For decades, America’s preppers have been an easy punchline to any kind of political joke. Something about the US drives a segment of its right wing libertarians towards outright paranoia about their government – fearing not just that the feds would come to take their guns, but would outright declare martial law, rip up the constitution and otherwise trample liberty.
As a result, preppers and survivalists have spent decades building bunkers, stockpiling fuel and freeze-dried food, and – of course – stocking up on guns and buying bullets by the bucketload. Sometimes, the movement has bubbled up into violence, often with tragic consequences for all concerned, but more often, they’ve simply been treated like a joke.
All of which makes it somewhat galling to admit that it increasingly looks like they might have had a point. Preppers were wrong when they said that Barack Obama or Joe Biden had a master plan to end Americans’ freedoms, but finally a government is coming along that is doing everything they warned about – undermining the constitution, deploying the military, sending plain-clothed goons to disappear its enemies and more. Donald Trump has vindicated the preppers. It turns out they had a point after all.
The strange thing is, none of them seem to have noticed. Finally, the federal government is doing everything preppers warned that one day they might, and America’s survivalists are silent. What’s going on?
Perhaps the most famous of America’s conspiratorial preppers is Alex Jones, the founder of the Infowars “news” network, perhaps most famous for claiming that the Sandy Hook massacre of 20 elementary school children and six of their teachers was a “false flag”.
Jones styles himself as a hyper-masculine role model, funding his conspiracy broadcasting through the sale of vitamin supplements and prepper materials to ready his audience for the incipient end times (though his critics have noted many of these supplements are the same goods that Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop sells, repackaged for a male audience). Jones made himself a multi-millionaire through his prophecies of doom, and has bankrupted himself – as a result of lawsuits by the Sandy Hook families – the same way.
Despite his aspirations to masculinity, Jones’s broadcasts have a tenor closer to that of an anxious chihuahua yapping angrily at everything that moves. He has claimed the US government was dominated by Satanists, that Obama was training up a secret militia in a bunker outside Washington DC, that Democrats run an elite child abuse ring, that various Democratic politicians may be the antichrist and more.
But his favourite warning has always been that the federal government was about to declare martial law and crack down on true “patriots” who wanted to preserve freedom and the constitution. President Trump is currently doing exactly this – he has sent the military into Los Angeles and Washington DC, and is threatening to send them into more Democratic-controlled cities against the will of state governors and city mayors.
Clearly, Jones and his survivalist friends only worry about a crackdown on freedoms when it’s people they don’t like doing it. But such short-sightedness suggests they wouldn’t last long if a tyrant really did try to bring down the constitution any time soon.
Infowars was not shy about sounding the alarm about federal tyranny in the run-up to the election last year. In October, about a week before election day, it warned that “Kamala lies… claiming Donald Trump is a Hitler figure who would use the military against the American people when it’s HER administration which passed legislation to do exactly that”.
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On November 1, days before polling day, it went further, as Jones ran a “special report” headlined: “ELECTION DISRUPTION ALERT! The Democrats Know They Lost & They are Now Openly Sabotaging the 2024 Election to Plunge America into Civil Unrest, Leading to Martial Law”. The network ran former FBI staffer Marcus Allen (styled as a “whistleblower”) warning the audience to “vote, arm yourself, [and] stock up 3–4 months [of] food and water” – many of which, conveniently, Infowars itself stocks.
Jones was not alone in sounding the alarm against troops being deployed on US soil. Michael Flynn, a retired general who briefly served as Trump’s national security adviser in his first term, shared a post claiming Biden had signed an executive order allowing him to deploy troops to kill Americans.
Republican congressman Andy Harris claimed on Ron Paul’s Liberty Report that “This is exactly what the Democrats said Trump would do. And they’re doing it… This means that after an election, they could declare a national emergency and literally call out the army in the United States.”
Former Fox News host Glenn Beck warned, “you have to prepare your kids mentally and physically that things in the world could change rapidly” while similarly warning that Democrats could deploy the military against US citizens, or else crack down on free speech or the right to vote.
These men built their careers and their millions-strong followings coming to the forefront of a movement that analysed and over-analysed any minute change in wording in executive orders, or the subtext of political remarks from any Democrat, as to how they might mean martial law and a crackdown on freedoms was coming.
What they’ve long looked for in subtext is finally there in text. Donald Trump has sent in the national guard to two major cities, neither of which needed nor wanted him to do so. Trump technically hasn’t declared martial law to do this, but by avoiding that he’s simply sent the troops in without any legal basis for doing so. This is the stuff that every conspiracy broadcaster has dreamed of.
That’s just the most blatant thing the president has done, though. Trump is seizing major stakes in American businesses – the government took 10% of Intel for no compensation just last week – and is demanding a share of overseas sales to China from NVIDIA. He is cracking down on the right to legal representation by pursuing law firms. He has installed a commissioner to oversee the output of the CBS news network. He is deporting foreign students for their political opinions. He has sent armed and masked, plain-clothed ICE officials into the street to harass US citizens and migrants alike.
In just six months, Trump has launched a direct assault on the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th, 8th and 14th amendments, and none of America’s vaunted checks and balances are doing much to slow him down. The preppers warned us, and it turns out they were right.
The trouble is, they haven’t noticed. People like Alex Jones should be simultaneously taking a victory lap while screaming to the rafters that all these terrible things they’ve professed to be against are actually happening. In reality, of course, they’re cheering it on. Because Trump is deploying soldiers in Democrat-controlled cities, and attacking the free speech of leftist protesters, Michael Flynn, Glenn Beck and Alex Jones see no problem with it.
Flynn has spoken approvingly of Trump’s actions to tackle the “real threat” facing America, which he claims is “antifa” and the “enemy within”. Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, who last year were podcasters and pundits warning against government “tyranny”, are now running the FBI for Trump and launching raids against his political opponents.
Jones repeatedly celebrates Trump’s wins against the “deep state” and cheers on how fast they’re coming. His Infowars network still pushes survivalist staples of supplements, iodine pills and freeze-dried food, but now says their audience should stock up on them in case of deep state Democratic counter-attack, or else some form of cyber-assault from China.
NRA board member Ted Nugent, who last year warned that Kamala Harris would “come for our guns and our freedom”, all but gave the game away when he said in July that he’d have “no problem at all if President Trump calls out the Guard to put down ANTIFA terrorists”.
These prepper leaders have backed themselves into a corner with only two ways out, neither flattering. The first is that they never actually feared or even cared about the federal government making an assault on the constitution or its freedoms – they were just cynically monetising an audience, and have no desire to stop now by challenging them, or taking the risk of standing up to a government that might actually turn against them, instead of tolerating them as the Democrats did.
The other option is that despite spending decades warning about tyranny, they’ve failed to understand the very basics about how it arrives. A would-be tyrant doesn’t present himself as your enemy. He claims to be defending the very freedoms and society he intends to destroy, and lets you cheer him on as he does it.
History is full of dictators – of right and left – rising to power by doing exactly that. If anyone should know this story, it’s them. If America’s survivalist leaders aren’t the most soulless of cynics, they’re the most hapless rubes of the 21st century. There is no third option.
For those who followed such people in the hope of riding out a constitutional crisis, or seeing a crackdown coming, a harsh lesson might be on the way: there is no amount of tinned goods and packaged water that can save you from yourself.
