I used to be a fairly regular watcher of Doomsday Preppers, the NatGeo “reality” show profiling a motley assortment of paranoid goofballs preparing themselves (and their sometimes enthusiastic, sometimes resentful families) in their own unique ways for what they saw as the impending end of the world.
One thing that was striking about the show was that each of the doomsday preppers was preparing for a different doomsday.
Some were expecting fairly standard-issue apocalypses involving things like giant earthquakes, economic collapses or worldwide pandemics; others were more, well, creative, worrying about solar flares and, in one case, a shift in the earth’s magnetic poles, which the prepper in question thought would send the continents themselves skittering around the globe.
Now the folks at right-wing garbage site Return of Kings are talking about their own version of doomsday, which they think could be caused not by some giant natural disaster but by the assassination of Donald Trump.
In a post suffused with melodramatic paranoia, RoK contributor David Garrett Brown urges his fellow Red Pillers to stock up on guns, food and medicine in order to prepare for what he predicts will be a period of “panic and craziness that will follow an attack on Trump.”
Never mind that an assassination is highly unlikely, to put it mildly. Never mind that the United States has survived the assassination of several presidents, as well a civil rights giant Martin Luther King, without falling apart.
We survived 9/11. We’ve survived devastating earthquakes and hurricanes and a flu pandemic that killed more than half a million Americans in 1918-1919 (and possibly as many as 100 million worldwide, far more than the number who died in World War I). As awful as all these things were, our country is still here.
It’s clear that Brown’s doomsday scenario isn’t based on a sober look at history. It’s a histrionic reaction to the protests that have dogged Trump at most of his recent rallies:
[V]iolent mobs descended on Trump’s rally in Chicago. Psuedo-journalist Michelle Fields accused Trump’s campaign manager Corey Lewandowski of assault in a bid to stir up white knight antipathy against The Donald and even violence. Protestors in Arizona blocked highways and then complained about being “run over.” The list goes on.
Where to even start with that? It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to pretend that the violence at Trump rallies has been caused by “very angry leftist zombies hellbent on destruction” rather than by the Trump supporters who have been caught on film punching and pushing and otherwise manhandling peaceful protesters.
It takes something more than chutzpah to pretend that Lewandowski’s assault on Fields — also caught on camera — was somehow an assault on Trump and his fans.
Oh, and the fact that a small number of protesters blocked a highway for several hours does not portend THE LITERAL APOCALYPSE.
At various points in his post, Brown writes about the possible assassination of Trump as if it has already happened. In this remarkable and revealing sentence, Brown starts off by referring to an entirely hypothetical assassination, only to switch to past tense at the end, as if the murder had already happened:
If [an assassination] happens, leftwing luminaries and the media will be shown to have no control over their supporters, despite them stoking the very same hatred that ended up killing him.
There’s a reason for this, of course. Brown is so eager to affix blame for the (hypothetical) assassination that he has to pretend it’s a done deal — and that it was leftists (plural) who done it. (Never mind that it’s Trump’s enemies on the right who are far more likely to spend their Saturdays at the gun range.)
Brown, happily playing the victim on behalf of his audience of Red Pill Trumpists, seems to think that veritable pogroms will be unleashed against Trump supporters in the wake of the hypothetical assassination. And so he encourages his readers to stock up on guns for their “self-defense.”
Protecting yourself and your family will be paramount if Trump is assassinated, especially if you have not associated yourself with any leftwing cause … It is up to you to help secure yourself and those you love, including with legal firearms. …
[W]ith an assassination, things will get very bad very quickly. Violence against Trump’s person will beget more criminal acts against his supporters and those aligned even moderately with him (i.e. the Republican Party).
Like a lot of doomsday preppers, Brown seems a little too enthusiastic about the prospect of shooting enemies in alleged self-defense. Indeed, at one point he seems to suggest that Trump supporters should bring guns to future Trump rallies even if the billionaire is still alive and kicking.
In Chicago, leftwing hate groups insisted that free speech and freedom of assembly are rights reserved only for people like themselves. We had fists in this case, but expect far more lethal means going forward.
