The people that know how to grow their own food and take care of themselves and garden and hunt or all those types of things, those are the people that get it,” Clark said. “Those are the people that when the ish hits the fan, we’re going to be looking to them for help.”
https://flipboard.com/article/inside-the-luxury-nuclear-bunker-protecting-the-mega-rich-from-the-apocalypse
https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/the-most-horrifying-aspects-of-capitalism-to-the-ultra-rich-the-coronavirus-pandemic-is-a-trial-run-for-apocalypse/
coronavirus pandemic is a present-day dystopia. Unfortunately, it is not the stuff of a science fiction novel set in the near future or an alternate reality. If not stopped, this pandemic threatens to become a new type of normal, one where the pain and misery are chronic, and therefore gradually seen as acceptable. The damage is ongoing, and will only get worse with time.
This pandemic has already killed more than 70,000 people in the United States. A million or more are infected. The Trump administration — in what may well be an intentional undercount — now reportedly projects that by June 1 at least 3,000 people will die of COVID-19 every day.
The economic devastation has also been significant: At least 20 percent of Americans are out of work. Trillions of dollars in wealth and income have also been destroyed. The harm caused by this catastrophe will be intergenerational in ways not yet understood or imagined.
But for some people the coronavirus pandemic is a type of utopian dream. Many right-wing Christians see the combination of the pandemic and President Trump as good things. Why? Because in their mythology these events are harbingers of the apocalyptic “end times,” a titanic battle between good and evil during which true Christians who are “saved” will be raptured away to paradise. Writing at Rolling Stone, Bob Moser describes the power of this deranged fantasy over the Trump administration:
While the media typically just uses the euphemism “Christian” to describe such beliefs, these folks are Christian nationalists, who view the second coming of Christ as an event in which America will play a leading role, thanks to its founding as a “Christian” nation and its Judeo-Christian principles. They’re also known as Rapture Christians, thanks to their conviction that before things start to get really ugly on the earth, with God-sent wars and plagues far worse than COVID-19, they’ll be wafted up to heaven en masse, to live in eternal peace, bliss, and moral superiority while everyone else — including lesser Christians — suffers years’ worth of unspeakably gruesome torments prior to the final, earth-destroying battle between Warrior Jesus and Satan at Armageddon, and the Final Judgment in which Jews and others who refuse to convert are condemned to eternal torture in hell…. Now, their pagan king is leading us through an actual Biblical-sized plague — with the guidance of End-Time Christians.
As a class, the gangster capitalist plutocrats view the coronavirus pandemic as another opportunity to make money from human misery and expand their power over America and the world.
Many neo-fascists and other members of the Global Right are “accelerationists” who want to bring about the destruction of multiracial democracy in North America and Europe so that they can rebuild Western society as a white-only or white-dominated autocracy. Nonwhite people, Jews, Muslims and other “undesirables” will be killed, enslaved or exiled through an apocalyptic “race war.”
Mark O’Connell is the author of the new book “Notes From an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back.” His essays and other writing have been featured in the New York Times Magazine and the Guardian.
In our conversation, O’Connell reflects on the strangeness of publishing a book about the end of the world just as the world is confronting the coronavirus pandemic. He explains how disasters are an opportunity for right-wing extremists, as well as plutocrats and oligarchs, to advance their antisocial agenda — and how such people plan to survive the apocalypse. O’Connell also argues that this pandemic may provide an opportunity for the best of humanity to assert itself, rather than devolving into barbarism as many doomsday preppers, survivalists, one-percenters and others have both predicted and, perhaps, hoped.
Given the coronavirus pandemic, your new book is either very well-timed or very horribly timed.
I suppose that it is both. But I can’t really decide. I was being interviewed recently and I was asked if “Notes From an Apocalypse” is prophetic. The book is actually the exact opposite. The timing is sheer coincidence. The prospect of a pandemic coinciding with the launch of my book seemed so far-fetched. Who could have predicted it? There is a great deal of dramatic irony around the timing for my book in a moment people are talking about nothing other than how apocalyptic everything feels.
Moreover, the prospect that the coronavirus pandemic could just become part of how children normally experience reality is quite sobering for me. I hope that these children, when they are adults, do not look back on this moment with the coronavirus as that singular event where everything went to hell. I hope they remember it as some type of weird, strange interlude that we all had to live through.
The apocalypse is never the end of the world. It is an idea that people reach for and use as a way to make sense of incomprehensible and challenging times. The apocalypse is a way to manage uncertainty and chaos and sudden change. Those are the times when the idea of the apocalypse rears its head, and I think this moment with the pandemic is definitely one of those moments.
In making sense of this moment, it’s very important to highlight how one person’s dystopia or apocalypse is another’s utopia and dream. Some people have been waiting for a disaster such as the coronavirus pandemic, in order to remake the world.
One of the things that has kept me going throughout this uniquely horrible experience is the idea that things are going to change in society because of this, and that those changes might be beneficial for a large number of people. The truths that are revealed by a global catastrophe cannot be easily ignored. The catastrophe shines a light on how societies are fundamentally structured. There will be those people who want to create positive change and there will be bad actors who are using the pandemic to advance a less hopeful and more negative vision of the future and society.
One of the scariest things about the coronavirus pandemic is that there are people, right now, for whom this disaster is an opportunity.
The coronavirus and its destruction strike me as a metaphor for Trumpism. You live in Britain. Is the coronavirus viewed as a metaphor for Brexit in the U.K. and Europe more broadly?
In terms of metaphor, for some time here in the United Kingdom and Europe everything seemed to present itself as a stand-in for Brexit. But I do not see the coronavirus as a metaphor for anything. Yes, there are ways in which it absolutely reveals so much about the way we live in the West and elsewhere at this moment in history. But how can the coronavirus pandemic be a metaphor for something else when it is the dominant subject of conversation — really the only thing that most people are talking about?
You are correct to say that the virus itself, in a U.S. context, is a huge society-wide problem. But the virus is not the central, fundamental core problem in your country. The problem is the radical inequalities in your society, the insane approach to health care, Trumpism and other issues which make the coronavirus’ impact much worse in your country than in most others.
In philosopher Fredric Jameson’s book “Archaeologies of the Future,” he argues that science fiction may focus on the future, but in fact all writing about the future is really an exploration of the present. How do you negotiate that tension?
In a way both of my books have been about “the future.” “To Be a Machine” is about people who are obsessed with a fantasy version of the future. “Notes From an Apocalypse” is also about some version of the future. But I am not interested in making predictions about what life will be like in the future, or thinking about various permutations of technology or politics, or how are we going to live in the year 2065 or what have you. That topic is not interesting to me.
I am interested in the present and the near past. For me the future is really a way to think through the complexities of the present. The ways that we imagine the future always have as much to do with the past as they do with anything else. The future is not a real thing. It is just an idea.
In terms of the way crises present a type of opportunity for some people, how are plutocrats and mega-rich individuals like Peter Thiel preparing for the apocalypse?
For me,Peter Thiel almost operates as a metaphor, a way for me to invest all of my anxieties and loathing about the extreme manifestations of capitalism. In that way, Peter Thiel is a kind of gift that just keeps on giving. A good portion of my first book, “To Be a Machine,” focuses on Peter Thiel’s quest for eternal life and the various companies he’s investing in as a way of accomplishing that goal.
In my new book, Thiel is a metaphor for the most horrifying aspects of capitalism, the moral void at the heart of the whole ideology and system. The way that he imagines surviving the collapse of civilization is extremely interesting insofar as it’s a way of thinking about how, in the present, with late-stage capitalism there is an increasing drift away from any kind of investment in democracy. What Thiel represents is the idea of the future as belonging to a very small number of extremely intelligent, far-sighted, radically self-interested individuals.
