It is the final backup plan for a lot of us in the case of a disaster. A generous supply of cold hard cash to buy our way out of trouble, pick up as many last-minute supplies as possible or to acquire resources that are unavailable to anyone with a credit card in a world where the electricity is out and the internet is down. We frequently talk about having cash for emergencies, but how much cash should you have if the grid goes down? What will you be able to purchase with your doomsday supply and how long would it last in the first place?
One of our readers made a recommendation the other day to have between $500 and $1000 in cash for your bug out bag and at the time it prompted me to consider again if this amount makes sense. In my personal preparedness plans I have a supply of cash but I am always trying to figure out if what I have is enough or too much. Will it even matter when TEOTWAWKI comes and how can I best use the cash I have to survive?
IMPORTANT BELOW:
During a SHTF situation, pain could become an annoyance for some, but unbearable for others.
If doctors are scarce and medicine becomes even scarcer, this one little weed, found all over North America and similar to morphine, could be a saving grace.
Why do you need to have cash on hand?
You want to know the time when you will need cash the most? It will be when you can’t get to it. How many of you right now have no cash at all in your wallets or purses? I used to be the same way. I never had cash and relied on the ready availability of cash machines or most often the ability to pay for virtually everything with a debit card. How convenient is it to never have to make change or worry if you have enough cash when with the swipe of a card your bank account funds are at your disposal. This is a great technological advance, but the problem is that this requires two things to be functioning. First, the card readers and ATM machines require electricity. If the electricity is out, neither of these two machines works. The second thing is a network connection. If the network is down, even with electricity the transaction won’t work and you can’t pay for goods or get cash from your bank.
In a disaster, one of the first casualties is electricity. This doesn’t have to be due to some cosmic solar flare that has rendered the grid useless, it could be as destructive and common as a fire, flood, earthquake, tornado or winter storm. It could also be from simple vandalism or perhaps terrorism. A major fiber optic cable was cut in Arizona back in February leaving businesses without the ability to accept payments. When the electricity is out, you aren’t going to be able to access your cash via the normal means so having a supply on hand is going to be a huge advantage for you in the right circumstances.
Even if there is no natural disaster, you are still at the mercy of your bank. What if your bank closes or there is a bank holiday declared because of some economic crisis. In any of these situations, if you are dependent on access to money that is controlled by either technology or physical limitations like a bank office it is wise to have a backup plan should either of those two conditions prevent you from getting cash.
What is cash good for in a crisis?
I think there are two levels to consider when it comes to keeping cash on hand. There is the bug out scenario mentioned above where you would have some “walking around money” to take care of relatively minor needs like food, a hotel or gas. The second is for a longer or more widespread unavailability of funds. Let’s say the economy tanks and the price of everything skyrockets but stores are still open for business. Your bank is one of the casualties, but you had a few thousand dollars of cash stored away that you could use to purchase food, gas and necessary preparedness items for your family. In this scenario, the government is still backing the fiat currency and vendors are still accepting it as a form of payment. For this scenario having a few thousand dollars makes sense.
But what if we have an extreme event where the currency is devalued and is essentially worthless? Your thousands of dollars might only buy you a loaf of bread. Don’t believe it can happen? It did to the Weimar Republic after WWI so it can happen again. That isn’t to say it will, but you should balance how much money you have squirreled away under your mattress with supplies you can purchase now that will last and keep you alive during that same event. My goal is to make sure I have the basics I need to survive at home for several months to a year without needing to spend any cash. This way, if the money is worthless, I still have what my family needs to survive.
If we have a regional disaster where you can bug out to a safer location, your cash should serve you well. Of course if you are in a safer location, assuming electricity was working your access to bank funds should still be working. If this is truly the end of the world as we know it, how long will that cash you have be worth anything?
It is surprisingly simple to disrupt all credit and debit transactions. Do you have cash instead?
How much cash do you need?
So the million dollar question is how much cash should you have if the grid goes down? I always try to plan for the worst case scenario. My rationale is that if I am prepared for the end of the world as we know it, I should be just as prepared for any lesser disaster or crisis I may be faced with. The way I see it is if we do have a disaster, you aren’t going to be using that cash most likely to pay your mortgage, student loans, rent, or your credit card bills. Cash will go to life saving supplies and this will need to be used in the earliest hours of any crisis before all of the goods are gone or the cash is worthless. Once people realize for example that the government has been temporarily destroyed, they aren’t going to want to take your $500 for a tank of gas. They are going to want guns, food or bullets.
I also don’t see you using your cash to buy passage to another country, but that’s just me. I know there is a historical precedent for that, but I am not planning on that being something I realistically attempt with my family. I am also not planning on bribing any officials with cash either. My cash is for last-minute necessities and then it is back into the hopefully safe confines of my home to plan the next steps. For that I have only a couple of thousand dollars in cash stored away. I figure if I need more than that I didn’t plan well. Also, I would rather spend my money on supplies like long-term storable food and equipment than having a large horde of cash. With that amount, I figure I can make one last run if needed or be able to weather any short-term emergency when I can’t access cash.
What is the best place to hide cash in your home?
I wrote a post awhile back titled, How to hide your money where the bankers won’t find it that had lots of good ideas for reasonably safe places you could store cash. As I said in that article, you do have risks involved with keeping cash in your house, but I think you have just the same, if not worse risks relying on banks to keep your money safe and give it back when you want it. There are a million places to hide cash, but you can get tricky and buy a fake shaving cream safe to store several hundred dollars in there. Just be careful you don’t throw that away. There are other options like wall clocks with a hidden compartment inside that might be less prone to getting tossed in the trash. Your imagination is really all that is needed for a good hiding place, but I would caution you that you don’t store cash in too many places or you could forget where you hid it. This happened to me when I had hidden some cash behind an item that I ended up giving to my daughter because I thought I didn’t need it anymore. Imagine my surprise when she came into the living room and said, “Dad, I found an envelope with a lot of money in it”. I gave her a twenty for a reward…
What about you? How much cash do you think you need to have on hand and what do you plan on spending it on if the grid goes down?
The forces are mounting that will eventually overwhelm most Americans and send their standard of living to unknown depths. Americans that have only known the post WWII prosperity are ill equipped and educated to deal with depression level living. Easy credit and instant gratification have created a nation of whining, self absorbed, entitlement minded people with no moral or mental toughness.
Doug Casey believes we are headed for what he calls a super depression created by the ending of a debt super cycle. The bigger the debt cycle the bigger the depression that follows. That’s how reality works and most people are not prepared for reality.
When this depression, which has already started, gets momentum, it will overwhelm the plans of a society that is expecting to get things like social security, pensions and payouts from retirement plans they have paid into for many years. All of those things will disappear almost overnight and leave society gasping and stupefied over what to do. Their reactions will be to yell and scream and try to identify who to blame but the only person they should blame is the one in the mirror.
Many very smart people have raised the alarm and done their best to warn the sleeping public, but those slumbering masses have ignored the warnings and hit the snooze button one more time. The masses do not understand economics, do not want to understand economics and they will pay dearly for that ignorance in the coming days.
When the real unemployment rate becomes common knowledge as it increases substantially, people will be left to survive on what resources they have saved up outside the banking system that cannot be stolen by the politicians and bankers. That is a key point here. The assets you have outside the system that cannot be stolen from you with a few key strokes on some computer.
Those hoping for some miraculous event that will send the U.S. back to the days of manufacturing might and jobs for all will never see it happen. Those days are gone. The west line theory tells us our economy will slow down and become more modest as the shipping center of the world moves west to the next powerhouse region which is Asia. This is what history teaches us.
When people suddenly wake up one morning and they have no job, their retirement is gone and they need to care for their family, what will they do? When government services have collapsed and they suddenly realize they are now living in a third world country with few government services, what will they do? When the banks are closed and only a select few connected people have any type of money or access to goods, what will they do?
This is the reality that many people will face in the future and they have no idea how bad it can get. They refuse to contemplate the harsh reality they will be living in and take steps to mitigate the effects. To do so would be to acknowledge it could happen and they are taking personal responsibility. Personal responsibility is a dirty phrase in today’s entitlement society. To see some of the effects one only has to look at the collapse of society in Venezuela today to see what awaits.
When it happens it will all fall back to you to take responsibility for your family and take care of them for the duration. To do that you need to plan now for that eventuality and build up the resources you will need to provide food, shelter, clothing and security when the system fails to do it for you. You need to be Noah on his ark not the people watching as he floated away.
Having resources stored up is a must but it may not get you all the way through if the situation lasts for many years. That is why you need some type of plan to replace those resources as time goes by and have some way to generate some type of income or at least items to trade. Usable goods are for the short term and things like gold ,silver and production equipment are for the long term to help you get through the crisis with the least amount of pain.
Even with proper planning the days ahead will not be easy as the standard of living of society will fall substantially to levels only seen in failed third world countries or old pictures. The assets actually owned by people today is very small compared to how they live. They will default on their home loan, their car loan, and their credit card debt leaving them with very few real possessions and few ways to move what they have left even if they have some place to go. Ultimately these people will become the new serfs to the wealthy class that will take possession of anything of value. Feudalism will once again rule.
The lack of planning by society will make this a reality if it is allowed. What will you do when everything you have worked a lifetime for is suddenly taken away? Do you have a plan to keep what you have? Do you have a plan to make money when you cannot find a job? Do you have a way to take care of your family until things stabilize? Do you have a home you will not lose if the whole system breaks down? What will you do if electricity or fuel is too expensive to buy or not available to the general population? These are the questions you should be asking yourself now and you better have a good answer because your family will be asking them when the greater depression sets in.