Great. In fact, other Trump fans have already started talking about forming Trump-friendly militias; RoK contributor and Roosh pal Matt Forney even suggested that Trumpists take guns with them to polling places.
Brown also seems to think that the evil leftists want a crisis as much as he does. Sorry, as much as he doesn’t, wink wink nudge nudge. Why? Because debt.
US government debt is currently at 20 trillion, significantly higher than annual GDP. Liberals and others, although most do not know it, need the crisis of something like an assassination on a controversial conservative figure to absolve themselves of the financial mess they have helped create.
If anyone can make sense of the, er, logic here, let me know.
In addition to buying guns and survivalist supplies Brown also encourages gun-toting, apocalypse-expecting Red Pill Trump fans to join up with “[o]rganizations such as (conservative) churches, gun clubs, informal Tea Party groups, [and] neighborhood watch programs,” because, clearly, what neighborhood watch groups need more than anything is a sudden influx of paranoid dickwads with brand new guns aching for an excuse to shoot “SJWs” and possibly black people generally.
Oh, and Brown also suggests joining veteran’s groups, but I can’t imagine many Return of Kings readers are veterans of any wars other than the ones that take place on Twitter.
In the comments to the post, RoK readers talk about how cool Donald Trump is and happily fantasize about the coming apocalypse.
League of Shadows celebrates what he seems to think will be the inevitable victory of the white man:
BLM and MS 13 discount the white man’s ability to wage war.
We are accomplished in this skill set beyond the capabilities of some feral street gangs.
YosarriansRight expects to see something straight out of a TV show:
It becomes a “The Walking Dead” survival scenario. Those that stick to “tea & crumpets” are dead. Those that improvise, adapt and overcome, survive.
Social Darwinism in action.
Bob Smith urges his comrades not to think small:
If sh*t hits the fan REALLY hard, we should prepare to become warlords so we don’t just survive, but so we can kick the SJWs’ asses and take our country back.
A few commenters are a bit less impressed. Someone called Kay dismisses the doomsday talk as “arrant nonsense.” He asks:
If Trump dies, so what?
Lincoln died and a nation wept, Luther King died and a nation wept, Demosthenes died and his people rightly wept, Timoleon, probably the greatest of them all died, and to this day, I read of him ,and bow in humble respect. …
I won’t be surprised if Trump himself arranged for this rubbish to further inflame his uneducated redneck simpleton crack crowd.
Hardcore Realist, meanwhile, declares the post
a sick joke. ROK’s articles have been on the decline since they start recycling old articles just to satisfy the readers. But this nonsense article is pure insanity. Nobody is conspiring to kill Moron Don since he prattles on about some YUGGGGEEEE wall that he’s gonna build on the border. …
Goes to show your abject stupidity in blindly following the Moron Don. As a white man to another white man, I tell you that Trump has skillfully played with your emotions.You are blinded by his vacuous speeches . Is it any wonder why uneducated jackasses form the majority of Trump-Tards?
Someone calling himself Danger responds:
so how long have you hated white men and western civilization?
Putting more guns in the hands of angry, paranoid bigots rarely ends well.
I know this should be really frightening, but when I imagine professional dunderheads Roosh and Forney and the like trying to put together their Trump militia, I can’t see them lasting more than a day before accidentally shooting themselves in the feet and almost certainly blowing something up on accident. Basically, they would be Homer Simpson’s neighbourhood watch group:
https://youtu.be/-HLn8T3baOk
I was talking to a guy once, who is thoroughly convinced that the US is heading straight for a militia based revolution.
No matter how I said it, he couldn’t accept that militias are AWFUL armies. They have seriously caused more harm in some cases in history than good. Like they screw over their own team with their complete lack of discipline and training.
They don’t know how to handle food/ammo/other supplies or even bring enough bags of chips to last three days (as evidenced by Oregon). They are all a bunch of people with itchy trigger fingers and there have been several incidences of militiamen getting into fights and shooting each other throughout history. In the civil war, the real army HATED their militia comrades because they were a liability and a nuisance.
