A four-week emergency food kit costs about two hundred dollars. It fits in a closet. The food lasts twenty years and the most popular items are the ones that taste like normal dinners, because the companies figured out early that nobody wants to spend a bad week eating protein powder.
My Patriot Supply, out of Idaho, doubled its online sales during the week of one inauguration compared to the same week four years earlier. In the three months before an election it ran triple its normal volume, working around the clock in shifts.
The customers were not who you would guess. The biggest jumps came from cities. Boston, St. Louis, Dallas. People who told the company the same thing over and over: if something happens, I am not going to be able to get to a grocery store.
That is worth holding onto, because it is not a fantasy about zombies. It is a specific worry about a specific building being closed on a specific bad day.
The numbers
About a third of Americans now believe the world will end during their lifetime.
The share of Americans spending money on emergency preparedness went from twenty percent in 2020 to twenty-nine percent in 2023, and the total came to somewhere around eleven billion dollars in a year. Sales of preserved food rose seven hundred percent between 2009 and 2014 and have not come back down.
The stereotype is a man on forty acres in Idaho. The data says otherwise. Roughly ninety percent of preppers live in metro areas. About forty percent of millennials and Gen Z now describe themselves as preppers, against twenty percent of Gen X and boomers, which means the fastest-growing group is young people in apartments.
They are not building bunkers. They are buying water filters and keeping a bag by the door.
It is not about him
Here is the part I have to be straight about, because the obvious story is the wrong one.
The obvious story is that people are stockpiling food because they are frightened of this administration. That story is not supported.
Research on apocalyptic belief finds that mood predicts it better than party or income does, and that political identity explains surprisingly little. The current wave includes evangelicals waiting on the Rapture, climate scientists who believe the tipping points are behind us, and AI researchers gaming out what happens when the machine stops taking instructions. Those groups agree on nothing else.
NBC interviewed a couple buying their second bunker. Both had voted for Trump. The wife said everything going on politically had motivated the purchase. Her husband said they were not worried about the Trump factor at all, they were worried about other people.
So it is not partisan and it is not new. What has changed is who is doing it and how ordinary it has become.
What they are actually reading
Now the part nobody says out loud.
They are not wrong.
Look at what has been taken apart in the last eighteen months, all of it public, all of it announced.
FEMA has lost about fourteen percent of its workforce and is sitting on a backlog of more than three hundred thousand projects across six hundred open disaster declarations. The dollar amount at which the Secretary has to personally approve a payment was dropped from twenty-five million to one hundred thousand, which jammed the agency's ability to move money at all. Sixteen major disaster requests were denied in a single year, roughly double the previous rate.
CISA, the agency that defends critical infrastructure, went from about 3,400 people to about 2,400. Five of its ten regional directors are serving in an acting capacity, and the regional director is the person a state calls when something is actively going wrong.
The program that provided free cybersecurity monitoring to eighteen thousand state and local governments, including the ones that run water systems, was defunded.
The Strategic National Stockpile was cut. So was BARDA, which develops vaccines and treatments for new diseases. The Hospital Preparedness Program was eliminated outright.
Five separate offices across four agencies that watched for foreign interference in elections were closed.
USAID, which the best available study credits with preventing roughly 91 million deaths over two decades, was abolished.
None of that was hidden. It was signed, announced, and reported.
The math is simple
If you are a person with a job and kids and no particular interest in politics, and you see that the disaster agency is short-staffed and denying requests, and the stockpile has been drawn down, and the people who monitor your town's water system lost their funding, what is the rational move?
You buy the water filter.
That is not doom. That is not fantasy. That is a correct reading of publicly available information by somebody who has correctly concluded that the cavalry is not coming, because the cavalry has been laid off and the announcement is on a government website.
The researchers who study this call it bunkerisation, and the useful part of the idea is that it is not really about bunkers. It is nanny cams and gated communities and private security and the generator in the garage. It is what happens when a country stops treating basic safety as something everyone gets and starts treating it as a product you buy for yourself, if you can afford it.
FEMA failing after a hurricane does not just leave people without help. It teaches everyone watching that help is not a thing that arrives.
The people who did it have the best ones
There is a class version of this and it is not subtle.
Mark Zuckerberg has been building a four-thousand-square-foot underground shelter at his compound in Hawaii. Sam Altman has talked openly about his own preparations. Peter Thiel bought into New Zealand. Kim Kardashian, Tom Cruise, and Shaquille O'Neal all have bunkers or safe rooms.
The men who built the systems that are currently frightening everybody have all bought doors.
That tells you something about what they expect and it tells you more about what they think they owe. Nobody in that group is lobbying to fund FEMA. They solved it for themselves, which is cheaper, faster, and available only to them.
The part that should actually worry you
Everything above is defensible. Buy the food kit. Fill the bathtub when the storm is coming. There is nothing wrong with any of it and I am not going to lecture anyone about a water filter.
Here is the problem.
A country where everybody has privately solved their own survival is a country that has already agreed collective survival is over.
Every household that buys its way out is a household that will not turn up to a town meeting about the water system, will not call a congressman about FEMA, will not vote on it, will not notice when the next agency goes. Why would they. They handled it.
And the demand is the only reason any of this capacity ever existed. Nobody built a national stockpile because it was profitable. It got built because enough people, after enough disasters, insisted that a country should be able to take care of its own people, and stayed loud about it long enough that somebody funded it.
Take away the insisting and the funding goes, and once the funding goes the argument for buying your own filter gets stronger, and the cycle closes.
That is what makes the whole thing so effective and so quiet. Nobody has to lose a vote. Nobody has to win an argument. The agencies get cut, people notice, people respond sensibly by taking care of themselves, and the constituency that would have fought for the agencies dissolves into eleven billion dollars a year of individual purchases.
So
A third of Americans think the end is coming in their lifetime, and the honest response to that is not to tell them they are being hysterical.
They looked at the record. The record says the government has been getting out of the business of protecting them, on purpose, on a schedule, in public.
They bought the filter.
The people who cut the agencies bought the bunker.
And the third group, the one that cannot afford either, is not in this story at all, because they are the ones the agencies existed for.
I don't want to live in the world that the people you listed as survivors of the apocalypse will be in charge. No thanks. I'll just pray I go quickly in the first blast. I'm not living as a slave to those fuckers.
Instead of waging illegal "wars"...confrontations, conflicts, etc. this country should be leading the charge to find and implement ways to counteract the effects of CLIMATE CHANGE, Instead of what appears Intent on Self-Destruction.
"Drill, baby drill"; space exploration - increasing number of rockets with their byproducts (carbon, etc.)-Cause and Effects. Not that exploration is a negative; only the UNCHECKED recklessness in the race to make profits.
I am no scholar and cannot pretend to have a vast knowledge of the sciences. However, it would seem that Mother Earth has provided enough resources for its inhabitants. The unmitigated and insatiable greed of those at the top of the heap would exploit these for their own benefit at the expense of the majority. There is a global plunder taking place, ie Iran (trmp is there only for THEIR oil) Greenland; Canada - even the shores of Albania!!!
The gutting of so many programs designed to aid and assist people during and in the aftermath of cataclysms, is what I have termed, "Stealth Genocide". No firing squads; no mass poisonings...just a denial of a human's basic needs.
And the "Bunker" ? A myopic survival-ensuring solution - which will last a nano second in the fullness of time. And then what ?
Climate change is real; it is the result of not respecting this "Third Rock From the Sun". If only the dubious powers-that-be could make a concerted effort for the benefit of ALL, because when the planet gasps its last breath they will understand that they have always been part of ALL OF US.