So the old adage goes anyway, and for the prepper – the one who’s keeping abreast of current events – cash is one of the last man-made means of protection that he or she has against governments that have grown to a degree of power that they never had before.
The Dangers of a Cashless Society
There are two predominant dangers that come with a cashless society, and just about every negative that you can think of due to such will fall into one of these two groups:
Denial of purchasing power
A complete loss of anonymity
Denial of Purchasing Power
A cashless society is a controlled society. If everything must go through an online banking or credit card process, then you have just lost virtually all control over what you buy.
Anything that is not politically sanctioned(guns, ammo, body armor, helmets, particular books, particular website premium subscriptions, political donations, etc.) could very easily be vaporized overnight.
This, of course, would drive the makers and holders of such products into a black market to barter their goods, and this in turn would be responded to by the use of overwhelming government force. This will come in the form of Stryker vehicles, concussion grenades, snipers, and men with automatic rifles and body armor.
Don’t believe me? Read FA Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. Totalitarian governments must resort to force simply for the sole reason that people will naturally refuse to comply with widespread theft of their own goods. This force will only continue to grow in its usage.
Totalitarians do not accept blame for their own economical failures. The state is the end of all things to them, and as such, the end justifies the means – no matter how terrifying such a means may be.
IMPORTANT BELOW:
During a SHTF situation, pain could become an annoyance for some, but unbearable for others.
If doctors are scarce and medicine becomes even scarcer, this one little weed, found all over North America and similar to morphine, could be a saving grace.
A Complete Loss of Anonymity
Once cash is abolished everywhere, your attempts at any form of anonymity will be destroyed.
You already have an amazing amount of data that has been collected from you from your Internet search history, GPS data, voting history, bank statements, credit card statements, phone data, and a host of other publicly available information that easily allows people to deduce information from you.
And where humans fail, algorithms thrive. I have a hobby interest in algorithm creation (particularly multiple linear regression analysis) and have used it within my healthcare job as a means of predicting patient attendance rather accurately on any given day. I’ve also used them to (somewhat less accurately) predict when a patient was going to have episodes of heart block.
Algorithms are a powerful tool, and the more data you feed them, the stronger they get. With the amount of data that has been collected on you already, the government may be able to make a much stronger prediction about who you are, what you believe, and what you possess than you would’ve ever thought possible.
Just think about what a cashless society would mean for the following purchases:
Medicine – The government can now invade your medical privacy to see what meds you need to live as well as know what could either improve or hamper your condition. For those who don’t believe that this is a concern, just keep in mind that it wasn’t that long ago that the US military was warning its soldiers against getting genetic testing to determine their family tree. Why? Because it was deemed to be a security risk. What do they know here that we don’t?
Food – Algorithms can easily predict when you are buying much more than what you could eat within a particular span of time. This then means that food stores can be predicted and located. Come disaster time, your house could easily be one of the first that is targeted for “hoarding”. And what happens if it’s determined that those with large food stores are likely to be “domestic terrorists”?
Firearms and Body Armor – This is the low-hanging fruit here. Weapons, ammunition, body armor – they could all be easily tracked (and later confiscated). Buying “too much” of one particular product may cause red flags to be attached to your file, and you could very easily end up with a visit from an alphabet agency full of men carrying what is now a felony for you to own.
Ham Radios – There already seems to be an attack against ham radio users as the government has realized that this is the route that many fearing censorship/silencing are turning toward. If you can shut down all communication other than what is government sanctioned, you have effectively silenced free speech.
Media – Do you like to watch documentaries that may be labeled as conspiracy theories? Is it that hard to imagine a “misinformation tax” to discourage Americans from imbibing in certain forms of media? Why not? We’ve already seen the “death by a thousand cuts” approach being used with firearms so that the argument can be made that “no, you can have a gun, but you just have to fill out these fifty forms, pay a $4000 fee, and have a license. See? There’s no infringement whatsoever.”
To think that the same idea couldn’t be applied to the news commentators that you like to listen to is naive.
Here are some arguments that will be used for a cashless society:
Physical Money Shortages
Throughout 2020 we were told that there was a coin shortage throughout the U.S.
As a result, retailers either quit giving coin change back or strongly discouraged customers from asking for it.
Kroger actually resorted to either giving you back your money in the form of credit vouchers (to that particular store of course) or by donating the change that they owed you to charity.
Control Over Dangerous and Illegal Purchases
In what can only be viewed as an incredibly ironic wordsmithing, we will be told that one of the benefits to a cashless society is that we can finally rein in purchases that are deemed by the government to be dangerous to the public.
Guns, ammunition, freedom-oriented books (“radical terrorist recruiting material”), and the like will be argued against so that we can keep our society safe. Notice that there is always an emphasis on safety throughout this entire process.
A Fomite of Disease
Once again, 2020 set the stage here. Cash purchases plummeted worldwide, with credit cards filling in the void as people began to avoid any and all cash purchases with the hopes of not getting themselves sick.
This was a talking point spouted throughout the mainstream media in 2020 and will continue to be used in the future as the push for the abolition of cash continues.
Cost of Creation Outweighs the Actual Value of Money
We see this already with the US penny. It actually costs 2.41₵ to produce a single penny.
While our government currently has no problem with making fiscally irresponsible decisions, when it finally does come around to deciding that “you know what, pennies aren’t worth it” – or any other form of cash for that matter – there will be nobody that will argue against them.
This decision will be portrayed as a means of reducing wasteful spending, and anyone who argues against this given reasoning for the abolition of cash will be labeled as an idiot who can’t do proper math.
We don’t often hear this argument being made currently, but it is out there.
The argument goes that if you’re mugged while you’re carrying $300 in cash, you simply lose all of your money.
However, if you’re mugged and all you have on you is your credit card, then you can quickly call the credit card company, cancel your card, and be reimbursed for any disputed charges that were made in the interim.
What Can We Do to Fight This Process?
While I do believe that a cashless society is inevitable, I do think that there are things we can do to fight against it and to slow it down.
Here is what we can do as freedom and privacy-loving Americans.
#1. You Need to Make Friends with Like-Minded People Now
I used to always blow off this idea. It wasn’t until I began talking with Forest of Prepper Net that I began to see the light on this issue. If you don’t have like-minded friends, you’re going to be up a creek without a paddle when a cashless society hits.
You need to know who has what skills, who has what goods, who can get what, and where their sympathies lie. Perhaps this is more of a cashless society survival skill, but nevertheless, refusal to comply is still a means of fighting against a cashless society.
And this isn’t just refusal to comply based on principal. This is refusal to comply because to do otherwise would mean certain death. When you’re not allowed into a store to buy food and other necessary goods for your family because you refuse to use Fedcoins for purchase or refuse to show a vaccination card you better be dang sure that you have some alternate means of getting what you need to live.
History has proven such. Read the diary of Anne Frank. Had Otto Frank (her father) not had connections with like-minded (this is key) people throughout his neighborhood well prior to his going into hiding with his family, they would’ve died well before the Nazis came and took them away.
Listen to what Good Patriot out of Texas has to say in her Fighting Back videos on Telegram. She’s echoing this same thought process. You need to make groupings of people who can work together to combat this evil.
#2. Develop Some Means of Production
Both Ayn Rand and Adam Smith harped on the fact that production is what equals true wealth. Whether it’s learning how to raise livestock, how to work with leather, how to tan hides, you need to learn some means of production so that you can still produce wealth when cash is taken from you.
You still have to eat. You still have to put bread on the table. And there are going to be others out there who have principles and love logic who will be of the same mind as you. They are going to want to trade for supplies. Barter will come back in full force. You’ll need to have some means of producing something of value so that you can get what you need.
#3. Invest in Precious Metals
Robert Kiyosaki harps upon this in his new book, Fake, the reason being, that precious metals have intrinsic value. They’ve been used as a form of money for roughly 6,000 years now, and they’re not going to stop being a store of value anytime soon. Within a barter society, this may be one of your best stores of wealth.
On top of this, over 40% of the US dollar supply has been printed within the past year alone. Every other economist you see is screaming about the signs of inflation. The U.S. dollar is about to collapse. There is no longer any denying it. Inflation has already risen drastically and will only continue to grow worse. You need to begin doing something to protect your wealth from inflation.
Precious metals are part of the solution.
#4. Start Using Masked Payments
If you don’t have one already, you need to set up a Privacy.com account. This is a form of masked debit card that will help to keep your purchases anonymous. Yes, this is a form of cashless payment, but it is still a way to fight against such a monster.
Provided that money is flowing out of your account but nobody can tell who you just bought from or what you bought, you’ll be much safer in your transaction privacy.
#5. Refuse to Cater to Businesses that Don’t Permit Cash Transactions
If you tug on their purse strings, they eventually change their mind. I’m sorry, but when good compromises with evil, evil wins. Do what you can to avoid these businesses like the plague, and then let them know why you’re avoiding them.
I used to carry around business cards detailing why I wouldn’t support businesses with ‘’no gun’’ stickers on the front doors. I’ve since ran out. I think that such a business card for businesses that don’t permit cash transactions would be an easy way to voice one’s displeasure as well.