Plus the guy I was talking to kept screeching about 7 million+ gun owners and how could the army hope to fight against THAT but for some reason couldn’t grasp when I tried to explain that there’s no way in hell all of those people would be in the same place at the same time with enough supplies to take out the army. Even if the army wasn’t 1000% better at fighting, strategy and general warfare.
And I may be an optimist, but when it comes down to it, I seriously don’t think most gun owners (the kind that don’t have “self-defense” murder fantasies) would be willing to shoot someone when it came down to it. Let alone abandon their homes to go hang out with a militia and shoot soldiers. America has a serious thing for soldiers, I think a lot of people would be uncomfortable being on the other side of the line from them.
edit: good lord my posts get way too long, sorry about that.
The Venn diagram of “people who think ‘social Darwinism’ exists and is a good thing” and “people who would benefit from ‘social Darwinism'” looks like an 8.
You are a good egg, HeinzD. And, speaking as an Albertan from the country, you’re more’n welcome here. I ain’t got a farm, but I can find clean water and recognize the good plants from the bad. I figure we’d have ourselves a nice peaceful little post-apocalyptic commune. Don’t sound half bad!
@A Space Alpaca
It’s particularly funny that they seem to think they could take on the U.S. military. I think they do not grasp the scale and might of our armed forces. For better or for worse, if there’s one thing America knows how to do…
@ Kevin
David Brin’s The Postman? Been a while since I read it.
I started learning how to weave this month, so in the event of an American civilization failure, I’ll have even more fiber-arts skills to trade on.
@ThatBear Right?!
They’re the same kind of people that will brag about their military might overseas but they can tooootally take on the whole army with a bunch of disorganized angry people and a some hand guns. (and probably no food)
All you need to win a war is enough “righteous” anger!
They bombard the enemy with leading questions?
@Alan:
But then how will they whine about the low quality of post-apocalyptic women who are always covered in mud and tired from farming?
@HeinzD and Scildfreja – I totally agree, the #1 apocalypse survival skill is willingness to cooperate within a group, which comes more naturally to the left. That means listening, helping others, sharing, and paying attention not just to other people, but to your surroundings. If you’re not good at reading subtle signs, from weather to predators to plant identification, you can get into trouble quickly. The wilderness is no place for arrogance and self-absorption. Out in the elements, there are a lot of problems that a gun can’t solve.
The argument that poorly-trained militias can’t take on the Full Might Of The US Army (TM) falls flat when you consider various conflicts in history. The Taliban is still kicking in Afghanistan. Sunni militias are still rebelling in Iraq. Syria fell apart. The Viet Cong won. Hitler’s armies faced partisans throughout the lands they conquered, which made fighting the enemy armies that much tougher for them. Algeria, India, Kenya, and dozens of other countries kicked out their colonial masters in bloody conflicts. Mexico is independent. And I vaguely remember militias in the US doing an awful lot of damage to the national army in one conflict, and outright defeating the army not quite a century earlier.
Armed rebellion really does work. Small arms really do defeat powerful armies. They don’t win by militarily defeating the established army; it’s OK to lose every battle. They win by getting widespread legitimacy and destroying the army’s legitimacy — or by making the army give up before their legitimacy is lost.
It wouldn’t be the end of civilization, but a repetition of the Carrington Event of 1859 – let alone a larger version of it – would certainly cause a good deal of damage and chaos. A solar storm of similar size occurred in 2012, but fortunately the coronal mass ejection missed the earth.
Folks have already addressed the ‘post-apoc’ fantasies, so let me take up some of the other points in this thread:
First off, I want to stress just how badly these asshats are misportraying what happened in Chicago the day of the Trump rally.
Violent mobs did not show up at the rally. Rather, Trump was, unlike prior rallies, speaking in very hostile territory. Protestors had taken advantage of the free-ticket policy to score a large block of seats. Thus, for once, it wouldn’t just be a handful of protestors who could be drowned out or removed or intimidated into standing down.
