Cultures and civilizations go through cycles. Over time, many civilizations and cultures have risen and then fallen. We who live in painful times like these do well to recall these truths. Cultures and civilizations come and go; only the Church (though often in need of reform) and true biblical culture remain. An old song says, “Only what you do for Christ will last.” Yes, all else passes; the Church is like an ark in the passing waters of this world and in the floodwaters of times like these.

For those of us who love our country and our culture, the pain is real. By God’s grace, many fair flowers have come from Western culture as it grew over the past millennium. Whatever its imperfections (and there were many), great beauty, civilization, and progress emerged at the crossroads of faith and human giftedness. But now it appears that we are at the end of an era. We are in a tailspin we don’t we seem to be able to pull ourselves out of. Greed, aversion to sacrifice, secularism, divorce, promiscuity, and the destruction of the most basic unit of civilization (the family), do not make for a healthy culture. There seems to be no basis for true reform and the deepening darkness suggests that we are moving into the last stages of a disease. This is painful but not unprecedented.

Sociologists and anthropologists have described the stages of the rise and fall of the world’s great civilizations. Scottish philosopher Alexander Tyler of the University of Edinburg noted eight stages that articulate well what history discloses. I first encountered these in in Ted Flynn’s book The Great Transformation. They provide a great deal of perspective to what we are currently experiencing.

Let’s look at each of the eight stages. The names of the stages are from Tyler’s book and are presented in bold red text. My brief reflections follow in plain text.

1. From bondage to spiritual growth – Great civilizations are formed in the crucible. The Ancient Jews were in bondage for 400 years in Egypt. The Christian faith and the Church came out of 300 years of persecution. Western Christendom emerged from the chaotic conflicts during the decline of the Roman Empire and the movements of often fierce “barbarian” tribes. American culture was formed by the injustices that grew in colonial times. Sufferings and injustices cause—even force—spiritual growth. Suffering brings wisdom and demands a spiritual discipline that seeks justice and solutions.
2. From spiritual growth to great courage – Having been steeled in the crucible of suffering, courage and the ability to endure great sacrifice come forth. Anointed leaders emerge and people are summoned to courage and sacrifice (including loss of life) in order to create a better, more just world for succeeding generations. People who have little or nothing, also have little or nothing to lose and are often more willing to live for something more important than themselves and their own pleasure. A battle is begun, a battle requiring courage, discipline, and other virtues.
3. From courage to liberty – As a result of the courageous fight, the foe is vanquished and liberty and greater justice emerges. At this point a civilization comes forth, rooted in its greatest ideals. Many who led the battle are still alive, and the legacy of those who are not is still fresh. Heroism and the virtues that brought about liberty are still esteemed. The ideals that were struggled for during the years in the crucible are still largely agreed upon.
4. From liberty to abundance – Liberty ushers in greater prosperity, because a civilization is still functioning with the virtues of sacrifice and hard work. But then comes the first danger: abundance. Things that are in too great an abundance tend to weigh us down and take on a life of their own. At the same time, the struggles that engender wisdom and steel the soul to proper discipline and priorities move to the background. Jesus said that man’s life does not consist in his possessions. But just try to tell that to people in a culture that starts to experience abundance. Such a culture is living on the fumes of earlier sacrifices; its people become less and less willing to make such sacrifices. Ideals diminish in importance and abundance weighs down the souls of the citizens. The sacrifices, discipline, and virtues responsible for the thriving of the civilization are increasingly remote from the collective conscience; the enjoyment of their fruits becomes the focus.
5. From abundance to complacency – To be complacent means to be self-satisfied and increasingly unaware of serious trends that undermine health and the ability to thrive. Everything looks fine, so it must be fine. Yet foundations, resources, infrastructures, and necessary virtues are all crumbling. As virtues, disciplines, and ideals become ever more remote, those who raise alarms are labeled by the complacent as “killjoys” and considered extreme, harsh, or judgmental.
6. From complacency to apathy – The word apathy comes from the Greek and refers to a lack of interest in, or passion for, the things that once animated and inspired. Due to the complacency of the previous stage, the growing lack of attention to disturbing trends advances to outright dismissal. Many seldom think or care about the sacrifices of previous generations and lose a sense that they must work for and contribute to the common good. “Civilization” suffers the serious blow of being replaced by personalization and privatization in growing degrees. Working and sacrificing for others becomes more remote. Growing numbers becoming increasingly willing to live on the carcass of previous sacrifices. They park on someone else’s dime, but will not fill the parking meter themselves. Hard work and self-discipline continue to erode.
7. From apathy to dependence – Increasing numbers of people lack the virtues and zeal necessary to work and contribute. The suffering and the sacrifices that built the culture are now a distant memory. As discipline and work increasingly seem “too hard,” dependence grows. The collective culture now tips in the direction of dependence. Suffering of any sort seems intolerable. But virtue is not seen as the solution. Having lived on the sacrifices of others for years, the civilization now insists that “others” must solve their woes. This ushers in growing demands for governmental, collective solutions. This in turns deepens dependence, as solutions move from personal virtue and local, family-based sacrifices to centralized ones.
8. From dependence back to bondage – As dependence increases, so does centralized power. Dependent people tend to become increasingly dysfunctional and desperate. Seeking a savior, they look to strong central leadership. But centralized power corrupts, and tends to usher in increasing intrusion by centralized power. Injustice and intrusion multiplies. But those in bondage know of no other solutions. Family and personal virtue (essential ingredients for any civilization) are now effectively replaced by an increasingly dark and despotic centralized control, hungry for more and more power. In this way, the civilization is gradually ended, because people in bondage no longer have the virtues necessary to fight.