Here’s a sample card template:
“I consider your refusal to accept cash as un-American, a forced invasion of my privacy, and a totalitarian tool. As such, I will cease from doing any business with you for the near future and will be spending my money at your competitors instead.”
This is similar to the language that I used within my Second Amendment business cards. I bought them easily off of Vistaprint (around 500 for $20 or so) and considered the money worth every penny.
#6. Learn How to Grow Your Own Food
There’s already a movement afoot within the U.S. to keep certain types of people out of grocery stores. Vaccination papers are beginning to be asked for before one gains access to certain venues or hotel chains. It won’t be long until cashless payments are the only means of accessing even groceries.
Because of this, I highly recommend that you learn how to grow most of your own food, and begin learning now. Gardening has quite a learning curve and is nowhere near as easy as Michael Bloomberg would have you believe. You need to ensure that your family can eat, and gardening is a great part of that process.
Final Thoughts
A cashless society truly is a scary world. Picture everything that you’ve read about in history books within other totalitarian regimes, and you’ll get a taste of what is to come. I implore you to do something now to protect yourself against the rolling stone that is coming down the mountain right for you.
If you follow the above advice, you’ll help to ease the blow. And there’s no doubt about it – it will be a smack in the face. But we can’t just sit back and do nothing as privacy dies a quiet death inside what was once the freest nation on Earth.
If you’ve found other ways to combat a cashless society that we did not cover within this article, by all means, please let us and others know within the comments. This is about helping our fellow man, and as much input is needed as possible.
The late afternoon light is shining through your window and the scene outside is quiet, just the way you like it. You are about a month into a serious collapse and thus far your preps have held up. Power has been out for 2 weeks; you don’t plan on ever having power again. You prepared for that.
As the sun sinks closer to the horizon you hear one of the most terrifying sounds of all: A knock on the door!
Your family finds their places and weapons, you leave from the backdoor and flank whoever might be on your porch. To your surprise it is your cousin! You haven’t seen him in years, but he is here. He looks rough and he has his disheveled family of three along with him. He also doesn’t seem to have any food or supplies with him.
This is one of the prepper scenarios we all have thought about. However, it might not be as bad as you think!
People Are Power
So, what do you do when someone unexpected comes knocking? Now, that is an interesting word to use in conjunction with preppers. UNEXPECTED. The whole point of prepping is to consider the unexpected.
In a true SHTF situation people bring you power. Your community should be like a hive. Hardly worth the trouble of any small group that might wish to steal or worse. You must be able to sustain them or have them sustain themselves but there will be tremendous power in numbers. Big jobs become easier, you can make an area more secure with more people, and you have more brains to put towards a problem.
Of course, its not heaven. With people come people issues like fights, jealousy, and the like. However, good leadership and preparedness can give you the upper hand on things like that.
Today I’d like to share with you a “3-second survival hack” you can use to skyrocket your chances of protecting your loved ones during ANY crisis.
You must first make an honest list of “survival dependents” or people who will come to depend on you when everything goes to hell!
Trust me, your list is bigger than you think.
Survival Dependents
While it is nice to imagine that the calamity will never cross your threshold, the reality is that many more people depend on you than you think. Chances are, even if people don’t know you’re a prepper, you are the type of person who has it together. You are likely the person people go to for answers.
No matter how strong your OPSEC protocols are if you are a good and solid person, than people will look to you in times of crisis. These might be people you love or just people you know.
Now is the time to sit down and create a real list. You must take off the blinders and truly consider all the people who will depend on you in an SHTF situation. It would be perfect if your list consisted of 4 people but when you break it down you have groups of people to consider.
Immediate Family
Extended Family
Friends
Co Workers
Your group of survival dependents could include people from each of these categories. How they depend on you may vary but this list will help you understand that there are more people than just your immediate family who will turn to you in times of calamity.
Of course, the question that comes to mind after you create a list like this is: Do I have enough?
For most people, the answer is no. It can be over burdensome to assume that you can prep for all the people who might be on your list of survival dependents. When these people show up asking for food, though, you need to have something!
Unless you subscribe to the idea that you are going to turn everyone away who comes to your door. If that is your game plan than you better also prepare for some serious backlash. How many fathers with kids can you turn away before one of them says, “No, we are coming in.”
What happens next cannot be good, with lots of harmful outcomes.
This doesn’t mean you should be a pushover and let any old person into your home and feed them.
Tip: When people approach you to ask for something, if they come to your door or see you outside, simply ask them for something first! Open the door and ask for food and medicine: “Oh, I hope you brought some food, we haven’t eaten in a week!”
Put Them to Work Immediately
From that list of survival dependents, you will likely choose people who you will bring into the fold. However, don’t let them in free of charge. The best way to handle someone who comes asking for help is to immediately give them some form of work to be done.
This is also a great gauge of the depth of that person. Those who are outraged by the work that needs to be done at “their new home” are people that you can easily weed out. Just make it truly clear up front that there is plenty to do and if they cannot do what is asked, they cannot stay.
By the way, there will be plenty to do! If you manage a household of four and all the sudden it jumps to ten you will have lots of extra work. It is not so much about room but about dishes, laundry, food production, security detail in the neighborhood, general cleaning.
In an off-grid situation, it might be about things like water procurement and sanitizing, renewable energy system maintenance, gardening, canning and everything in between.
There will be a serious list of chores to be done and the last thing you want is a house full of freeloaders laying around all day while you are red in the face.
Using a basic Excel spreadsheet, you will be able to create chore lists TODAY for issues that might come tomorrow. Print a stack of them and save them. They can be filled out by hand when the time comes or if you know the system you could print them with the duties listed.
It’s high time we stop looking at neighbors and friends as threats in the downfall. Many people can see something resembling collapse just on the horizon. Its hard not to look around and wonder how the unprepared will react to a future of scarcity, uncertainty, with up close and personal violence.
If America is facing balkanization or civil war it will be particularly important that you have a secure neighborhood with plenty of able-bodied individuals. Many neighbors will leave for a safer environment and you must be aware of that. However, that might free up homes and living areas for more of your survival dependents.
Your survival dependents are not the burden you once thought. Believe me. While you know the flaws of the people around you, they have two ears, two eyes and a heart that wants to survive. If you can find it in you to lead these people they will provide you with a true survival group that will keep you and yours from being acted upon by anyone with a group larger and better trained than you and your spouse!
Is the USA going to collapse? Nobody can say. There are a few things that could cause a collapse, but who knows if any of them will?
What we can be sure of, though, is that if a crisis comes it won’t affect the whole country equally.
If one of the doomsday scenarios preppers fear happens, even if it’s a national event the effects will hit some places sooner, and harder, than others.
Some states will collapse almost immediately, and things there could get very bad, very quickly. Other states will hold up better, and even if they do completely collapse the process will be slower, giving people time to prepare, adapt and survive.
If you want to maximize your chances of making it through a crisis you need to know what states to avoid. Here are the top five:
California This one probably won’t surprise anyone. California is famously vulnerable to natural disasters – earthquakes and wildfires are common, and huge parts of the state are vulnerable to tsunamis as well – but that’s only half the problem. California has some other massive vulnerabilities, too.
For a start, it’s densely populated. Compared to the likes of New Jersey or Rhode Island it isn’t that densely populated – it ranks 17th in the nation – but a combination of relatively high density and very high population makes it very vulnerable.
California’s big cities are incredibly reliant on supplies from outside. San Diego and Los Angeles bring in up to 90% of their water from Northern California; if the infrastructure that carries that water breaks down (and it isn’t in any better shape than the rest of our infrastructure) the cities will collapse into chaos within days.
San Francisco is a lot smaller and has a cooler, wetter climate, but it isn’t in the clear either. Over 85% of the Bay Area’s water comes from the Hetch Hetchy Valley in the Yosemite National Park, 150 miles to the east, and if that stops flowing San Francisco will be just as screwed as the big cities.
California isn’t helped by the fact it’s such an obvious target for attackers.
The First States That Will Go Down In A Collapse. Do You Live In The Red Zone? Silicon Valley and the San Francisco area is the center of the global tech industry; an EMP attack on California is a quick and easy way to devastate the US economy – but it would also cause a rapid and massive collapse as the bankrupt state’s crumbling infrastructure simply broke under the impact.
Florida Florida’s politics might be different to California’s, but unfortunately, its vulnerability to collapse is similar.
It also suffers a lot of natural disasters – hurricanes, this time – and it’s also densely populated. In fact, Florida’s people are packed in a lot more densely than California’s, although that’s balanced by the fact there aren’t as many of them.
Like California, Florida is highly urbanized – about 92% of Floridians live in an urban area. That makes them very dependent on outside supplies that probably won’t come in a crisis, and as the old saying goes, civilization is never more than three missed meals from anarchy.
If disaster hits, life in Florida is going to get ugly in a hurry.
The First States That Will Go Down In A Collapse. Do You Live In The Red Zone? Alaska You’re probably wondering what Alaska is doing on the list. After all, it’s about as unlike highly urbanized California as you can get.
Alaskans are self-sufficient, many of them hunt and they don’t rely on vulnerable infrastructure for such basic necessities as water.
Unfortunately, Alaska does rely on imports of some other necessities, with gasoline and heating oil being the most important. It also buys in most of its processed food and almost all its manufactured goods.
And, while Alaskans can easily supplement their diet by hunting and fishing, farming is another story.