One of the responses to the coronavirus pandemic and economic collapse here in the United States has been the suggestion by Donald Trump and his followers that elderly and vulnerable people should be willing to die for “the economy.” It’s almost a form of human sacrifice.
Civilizations fall. And they fall quite suddenly. In fact, some of the most elaborate and sophisticated former civilizations practiced some type of human sacrifice as central to their culture. A classic example would be the Aztecs. They were convinced that human sacrifice was necessary for the continuation of their way of life. Such cultures genuinely believed that they had to kill to appease the gods and to ensure a good harvest or some other type of prosperity.
Now, it just so happens that they were wrong. Modern society has convinced its subjects that we have moved beyond such behavior. Human sacrifice seems too barbaric to us at present. But in reality, our own modern civilizations are based on human sacrifice in various forms.
The rich are building luxury bunkers to survive the “end of days” and to ensure their social and political power in the future. What does that reveal about Western society and culture?
Those bunkers are a classic, overblown, extreme metaphor for capitalism in the present, not in some imagined future. The rich are building luxury survival bunkers with private cinemas, DNA vaults, wine cellars and other lavish ways of surviving the end of the world. As the saying goes, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”
What do these luxury bunkers reveal about how the global one percent and other oligarchs imagine society? Do they simply reject the obligations and responsibilities that human beings should have to one another?Whether it is doomsday prepperswho are stockpiling guns and freeze-drying food, or billionaires buying chunks of the South Island in New Zealand, the approach is to look after yourself first and survive at the cost of other people, or survive outside of the context of other people. In all these cases it is civilization as both an idea and structure that is considered a very fragile thing. From their point of view, society is a weak construct, a very thin layer of societal norms which hangs over an abyss of chaos and violence.
The preppers, as with the very rich who are building these luxury bunkers, have a sense that people are going to quickly revert to some type of animalistic savagery once a severe enough crisis comes along. This idea animates so many of these right-wing apocalyptic thinkers. It is capitalism to the extreme. The heavily fortified, luxurious bunker is just a logical conclusion of the gated community and of capitalism itself.
But such a conclusion is also wrong. During the pandemic, from what I have been seeing, people have mostly been pulling together. Community and society are much more resilient than we have been led to believe. That is something which is not accounted for in the worldview of the apocalyptic people, the preppers and so on. For them, this is not what is supposed to happen. They believed that the pandemic was supposed to create a state of mass civil unrest.
==
https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/the-far-right-wants-to-make-its-shared-fantasy-of-violent-civil-war-a-reality/
david n kos
The Age of Conspiracy Theories in which we are now immured has produced a kind of bastard offspring: the Shared Violent Fantasy. Exhibit A is the “Boogaloo,” the far-right’s ironic name for the long-sought “second civil war” they believe is on the verge of erupting in the United States—and in which the ongoing novel-coronavirus pandemic has become a virtual petri dish for cultivating the fear of societal collapse essential to their worldview.
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Like many conspiracy theories, and all such fantasies, the “Boogaloo” has a powerful tendency to produce real-life violence from people who absorb the underlying paranoid values and believe in them fervently. A recent incident in Texas in which a self-proclaimed “Boogaloo Boi” set out to murder a police officer in order to help spark the civil war underscores the extent to which the believers are likely eventually to attempt manifesting their fantasies—which can entail violence not just against authorities, but sometimes even their unsuspecting neighbors.
Aaron Swenson is a 36-year-old Texarkana man who frequented “Boogaloo”-related Facebook pages with some frequency, sharing their frequently violent memes and indulging the usual violent rhetoric in the comments. Eventually, he reached a point where he decided to act on it.
The world of “Boogaloo” on social media—particularly on Facebook, where over 125 such pages reside—is riddled with references, both direct and obscure, to their eagerness to begin a civil war by shooting law-enforcement who attempt to enforce gun-control measures, or for that matter any other measures that attract the ire of the far right. Recently, these have come to include COVID-19 lockdown and social-distancing measures.
The universe it occupies resides in a bubble of conspiracy theories and “constitutionalist” fantasies, but with a distinctly alt-right edge. Irony abounds everywhere:adherents wearHawaiian shirts as a reference to “the boog,” or the “Big Igloo” (the “Boogaloo” flag features an igloo and a palm tree). Their memes reference “Pepe the frog,” white-nationalist OK signals, and the common shared belief that nefarious communists are plotting to confiscate their guns and enslave them in concentration camps. This fantasy is the justification for their announced intention to begin shooting their fellow citizens, especially those who work for the federal government or police.
On the night of April 11, Aaron Swenson began livestreaming from his pickup truck, telling his audience that he was out hunting a police officer—anyone would do, he wasn’t particular—to shoot and kill, all in order to start the “Boogaloo.” He told them he was seeking a lone cop to “ambush and execute.”
People began calling the Texarkana Police Department, which promptly found the page and figured out both where Swenson was located and what kind of vehicle he was driving. Upon locating him, he fled a squad of police cars at high speed, eventually grinding to a halt well after his tires were flattened by a spike strip. “He was wearing an armored plate carrier type vest when we arrested him, and officers found several loaded weapons inside his truck,” the police department’s Facebook post reported.
At his own Facebook account, Swenson liked more than a dozen pages that mention boogaloo in their names, as a report from the Tech Transparency Project (TTP) on the “Boogaloo” phenomenon described. It also noted that “some users leaving comments on the profile on the night of the attempted attack endorsed the targeting of police officers, while others suggested calling 911 in response to the live broadcast.” The two videos were active on the Facebook page at the time of the report, having amassed over 1,500 and 3,400 views, respectively; however, they have since been removed by Facebook.
Swenson has been charged with making terrorist threats against an officer, evading with a vehicle and illegal possession of a weapon.
He is not the first such “Boogaloo” enthusiast intent on making the shared fantasy into a violent reality. In January, three would-be terrorists from the neo-Nazi organization The Base were arrested by the FBI, charged with plotting to wreak havoc with their weapons at a planned anti-gun-control march in Richmond, Virginia, around which “Boogaloo” rhetoric was already rife.
A few days later, three more “Boogaloo”-loving members of The Base were arrested in Georgia for plotting to assassinate a local antifascist couple, as well as overthrow the local county government.
At the Richmond rally, the “Boogaloo” was a major theme—flags, signs, and social-media posts from the event all referenced and celebrated it—that continued even afterward during the debate in Virginia over its gun-control laws.
And just as the white-nationalist, conspiracist and “accelerationist” right has sought multiple means to exploit the novel-coronavirus pandemic, the “Boogaloo” theme has become a louder topic of discussion on far-right telegram channels. The lockdown measures instituted by governors around the nation in response to the virus have particularly provided ample evidence for the conspiracists—in their minds, at least—of their long-running contention that “globalists” are seeking ways to enslave the world.
Signs referencing the “Boogaloo” have popped up at a number of the far-right-led protests against the lockdown measures. One marcher at the “ReOpen” rally in Topeka, Kansas, on April 23 carried a large black “Big Igloo” flag.
There has also been a certain amount of somewhat predictable crossover between the “Boogaloo” element and the far-right conspiracists of the Trump-loving QAnon world, some of whom have also been acting out violently during the pandemic—notably the locomotive engineer who attempted to ram the USNS Mercy with a train engine.
According to QAnon expert Travis View, the “Boogaloo” has become the preferred fallback position for people swept up in “The Storm” theories, believing that one day soon there will be mass arrests of leading liberal and media figures for their roles in a global child-trafficking ring, and increasingly disappointed at its failure to materialize.