Another possibility is that a more powerful nation or group is able to enter, by invasion or replacement, and destroy the final vestiges of a decadent civilization and replace it with their own culture.

Either way, it’s back to crucible, until suffering and conflict bring about enough of the wisdom, virtue, and courage necessary to begin a new civilization that will rise from the ashes.

Thus are the stages of civilizations. Sic transit gloria mundi. The Church has witnessed a lot of this in just the brief two millennia of her time. In addition to civilizations, nations have come and gone quite frequently over the years. Few nations have lasted longer than 200 years. Civilizations are harder to define with exact years, but at the beginning of the New Covenant, Rome was already in decline. In the Church’s future would be other large nations and empires in the West: the “Holy” Roman Empire, various colonial powers, the Spanish, the Portuguese, and the French.  It was once said that “The sun never sets on the British Empire.” Now it does. As the West began a long decline, Napoleon made his move. Later, Hitler strove to build a German empire. Then came the USSR. And prior to all this, in the Old Testament period, there had been the Kingdom of David, to be succeeded by Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome.

The only true ark of safety is the Church, who received her promise of indefectibility from the Lord (Matt 16:18). But the Church, too, is always in need of reform and will have much to suffer. Yet she alone will survive this changing world, because she is the Bride of Christ and also His Body.

These are hard days, but perspective can help. It is hard to deny that we are living at the end of an era. It is painful because something we love is dying. But from death comes forth new life. Only the Lord knows the next stage and long this interregnum will be. Look to Him. Go ahead and vote, but put not your trust in princes (Ps 146:3). God will preserve His people, as He did in the Old Covenant. He will preserve those of us who are now joined to Him in the New Covenant. Find your place in the ark, ever ancient and yet new.

The worst thing about a financial collapse is that you cannot predict when it is going to happen, how soon it will happen, or how long it will last for.

All you can do is take the steps needed to prepare for an economic collapse, embrace frugal methods, and start thinking about your bank and wallet as a survival tool, rather than a spending tool.

When the last economic crisis hit, the 2008 financial crisis, the world was shocked at the speed in which it set in. From what started as a meltdown in the US mortgage market, the rest of the world collapsed in a domino effect in rapid succession.

For most of us, that economic collapse was something we just weren’t prepared for, and for those that were not prepared, it was a very tough period.

The question everyone is asking now is ‘when is the next economic collapse?’. It could be this year, the next or in five years. But as many economists argue, we are due for one, and the next one could be much worse than the previous financial downturns.

Since the only thing we can do is ready ourselves for another economic downturn, we take a look at 10 steps you can start taking now to survive an economic collapse.

But first, let’s take a look at some of the basics, to understand why we need to prepare for an economic collapse.

What is an economic collapse?

Simply put, an economic collapse, interchangeably used with the term financial collapse, is a series of very severe economic conditions. Many survivalists and preppers say an economic collapse is the one thing that they are preparing for, as it includes several symptoms that place risk on our necessary needs, such as food, water, power, and safety.