A harsh climate and short growing season mean the state is nowhere near self-sufficient in grains, fruit and vegetables, and true self-sufficiency is pretty hard to achieve.
The First States That Will Go Down In A Collapse. Do You Live In The Red Zone? Alaska might not be torn apart by urban riots in the first days of a crisis, but it will still collapse within weeks as food stocks run down and gas disappears.
Hawaii All the things that count against Alaska also count against Hawaii, and there are a couple of other issues, too.
While Hawaii has more agriculture than Alaska, the biggest crops are sugarcane and pineapples – not exactly staple foods. The climate means it’s a bit more feasible to grow your own food there, but on the downside, land is scarce and expensive.
Hawaii is also heavily urbanized, with almost 92% of the population living in cities. Like California or Florida, as soon as supplies from out of state stop arriving those cities will collapse fast and hard.
The First States That Will Go Down In A Collapse. Do You Live In The Red Zone? There’s another serious problem with Hawaii, too – it’s an island chain in the middle of the Pacific. At least if you’re in Alaska when the collapse comes you can get to Canada. If you’re in Hawaii, plan on being there for a long, long time.
New York If the power goes off and supplies of food and water stop coming, the Big Apple will rot in a hurry.
The state of New York contains the USA’s most populous city, over eight million people with basically no ability to be self-sufficient.
While New York does have some agriculture, including a lot of basic foods – the state is the largest cabbage producer in the country, for example – in a crisis not much of that food is going to make it into the city, so you can expect hungry mobs to fan out into the rural parts of the state looking for food.
New York Along with the city’s already high crime levels, the collapse of New York is going to be fast and brutal.
The Alternatives If you live in one of these collapse-prone states, the best advice is to be ready to bug out as fast and as far as you can.
The ideal solution is to move to a more rural state where any collapse will be slower and less violent, giving you time to adjust to the new normal.
The Great Plains states are a good choice – large, sparsely populated and heavily agricultural.
It’s easy to be self-sufficient there, and you’re a long way from the chaos that will erupt when America’s helpless cities start to starve.
Looking around I couldn’t find an important piece of information – how one should fight in a SHTF situation. I think this is an important topic to cover because it has several special circumstances that need to be considered.
Ammo will need to be conserved – I don’t care how many rounds you have saved up, it won’t be enough and the long-term of a complete collapse of society (potentially 40+ years) means that from the get go every single shot will be precious.
Due to the fact that it is almost a certainty that combatants will be intensely familiar with the area and possibly have been residing for a long period of time it rather changes the mechanics of combat.
Due to limited manpower and the fact that any attrition will be felt heavily, patrols, night combat, and outposts will be nigh impossible to field with regularity.
Expanding on the above, most medication has a limited shelf life and even minor wounds will start to become quite threatening (increased risk of disease and infection) – Medication will run out fast.
With that in mind, let us analyse why tactical considerations are always important and what style of fighting we will have to adopt. Due to the fact that ammo will always be a luxury, modern tactics which rely on the idea of expending more ammo in a gunfight at the foe over men or positioning is obviously not possible.
During a SHTF situation, pain could become an annoyance for some, but unbearable for others.
If doctors are scarce and medicine becomes even scarcer, this one little weed, found all over North America and similar to morphine, could be a saving grace.
Now – every weapon you should use should focus on stopping power, the smallest cartridge in your arsenal should be 6.5mm (handguns excluded).
With that out-of-the-way – let us look at the overall thought process and things to identify before you engage in any situation.
Manpower: Who has more bodies at their disposal – do they look weak and ill-trained or are their movements/positions well thought out and the men (and women!) well fed? Are they all moving armed or do they have the luxury of people dedicated to guard duties?
Armament: What weapons are they using – are they rusted and in ill repair? Can you identify if they are carrying enough ammo for everyone to fight adequately?
Maneuver: Who is in the better position? – do they have a path of pursuit and escape, do they have a height advantage? Importantly are they defending something valuable (like a base or stash)? If so you may have the luxury of being able to attack at will, the same thing goes if you are on the defensive.
From these 3 guidelines a threat level can be deduced, obviously there will be some situation where one advantage is so great that it will offset disadvantages – this is a rough guideline. If they check off none, then you are probably in a position to utilize a diplomatic approach and join groups. If they check off one of 3 then you should approach with caution, maybe attempt to surround them at night and make your intentions clear – again diplomacy may be the best decision here. If they check two of three than combat should be avoided until you are in a position to use your advantage to overwhelm them (attacking at night, in an ambush, etc). Do not attempt diplomacy at this threat level as you will not be in a position to make a fair deal and all emphasis should be placed on evening the odds or avoiding the threat. Finally if they check off all three do not engage at all, the goal is survival not heroic death and if worst comes to worst retreating completely or surrendering goods is preferable to a bullet in the brain. They still are people and unless you are absolutely sure that they are completely hostile they may be willing to work with you.
Now with the overall threat assessment done we may now talk about the five stages of combat (Recce, Skirmish, Combat, Push/Withdraw, Decisive Blow/Total Withdrawal).
RECCE
“IF YOU KNOW THE ENEMY AND KNOW YOURSELF, YOU NEED NOT FEAR THE RESULT OF A HUNDRED BATTLES.” – SUN TZU
Recce is often the most overlooked stage of combat but it is BY FAR the most important. Recce is the mode of thought that you should be on at all times, dispatching a scout if possible and identifying incoming threats. The more focus you place on recce the more forewarning you will have as to inbound threats, and more time to prepare/evacuate. Obviously you will be unable to have a complete recon net due to limited supplies but any extra hands should be trained for recce and dispatched when possible.
This is where you will identify your enemies capabilities on your threat checklist and decide whether to choose engagement/diplomacy/retreat. Just to outline how vital this is, 90% of a good tactician’s skill is how the deploy and utilize information from recce, with the other 10% being a good leader with good interpersonal skills and the ability to keep cool under pressure.
SKIRMISH
This is where you action your initial decision on engaging the enemy, it is the period where hostilities have begun but you are not locked into a fight. This will be the period where you harry the enemy with traps and marksman to attempt to pick off men before you attack or they reach your designated point of defense (usually your fortifications).
Some skirmishes may only last a minute or two and some may be the entire fight, note that your main focus should be leaders and sensitive targets (heavily armed fighters and if possible, medics). The goal of this will be to break your enemies organisation and morale when combat begins – that being said…
This will be the time when individual training counts. Communication will be close to impossible in this brief period and this is where the most casualties will be sustained – though despite this being the most calamitous point of a fight it will be the least important for you as the person in command. Your main role will be encouraging your men and stopping any obvious screw-ups.
What you should be watching closely is the movement of combat, are you making good progress towards your goal or are you sustaining casualties – are there hostile elements that you were unaware of?
Before I make my next point the thing to keep in mind is that in a ‘battle’ there may be multiple combats, intensive fighting between periods of skirmish, pushing, and retreat.
PUSH/WITHDRAW
This is as much a phase of combat as it is its own separate action, and the commands will have to be executed well and especially in the case of a withdrawal you need pre-planned points to ensure cohesiveness.
Really the most that can be said of pushing is that your enemy has begun to break or have thinned enough that they can no longer maintain the area their position demands, as I would expect almost all combatants to be ill-trained this will almost certainly result in a decisive victory as the enemy breaks completely.
However, keeping your men together in the case of a withdrawal is another issue. The things to watch out for: can you retreat to your designated point safely (if you have one – keep in mind most defense should take a multi layered approach), do you have enough manpower left to pursue another attack, is the enemy willing to pursue or are they holding position. If it is the latter the combat may switch to a skirmishing stance again.
TOTAL WITHDRAWAL/ DECISIVE BLOW
Decisive blow: Your enemy has completely shattered, this is the period encompassing cleaning up resistance before taking stock of supplies and beginning the process of recce again – re-assessing.
Total Withdrawal: This comes about one of two ways – Your force has broken and are fleeing in a blind panic, or it is (hopefully) an organised retreat to put some distance between yourselves and the enemy combatants and re-asses. You will again need to survey the situation and determine the next point of action for your group.
Something to note – Overall your group should always be prepared for a total retreat, even an easy fight could be a ruse and you always need to be prepared to move and maintain as many supplies as possible.
Have you ever wondered what makes a person snap? What causes a normal, quiet, everyday citizen, loving mother, or doting father to lose it all and fight like a caged animal? What can cause a small village to rise up and rebel against an oppressive police force and start killing them? What is the switch that gets flipped that causes a city to pour two million people into the streets, chanting and demanding to be heard by their government?
Lately it feels more and more as though we are on standing on the edge of some yawning precipice peering over the crest into darkness. What is more troubling to me is that we have been down this path before. The sense of unease is almost palpable to me sometimes; it is more evident if you are paying attention. If you are able to eliminate the white noise of the world for a minute; hit the pause button on the playlist of daily life for a while and look around, listen, you may start to recognize that you too are caught up in events that will soon change all our lives.
During a SHTF situation, pain could become an annoyance for some, but unbearable for others.
If doctors are scarce and medicine becomes even scarcer, this one little weed, found all over North America and similar to morphine, could be a saving grace.