Facing the prospect of an audience that hadn’t already bought into his mountain of bullshit, Trump invented a conversation with non-existent law enforcement authorities to send a spokesman to cancel the rally, pretty much around the time it was supposed to get started, after the stadium was already full.
So the crowd, on both sides, had their adrenaline up in either jubilation or anger. Then they got released into the streets outside, where even more anti-Trump protestors waited. Jeers and taunts went both ways as the Trump supporters (mostly whites from the suburbs and Downstate) passed through the crowds.
I’ve yet to hear anyone clarify who turned it physical; I will say, categorically, that whoever did so was completely in the wrong. Then, the Chicago cops took the opportunity the way they always do, and started busting heads and rounding people up (including a reporter who identified himself as such, for the crime of filming a group of officers surrounding a black man on the ground).
Trump’s cowardice and poor management led to that fiasco.
*******
Saphira:
Brokered convention is highly likely, but the odds are strong that they’ll pick Cruz or, as a dark-horse candidate Kasich.
However, I think you’re too optimistic about how a Trump presidency would go. He’ll get the Tea Partiers to go along with him, and it’s that contingent that’s made it impossible to get anything done through Congress. While I expect a few GOP’ers to go rogue, I no longer am confident that enough of them have the spine to resist the peer pressure from their worst elements.
**********
There’s a major difference between a native rebellion kicking out an imperial invasion, and a civil uprising against a native government. The latter has a far smaller success rate than the former. While they can make a country impossible to rule for a time, they have very, very rarely actually succeeded in remaking a country to their liking. The nature of civil war prevents it from being an effective tool, because it hardens the opposition. There are exceptions, but they require a government that is almost universally hated by the populace.
@ Nick Gotts
There was a great “Horizon” documentary about solar flares and CMEs on BBC4 the other night. Not sure where you’re located but if you can track down a way of viewing you may find it very interesting.
Some great footage of a flare hitting that satellite at the Lagrange point (basically when the screen goes all fuzzy they’ve got 15 minutes to call the electricity companies)
@ numberbois
Freemage has already made the point about insurgencies so I’ll just add that in Afghanistan and Iraq the actual initial military part of the operations went well.
Degrading the Taliban’s ability to host AQ and destroying the training camps was completed in less than three weeks utilising only a few hundred SF and CIA personnel (there were more journalists than combatants at Tora Bora). Similarly the removal of the Baathist regime and over running the Iraqi army (including the republican guard, no soft target there) in Iraq happened so quickly that they had to pause to allow the logistics to catch up. It was only when the military had to take up a ‘policing’ role in support of the attempts to nation build that problems began to occur. Winning a war is easy; running a country is hard.
So yes, militia groups could cause mischief but they wouldn’t stand a chance of actually taking power.
Of course making the country ungovernable is probably a fringe benefit (or the main benefit) for these guys.
I do love watching these guys talk about how badass they’ll be in a real survival scenario.
I used to live in a house that was built in the pre-Civil War era, about forty miles outside the nearest town, deep in the swamp of South Carolina, where all our water got pumped out of a well in front of the house (the water also stank like the swamp, but whatcha gonna do?). You want badass? How about being mid-shower and hearing the pump explode, so you drag yourself outside covered in soap and shampoo wearing nothing but a towel wrapped around you and clambering through the mud and gushing water to get it under control? Just so you could finish your shower in time to make it to work? These guys ever built an irrigation system? Ever used a trencher? Ever had to figure out if that snake the dog is determined to attack is actually a cottonmouth or just one that mimics it, in the five seconds before the dog lunges and possibly gets killed?
I’ve always liked going camping, if only because it’s the only way you ever get the slightest grasp of just how goddamned *easy* you’ve got it, living in your fancy house, with fancy insulation and drywall that bugs can’t climb through and a roof that doesn’t leak. To paraphrase Good Omens- “Getting back to nature is important because it reminds you why the entire sum of human history has involved getting as far away from nature as was humanly possible.”