“If that change doesn’t come, some of the followers have made reference to what they call Plan Z,” View says. “If the whole Q operation fails, then Plan Z is sort of equivalent to what the far-right extremists call the ‘Boogaloo.’ Which is civil war, basically.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has sharpened the interest in a civil war. The TTP report found that most of the 125 Facebook groups devoted to the “boogaloo”—some 60%—were created in the very recent past (within three months), just as the states began declaring lockdowns and social-distancing measures. Perhaps more worryingly, “they have attracted tens of thousands of members in the last 30 days.”
In several private boogaloo Facebook groups that TTP was able to access, members discussed tactical strategies, combat medicine, and various types of weapons, including how to develop explosives and the merits of using flame throwers. Some members appeared to take inspiration from President Donald Trump’s recent tweets calling on people to “liberate” states where governors have imposed stay-at-home orders.
Despite these findings, TTP notes, Facebook has been slow to remove these pages. One of the most prominent—Thicc Boog Line, which specializes in selling branded “Boogaloo”-themed gear and clothing—attracts thousands of readers. It has recently been pitching messages to its readers emphasizing the opportunity to wreak “boojahideen” havoc during the time of a pandemic.
These findings resonate with a similar report issued in February by :{the :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{Network Contagion Research Institute,:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}: warning that “domestic militants” are organizing around memes to “incite violent insurrection and terror against government and law enforcement.”
The boogaloo, a joke for some, acts as aviolent meme that circulates instructions for a distributed, viral insurgency for others.The topic network for boogaloo describes a coherent, multi-component and detailed conspiracy to launch an inevitable, violent, sudden, and apocalyptic war across the homeland. The conspiracy, replete with suggestions to stockpile ammunition,may itself set the stage for massive real-world violence and sensitize enthusiasts to mobilize in mass for confrontations or charged political events.
Daniel E. Stevens, executive director of Campaign for Accountability, the umbrella organization under which TTP operates, told Christopher Mathias of HuffPost in a statement that “Facebook’s failure to stop their platform from being used as an organizing tool for extremists is completely unacceptable.”
“There is nothing subtle about how these extremist groups are using Facebook’s platform to advance their cause,” Stevens said. “Boogaloo proponents are not simply discussing ideas or political views; they are directly advocating for violent action and tactically planning how to defeat government entities.”
“Boogaloo” enthusiasts indeed have detailed plans for how to achieve their goals, both militarily and through propaganda, as the TTP report details. However, government and law enforcement are not the only targets that “Boogaloo” memes discuss. A subcurrent in a number of the violent fantasies that they express in their memes is the idea of committing home-invasion robberies targeting their relatively hapless and untrained neighbors as a means of thriving during the civil war—or a pandemic.
Another featured a photo of an angry Joaquin Phoenix in Jokerwith the script: “When you dispatch the normie with ease to raid their stash because they stocked up on TP and not ammunition”—with a subscript across the bottom reading: “You get what you fucking deserve.”One popular meme among Facebook “Boogaloo” followers was one that showed a SWAT-style armed raid team in military gear massing outside a door, with the script: “Me and my boys going for a grocery run at my asshole neighbor’s house.” Another features a grid of graphics demonstrating military hand signals during a raid, all of which are interpreted in the language of a home invasion: “Shoot that dog.” “Cover up the evidence.” “I found cocaine. It’s pretty good.” “Wrong house. Let’s boogie!”
These ideas are not particularly new among the more openly cynical participants in far-right conspiracism and survivalism. Indeed, they were openly elucidated back in 2014 by a “**Patriot” movement survivalist named Tyler Smith**,who was featured on an episode of National Geographic’s TV series Doomsday Preppersboasting about his plans to invade the homes of his neighbors—particularly those who might also be preppers, since they would make better targets.One of the more commonly shared of these memes actually makes fun of other “preppers,” particularly those who are suddenly new to the business amid the pandemic. It shows a “Virgin Prepper” who is “always scared, can’t sleep at night,” and “has no fun,” then contrasts him with an obviously fun-loving “Chad Raider” who “Takes your good shit and burns all the rest so no one else can have it,” and is seen holding up a bag marked “All Your Shit.” He’s also “not scared of death or coronavirus.”[vid]
“We’re not in it to stockpile,” he proclaimed in a segment that was used to promote the show. “We’re in it to take what you have, and there’s nothing you can do to stop us. We are your worst nightmare, and we are coming.”
He told the show’s producers that he only had a few months’ supplies for his family because he intended to aggressively assault his neighbors and steal their food and weapons caches.
“All your shiny ARs, your high-powered .308 rifles, your 50,000 rounds of ammo, are all going to be ours,” he said on the show.
Smith was arrested by the sheriff of Pierce County, Washington, where he resided at the time, shortly after his appearance on national TV, because he wielded multiple guns on camera in the segment, and he was already a felon (on a sexual-behavior-with-a-minor charge) forbidden from owning weapons. He spent a couple more years in prison for that, but was back on the streets by late 2016.
He was most recently spotted marching in Portland with Patriot Prayer—the far-right street-brawling group led by Joey Gibson of Vancouver, Washington—at one of its 2017 demonstrations. Gibson, as it happens, has been active in the anti-coronavirus-lockdown protests, traveling to Seattle and Olympia for protests.
Those protests, of course, featured plenty of “Patriots” wearing Hawaiian shirts underneath their body armor—a signal for what the “boojahideen” like to call “the Big Luau.” The chief organizer of the “Boogaloo” motif in Olympia was Matt Marshall, the leader of the III Percent of Washington, a “Patriot” militia group based in Eatonville, Washington, and a close ally of both Gibson and state Rep. Matt Shea, the far-right legislator whose plan for a post-breakdown society called for the execution of all non-believers.
These violent fantasies keep mounting in number and vehemence. The question increasingly is what spark will inspire them to attempt to make them manifest.
==
common dr 420
...There are other similarities. Since the 1970s, oil shocks (and coincident with the rise of the New Right) an abiding feature on the American scene has been thesurvivalist,hoping for the national Götterdämmerung that will vindicate his having stockpiled 10,000 rounds of ammunition and a horde of Krugerrands. This dovetails with fundamentalists’ weird enthusiasm for the prospect of world annihilation that animates belief in the Rapture, the only difference being the technique by which the elect avoid the mass slaughter.
Firearms fetishism and a fascination with violence, war, and armed insurrection are also mainstays of right-wing ideology, hardly distinguishable from Jerry Falwell Sr.’s, proclamation that God is Pro-War.And how about the Ultimate Fighting Jesus? The NRA neatly intersects with “muscular Christianity,” revealing both ideological kinship and some very embarrassing gender insecurities that frequently irrupt in misogyny and homosexual panic.
There is no longer the slightest doubt in any sane person’s mind that not only are the GOP’s fundamentalist-extremist religious allies a death cult disguised as 501(c)3 tax-exempt charitable organizations. The whole extremely well-funded edifice of “economic conservatism” is equally a death cult, worshiping Mammon so fervently that it is eager to make human sacrifice upon its altar, just like the Mayans and Carthaginians.
https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/alex-jones-infowars-attempting-profit-coronavirus-outbreak
no lnx docs
Jones’ Infowars is attempting to profit from the coronavirus outbreak
Jones: “I am very sad about this virus and very sad about the bioweapons and things that are going on, but it is an opportunity for people to take advantage of the products we have”
WRITTEN BY TIMOTHY JOHNSON
PUBLISHED 02/29/20
Alex Jones coronavirus
Far-right conspiracy theory outlet Infowars has been aggressively hawking bulk food packages at inflated prices while spreading wild conspiracy theories about the coronavirus outbreak. Since December, the price of bulk food at Infowars’ online store has more than doubled with the biggest package costing nearly $3,000.
On December 31, China announced an outbreak of COVID-19, a novel coronavirus that started in Wuhan City, with the first known case dating back to December 1. The disease has since spread beyond China and is currently present in 53 countries, including the United States, and has stricken more than 83,000 people.
