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.