For several years I have felt an unsettling sense that we need to be prepared, that life is going to throw us a big, fat, greasy curve ball soon and we better not be caught napping. To try and proactively address that warning voice I started planning and taking steps to prepare my family to be able to weather events in the future. I am certainly not alone in this concern as you can easily see by the tremendous growth of the prepper movement. In the spectrum of probable events, there are a lot of potential scenarios. Natural disasters and emergencies occur every day all over the world, but you have to broaden your gaze and look to current events and history as well. One of the things that I think is a valid potential event to consider is a collapse of our way of life which leads to an authoritarian oppressive government.
Are we reaching a tipping point?
SS soldiers guarding the column of captive Jews in the Warsaw ghetto.
We have seen in recent events, by now almost too numerous to mention, the effects of a rising frustration with the way things are. It isn’t necessary to go into all of the individual reasons, but as a society there are more and more outpourings of frustration on a global scale. There are increasingly tightening restrictions against people. There is a manipulation of markets and the economy. There is a great increase in the loss of freedom and there is a more open antagonism and almost outright animosity by Government towards their people.
Governments exist either because they have come to power through force and violence or they have been elected and given power by the people. The force and violence crowd usually have their roots in the military and we like to call them Dictators. There have been a ton of them throughout history; Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Kim Jong iL and now his son, Saddam, Gaddafi, the list goes on and on. Dictators don’t care about the people and usually kill anyone who gets in their way. It is a fact that government has killed more people than any other cause, disease or reason.
The other side of the coin is what is usually called Democracies. I am lumping a lot of governments in here I know, but the democracies are usually elected and formed with the consent of the people with the noble goal of securing rights or protecting the people over whom they govern. Almost without fail however, Democratic Governments eventually do not want to answer to the people and at some point they most certainly will not be told what to do by the people to the point of ignoring the will of the people (for the people’s own good of course). Now these governments that are supposed to secure the liberties of their people are becoming more openly hostile to the same people they have sworn to defend. Funnily enough the democratically elected governments now seem to want to hang on to power with the same methods of force and violence as dictators. How else can you explain arming themselves with ammo, ignoring the constitution, purchasing assault vehicles and preparing to confiscate firearms?
When governments will steal money outright from the citizens in order to pay bills that were not incurred by the people we have a problem. When government spies on its people and uses that information against them punitively we have a problem. When Government uses the force of the military that was supposed to defend the people that was paid for by the people, for the purposes of killing the people, we have a big problem. When someone brings to light crimes by the government and is labeled as the one who is a danger, we have a problem.
The problem is that governments around the world are viewing their people as the problem and there really seems to be only one way throughout history that this is ever rectified. My fear is that we are already set on a course that won’t be changed with laws, great political leaders, or a return to the values of a golden age in time long past.
The Fine Line – The Straw that breaks the camel’s back
The fine line between someone who is a law-abiding citizen and a murderer is one that exists purely in our souls. There is nothing physical that is different from a person who follows the rules and someone who breaks them. The urge to pull the trigger isn’t something you can see and it isn’t a trait to test for, so it must be our own individual sense of right and wrong. Of good and evil.
I know that some will argue that a psychopath is definitely recognizable by character traits and maybe even brainwaves or chemistry. That may be true, but you can be a psychopath (clinically) without ever hurting anyone. By the same token, you can take a life while being perfectly “sane”.
If you hold a knife in your hand, you are just as capable of using that to stab or cut someone as the murderer in the next town, but that thought never enters the mind of an overwhelming majority of people. A baseball bat in your hands can easily be swung with great force connecting it to the back of a skull, but this thought never appears in our heads; that is unless we are forced into a corner. When a person is in desperate fear for their lives, the unspoken rules of right and wrong are broken. The processes that we follow every day are overridden in the cause of rage or self-preservation. What was unthinkable before is now very real, necessary and even righteous with the right circumstances.
When the right buttons are pushed, anyone can lose it. When the fear of dying or of losing someone you love is so overpowering, the “fine line” that has been keeping us sane, law-abiding and good is easily shattered. When this happens, all bets are off.
We as a people, a country are still rather firmly attached on the good side of this line. We have not yet completely been driven to abandon all hope and lash out. We have not yet been so harmed, have not gotten to the point that we have nothing to lose and are ready to lose it, but this may be coming in the future.
The force and violence that is being used now to quell the dissatisfaction of people globally is increasing. The methods to cease the complaining of the rabble has been relatively minor with some exceptions. Tear gas, rubber bullets, mace and batons only work up to a point though. When the time comes that people can no longer abide, there won’t be enough police to stop them using riot control techniques. The military doesn’t have enough people to stop the entire population unless those people peacefully agree to surrender, so what will they do? Do you believe any government will quietly step down and admit that they are obviously not speaking for the people anymore? No. They will resort to more force and violence and people will die. Either that or you have a coup like they had in Egypt and guess who took over to “restore order”? Yep, the Military.
What will be the inevitable response by the authorities?
The Chinese people who started to revolt against the police in their town did so because the authorities were “placing restrictions on their culture, language and religion”. China is no picnic compared to America and we clearly know they have lived through far worse oppression than we have, but this was the straw that broke the camel’s back for them?
The protests which turned into an estimated two million citizens of Brazil had started simply enough with a protest over a rise in the rates of public transportation.
In America, what will be the trigger that causes people to rise up and say we aren’t going to take this anymore and more importantly what will happen when/if we do?
What will happen if we don’t change the path we are on?
The execution of the last Jew in Vinnytsia, made by an officer of the German Einsatzgruppen
There is a quote that has always struck me as very sad and telling from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his book The Gulag Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn was a Russian who was sentenced to 8 years in a Soviet prison camp for essentially writing things about Stalin that the government didn’t like. During this time in Soviet Russia, to stifle dissent, millions were killed or sent to prison camps. In this passage Solzhenitsyn is talking about regret that everyone felt because they simply went along with this tyranny and didn’t oppose it.
“AND HOW WE BURNED IN THE CAMPS LATER, THINKING: WHAT WOULD THINGS HAVE BEEN LIKE IF EVERY SECURITY OPERATIVE, WHEN HE WENT OUT AT NIGHT TO MAKE AN ARREST, HAD BEEN UNCERTAIN WHETHER HE WOULD RETURN ALIVE AND HAD TO SAY GOOD-BYE TO HIS FAMILY? OR IF, DURING PERIODS OF MASS ARRESTS, AS FOR EXAMPLE IN LENINGRAD, WHEN THEY ARRESTED A QUARTER OF THE ENTIRE CITY, PEOPLE HAD NOT SIMPLY SAT THERE IN THEIR LAIRS, PALING WITH TERROR AT EVERY BANG OF THE DOWNSTAIRS DOOR AND AT EVERY STEP ON THE STAIRCASE, BUT HAD UNDERSTOOD THEY HAD NOTHING LEFT TO LOSE AND HAD BOLDLY SET UP IN THE DOWNSTAIRS HALL AN AMBUSH OF HALF A DOZEN PEOPLE WITH AXES, HAMMERS, POKERS, OR WHATEVER ELSE WAS AT HAND?… THE ORGANS WOULD VERY QUICKLY HAVE SUFFERED A SHORTAGE OF OFFICERS AND TRANSPORT AND, NOTWITHSTANDING ALL OF STALIN’S THIRST, THE CURSED MACHINE WOULD HAVE GROUND TO A HALT! IF…IF…WE DIDN’T LOVE FREEDOM ENOUGH. AND EVEN MORE – WE HAD NO AWARENESS OF THE REAL SITUATION…. WE PURELY AND SIMPLY DESERVED EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENED AFTERWARD.” – ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN
Will this be our fate too? Will we slowly be conditioned to accept atrocities like this and to be completely defanged so that we can be herded into camps without so much as a whimper as well? That’s crazy you say! Is it? Right now, our government is hunting down someone who simply exposed how they (government) were illegally spying on all of us. Our government is buying arms and stockpiling weapons for use domestically not in some war. Our government has the IRS actively harassing a single political/opposition party. Our government has shown that they will lock down a town and go door to door while making the citizens stay cowered inside. Our government has stated that they can imprison anyone without cause for an indefinite amount of time.
Can you seriously argue that we aren’t headed down the same path as others have in our not too distant past?
This is not a call to armed Revolution, but I do think we should all be very wary of this course we are on and the echos of history. We should not be silent in the face of increasing oppression. We should not simply go along quietly because of the fear that we may get in trouble, or worse that we believe the government is only looking out for our best interests. You only need to look at the people in Poland who quietly went into the Warsaw ghettos. You don’t have to look any further than the Holocaust to see what quietly going along will get you.
This is not a fate that I will be bringing on my family.
Surely many have recently noticed a rather peculiar attention on the part of the Kremlin towards Italy.
In fact, the Foreign Minister, Lavrov, recently gave an interview to the “Zona Bianca” program on Mediaset. It is quite likely that Russia has decided to make its voice heard through this broadcaster, certainly not because of a particular predilection for the group owned by the Berlusconi family.
The purpose was another, and it is partly contained in the words released by the spokeswoman of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova.
Zakharova explained that Minister Lavrov receives hundreds of requests for interviews and this is certainly out of the question. The Russian diplomat explains, however, that Lavrov decided to accept the requests of the Italian journalists because of their “insistence” and then immediately added that “Italians must know the truth” .
If society collapses, you can bet that the foods the pioneers ate will become dietary staples
The key to Lavrov’s decision is probably contained in this last sentence. The Kremlin wants to reach as wide an audience as possible to make its version of the facts about the Ukrainian crisis known, and in this regard, it needed a national broadcaster to be able to do so.