Infowars is selling bulk food at recently increased prices
As the virus continues to spread, and a pandemic becomes more likely, Alex Jones is using Infowars to panic his viewers while also trying to profit from them.
Infowars operates InfowarsStore.com, which sells dietary supplements, apparel, firearm accessories, and bulk food. The page for bulk food has been using the coronavirus outbreak as a sales hook. A video ad has appeared at times on the store’s “emergency survival foods” page with the title, “EMERGENCY SURVIVAL FOODS: Coronavirus Clearance Sale.” In the video, Jones urges viewers to buy Infowars bulk food packages, claiming that other sellers are sold out, but that Infowars can ship within seven to 10 days. (When accessed on February 28, the Infowars Store now says “Shipping WILL be delayed on many orders, potentially 6-8 weeks or more in rare cases.”)
In the advertisement, Jones explicitly references coronavirus, saying, “I noticed there were reports that food prices in general were going to be going up because of the crisis in China and surrounding areas and with how deadly this coronavirus is” and claims, “This is the lowest price you’re going to find anywhere, even when it’s at its regular price.” He also suggests that buyers should act before it is too late, saying, “You can feel it in your bones, big stuff is coming down, whether it’s coronavirus or something else, now is the time to get prepared and I suggest folks get their storable food at InfowarsStore.com while you still can.”
Jones urges buyers to consider large purchases, saying, “I personally have ordered more storable food just last week because I have to be able to take care of not just myself but my neighbors, because believe me, hungry starving neighbors are not a good thing to have and so it’s simple: You better hide your food or you better have extra.” During the video, Infowars packages with prices up to $2,987.00 are shown.
Video file
CitationFrom the Infowars Store website "emergency survival foods" page
Since December, the Infowars store has more than doubled the price of its largest package, “Infowars Life Select: 1 Year.” On December 21, the package was being sold for $1443.50. The price increased to $1,594 by January 23. By January 30, the price had increased to $2,987, and the page was displaying the “EMERGENCY SURVIVAL FOODS: Coronavirus Clearance Sale” video.
Infowars broadcasts are filled with aggressive sales pitches for bulk food
Coronavirus has been a near-constant topic of discussion on Infowars' various broadcasts. According to a search of Infowars’ online streaming platform Banned.video, at least 145 videos have been posted since January 22 that reference the outbreak in their titles. Of these, 127 were published after Infowars released its “EMERGENCY SURVIVAL FOODS: Coronavirus Clearance Sale” ad for bulk food on January 27.
Sales pitches that appear in Infowars content are aggressive. They play on fears of food shortages, emphasize the need to make immediate and large orders, and fearmonger about the prospect of societal collapse and cannibalism. Among some of the on-air pitches:
On February 27, Jones posted a video with an “emergency announcement about storable foods” in which he announced shipping delays and then said “the lord works in mysterious ways” before crediting the coronavirus outbreak and subsequent bulk food sales for helping Infowars’ finances.
During a February 25 broadcast, Infowars contributor Mike Adams pitched Infowars bulk food, telling viewers to buy Infowars bulk food right now because “if the CDC is briefing the Senate right now today -- if they tell the Senate this is uncontained in America, that news could come out three hours from now and then it’s too late. You won’t be able to order anything.” As Adams made the pitch, the camera cut to stacks of Infowars bulk food products displayed in the Infowars studio.
In a February 18 video with the title “How To Prepare For A Coronavirus Lockdown In The U.S.,” Jones raised the prospect of cannibalism during a food crisis, saying that “within about 15 days, most people become cannibals” immediately before pitching Infowars bulk food, which was shown stacked in the studio.
In a February 12 video about “the natural components that can easily be used to combat viral infection,” Jones pitched Infowars bulk food, saying, “I am very sad about this virus and very sad about the bioweapons and things that are going on, but it is an opportunity for people to take advantage of the products we have.” During his pitch Jones said the Infowars warehouse is full of “safes with guns and folks trained to use them” and said, “We got food, we got guts, we got red blood, we’ll kick your ass if you attack us.” He also said: “With me, it’s religious not to screw you over.”
In an Infowars bulk food ad that appeared on a February 2 video about “possible solutions for those who seek to prepare for the coronavirus pandemic,” Jones said, “Last week there I was ordering masks and more food and then I didn’t even come on air and do it myself, because there was that feeling of like, ‘Well I’m pushing it during a crisis.’ Of course we should promote this during a crisis, it’s all more reason to get prepared and get ready.” Jones urged viewers to order food within the next four or five days to avoid price increases.
On January 29, Jones hosted Keith Bansemer, the president of My Patriot Supply, the company that provides Infowars with the bulk food that it sells under its own label. A video of the segment was published with the title “EXCLUSIVE: D.O.D. Buying Up American Food Supplies For Coronavirus Outbreak.” Bansemer claimed that the Department of Defense is repeatedly calling him trying to buy food, but that he has refused. Throughout the segment, Jones and Bansemer promoted their respective bulk food products.
Infowars is seeking to instill fear in its audience
Infowars streaming platform Banned.video has been carrying a banner advertisement for Infowars brand bulk foods.
Banned.video banner ad 2]
And the videos that are paired with this ad appear designed to maximize fear about the coronavirus outbreak. Here are some of the more sensational titles of Infowars videos related to coronavirus:
“Violent Leftists In A Coronavirus Quarantine Would Collapse Society”
“How Globalists Justify Releasing the Coronavirus Bioweapon”
“Lancet ModelPredicts Hundreds Of Millions Dead From Coronavirus Outbreak”
“Was Coronavirus Intended To Be Primer For Chinese Invasion Of America?”
“Bioweapons Expert: Coronavirus Is Super Biological Weapon Never Encountered Before”
“MSM Tries To Suppress Evidence That HIV Delivery System Is Embedded In Coronavirus”
“Countdown: Top Ten Ways Coronavirus Will Be Used to Usher In Global Government”
The conspiracy theories Infowars is pushing to sell its bulk food
Infowars has been spreading ever-evolving conspiracy theories about coronavirus, pushing other falsehoods, and making dire predictions about the outbreak. Initially, Infowars broadcasts pushed a conspiracy theory that coronavirus was designed in a lab and was accidentally released, but more recently the overarching conspiracy theory is that coronavirus is a bioweapon that was created by China and/or the “globalists” and was purposefully released in an effort to control and depopulate the planet. Here are a few of the various conspiracy theories and fearmongering:
While guest hosting the February 26 edition of The Alex Jones Show, Infowars contributor Mike Adams claimed that the Centers for Disease Control is “setting a trap for Trump” by exacerbating the spread of coronavirus in the U.S. The end of the segment was an ad for Infowars bulk food.
During the February 24 broadcast of The Alex Jones Show, a video was played which Adams claimed showed residents of Wuhan en masse screaming in terror. In fact, the residents were shouting encouragement to each other. Adams used his false account of the video to make claims about what would happen if there were coronavirus quarantines in the U.S., saying, “When you take these deranged lunatic violent leftists, who are already mentally ill … and you add a quarantine to that, what’s going to happen to their state of mental health? What are they then willing to do in terms of violence or looting or murder or killing or rape or pedophilia or all the things that they do almost on an everyday basis anyway? Add the coronavirus to that, you start looking at the downfall of society.” The segment included a coronavirus-themed pitch for Infowars bulk food.
In a video published on February 21, Infowars contributor Greg Reese claimed “experts tell us the virus was weaponized in a lab, and while nobody disputes this fact, the mainstream media hide it.” The video ended with an Infowars Store ad urging viewers to buy bulk food and other products.