One of the worst factors about a financial collapse is the fact that it doesn’t abide by a timeline. Natural disasters, for instance, while very destructive, are short, with their duration measuring only for days let alone weeks. This allows recovery efforts to commence almost immediately. Economic downturns, however, are unmeasurable in length and for most, will last a minimum of a year, with the aftereffects resonating for several years as a nation recovers.

During an economic collapse, some symptoms affect large companies and industries, with very visible signs, felt in the family home. For instance, common symptoms of collapse are high bankruptcy rates, widespread unemployment, hyperinflation, a spike in death rates (attributable to depression or other financial causes), social collapse, and a high increase in crime.

What causes an economic collapse?

Financial systems can be affected by a large number of different scenarios, and for the most part, a country can bounce back quite quickly with severe financial fluctuations going undetected by the majority of the population. But for the causes, they seem to be factors that can create a ripple effect in a country’s financial industry, resulting in economic loss shockwaves.

If we look back at history, one financial collapse is not like the other. Yes, their symptoms are the same and in the home, loss, grief, and stress are all experienced, but their causes remain unique.

The 2008 Global Financial crisis was triggered by factors such as the burst of the US housing bubble, easy credit conditions, fraudulent lending services, overleveraging, and shadow banking practices. This is different from Venezuela’s economic collapse, which has only been felt in that country and not across the world. In Venezuela, the causes of its economic crisis were caused by presidential policies and a fall in oil prices as well as several other contributing factors. Since its beginning, Venezuela has experienced severe spikes in crime, corruption, poverty, and hunger issues.

There have been some other economic downturns that have completely different causes but have all displayed widespread unemployment, poverty, hunger, and social chaos. They include:

• 1998 Argentine Great Depression
• 2001 Turkish Economic Crisis
• 2008 Icelandic Financial Crisis
• European Debt Crisis
• 2014 Russian Financial Crisis

The economic crisis is not just limited to societies, it can also be limited at an individual level. But, an individual can recover much quicker than a society, by making good choices for him or herself. Keep in mind, this his pernicious crisis can likely be prevented or minimizes with some planning. Avoiding certain situations and leaning towards safe investing strategies can make all the difference.

What are the warning signs of an economic collapse?

As we have seen above, a financial downturn can set in very rapidly, and before we know it we have lost our jobs, stores are shutting down, and we’re left high and dry. But there are some warning signs to watch out for. These are early indicators for a potential financial downturn and possible economic collapse.

Of course, your first source is to stay up to date with the news. All good survivalists are avid readers of politics, finance, and weather – the three things that can kick us out of our home or make us go hungry. So inevitably, they are the go-to sections for survivalists, and anyone else that cares about what happens in the world, and indirectly themselves.

According to Lombardi Letter, there are five signs that an economic collapse is about to happen. They are:

1. Growing government debt: when an economy slows, the government usually steps in to help stimulate spending again, but with high debt, the government might not be able to make that injection.
2. Stock markets trading at all-time highs: investors are taking more risk on the market, markets continue to trade higher meaning investments are bull-market driven and not research-based which could lead to a stock market bubble.
3. Unemployment rate: eligible worker, retirement, and student rates all identify trends in people not contributing to the economy and could slow down economic growth
4. Unstable government: this boils down to the leader and government team in the decisions and actions that may affect the economy in various ways
5. Rising national debt: this means less consumer spending in the economy and more money spent on paying a debt.

Although those five economic collapse red flags are present in any collapse, there are also other things we can do to be ahead of a financial collapse disaster. And that is to look at what the warning signs displayed by the people involved in it all, America’s elite Wall Street executives and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.

What are the world’s richest preppers doing?

A good sign of an economic downturn is when you see some of the world’s richest executives preparing for an economic disaster. You know things are about to go wrong if they are taking considerable efforts to protect themselves and their families.

Silicon Valley millionaires and Wall Street investors are buying big houses overlooking lakes in New Zealand and other underpopulated places in the world should they need the security of a hideaway to bug out to, should a severe financial downturn happen.

One of the world’s wealthiest technology entrepreneurs, and Trump advisor, Peter Thiel (co-founder of PayPal),  became a New Zealand citizen in 2011 and has a large family mansion fitted with panic rooms on a homestead property. He plans to live out an economic collapse in that self-sufficient mansion in New Zealand, far away from Silicon Valley, when the early warning signs appear. Facebook Product Manager Antonio Martinez has five acres of isolated land in the Pacific Northwest where he has stockpiled food, water, generators, and solar panels with shelter as a bug out location.

