The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Friday, February 21, 2025

Notably: Over the last few years The New Yorker and a few other publications have nervously reported about the rise of the “survivalist” movement: “Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich” was one such piece in 2017, “What Drives Doomsday Preppers” in 2018: “Most people are not prepared for disasters. A lot of people like to think they are, and there’s so much to prepping. It’s not just having food, it’s having a mindset. You have to realize that people are not gonna come take care of you. You really have to be able to take care of yourself. After the apocalypse, most of the people you love are gone, most of your friends are gone, everything you love to eat are gone. It’s like the beginning of mankind all over again.” The question is, why are you the one still around? In August the magazine had “Real-Estate Shopping for the Apocalypse,” and this summary: “Thirty-nine percent of Americans believe that we’re living in end times, and the market for underground hideouts is heating up.” And more recently–published the day before the election–“The Americans Prepping for a Second Civil War.” Charles Bethea reports:  “According to an analysis of FEMA data, some twenty million Americans are actively preparing for cataclysm—roughly twice as many as in 2017. Political violence, including the spectre of civil war, is one of the reasons. A recent study conducted by researchers at U.C. Davis concluded that one in three adults in the U.S., including up to half of Republicans, feel that violence is “usually or always justified” to advance certain political objectives (say, returning Trump to the White House). In May, Ray Dalio, the billionaire founder of Bridgewater Associates, one of the world’s largest hedge funds, told the Financial Times that he believed there was about a thirty-five-per-cent chance of civil war breaking out in America. “We are now on the brink,” Dalio said, noting that a modern civil war—though it might not involve muskets—would see the fracturing of states and widespread defiance of federal law.” Every time I wade through one of these pieces two thoughts recur: the survivalists are close cousins of the Civil War reenactors who seemed to have peaked in the slightly more peaceful but no less militia-rich 1990s, when they were looking for some way to validate their apocalyptic lusts. Also, and more obviously, the eagerness for an apocalypse. These survivalists want the country to fall apart. They want to go from prepping to doing, from reenactment to stars of the show. They’re like the clueless wannabe heroes who wear camouflage and camouflage their language in brawny vocabulary as they wait for the Revelation to go into action, never knowing that whatever apocalypse may strike, if it ever does, will be nothing like they imagine, or at least more Cormac McCarthy than Dalio. Nor does it seem to occur to them that the brink is of their own making. It’s not what they’re preparing for. It’s what they want. 

—P.T.