In a February 20 video, Adams said, “We’re going to get into the heads of the globalists here to try to understand what they are thinking when they released this global pandemic and engineered this weapon against human beings, the Wuhan coronavirus.”
During a February 17 broadcast, Infowars host Owen Shroyerpromoted the conspiracy theory that coronavirus was designed by China as part of a U.S. invasion plot. The segment ended with a promotion for Infowars bulk food.
During the February 17 broadcast of The Alex Jones Show, Jones suggested that coronavirus was a bioweapon created by globalists so governments “can use the smokescreen of the crisis to expand their control.” The segment ended with a pitch for Infowars bulk food.
During his February 7 broadcast, Jones claimed that coronavirus is “a race-specific bioweapon” that was released by the Chinese government.
During his February 6 broadcast, Jones devoted a segment to claiming that coronavirus is a bioweapon designed by China to attack the west. The segment concluded with a coronavirus-themed ad for Infowars bulk food.
During a February 4 Infowars broadcast, Adams claimed that globalists designed coronavirus by combining HIV and SARs. Moments later, Infowars broadcast a coronavirus-themed Infowars bulk food ad.
During the February 4 edition of The Alex Jones Show, Jones suggested that maybe even President Donald Trump was involved in the creation of the coronavirus, but that “maybe it’s a complex false flag to blame America down the road.” After Jones finished his comments, a coronavirus-themed ad for Infowars bulk food was broadcast.
During a February 2 Infowars broadcast, Adams hyped a scenario in which people in Mexico become infected with coronavirus and then flee to “sanctuary cities” in the United States causing a massive outbreak. The segment ended with a coronavirus-themed ad for Infowars bulk food.
How Alex Jones is taking advantage of his audience
People are right to be concerned about coronavirus, but Jones and Infowars are attempting to profit from panic that they create. Writing in Scientific American, Zeynep Tufekci argued that the way to stop the spread of COVID-19 coronavirus is through practicing “community-wide isolation” where outbreaks are present and taking actions -- including getting a flu shot, regularly washing your hands, using alcohol-based hand sanitizer, not touching your face, and, if in a position of authority, allowing workers to work from home or make up the time later. Such steps, according to Tufekci, reduce the risk for people to get infected -- by coronavirus or other diseases like the common flu -- and will lower the burden on the healthcare system, so it can better treat vulnerable populations such as the elderly.
In her article, Tufekci criticizes tactics like the ones used by Jones, writing, “There is no shortage of snake oil sellers who hope stoking such fears will make people buy more supplies: years’ worth of ready-to-eat meals, bunker materials and a lot more stuff in various shades of camo.” Instead, Tufekci says the way to prepare for the possibility of self-isolation is to “buy two or three weeks’ worth of shelf-stable food that you would eat anyway, and be done; this could include canned food like beans and vegetables, pasta, rice, cereals or oats, oils/fats, nuts and dried fruits” and to have potable water on hand.
That won’t cost you $3,000.
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fox news alerts
early direct mail newletters scams, early 1st move on internet? --> social media good at spreading hype /disinfo b/c no filters
rational wiki
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Survivalism
Survivalism is a song by Nine Inch Nails the making of preparations for an expected long-term or complete breakdown of society or its infrastructure — also known as The End of the World as We Know It (TEOTWAWKI) or When the Shit Hits the Fan (WTSHTF).
It may involve the hoarding stockpiling of guns, food, and other supplies, the construction of fallout shelters or other shelters specific to whatever apocalypse they are expecting (there is actually one group building an ark[note 1][3]), the purchase of isolated rural property to retreat to during the crisis, keeping some sort of barter currency in expectation of the complete collapse of the value of paper money (silver and gold are common bulwarks here, because of course everybody else will be willing to trade food and ammo for shiny metal), and either learning how to survive without electricity or building "off the grid" power supplies (particularly those based around renewable energy sources that won't run out of fuel) in expectation of the world, or at least their region, being without centralized power generation for the indefinite future.
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What survivalism is, and what it is not
Thanks to disasters like Hurricane Katrina and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, there has been a sharp resurgence in reality-based emergency preparedness. General preparedness for emergencies is highly recommended by most government agencies and groups like the Red Cross, even though most people don't make these preparations as well as they should. Promoting this has been part of FEMA's official policy for a while, because after all, prepared citizens are citizens that emergency services don't have to devote as much time and resources to saving. September is National Preparedness Month. Get a kit, make a plan, be informed, get involved.[4] Keep a first aid kit in your home and in your vehicle, and learn how to perform basic first aid and CPR. Learn how to boil water and cook food without electricity, and keep some emergency lighting and cooking gear as well as at least three days' worth of water and non-perishable food for each member of your household, so that you don't get caught off-guard and forced to spend extra money eating at restaurants if the power goes out for several days (such as after a major storm) or the water main springs a leak and gets contaminated. Learn how to change a tire so that you don't have to spend extra money to have your car towed in the event of a flat — cars come with spares, jacks, and tire irons for a reason. If you live in an area vulnerable to natural disasters, know where the evacuation routes are. If you live in or regularly travel in rural areas, learn some outdoors survival skills.
To illustrate the difference between survivalism and emergency survival preparedness, here are some scenarios. In the event of being stranded, "survival" means finding enough food, shelter, and water to keep oneself alive until one is found or reaches help, and signaling with the intent of being rescued. Likewise, in the event of a natural disaster (a hurricane, tornado, flood, earthquake, etc.), "survival" means both weathering the disaster itself and having enough resources to get by when the power is out, the stores are closed, and the routes away from the disaster area are all flooded, covered in debris, or otherwise inaccessible. Either way, this implies that the rest of society's infrastructure is still alive and well, and defines survival as keeping alive so as to return to society, not abandon it.
Survivalists, on the other hand, are preparing not for a short-term disaster that will be over in a week or two at most, but for a long-term or permanent breakdown in society's infrastructure, whereas emergency preparedness necessarily implies that the emergency situation will be temporary. They see themselves surviving apart from society or what's left of it, and don't necessarily want to be rescued in the event of an emergency. Some of them even make preparations to defend their "retreat" against all threatening intruders, including FEMA, the Red Cross, the National Guard, or the local police and fire departments. Hence, survivalists are usually rugged individualists, and are largely concerned with their own survival above that of others.
Many of those involved in emergency preparedness have begun using the term "preppers" to describe themselves, possibly to distance themselves from the wild doomsday predictions and political and religiousextremism that survivalism has come to be associated with.[5] However, those same fringe types, recognizing this, have since borrowed the term "preppers" themselves in order to look more respectable, so beware.
Origins
The popular stereotype is that survivalists wear camo 24/7, live in bunkers and cabins deep in the woods and/or mountains, have stockpiles of automatic weapons and military-grade explosives, and have copies of Mein Kampf, The Turner Diaries, and the works of Matthew Bracken et al. on their bookshelves, so one might be forgiven for believing survivalism had its origins in the militia movement (or vice versa), or among disgruntled former members of the American Nazi Party. Another popular belief is it had its origins in government civil defense programs of 1950s vintage, such as the infamous Duck and Cover.
One would be wrong on both counts. It actually had much more nerdy and wonkish origins going back to the late 1960s and early 1970s. Part of it was hippies motivated by communal, environmental or "back-to-the-land" concerns, but most of it came from libertarian gold bugs grouped around such newsletters as the Innovator and the Inflation Survival Letter. Many of the early leading lights of the movement were financial advisers and coin entrepreneurs advising people to store food and precious metals in expectation of economic collapse, and many of them were followers or graduates of the lectures of Andrew J. Galambos.[6]
The racist-paramilitary reputation of survivalism, however, is not without good reason. The reason for it can probably be traced to a different group of (you guessed it) disgruntled former members of the American Nazi Party who latched onto the movement. The most notable of these guys is Kurt Saxon, author of The Poor Man's James Bond, who had also drifted in and out of the Church of Scientology, the John Birch Society, the Church of Satan, and the Minutemen among other groups. He claims to have coined the term "survivalism" circa 1975. Whether there is any truth to this is uncertain.