On the Wall Street executive side, a member of an investment firm, quoted in the New Yorker, has a helicopter on standby at all times to take him to his underground bunker where he plans on living out an economic collapse with a self-sufficient garden, power source and food and water supply. Meanwhile, Mayfield Fund managing director Tim Chang has bug-out bags for him, his wife and four-year-old, and several established bug-out locations in regional areas.

How can you prepare for an economic collapse?

Let’s face it, we can’t fight an economic collapse, we can’t run from it either. Even if it were to be isolated to one country, such as in Venezuela, our savings would be very little in any other country, effectively trapping us and turning us into financial crisis refugees. The only thing we can do is prepare for an economic collapse and be a little more frugal when the going gets tough.

So let’s take a look at the 10 steps you can take to prepare for an economic collapse.

1. Learn simple economics so you can identify early warning signs

The list I provided above on economic collapse red flags to look out for is not a complete list, there are an endless amount of warning signs that you will be able to see if you regularly view financial news on the stock market’s performance and the nation’s economy.

Basic understandings of economics will help you in not only noticing an early downturn but will help you identify possible safe havens for your money and economic minefields that you should avoid.

2. Cash is king

When you have cash, it’s buying power that many might lose. When I mention cash, this also refers to money in the bank. Just make sure that whatever investments you have, you can quickly liquidate them should you need to and secure the cash. I would recommend not having investments in anything that takes longer than a week to withdraw. As you have seen in the past, an economic recession can set in in the blink of an eye and some resources may not be valid for liquidating due to early bankruptcy.

If I can give any advice to financial collapse preppers out there, it would be to get your savings in a safe place. Savings and checkings accounts should always carry a certain amount of emergency money as these can be withdrawn quickly. This is much better than having all of your money in a term deposit account that provides restrictions on when you can withdraw your money.

Also try to have a set amount of cash on hand, especially if you are picking up warning signs of a recession. This amount of money will be able to act as an emergency stash until you can withdraw the money in your account and have your assets liquidated.

3. Start building an emergency cash fund

An emergency fund should not be in credit, it should be from the cash you saved in a savings account from your monthly income. You can file this in any savings account with your bank (most allow for a free account to be opened). This fund is essentially a do not touch fund, or as some prefer to call it, a SHTF fund. Make sure you have enough money to at least allow you to buy tickets to another country and support yourself and your family for a month.

This type of fund allows you to leave a country before the US dollar becomes weak and should provide for enough time to get a job in that country until the collapse has resided.

4. Start being more frugal with your monthly bills

When you have no money coming in, the worst thing to have is money coming out on expenses that you don’t need. Start minimizing your bills by going through them each month with a highlighter and seeing where most of your money is going. Is there a way to limit that? Perhaps the power is a little higher than it should be and the air-conditioning or heater is being left on?

Practicing sustainable methods such as organic gardening, generating your power, and utilizing your own space is a great way to also lessen monthly expenses and become more self-reliant in case of an economic collapse where regular comforts might not be reachable in the same manner as we are used to. You can invest in solar panels or grow your produce to supplement your food expenditures. This is also a growing trend as a lot of people are pushing towards self-sufficiency and off-the-grid methods.

A few of the people that have already moved to unpopulated areas are running gardens on their properties that can completely sustain their whole family all-year-round. It doesn’t take long to learn urban gardening skills or country homesteading skills and they are both very fun and rewarding tasks.

5. Generate an additional (collapse-proof) form of income

Our writer from Venezuela was an engineer but started making cheese, learned to use a CNC crafting and cutting kit, and became a freelance writer for various websites as a way to find alternative income when his country’s economy collapsed.

Diversifying the income, and distributing the money in the accounts you believe you may need, and even your means to receive money is crucial. In an economy like this, I believe that keeping the 20% of the monthly income in silver would have worked, but Venezuela is not a place where preppers and people concerned about taking the direction of their future are plentiful, so a trading network would have been pretty difficult to set up.

Many try starting an at-home business to ensure they have a bit of extra cash each month aside from their normal job, and as a fallback when times are tough and they have faced job loss. Of course, those skills would have to be essential skills required in a collapse, which could be things such as sewing, gardening, building, repairs, selling your foods, accounting, and other things that households would regularly require.

6. Get out of debt

If you have considerable debt, build a strategy to get out of it as quickly as possible. In the case of a financial collapse, there will be multiple job losses and widespread income loss. The sooner you remove debt the sooner you can remove the worry of having to pay debts when you have no source of income.