However, it did not do so through a French or German national channel. He did so through an Italian channel and this is certainly significant of the Kremlin’s desire to start a dialogue with the Italian people.
A dialogue that had probably already begun when a mural dedicated to Dostoevsky appeared in Naples, promptly defined by Putin as a sign of hope to keep relations between Italy and Russia alive.
Russia is somewhat aware that the Italians do not at all share the suicidal economic war and the dangerous and aggressive statements made by Mario Draghi himself and by members of his government against Moscow.
Of all the governments of Western Europe, the most hostile to Russia – immediately after Great Britain, which has now become a sort of ferociously Russophobic rogue state – is that of Italy.
The other governments, especially the German one, have tried to leave a door open with Russia so as not to completely destroy trade relations between the two countries and cause even more disastrous economic damage than those already caused up to now.
If you take a look at the trade balance between Germany and Russia, you can get a better idea of this damage.
Germany saw its exports drop by € 860 million in March alone, and this is certainly bad news for Berlin.
This suggests that Germany sooner or later has decided not to lend itself further to the massacre game against Moscow and has definitively released itself from the suicidal madness that Brussels has decided to unleash against Russia.
As for Italy, the discourse is different because, in the hierarchy of European elites established in the 1950s at the time of the creation of the EEC, the Peninsula comes after the Franco-German axis, to which international finance has assigned the weight major in the community project.
In the so-called “European Union,” which is neither a union given its obvious divisions, and not even European given its refusal to identify with the Christian roots of the continent, the interests of the countries of the North, or rather their economic powers and industrialists, always come before those of the Southern countries, considered second-class or “unreliable” in this hierarchical scale.
This is the reason why Italy has been the Cinderella of Europe for some time, and this is the reason why over the last 30 years the “Italian” political class has always and constantly acted to serve supranational interests.
The political class of the Second Republic, much more than the First, had only the task of guaranteeing the execution of the europeanist and globalist agenda by throwing away what was once the world’s fourth economy.
This explains the aggressiveness of the Draghi government towards Russia. The powers that are outside the country consider Italy as the most expendable country and its political system as the most subservient to this agenda.
Italy is the most anti-EU country in Europe
However, this contributed to developing a profound anti-European sentiment. And there is ample evidence of this sentiment even in the Eurobarometer polls ordered by the European Commission, which are done to actually show the popularity of the EU.
According to this statistical survey, only 44% of Italians want to stay in the European Union. One can imagine by how much dissent could be even higher if only it were detected by a third and independent source.
In recent decades, in Italy, there is a magma of profound dissent flowing in Italian public opinion towards EU institutions.
It is not at all a gamble to say that this country is the one in which the most mature awareness of the problem that the euro and the EU represent with respect to the sovereignty and independence of a nation has developed.
More simply, the people have realized that there is no benefit to them from having a coin in their pocket that has massively eroded savings and led to the bankruptcy of many small and medium-sized businesses.
After all, it could not have been otherwise. The euro was certainly created in the first place to strip the states of their ability to print money, but also and above all to deindustrialize Italy, which has long been penalized by a currency whose exchange rate is too high for the parameters of Italian economy.
Paraphrasing Jacques Attali – the gray eminence of Macron and of every French president of the last 40 years, and one of the most influential members of the Bilberberg group – the euro “was certainly not made for the happiness of the Italian rabble”, and Attali’s use of the word “rabble” expresses at best, or perhaps at worst, the conception that neoliberal and globalist ideology has of humanity.
Not a spirit of love for peoples, but one of ferocious hatred towards them, which in the perspective of these globalist powers must be reduced as much as possible as “useless eaters”.
The basic conception of globalist thought is that of hatred towards humanity which must be exterminated through the application of Malthusian philosophy and, then, what remains of it, deprived of the gift of free will through the use of transhumanist technologies.
However, if there is a people that occupies a special place in the list of countries most hated by these stateless parasites, it is certainly Italy for a series of reasons connected to its history deeply linked to Greek-Roman and Catholic roots, of which this Country is the cradle and keeper.
And the ruthless and ferocious application of this plan conceived to destroy nations, and above all the Italian one, has matured a profound discontent among Italians towards Brussels.
A discontent that in past years has not been able to find outlets to take Italy out of the EU prison.
This enormous basin of dissent has been swallowed up by those who in Anglo-Saxon jargon are called “gatekeepers”, an expression that in Italian means “guardians of the gates”. They are the sentinels of power who are activated when popular opposition to the status quo grows too much and these sentries play the role of containers of dissent.
Their purpose is to prevent the people’s demand for change from causing real change. Their aim is to leave unchanged the condition that preserves the power of the financial elites they represent.
In Italy, this role of controlled opposition was certainly entrusted to the M5S at the beginning of the last decade, and subsequently to Salvini‘s League. (ER: We can only concur. Matteo Salvini, the great voice of supposed sovereignty, who opposed mass migration, capitulated to the globalists on cue to help Mario Draghi.)
Both political formations, however, are now “burned”. The limit of the gatekeeper mechanism is mainly one. Sooner or later the façade oppositions are forced to reveal their true identity because their purpose is to ensure the survival of the system, not to question it.
In the case of the M5S, the unveiling of his role came with his marriage to the democratic party in 2019 when the second Conte government was born, and in the case of Salvini’s League the unveiling occurred when the Carroccio brought down his own government for preparing the way to Palazzo Chigi for Mario Draghi.
In fact, the signals and elements already existed previously that demonstrated how these two formations were fully integrated into certain powers. In this regard, it is sufficient to think that one of the two founders of the M5S, Gianroberto Casaleggio, was a business partner of Enrico Sassoon, a member of a family linked to the Rothschilds, and the other Beppe Grillo, according to some sources, was spotted on board of the yacht Britannia in 1992 when Mario Draghi officiated the sale of the Italian public industry.
The Freemasons were already aware in those years that ‘europeanism’ and its savage execution would create enormous dissent in Italy and were already preparing the containers of dissent at that time.
Now, however, as previously mentioned, the true identities of these subjects have been made known to everyone, even to the less attentive observers.
The mechanism of façade oppositions has come to an end and power is no longer able to invent its own controlled opposition.
The dissent is enormous and at the moment, the international powers have nothing to be able to capture it. It can lead anywhere, and above all it can lead to new spontaneous political and social movements that could soon arise and which are in no way controlled by the system.
Russia knows that the crisis of the Italian political system can bring down the EU
Russia is aware of this precarious situation of the Italian political system and that is why it is paying particular attention to this country.
In Moscow they know that the current status quo will not last long. The parties are too fragile, and the Italian political institutions too unpopular.
The distance between politics and the real country has never been as deep as it is in this historical moment.
Virtually no one now benefits from this status quo, except for the residual, and increasingly restricted, clientelist network linked to these parties.
Above all, the Kremlin is aware that the decadent Second Republic born of the 1992 judicial coup has lost the protection of those who conceived it, that is, the men of the deep state of Washington.
In recent years, a new event occurred that has changed not only the history of the United States of America but also that of Italy.
Donald Trump’s presidency has taken America out of the orbit of Washington’s parallel power, which has used this nation to implement the New World Order agenda.
In Rome, therefore, the parties that were closely linked to Washington have been left orphans. They have lost the protection and shield of their referents.
Donald Trump, and the Biden presidency commissioned by the armed forces loyal to Trump, have severed the umbilical cord that linked the deep Italian state to the American one.
The end of the power of the lobbies that govern America could only cause the crisis of those powers that in Italy strictly depend on the survival of the former.
The sanctions imposed against Russia did nothing but worsen the situation of Italian politics and widen the distance between the country and the institutions even more. Electricity prices are at an all-time high and the artificial energy inflation caused by the EU’s “environmentalist” policies, carried out by Draghi, risks wiping out companies that have survived two years of pandemic farce from the markets.
Wherever Draghi goes, he is showered with a barrage of whistles. His and his government’s aggression against Russia has only increased the unpopularity of this executive.
The natural and spontaneous response of the Italians to this russophobic war was exactly opposite to that of Palazzo Chigi.
The chains of Saint Anthony have been set in motion that have led the Italians to express their solidarity with Russia and to distance themselves from the Draghi government.
Moscow received the message and thanked the Italian people.
There is a natural understanding between these two countries that the Italian political establishment cannot sever. Russia has a deep admiration for Italy, and Italy, in turn, reciprocates this enormous esteem.
Rome and Moscow are those cities united by a common history of defense of Christianity and Greco-Roman values. Moscow considers itself the “third Rome” for this reason, and no one can therefore sever the link between the third Rome and the first Rome.
This is the reason why a direct dialogue has been initiated between Russia and the Italian people.
The Kremlin is aware of the serious crisis that the decadent Second Republic is going through and is equally aware that the current parties could soon leave the scene.
The analogies between the Russia of the 90s and contemporary Italy
It is a historical and economic situation that in some respects recalls what happened in Russia in the 90s.
In that historical period, Russia was faced with the rubble inherited from the collapse of the Soviet Union of Marxist mold, for which frankly there is no great nostalgia but its disposal was certainly endorsed and favored by the then President Gorbachev on behalf of the “great” transactional powers, of which the man of Perestroika was a part.
The country after the collapse of the Berlin Wall found itself facing an unprecedented wave of violence. In the streets there was a war between armed gangs and the overwhelming power of the Ashkenazi oligarchs. Russian institutions only existed on paper because these were actually a Washington prosthesis.
