I originally wrote this back in October. How are you using your time?
There’s a common misconception in the Survivalist community. “I’ll retreat…get away from the major population centers…work to live off the grid…and let the urban hellholes rot.”
Well…about that.
Rural living is, for all intents and purposes, a better way to live. We’re more in tune with the natural world by and large, not in spite of it, and for the most part the lifestyle lends itself well to harder people used to doing without. And for people like me, there’s nothing that replaces the generations-deep connections to your homeland. The people there are your people- and in spite of differences, there is a deeply ingrained love of place. It is home.
Sounds good until the problems begin to bubble up. The first issue is questioning exactly how many in those rural areas are actually self-sufficient. That answer is probably few. And the rates of addiction and substance abuse is in turn shockingly high, correlated with the inevitable poverty rate. This was not by accident. The trailer-hood is a thing. Opioids were dumped on our population by Big Pharma, just as with the rise of decentralized meth manufacturing two decades earlier, and the crack epidemic which made its way into rural America just the same as the well-publicized urban epidemics during the 1990s. Home invasions and thefts are the norm.
No, not quite the retreat paradise the suburbanites had envisioned…is it?
Dusting off the old sociology coursework, I’d argue rather convincingly that this creates a populace primed for violent revolution. Decades of institutionalized poverty have created a primed pump. This in turn is a reality that one group on the Left whole-heartedly is attempting to exploit (albeit self defeated at times): Redneck Revolt.
Redneck Revolt is active in spaces in which white supremacist groups also often recruit, including country music concerts, flea markets, gun shows, NASCAR events, rodeos and state fairs. Chapters provide firearms and first aid training, food and clothing programs and community gardens and host needle exchanges, potlucks and educational events.
You may not think much of this crowd pictured, but the guy standing, centered, is a political science professor from UNC. He’s got an unlimited pool from which to recruit and influence. A strong place to be for a revolutionary leader.
Interesting bit there. While the Left is no stranger to infighting, at a possibly even worse level than their counterparts on the Right, Redneck Revolt admittedly is correct in focusing on rural areas as a vanguard for fomenting revolution. This is reflective of the strategy employed by Che Guevara’s opinion on the same from his work Guerrilla Warfare. They are seeking to exploit the social and economic realities for their benefit. While the gun community snobs look down on guys with inexpensive gear, cheap weapons and optics, and a general lack of cool-guy bravado, they wholly embrace it. Its a more effective recruiting model than belittling a guy to whom $20 may mean the difference between if his kids eat why he can’t afford a NightForce and BCM AR-15.
This image is of a self-described Antifa Guerrilla while fighting in Syria, equipped with both day and night optics. Think they haven’t brought that training back to the US?
This creates a serious potential in the rural areas. For all those I’ve personally heard claiming ‘that can’t happen here’, I argue that not only can a rural area be overrun quickly, but, without training and networking small isolated homesteads are easy pickings for a small team of determined attackers. With only one or two real trigger pullers in a home and little to no warning against a force that likely is well equipped with enablers such as night vision and thermal, you’d be easy pickings in the event that big balloon goes up.
So this begs the question as to mitigating this threat.
- Take every opportunity to get to know your neighbors and bring something of value to the table. Understand that if you’re an outsider to a rural place, you’ll be exactly that for years. Rural folks are slow to warm up to new people. Be quick and receptive to taking advice and rare to give it yourself.
- Take every opportunity to embrace the tradition of a place. The Left abhors tradition and the authority inherent in it. They exist to destroy it, viewing it only as an oppressive force maintaining status and social domination. Celebrate traditions and be a fixture in Church.
- Stop saying ‘it can’t happen here.’ It absolutely can, and likely will, post-election. A normalcy bias exists, especially among rural areas and so-called retreatists, that they’re somehow exempted from all this. You’re not. The Left has been laying the groundwork for their revolution for well over 100 years and despite a few setbacks, plan to steamroll ahead.
- Build an off-grid communications network. This is invaluable for early warning and critical for rural defense. Reliance on phone networks is problematic for a lot of reasons but central to that is its inherent fragility. I’ve been re-running old American Partisan communications articles on Brushbeater to refresh that knowledge, but nothing replaces training. Get some.
- Get Training. This is the urgent one. Whether its from a course I’m running, or one of the many run by fellow American Partisan contributors and trainers such as Sam Culper or JC Dodge, you owe it to yourself to learn from those that have the real-world bona-fides in their specific areas of interest. In fact, JC Dodge has a course coming up just after the election- go train with him.
The next seven days in America will tell us much about the shaping of our future as a nation, but the days after it will tell us much more. The Left sees an opportunity, and while many on the Right have completely written off the threat posed to rural areas by Redneck Revolt, I contend, with a substantial amount of history to back it up, that for rural areas the threat may very well be the highest.
Be a hard target.
This is an excellent article with many takeaways. An early point is that many rural folk are poors, and with that will come desperation.
A good and valid perspective. Hard to argue with it.
Nobody is really safe if it gets that salty. Anybody who denies the possibility or eschews the threat is sitting in a front tie seat at the natural selection Olympic Games.
Appreciate ya.
Asking yourself how will I know and what will I do next aren’t bad questions. How soon to bring in/up your own comrades and set the watch is also important.
Rural folk aren’t safe just by location – look to Rhodesia, S. Africa, etc. and the situation with the farmers over there.
Very interesting and almost inevitable.
If you are to believe history this like most everything is cyclical.
The left can only push so hard so as not cross the threshold.