As a method to manage any debt you have owing, try the following:

• Create a spreadsheet budget plan in excel or online using a free budget calculator
• Use a column for incomings and another for outgoings.
• Create another column for your debt repayments and list their interest rates as well
• Identify and rank each debt by their interest rates from high to low
• As you find you have savings in the bank, pay off the debt with the highest interest rate
• When that debt is paid off completely,  move onto the next one.

7. Make sure your passport is current

Should the country be at a point where it is about to take a steep dive downwards, it might be time to get out and spend some time abroad. This is a common move for many economic refugees as they wait for their country to regain financial security.

Your passport should have enough remaining time, with at least a few years on it so that you can avoid unnecessary complications with having to renew a passport overseas. Also, research countries that you might choose as a refuge destination and research their visa laws, as well as any possible employment there.

8. Start prepping

If a financial collapse does occur, you are going to want to start prepping so that, should an economic downturn occur, you have enough food saved up while you either grow your food in the garden to supplement it or find another source of free food. Chances are you will need food more than water as water will still run, but stores may close down and shelves may empty quite quickly.

Part of our guide to start prepping involves identifying a bug-out plan, location, a suitable bug out bag and bug out contents. If a true economic collapse was to occur, there will be a high increase in crime rates, social disorder, looting, and likely clashes with law enforcement and military. It is a safe option to consider leaving busy urban areas as these are most likely the areas that will be prone to violence.

9. Use Websites and Apps Now

In this age of technology, the best way to prepare is to make use of the applications and websites available to you. There are many investing applications to store money. Here is a list of best investing applications to consider.

Fidelity Investments is a well-known investment brokerage. The firm charges a fee or commission for executing buy and sell orders submitted by an investor. These brokerage accounts are operated through licensed firms. Through this, the investors deposit funds and buy investments. Fidelity has almost 200 investor centers around the United States. They assist customers on iMessage, google assistant, and Facebook messenger. The fidelity mobile application is fresher and easier that bring excellent trade executions and exchange-traded fund (ETF) research on the mobile screen.

The Robin Hood application has been very significant in the online brokerage industry since it launched in 2014 as a mobile application. It allows customers to buy and sell stocks without paying any commission. It offers an abundance of research, news, charting, and educational resources. It is successful because it allows individuals to open accounts with very little funds and gives them access to their entire platform.

The Acorns application is a newer kind of investment. It automatically links debit and credit card purchases while investing from them. It has 650 thousand members most of which are millennials. People can easily invest spare change to the next dollar on all purchases. Acorns do not charge a commission but they can charge one dollar per month fee on some accounts.

The Nutmeg application, which was launched in 2011, is a cheaper investment platform. It focuses on ETFs and tracker funds to provide wealth management services. The portfolio invested, as well as the different countries and industry sectors invested in, are reviewed regularly by Nutmeg. Even if the markets fluctuate, the portfolios will have the same exposure to each asset.

The TD Ameritrade mobile application is one of the most powerful platforms on the market. It gives a succinct brief on the market, as well as stock and portfolios. It allows the person to trade in foreign currencies and many other complex options. Large investment selection makes it the number one application. You’ll have access to research and top-notch customer support.

10. Expand your Skills

It is important to learn skills that can serve as an alternative to the individual’s job, should you lose your job. And, in the current climate of job globalization and automation, almost every sort of job is at risk. During the financial crises, there is a huge rate of unemployment. A person should utilize his skills in another industry or field so they can stand out from all the other candidates who will also be searching for jobs.

Over to you…

Many of us have already been affected by past economic downturns. They are reoccurring beasts that can be escaped. The only thing we can do is to ensure we are prepared so that we can survive the many problems that come with an economic collapse.

In this post, we have identified what is an economic collapse, how to tell when a financial collapse is about to happen, and how to prepare for an economic collapse. I hope this information has helped you form a more clear picture of how to start your economic collapse preparations.

As preppers we usually focus on practical steps that will give us a better chance of surviving whatever crisis comes down the road. We talk about what kind of food to store and how much of it, where our water is going to come from, and the best weapons to have available. These are all important points, and if we don’t get them right life will be a lot harder post-SHTF. But is there something else, maybe just as important, that we’re all overlooking?