It was directly the CIA, the American intelligence agency, that ruled the Kremlin which was controlled by men belonging to the American deep state.
Russia was robbed of its industrial public heritage through a savage wave of ordered and executed privatizations to further enrich the power of the neoliberal oligarchs.
The state practically did not exist because this was nothing more than a legal simulacrum in the hands of domestic and foreign power groups.
The situation of chaos and submission came to an end when a man came to power who began to free Russia from the grip of those who had humiliated and brought it to a standstill.
That man was Vladimir Putin who, many years later, revealed how he was forced to carry out a real clean-up operation of the government institutions infiltrated by infidel agents who had handed over Russia to the various potentates who had divided the country.
In some respects, there are profound similarities between the Russia of the 90s and contemporary Italy. Corruption was what ruled Russia at the time and it is what rules Italy today.
In Italian government institutions, there are exponents and representatives of private power groups everywhere, starting with Mario Draghi himself, emissary and spokesman for the investment bank Goldman Sachs.
Italy’s state machine is the victim of the same infection that plagued Russia 30 years ago. There are no faithful servants of the state in Palazzo Chigi in the ministries and in the judiciary.
There are subversive elements that have transformed the state into a dependence of foreign powers and have swelled the institutions of their incompetent and corrupt clientele.
An entire nation has been put up for auction to please the interests of centers of power in Brussels, London and Washington.
The Kremlin is aware that this particular historical period is ideal for Italy for the birth of a leader and a sort of Italian Putin who can lead the country out of the shallows of colonization at the hands of the foreigner who is making Italy suffer.
This is the reason why Moscow wants to keep relations with the Italian people alive. The Kremlin is sowing the seeds of a future new relationship between Italy and Russia that could prove to be the key and decisive element to address the final backbone to the shaky EU and Euro-Atlantism, for some time in deep crisis.
There is a huge space for Italy in the multipolar world. A space that would allow the Peninsula to exploit its enormous economic and geopolitical potential which until now has been suppressed and buffered by corrupt rulers and subjected to the agenda of the country’s enemies.
Russia is perfectly aware that the country that can shift the balance of Europe and the world is Italy, and wants to be ready for what will come after the collapse of the second republic.
There are therefore too many points of vulnerability in the current political system. Too many to think that the current parties can hold out for long.
Russia seems to have read this historical moment of Italy and has understood that soon there could be new interlocutors with whom to establish precisely that natural alliance mentioned above.
Italy is the country that at this moment has all the ideal characteristics to deal the final blow to those powers that have tried to implement the Great Reset of Davos and have tried to erase this millenary civilization.
Russia has understood this very well and is looking carefully at Rome. And the eyes of all to understand which country will be able to cause an international political earthquake will be focused on Italy.
Italy is the country that can blow the bank, and Italy is the country that will be a crossroads of national and world destinies.
Did you know that if you have even a small subsistence farm to grow and or raise food for your family it all could be confiscated. Did you know the government is currently trying to identify and register all food producers to support this goal? Whether you are aware or not, at any time the president deems necessary, the US can now confiscate key resources in the name of national security. In particular, the food you worked hard to grow or raise could be seized. Naturally, it makes no sense to spend your time and money developing a farming capability to insulate your family from hard times only to have it seized. By following a few basic rules, you can help to protect your food supply and ensure those that helped cause the collapse and refused to prepare aren’t fed on your watch.
President Obama also nationalized our nation’s food supply through executive order. This executive order effectively orders the heads of various agencies to include the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) to identify critical resources under their purview and develop policies on how to ensure their production and procurement during national emergencies. As with most government regulation, this order on the surface doesn’t sound too draconian. However, the devil is in the details regarding its implementation. In order for the USDA to “secure” the US food supply, it becomes necessary to identify everyone involved in food production. Once identified, then upon order, the USDA can send nationalized goon squads to confiscate any and all “critical resources” deemed necessary for national security. National security may very soon include declaring “preppers” “extremists and depriving them of their stores of food. In this particular case, it could involve your entire crop.
Doubt this affects you? Consider this, if you live in North Carolina, you must register with the state if you have even one chicken. This is ostensibly being done to rapidly inform, monitor, and protect the state’s poultry farmers from avian flu strains. However, as soon as anyone in government starts talking about “protecting” anything, one should suspect subterfuge. In this case, the government suddenly feels that you must be forced to “register” even if you have one chicken. By the government’s own admission, small isolated flocks have almost no risk to catching or passing the current avian flu strains due to their lack of ability to intermingle with wild waterfowl and then spread the virus to other birds. As such, one must consider alternative reasons the government feels that it is necessary to pry so deeply into private citizens’ lives. I would entertain the government’s arguments if they were focused solely on large commercial poultry farms, but they are not. This North Carolina regulation targets even an owner of a single bird as a pet and as such, is far too broad to be considered justifiable. However, when considering the quiet push behind the scenes by the USDA to identify all food producers, it makes much more sense.
You may be thinking that North Carolina is an isolated incident or that this is only applicable to poultry, but it is not. Let’s look at Wisconsin, which now “mandates” livestock premises registration. Again, as in North Carolina, if the regulation was solely focused on large scale livestock operations, it could be justifiable for the monitoring and tracking of disease. However, just like in North Carolina, this applies to even the smallest of hobby farms and in fact applies to anyone that has even one animal. It is also completely unnecessary. Just like the family that has a few chickens as pets in North Carolina, the family in Wisconsin with a pot belly big or rabbits do not pose any demonstrated increased risk to the livestock of the state. As such, once again, the trend supports a motive more indicative of complete registration and tracking of “all” food resources vice monitoring and mitigation of livestock diseases. Wisconsin isn’t alone. Both Michigan and Indiana also mandate registration of “any” livestock of any number being kept anywhere. Digging a bit deeper, the state link to the USDA policy of registration, monitoring, and tracking of all livestock (under the guise of tracking infectious disease) becomes very clear. In fact, the Council of State Governments blatantly tells us the states are in fact tracking all farms and livestock at the behest of the USDA.
Again, I recognize that skeptics will assert these are nothing more than well intentioned regulations being taken out of context and that they would need to see more specific evidence. To rebut their arguments, I could write volumes about the numerous new government regulations relating to heirloom seeds, animal and plant propagation, food storage, small gardens, raw foods, off-grid living, and water rights. When these regulations are considered in their entirety they form a powerful body of evidence that supports my assertion the government is building a broad database to use in the event it decides to confiscate food. However, the willfully ignorant and blind supporters of government tyranny are not of my concern. No amount of “evidence” will overcome their cognitive dissonance. My concern is to warn and inform those of you amongst us that have proven immune to brain washing and still have free thinking independent minds. Therefore, the fact remains that there is a growing trend at both the federal and state level of forcing everyone with live stock, orchards, gardens, etc. to register with the government. Once this database is complete, the government will no doubt use it to extract taxes and fees, conduct inspections and raids, and ultimately, should the need arise, confiscate your food. To prevent mitigate possible confiscation attempts from both government agents and looters; one should consider employing my four rules of food security. Living without power, cars, electronics or running water may seem like a nightmare scenario but to pioneers it was just the way life was. Having the skills to survive without modern conveniences is not only smart in case SHTF, it’s also great for the environment. Keep in mind that the key to a successful homestead does not only lie on being able to grow your own food but on other skills as well. Learning these skills will take time, patience and perseverance, and not all of these skills are applicable to certain situations. Hopefully, though, you managed to pick up some great ideas that will inspire you and get you started! Just like our forefathers used to do, The Lost Ways Book teaches you how you can survive in the worst-case scenario with the minimum resources available.It comes as a step-by-step guide accompanied by pictures and teaches you how to use basic ingredients to make super-food for your loved ones.
My first rule comes from the movie “Fight Club.” Don’t talk about your food production and storage. Although it may be obvious to neighbors you garden or raise a small amount of livestock such as hogs and poultry for personal consumption, the broader public doesn’t need to know. Continuing with that point, how much food you put up for long term storage and where it is stored should never be an open topic of discussion. Let them think you have nothing in food stores even if that means using disinformation.
My second rule is to disperse your food stockpiles using food caches. If you have stored adequate amounts of food for your family properly, even a complete confiscation of your current harvest shouldn’t push you to food lines and soup kitchens. Just like with firearms, don’t store your food all in one place. Food preserved properly can be cached in the ground just like most anything else and store literally for years. In fact, well camouflaged in-ground storage areas similar to mini-root cellars are excellent places to store food. Just make sure you don’t mix foods like apples and potatoes, which will cause the other to go bad quickly in your food cache. The simplest of these food caches can be constructed by digging a hole below the frost line big enough to store what you want. Then load your cache, cover it with a board, add a layer of insulation, and cover it with a layer of dirt (dirt alone can be used to cover and insulate). To finish it, camouflage the cache site any remove traces of a trail to it. I favor using a technique where you cache a mixed bundle of food stuffs capable of supporting the basic nutritional needs of your family for a month. This method allows a cache to remain undisturbed until you actually are going to use it and includes all of your food staples. It also justifies the investment of energy making the site.