A third impetus came about with the directive by the LDS Church for its members to store a year's supply of food in their homes, as well as to purchase seeds and gardening tools and learn how to preserve food.[7] The policy is referred to as "Provident Living" in official Church publications, and officially it is in case of unemployment or prolonged sickness, but at one point the minimum was to store seven years' worth of food reserves.[8] With proto-survivalism being official Mormon doctrine, the heavily Mormon-populated "Jell-O Belt" of Utah, southern Idaho, Arizona, and eastern Nevada developed a thriving cottage industry of businesses selling freeze-dried food, home canning equipment, and other survival gear.
The end is near![edit]
See the main article on this topic: Doomsday scenario
Since they expect a total breakdown in society, and expecting such a total breakdown from the usual floods, fires, earthquakes, and hurricanes is unrealistic at best, survivalists' apocalyptic visions come from other sources. Many of them are complete woo:
Plausible
There are really only a few events that could conceivably occur and conceivably result in long-term breakdown of the infrastructure (which excludes more ho-hum run of the mill emergencies) and the probability of some of these events occurring is quite small:
- A NASA-funded study considers economic inequality and resource depletion the greatest threats to society.[9]
- A sufficiently large solar flare/geomagnetic storm, which can knock out power for months or years. The most notable recent example would be the flare that blacked out Quebec in 1989.[10]
- A global pandemic or widespread disease outbreak. Relevant examples would include the Justinian plague, the Black Death, smallpox in the New World, the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, the global AIDS crisis, the 2014 Ebola outbreak of Africa.
- Economic collapse. Pertinent examples would include the Great Depression, the post-communist economic crisis in Russia and the former Eastern Bloc, and the 2001-02 economic crisis in Argentina.
- A nuclear war. While this threat has faded considerably in most of the Western world since 1989, it is still ever-present in India and Pakistan, two nuclear-armed states which have been to war with one another four times in less than seventy years, and which have chilly (at best) relations and a major border dispute in Kashmir. Nations perceived as enemies by North Korea (particularly Japan, South Korea and the USA). After the 2014 annexation of Crimea, panic flares of a new cold war has instigated new interest in this sector.
- A widespread, protracted civil war(s), such as that seen in the former Yugoslavia.
- Repressive government and/or genocide.
- Military invasion by a foreign country. This one is chiefly an issue in the developing world (see: the Russian invasion of Georgia followed by the partial invasion of Ukraine), as most First World countries have renounced warfare (against each other, at least) and their less-developed neighbors are too militarily impotent to seriously threaten them.
- Collapse of government (resulting in conditions of anarchy).
- An asteroid impact or supervolcano eruption (same problem of massive quantities of dust and sulfur dioxide thrown into the atmosphere, blocking the Sun).
As for the rest:
Disputed[edit]
- The "Long Emergency" scenario conceived by James Howard Kunstler, an extremely pessimistic prediction of the effects of peak oil and global warming.[11] While it's likely that many developing countries, especially in low-lying and/or tropical areas, will be screwed over due to their limited access to both scarce resources and the means to adapt to a changing climate, the ability of the developed world to adapt through technological means and energy efficiency has been debated for years, and a solid case can be made both for and against. In addition, there's the not-insignificant chance that the worst-case peak oil and global warming scenarios may be mutually exclusive — the effects of peak oil may force a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, which can in turn reduce the effects of global warming, and most plans to stall, mitigate, or adapt to climate change would reduce consumption of fossil fuels and, with it, the effects of their shortage. One issue of the collapse of much of the developing world would be a global exodus unseen in human history, especially if much of the developed world continues to refuse to let refugees and migrants in.
- Y2K was disputed before January 1, 2000, and turned out to be a bunch of people making mountains out of molehills. While the Y2K problem was a very real issue, it would not have come close to destroying society; all it would have done was make some financial transactions screw up until they could be fixed. It did, however, provide full employment for a while for COBOL programmers who forgot about centuries changing. (It is well known that the world will in fact end in January 2038, when 32-bit Unix timestamps overflow, given that God runs Unix.)
Woo
- Plausible or real events that can't actually happen where the survivalist lives e.g. major earthquake in Florida.
- "Earth changes"
- The "Great Tribulation" prophesied in some interpretations of the Bible. Christians will have to live off the grid for three to seven years so they don't have to take the Mark of the Beast, 666, on their foreheads/wrists!
- God hates (fill in the blank) and is about to do for the U.S. what He did for Sodom and Gomorrah
- The 2012 apocalypse was coming; this one was firmly discredited on the morning of December 22, 2012
- A race war is coming because whites are being out-bred by those of inferior genetic stock (read: minorities)
- The UN's black helicopters occupying America to enforce the New World Order
- The Commies are coming and a small remnant must be ready to take to the hills and wage guerrilla warfare. WOLVERINES!
- Fluoride in our water (or mind control rays, or the Russian Woodpecker,[note 2] or whatever) makes people stupid and will do the same for the U.S. as lead in the water pipes did for Rome
- Another great flood
- The zombie apocalypse, though this one is admittedly more of a spoof or a thought experiment (usually). Some survivalists and preparedness groups (such as the Zombie Squad[12]), while not seriously believing in zombies, use a hypothetical zombocalypse as a benchmark for survival, the theory being that, if you can survive zombies, you can survive anything. Using "zombies" as a metaphor for any hypothetical disaster scenario also allows people to talk about survivalism without getting into the sticky political arguments that characterize the movement, as is known to happen when the subject is about, say, economic collapse, terrorism, or nuclear war. Even some quite serious organizations use a zombie apocalypse as a model for various disasters – the Centers for Disease Control, for example, uses it to model the outbreak of a pandemic disease and get people interested in emergency preparedness.[13]
Not woo, just juvenile[edit]
- Grown-up little kids for whom "survivalism" is merely an excuse to run around in the woods in camo and read magazines about mercenaries
- Some survivalists have a grudge against society and *want* it to collapse, whether or not they actually believe it will (see: Unabomber). These people are known as "collapsitarians",[14] anticipating that the collapse of the status quo will lead to the ascendancy of their preferred system (libertarianism, theocracy, primitivism, hard green ideologies, neo-Nazism, and various flavors of anarchism are all popular), and that they will naturally be a part of the new 1% rather than the teeming, impoverished masses.
Politics and religion
Ironically, many survivalists claim to be practitioners of Christianity,[15][16] a religion originally built on the willingness of converts to accept personal extinction in a process known as martyrdom. It also includes some New Agers, who believe in the end of the world because J.Z. Knight Ramtha said so, or "earth changes" are coming soon, or the Mayan calendar ends in 2012, or other woo.[17] It has also attracted some white supremacist types who think society will inevitably break down what with all the minorities unless we institute a national eugenics program ASAP.
Historically, right-wingers and arch-libertarians have dominated the survivalist movement, most notably in the 1990s when the militia movement adopted survivalist rhetoric as part of their broader antipathy to the government. However, there are survivalists with views across the spectrum. Some are completely apolitical, and there also exists a left-wing survivalist movement mostly associated with environmentalists, New Agers, the 1970s "back to the land" movement, and unreconstructed ex-hippies. This contingent, moribund since about 1981, has made a comeback in the 2010s, largely motivated by extreme interpretations of the potential effects of peak oil and global warming (we have the books of James Howard Kunstler to thank for this), and by William Strauss and Neil Howe's prediction of an imminent crisis period lasting 20 years. Because of this, the usual rightie-dominated survivalist forums are starting to complain about all the lefties who have been showing up of late. However, extreme-right interest in survivalism also appears to be at a high point right now, for various reasons (the War on Terror, predictions that the culture war will expand into an actual shootin' war, that big bad Islamic threat, Barack Obama is the Antichrist, the New World Order is coming, et cetera).