Re: Solar flares-
Oh man, I think I’ve seen some of that footage. There’s a couple great ones of solar monitoring satellites where you see the magnetic lines around the sun twist and erupt, then a few seconds later it hits the satellite and KKSSSSHHHHH. Makes me think of that movie with Tony Randall where the US is going to accidentally nuke Moscow, so as a concession to keep the USSR from going full-war (and to prove it was really an accident) they agree to voluntarily nuke New York. There’s that scene where the guy is describing the explosion before it cuts to that horrible noise that says the phone melted.
Tanks. Drones. Attack aircrafts. Bigger guns. I mean, what the fuck is some moron with a shotgun going to do against a helicopter that can fire a missile at you from so far away you can’t even see it?
@ numberbois I acknowledge the ability of strongly supported uprisings to be successful, but if a small, angry contingent of Americans decided to fight the government (7 million is actually pretty small in regards to the entire population, and like I said I doubt that many would participate) while a huge majority of the population denounced and disagreed with them, on top of the army fighting them, they’d be so screwed it’s not even funny.
And that’s not even taking into account that a bunch of people flooding out of their homes to form an army are really hard to feed and I sincerely doubt they’d be prepared for that. Or that they’d even be able to find a place to congregate.
Like they can’t even agree on their goals online, do you seriously think they’d make a cohesive army?
@ColeYote I actually think they’d be reluctant to use planes and drones on their own citizens, just because that doesn’t exactly breed a lot of trust for after the conflict, but yeah, regardless, they would outgun a militia very effectively.
This is so painfully accurate I can’t believe a RoK reader actually formed these sentences.
The percentage of women in the US military was 16% in 2012.
http://www.businessinsider.com/us-military-demographics-2014-8?op=1
This does not count some groups, such as Jews or Hispanics, as “minorities,” so the numbers are really higher.
And, assuming that the 70% white percentage also applies to the 16% of women in the military, that’s 11.2% of personnel who are white women. So that’s 58.8% who are white men specifically.
Hispanics make up 11.4% of the armed forces (http://nbclatino.com/2013/01/01/u-s-military-a-growing-latino-army/), so, if you don’t count Hispanics as white (and racists certainly don’t), that’s actually 47.4% of the military that are white men.
So, yeah. You might claim that white men have some magical genetic skill at fightin’ just on virtue of being born with a pinkish dick, but if you look at actual military training, they’re less likely per individual to have it, and they’re a minority of military personnel.
Buttercup:
Exactly! This is something I talked about, in a more humorous post, about how there was no way in Hell I was going to drag my anemic, myopic , and allergic ass (and an ailing mother who needs medication) out into the woods with a bag of granola bars, in the event of a zombie apocalypse,.
And how in all likelihood, my handyman brother and his friends will probably hook our neighborhood up with electricity and running water, given enough time. All of that, while fending off white male bigots, like the militiamen above, (who think they have a score to settle with the negroes.)
And this would probably work as long as a person was willing to cooperate and share their skills, something very poor people already know how to do now.
Its my contention that its the disenfranchised middle class, out in their “white flight” suburbs who’d have the most trouble surviving any kind of apocalypse.
I think these dudes believe that if society collapsed, the majority of what survivors eat would be meat from animals people hunted. In reality, you would eat more plants, fish, and small animals caught with traps. Their post apocalyptic fantasies are really just a contemporary version of “we hunted the mammoth for you!” Really, those who know how to garden would be the best off. Not necessarily the big alpha bros. Happening to be near a source of fresh, clean water is crucial too.
A lot of John Wyndham’s work involves these post apocalyptic scenarios where the world collapses but the protagonists are only mildly inconvenienced and otherwise do ok. A term was coined to describe these stories; “cosy catastrophes”.
(Wyndham is pretty brilliant though)
@ binjabreel
Love that film. If I recall correctly, aren’t the Presidents wife and kids in New York at the time?
@binjabreel –
My husband grew up bouncing between homeless and “housing insecure” and then very poor but in subsidized housing.
His stance on camping: “I work hard all year just so I don’t have to live like that.”
He’ll get as far as setting up a tent in the back yard for the kids, but after that – nah, he’s good.