My third rule requires developing the skills to identify and use wild and edible plants. As I have written many times about any government bureaucrat with an accompanying goon squad or looter can identify a cellar of potatoes and a field of corn. However, very few will ever be able to recognize wild spinach, pokeweed, dandelions, chicory, huckleberries, and common milk weed as “food.” In fact, most will walk right past these tasty, super-nutritious wild plants assuming them to be weeds in a fallow field you didn’t plant this year. Further, even if they recognize them as potentially being cultivated, they wouldn’t have enough sense or knowledge to know when to pick them, what parts to pick, and how to prepare them without potentially poisoning themselves. Like the bureaucrats and looters though, if you don’t study this knowledge on your own, you will not be capable of employing this critical food security technique. I find that the best way to employ this technique is in a deliberate fashion. Leave small plots of your garden or fields to appear “fallow,” but in reality, plant these plots with a natural mix of wild edibles. This requires you to collect the seeds from various edible plants the season before and store them in a cool, dark, dry location. In the spring, till up the soil in that plot, mix the wild seeds, and broadcast them throughout the fresh soil. Then lightly cover the seeds and allow nature to do its work. The plot will grow up appearing as if it is a natural mix of weeds typical of any fallow field or recently disturbed ground, but in reality will be a dense mix of mutually supporting edible plants that require little to no further gardening. In fact, the yield may far exceed the yields of your cultivated plant species, will naturally choke out undesirable weeds, and require no additional work aside from harvesting. I apply the same basic concept to my fruit and nut trees. Naturally, having an orchard setting is smart, but also intentionally plant Black Walnut, Butternut, various hickory, apple, pear, plum, and pawpaw trees throughout your property and forest. These trees will also blend in to the natural flora and an untrained eye will never be able to pick them out as fruit and nut bearing trees outside of an orchard setting. Respective of livestock, one faces more difficult challenges keeping their existence hidden. One technique to leverage is to raise free range animals, which are difficult to completely account for and round up. In the event of an inspection, theft, or confiscation, it is unlikely that without the owners help, the offender will be able to locate and completely coral and capture all of the free range livestock. For animals such as ducks and chickens, this can be accomplished pretty easily; especially, if non-traditional coups are used and they are dispersed throughout the property. However, with grazing livestock and hogs, a fence must be used to limit their range. Still though, with enough property, one can let their animals roam as they graze and forage like the old cattle ranchers of the West. Ultimately, if confiscations were to begin, one could simply release their livestock to become feral and be hunted rather than allowing their livestock to be stolen or seized.
My fourth rule is to register absolutely nothing unless you absolutely have to. Whether or not you choose to comply with government regulations is a matter you must individually assess and decide upon. If registering your farm, livestock, or garden isn’t mandatory, this is a no brainer…don’t. However, when it becomes “mandatory,” one must consider the pros and cons. For example, maybe it is best if you just register “some” of your livestock to give legitimacy to your farming operation, but not draw unnecessary attention from authorities. Maybe you simply want no trouble and are willing to risk confiscation so you comply 100%. Maybe the risks are not the issue and you decide that your moral and ethical code to resist encroaching tyranny at all opportunities is more important so you register nothing. I cannot make this decision for you, but you must make it. Either way, my first three rules are designed to work equally well whether or not you decide to comply when the time comes.
In summary, the USDA working in conjunction with the military and the Department of Homeland Security have set in motion plans to identify and track all critical resources in this country to include food. The impact of this could mean that in a time of crisis, if the government deems it necessary, it will confiscate your food. To ensure your food security, I have provided you four basic rules to follow that will help you cache your food, diversify your crops, and provide for better overall food security in the face of looting or confiscation.
Preparing to survive in a post-SHTF world is challenging. More than anything, we have to realize that we’re preparing blind. We don’t know what sort of disaster we’re facing or what the post-disaster world is going to look like. With those two pieces of information missing, it’s hard to know exactly how people will react and what they will do. Therefore, we must prepare for the worst.
There is a wide-ranging assumption that public servants will abandon their posts. I would have to say that this assumption is totally unfair. We live in a hurricane zone and my wife is a city employee. She and her co-workers are required to agree that they will stay on the job, protecting the citizens of the city and keeping city services running, both during and after a hurricane. While a few might abandon their posts if things get bad enough, most seem to be people who will follow through on that requirement.
But what about a worst-case scenario? What about in the wake of an EMP or other grid-destroying event, which would result in a true breakdown of society and the banking system; a situation where they would no longer be paid to do their jobs?
That’s a difficult question. For some, like my wife, their positions probably wouldn’t exist anymore. But the real issue here is emergency workers and law enforcement officers. We would greatly need their services in the wake of such a serious disaster. Would they stay on the job or would they feel they had to abandon their posts to care for their families?
There’s really no way of knowing the answer to that question until the time comes. It is a very individual question, so I imagine that some will stay, while others leave. Whether they stay or leave will largely determine whether they are friend or foe.
If society collapses, you can bet that the foods the pioneers ate will become dietary staples
Police officers tend to be highly disciplined individuals, much like soldiers. In fact, many start out as soldiers, then move to law enforcement when they get out of the military. As such, they are largely people with a high regard for the law. Oh, there are the few bad apples; but despite stories saying otherwise, there aren’t many of them.
Those who stay on the job will be concerned with maintaining law and order in the worst of circumstances. They will also be subject to the politicians who are still in place over them. This means that if those politicians declare martial law, they will most likely enforce martial law, unless they believe that to be an unlawful order.
This could get sticky. As we saw during Hurricane Katrina, declaring martial law would probably mean they would be confiscating guns as well. That would put the police in the position of appearing to be the enemy in the eyes of any Second Amendment supporter. Whether or not they actually became an enemy would depend on how you, I and other gun owners would react to them. If we use force to reject their orders to turn over our guns, they will use force in response. That makes them our de-facto enemies.
The Cops Who Abandon their Posts
Some police officers may choose to abandon their posts, especially if they feel that their families are in danger. In that case, the question is what they will do to protect and care for their families. While there are very few bad cops out there, there is always the possibility that a cop will turn bad in such circumstances, out of desperation to take care of their families.
These people will be dangerous, because they will be able to present themselves to the public as law-enforcement officers, when in fact they are acting like criminals. There could even be some cases in smaller communities, where the police take over, much as warlords take over in times of anarchy. Should that happen, the police in question would be extremely dangerous.
It would be our duty, in such a case, to stand up against the police. But here’s the problem. How do you tell if what they are doing is in the public interest, or just in self-interest? If they are acting in the public interest, our duty is to support them, so we need to be sure they are the enemy, before treating them as such.
The National Guard
If military forces are called out to help gain control, it will be the National Guard, not the active military. US law prohibits the use of US military forces within the borders of the United States. Even if politicians in high places wanted to use the regular Army, it is doubtful that Army officers, all of whom know that prohibition in the law, would allow it.
But state Governors can call out the National Guard to help law enforcement in maintaining law and order. It’s not unusual for this to happen in the case of natural disasters. I would say that we should expect it to happen in a true SHTF scenario.
National Guard forces are US Army reserve soldiers and formations, which are “owned” by the governors of the several states. They serve a dual role, both as state owned military forces and reserves for the federal forces. If called out in a disaster situation, they could serve either to support law-enforcement or to provide disaster relief. In either case, they would be armed.
Should martial law be declared, it is highly likely that the National Guard would be called out. If guns are confiscated, they are the ones who would most likely do the confiscation. They would probably be as polite as possible about it; but if they decided to obey that order, they would do their best to fulfill it.
However, the National Guard, like other military forces, is made up of predominantly conservatives. There’s a very good chance that they would refuse an order to disarm the population. Military officers swear an oath to uphold the Constitution and they would likely see the disarm order as a clear violation of the Second Amendment. As such, it would be their duty to refuse that order.
UN Troops
Of all these options, UN troops is the most dangerous. Any decision to use UN troops would have to be made at the federal government level. Were such a decision to be made, the troops which would be brought in to help maintain civil order would not be American troops. They would be unfamiliar with our culture (other than what they had seen in movies) and unfamiliar with our laws.
To these troops, a firearm confiscation order would seem perfectly reasonable, especially when you consider that they would probably come from a country where they don’t enjoy our Second Amendment protections. There would be no appeal to them on the grounds of our Constitution.
Should this happen, refusing an order to turn over your guns would be dangerous. The only thing that would protect any of us is the fact that there is no federal gun registration. Even so, there are states which require a permit to own guns, as well as concealed carry licenses which many of us have. That would give them a starting point for where to look.
Getting into a battle with armed troops is foolish. In such a situation, the only practical recourse is to hide all your guns where they won’t be able to find them, with the exception of a few, which you could then allow them to confiscate, making them think you’ve obeyed the order.
Regardless of the specific situation we would end up encountering, chances are that any police or military forces which were still in operation, would be there as part of whatever government managed to survive. Unless such forces decide to go rogue, we can count on them being there to help.
That doesn’t mean they’ll be our friends though. Unless you know them personally, they will look on you with suspicion, just like they will everyone else. Anyone carrying a weapon openly will be suspect. That doesn’t mean that they’ll hassle you, take away your weapons, fire upon you or arrest you; it just means that they will be watching to make sure that you aren’t a problem that they need to deal with.
The best thing you and I will be able to do in such a situation is to keep ourselves below the radar, so that we aren’t noticed. If we are not noticed, hopefully we will be left alone.
Should orders go out to confiscate any supplies that are stockpiled, it would probably be a good time to put our bug out plans into effect. Hopefully, we’ll all have a cache of supplies elsewhere, so that when we lose the supplies that we have stockpiled at home, we’ll still be okay.
Ultimate-Survival 