Patience is their greatest asset.
The old adage on how to boil a frog comes to mind.
I would only hope to live long enough to witness and be a part of the revolution, but as a 4 score plus “seasoned”
citizen i doubt i will be here in body to participate.
I can only pray for the children who are being manipulated by the likes of Joseph Goebbels.
The left in our great nation are a much more devious gang than the nazi party could ever hoped to be!
Again, we can pray to our God who is in control and does not make mistakes.
One way into the rural community is to be useful, and helpful. Helping some guy fix his tractor, get his beat up jalopy running again, leads to acceptance. Being able to mount a scope, or teach someone safe weapons usage, opens other doors. Teaching basic off grid communications, allows the farmer to keep in touch with his kids, working the fields a hundred acres away. As the communist democrats pump rural areas full of the gimme free stuff gangs in section 8 housing, first perpetrated by building prisons in all nice towns, demographics change. Once out of prison, the democrat criminals move right back to their original infested hood, but they leave their welfare supported families behind in the rural, section 8 welfare housing. Further social jetsam, and flotsam is generated by putting a communist led university, or community college, in rural locations. Interesting in that- in every small town community college ville I’ve ever been in, the college educational staff never helps anyone in the community with anything! All of them rely on community members for every day living assistance. They can’t even change their own oil! If you ask them where they are from, the educational staff is always from far away liberal out house location. They stay to themselves, demand communist big city change, where it doesn’t fit, and teach kids to demand free stuff, without ever teaching responsibility. If you read the comments section of any we the peopleville news paper, you will always find communist democrat educators mouthing off, spinning the truth, and generating communist diatribe to the section 8 housing, gimme free stuff crowds. The rural drug problems didn’t just happen! The kids are actively taught about drugs starting at about age 12. The difference between a drug awareness DARE program, taught by law enforcement, and taught by educational staff is that LE teaches drugs-bad because. While educational staff teaches drugs-bad because they make you FEEL good, happy, bullet proof, make you money, give you power and friends. So naturally, under communist democrat corruption, LE management stopped having their narcs teach drug awareness. End result- drug legalization for political power and financial benefit. We have a long road to hoe, to bring this Republic back!
Using my time? * got an ID Enhanced CCW cert – covers 39 states, to VA’s 25 * scored a CZ Scorpion (9mm carbine from Czech republic); buying suppressor (BATFE clock started 20 Nov; runs ~6 months) & 165gr bullets (sub-sonic Vm so 10-15 dB quieter than 115gr) & did initial firing; will buy red-dot soon * upgraded glass on 6.5G from 3-9x to 6-24x (coming in mail this week from Natchez); scored 400 rounds, before the panic-buy even started * put lights on the nocks of 5 of my crossbow bolts, and hunting tips on 3 of them (it’s a 150# reverse-draw, with telescopic sight – 400 ft/sec Vrelease and half a century, so at 4+ years in, I’m very much “new kid on the block”. But I’m taking to heart your advice: listen a lot, speak but little. Seems to be working. I don’t know yet who the neighborhood organizers would be, came to a kerfluffel. That’s next.
And I live just out of town (10,000 in town, 20,000 including outlying neighborhoods like mine – the majority with Piedmont outlook on life), and everyone on the street has 1-3 acres (I have 1). I see no imperative to go further rural than I am – it’s “bug-in”. I’ve set up for gardening (have 4 honeybee colonies), and so far have not harvested any wildlife: 4 black bear, >15 white-tail, 18 hen turkeys (I’ve seen only a single tom – but then, they work alone) and assorted red foxes, coyotes, raccoons & opossums run free in the neighborhood/woods. We’re in John Mosby country.
As to the opioid tsunami rurally, I didn’t know – and I’m appalled. At 77.5 years old, I’ve never taken so much as a dose. Never drunk, never smoked. If I don’t die with boots on, I have the genes to live past 100.
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I like the article, very thought provoking.
I like to view these things like prophecy in the Bible, no one knows what will happen and how prophecy will be fullfilled until it happens.
Everyone has their idea. Like a horse race, everyone has their pick, we will see who wins.
This idea is one horse.
I think it has a few problems.
1. The lefts superiority complex. They view themselves as educated, and elite. They have trouble accepting other views and alienate themselves very easy with rural population. For instance let them bring up social justice, BLM, ANTIFA, Gay marriage, abortion, anti-religion, climate change any number of things and boom they are done. As much poverty and drugs have flooded rural areas religion is still strong.
I understand the left wants to use it’s useful idiots but I hesitate to believe they will get them in the country.
I think they will and have shown a much easier time harvesting their useful idiots in college and urban populations with poverty, drugs and educated areas.
The crap in Portland hasn’t been able to expand to the rural areas. It is stalled in the city, same thing with Californias problems, Denver, Austin and St. Louis. When the riots happened a few years ago they all stayed inside the loop. They would not leave it.
There was an “ANTIFA” march here in rural Missouri a few months ago. There were about 10 people. About 30 rednecks in junky lifted trucks showed up in cut off camo shirts and overalls I shit you not and ran them off through intimidation. I was not there but I saw the pictures and read the news stories.
My horse in this race is the cities fall and roving bands of gangs from the cities slowing spread out further and further into rural areas pillaging food, crops and supplies. Which is just as scary as what you described. The advantage is it will start in the cities and those in rural areas will be affected slowly and the supplies in and around the cities is gone first.
Just my opinion. We do need to prepare for all possibilities and be as adaptable as possible.
Tradarcher