Typically, survivalism grows and ebbs over the years, and holds some attraction for mainstream people during times when a (realistic, not woo-based) potential major crisis gets a lot of media attention: economic collapse in the 1970s, global thermonuclear warfare in the early-mid 1980s, Y2K in the late 1990s, and economic collapse (again) and, as mentioned, climate change and peak oil in the present day. Each time, the mainstream folks inevitably lose interest within a year or two, leaving a core of true believers expecting one or another sort of woo. The wild-eyed apocalyptic woo-meisters and assorted right-wing extremists tend to positively repel normal folks, and normal folks usually also quickly figure out there is a difference between preparedness for emergencies and survivalism, and opt for the former. As of this writing, woo-based survivalism seems to be more prevalent than ever.
The "American Redoubt"
The "American Redoubt" in the inland northwestern US is a concept[18][19] that perfectly illustrates the right-wing undercurrent underlying much of the modern survivalist movement. Broadly defined, the Redoubt consists of the states of Idaho, Wyoming, Montana (particularly the western half of the state), and the areas of Washington state and Oregon east of the Cascade Mountains (away from those filthy liberals, minorities, Jews, tree-huggers, hipsters, immigrants, and commies in Seattle and Portland).
The idea of the Redoubt was developed by James Wesley Rawles,[note 3] owner of the popular one-stop survivalist website SurvivalBlog, as a haven for survivalists and conservatives to relocate to on the basis of its being perceived as the exemplar of "true American" values, a place where small towns, farmers, the working class, and (mostly) churches dominate political and cultural life. Furthermore, the region's mountainous terrain makes it prime territory for subjugating the masses guerrilla warfare against an invading army — he explicitly disqualified North and South Dakota and eastern Montana from being part of the Redoubt, despite their similar values, on the basis of their open plains being "tanker country".
It was likely for this reason that the people behind The Citadel chose northern Idaho as the site of their planned community for "true Americans". The Flathead Valley in western Montana has also become a magnet for the "Patriot" community[20], with fundamentalist pastor and 2008 Constitution Party Presidential candidate Chuck Baldwin notably moving there from Florida in 2010 and calling on his fellow "Patriots" to follow him west.[21]
Coincidentally, the northwestern US was also chosen by white nationalists in the 1980s as a place to relocate to in order to turn it into a white/Aryan "homeland" on the grounds of the area being overwhelmingly white.[22][23] Rawles and other Redoubt supporters insist that they're not racist, though; in fact, Rawles has explicitly disavowed white nationalism[24] (a position that's gotten him no shortage of hate mail), and speaks of Orthodox Jews (and, of course, Messianic Jews) as being in line with his moralistic Christian ideals, calling on them to move to the Redoubt as well (he don't know dem vewy well, do he).
Survivalism in practice
Somalia[edit]
See the main article on this topic: Somalia
Ironically, the sort of long-term breakdown survivalists expect has happened in recent years — in Somalia, a country where few people had the means to make the sort of elaborate preparations survivalists make. The big irony here is if the breakdown that survivalists are expecting actually comes, they (like everyone else) will suddenly be dirt poor and forced to adopt the lifestyles of remote third world villages in order to survive. Cooperative living will be a necessity, and a stance of rugged individualism (in this case, a euphemism for being willing to knife someone in the back for a carton of powdered milk) will be a one-way ticket to starvation (or worse).
In addition, even with the collapse of the central government, many places still see some form of order — the northern states of Somaliland and Puntland have, for all intents and purposes, restored government in their areas and are de facto independent, functioning nations,[note 4] while in the rest of the country an assortment of warlords, pirates and Islamists hold power.
Argentina[edit]
See the main article on this topic: Argentina
One survivalist, Fernando "Ferfal" Aguirre, runs a blog called "Surviving in Argentina"[25] dedicated to his experiences with having lived in a developed country where a large-scale economic and societal collapse actually happened — Argentina, during that country's economic crisis in 2001-02 after the nation defaulted on its debt. His observations pointedly contradict many of the assumptions made by American survivalists:
- The logic of "bugging out" to a distant rural area to escape the chaos in the cities did not hold up in practice, as major cities like Buenos Aires and Cordoba were often the first places to see order and services restored. By contrast, rural survivalist compounds often found themselves outgunned and outnumbered by criminal gangs with nobody to help them for miles. Many such compounds were later discovered by the authorities looted and abandoned, sometimes with their would-be survivalist owners murdered.
- Government collapse is always temporary. By 2003, the crisis was over and Argentina's economy was booming again, partly as a result of the economic corrections triggered by the crisis.[note 5]
- Even at the height of the collapse, collective effort was often the most conducive way for many working-class and former middle-class Argentineans to make a living, as demonstrated by the proliferation of worker-owned cooperatives.
- The rich, rather than being thrown from their lofty perch, got richer during and after the collapse — income inequality rose between 2001 and 2005, and at the height of the collapse the upper classes managed to defend their wealth by hiring armed private security.
- Likewise, the decadent pop culture and lifestyles that should have been swept away (according to American survivalists) were only reinforced. To give just one example, Argentinean TV studios and networks, reeling from the economic collapse, cut costs in any way they could and went for the cheapest programming they could find. Yup — the economic meltdown led to an explosive boom in trashy reality TV, and a similarly sharp decline in educational programming.
In short, total anarchy and a return to rural subsistence living failed to materialize even in the midst of a worst-case economic meltdown scenario.
Conclusions[edit]
The experiences of Somalia and Argentina together demonstrate many of the fallacies, shaky logic and biases surrounding the thinking of many survivalists, especially the rural right-wing survivalists that make up the majority cohort of the movement today. The prevailing stance of many survivalists is one of rugged individualism, an idealized vision of life in which a man can make it by the sweat of his brow without having to rely on anybody else. In reality, such a stance would get one killed as those who engage in collective effort, be they gangs, warlords, new city-states, or pre-collapse governments reasserting their authority by force, out-compete them and eventually drive them out. Philosophical arguments about "common law" will matter to the armed men at your doorstep about as much as arguments about Roman law did in the Middle Ages. It was never the lone cowboy that "won the West" — it was new settlements collectively organizing for law enforcement and the other infrastructure of society, backed by the power of the US Army and the Marshals Service and the cattle, railroad, and mining barons they supported.[26]
Furthermore, many survivalists also assume that a return to rural and small-town living will be the "natural" result of the collapse, with cities descending into total chaos while the countryside weathers the storm. To be fair, this idea emerged at a time when the threat of nuclear war (in which cities would be targeted for destruction) was very real, but it is just as present in predictions of economic meltdown and other disasters. What they fail to account for is that the collapse of law and order will happen everywhere, including in their rural retreats, as trade and transportation break down and their Wal-Marts and country stores stop getting shipments of food. With the end of the Cold War and the threat of World War III, it becomes clear that this idea is rooted more in a bias towards, and an assumption of the superiority of, rural living vs. urban living than in any realistic assessment of a collapse. While large scale decline of cities has happened in past collapses, with the fall of Rome probably being the most famous and accessible example, the cities still remained places with more order and more economic activity than the largely agricultural countryside, where bandits and highwaymen often roamed free. The Roman trend of wealthy suburbanites living outside the city while still having business inside it disappeared completely upon the fall of Rome, so the suburbia many Americans mistake for "the countryside" will probably fare worse than the cities in any kind of collapse.
In short, survivalism, at least in the form commonly preached in the West, isn't so much a movement towards self-sufficiency and personal independence as it is a game for the idle rich in search of self-actualization. Their spending money on guns and state-of-the-art "survival" gear is ultimately little different from the behavior of the consumerist "sheep" that they love to criticize, especially when considering that many outdoor/sporting goods companies have started overtly targeting the prepper market.[27] People in the developing world who actually have to concern themselves with day-to-day survival usually can't afford it.
In fiction[edit]
See the main article on this topic: Dystopia
Science fiction author David Brin's post-apocalyptic novel The Postman has, as one of its central themes, the way that survivalism siphons off resources needed to keep society running. Sadly, it's best known now for how self-career-imploding Hollywood hack Kevin Costner turned it into one of the least comprehensible movies ever. (On the bright side, it was one of the inspirations for the Fallout series of games.)
Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's book Lucifer's Hammer is also a post-apocalyptic novel with a more positive view of survivalism than Brin's work.
Patriots: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse is a "novel" written by James Wesley Rawles (the same guy behind the American Redoubt and SurvivalBlog). In all actuality, it is a survivalist manual using a novel as a framing device, meant to present Rawles' ideas about survival and politics in an easily digestible literary form. The plot is a fairly standard right-wing/libertarian potboiler — in the event of economic meltdown, a group of people from Chicago "bug out" to northern Idaho and later lead a guerrilla war against a tyrannical "Provisional Government" backed by Europe and the UN. It's not particularly well-written on the literary front; even its fans seem to appreciate it more for its message and its survival tips than for the actual story. Notably, when Rawles wrote a sequel that focused more on the story, entitled Survivors: A Novel of the Coming Collapse, even many of his fans thought it sucked.
The CBS TV series Jericho is perhaps one of the more notable depictions of survivalism on the small screen. Lasting about two seasons, it followed the residents of the town of Jericho in western Kansas after terrorists stage a massive nuclear attack against dozens of American cities. Made in the Bush era back when Lost was spawning a huge boom in sci-fi/mystery television, it was as much a conspiracy thriller as anything else, revealing that a Halliburton-esque corporation (one that's headquartered in Dick Cheney's home state of Wyoming, even) orchestrated the attacks and blamed them on Iran and North Korea in order to take over America and turn it into a corporate-run dictatorship, like an anti-military-industrial complex version of the usual right-wing, anti-UN conspiracy theories. The second season ended with a Second American Civil Warabout to begin, just in time for the show to be canceled, though the story was continued in a series of comic books. Outside of its fandom, it's best known for the campaign by its fans to save it from cancellation at the end of season one, which involved sending bags of nuts to CBS headquarters. Don't ask.[note 6]
A much longer list of depictions of survivalists and survivalism in general can be found on TV Tropes.[28] The fact that their "trope" for survivalism in pop culture is called "Crazy Survivalist" speaks volumes.
See also[edit]
- Autarky — when a whole nation becomes prepper from the top down
- Useless eaters — a term most commonly found in conspiracy literature, but also sometimes used by survivalists as a synonym for "sheeple"
- Duck and Cover — survivalism as taught in 1950s elementary schools
- Libertarian paradise
- List of predictions of the end of the world
- Militia movement — a distinct but sometimes overlapping group
- Survival seed bank
- Whacker — another, sometimes overlapping group
External links[edit]
- Frugal Squirrels
- Zombie Squad
- Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends — Survivalists
- International Survival and Homesteading Forum Community - everything related to preparedness, from survival to homesteading.
- Off The Grid News — an example of the right-wing, Christian variant
- Spec Ops Brand Military Tactical Gear
- SurvivalBlog — James Wesley Rawles' website
- Mother Earth News — an example of the left-wing, environmentalist variant
Notes[edit]
- :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ They're in western Maryland, which is not to be confused with the rest of Maryland. Western Maryland is mountainous, isolated, tends to get snowed in in the winter, and is more like West Virginia and south central Pennsylvania than the likes of Baltimore. And yes, they are building an ark, right next to Interstate 68 where they'll surely be safe from God's next big flood, although all the sheeple fleeing Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. on same Interstate 68 when TSHTF may be a problem for them.
- :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ The Russian Woodpecker was the name given by shortwave listeners and ham radio operators to the Soviet Union's top secret Duga-3 missile radar installation; the name came from the sound of the signal in an AM shortwave radio, which resembled a high-speed tapping. It powered up in the mid-1970s and went off-line in 1989 for reasons still not publicly known in the West.
- :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Or, as he calls himself, James Wesley, Rawles. Yeah, that's the kind of guy we're dealing with here.
- :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Somaliland has made it formal and declared independence from Somalia, though it is not officially recognized as such by any foreign governments or by the United Nations.
- :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Specifically, the devaluation and inflation of the Argentinean peso caused a manufacturing boom as foreign companies took advantage of very friendly exchange rates.
- :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ If you must, it's a reference to a scene in the first season finale where the main characters are cornered by a rival militia from a neighboring town. When asked to surrender, one of the characters quotes General Anthony McAuliffe at the Battle of the Bulge, who replied "nuts!" to the Nazis' call for him to surrender when they had him surrounded.
References[edit]
- :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ How past disasters can help us prepare for the future: In 'The Big Ones,' Lucy Jones discusses planning for the next catastrophe by Kyle Plantz (8:00am, March 25, 2018) Science News.
- :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ The Big Ones: How Natural Disasters Have Shaped Us (and What We Can Do About Them) by Lucy Jones (2018) Doubleday. ISBN 0385542704.
- :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ http://dcist.com/2014/02/gods_ark_of_safety_i-68s.php God's Ark of Safety
- :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ National Preparedness Month
- :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ "What is the difference between a Survivalist and a Prepper?"
- :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Doherty, Brian. Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement. PublicAffairs, 2007.
- :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ "Food Storage: Why, What, and How." About.com, Latter Day Saints.
- :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ "Food Storage". Mormon Wiki. http://www.mormonwiki.com/Food_Storage. Retrieved 2010-09-27.
- :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ http://www.nationaljournal.com/tech/here-s-how-nasa-thinks-society-will-collapse-20140318
- :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ See the Wikipedia article on March 1989 geomagnetic storm.
- :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Kunstler, James Howard. The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century. Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005.
- :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Zombie Squad
- :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ The CDC on Zombie Preparedness
- :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Virginia Heffernan, "Apocalypse Ciao: Let the End Times Roll." Mother Jones, July/August 2009.
- :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Christian Survivalists Losing Faith in the Future
- :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ http://mark12ministries.wordpress.com/2008/10/09/the-christian-survivalist-a-biblical-view-of-preparedness/The Christian Survivalist: A Biblical View of Preparedness
- :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ French village faces influx of apocalypse believers
- :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ American Redoubt
- :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Rawles' call to move to the mountains.
- :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Lenz, Ryan. "A Gathering of Eagles: Extremist Look to Montana." Intelligence Report, Winter 2011.
- :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ In his own words. (Warning: deep well of crazy.)
- :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ See the Wikipedia article on Northwest Territorial Imperative.
- :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Burghart, Devin and Leonard Zeskind. "The Northwest Imperative Redux." Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, 27 November 2012 (recovered 18 November 2014).
- :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Rawles, James Wesley. "Lest Any Man Should Boast: A Christian Survivalist Perspective on Race, Religion, and Reason." Survival Blog (recovered 12 January 2015).
- :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Surviving in Argentina
- :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Lause, Mark A. "The Cowboy Class Wars." Jacobin, 29 August 2016 (recovered 30 August 2016).
- :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Brown, Jennings. "The Prepper Obsession With Clothes." 29 May 2017 (recovered 31 May 2017).
- :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ TV Tropes: Crazy Survivalist