Being prepared is about being ready to survive in a world that’s radically different from the one we live in now. Most of us are pretty well equipped to deal with the physical differences – not being able to go to the store for food, or the mains power going out – but what about the moral differences?

The moral standards we use in everyday life are going to be stretched to the limit, and far beyond, if the SHTF. Our standards of right and wrong developed in a safe, organized society where most essentials are easily available. How well are they going to cope in the chaos of social collapse? Probably not very well – and that means we all need to think about our personal moral values, what limits they put on our actions, and how we might have to adapt them when the situation changes.

Most people’s moral code says “don’t steal”. It says “help people who’re in trouble”. Unless you’re a psychopath it says “Don’t shoot at anyone except in self-defense”. It probably includes beliefs about marriage, relationships and what’s acceptable in those areas. You can probably think of a list of other rules you live by. Have you thought about how those rules will work in a crisis situation?

Obviously some of them will still work just fine. Don’t rape; don’t kill for the fun of it; don’t abuse the weak and helpless. All of these things are simply wrong, in any situation. Other things fall into more of a gray area though. You’ll have to be a lot more willing to use violence than you’d usually be comfortable with. Other people’s property rights will often take a lower priority compared to what you and your loved ones need to survive. Helping others has to be balanced against the impact it will have on you – if you give a starving child a meal, you can’t just head down to Walmart to replace the food you gave them.

Madly Murderous

Modern society has strong taboos against killing unnecessarily, and that’s basically what murder is – killing someone without legal sanction. Soldiers on operations are legally sanctioned to kill within their ROEs; a homeowner faced with an intruder is legally sanctioned to kill under self-defense laws. But if you kill someone because they took the parking space you wanted at Safeway, or because you saw them grab an ear of corn from your field, there’s no legal justification for that and it’s murder.

But what happens if law and order have collapsed? In a serious crisis there won’t be any legal sanction, because who’s enforcing the law and making that kind of decision? In that situation you have to look beyond your personal morals and consider what knock-on effects there will be.

Shooting someone for taking a parking space is still wrong; just because it’s the end of the world doesn’t mean you can’t walk an extra ten feet. Shooting someone for taking a single ear of corn is probably also wrong – if they’re taking a single ear. But what if they’re systematically harvesting your crop?

A lot of preppers grow their own food in normal times, and like anything valuable sometimes crops get robbed. Usually, unless they threatened you with a weapon, you wouldn’t be justified in killing someone for stealing your crop. They’re committing a crime, but you can replace the lost food from the grocery store. In a crisis it’s different. Let them take that food and, come winter, you and your family could be starving to death. Will your personal morality let you shoot to keep hold of that food? It’s something you need to consider.

Are you going to make a moral judgment based on who is taking your food? A lot of us would feel justified in opening fire on a group of armed looters, but might be more hesitant to pull the trigger on a starving woman with kids in tow. Are you willing to face a bit of personal hardship to keep someone else alive?

Fair Shares? Forget it!

Most of us do what we can to help the less fortunate. Whether it’s handing some spare change to a homeless person or volunteering for a local shelter, we generally do what we can for others. That’s fine when only a minority of people need help, and the majority can carry them without much of a sacrifice. It’s totally different when only a few are prepared for a crisis and almost everyone else is looking for a share of their supplies.

With the best will in the world, you can’t help all your unprepared neighbors. You just don’t have enough food, fuel and medicine to keep them going for more than a couple of days, and in the process you’ll wipe out your own supplies.

Recently we looked at your options for what to do if someone asks for food during a crisis. That decision has moral dimensions too. You might find it morally unacceptable to leave others hungry when you have food – but is that a realistic approach? Simple – no it isn’t. To survive you’re going to have to adapt your morals to the situation.

Finders, Keepers?

If I find lost property, I do everything I reasonably can to return it to its owner. It’s theirs, not mine, and I don’t have any right to keep it. I never steal, either; property rights are the foundation of any decent society. But when the SHTF I’m going to have to evaluate my positions on that.

In a crisis there’s going to be a lot of lost stuff lying around. When refugees start leaving urban areas, expect their path to be littered with things they got fed up carrying. A lot of these things will be useful to you, and it’s obviously impractical to collect them and return them to their rightful owners. It makes no sense to leave them lying around, either, so I’d say it’s morally acceptable to scavenge them and take anything that improves your own chances.

Stealing, on the other hand, is still wrong. If someone else has something you want, that’s tough; it’s theirs, not yours. If you think you’re justified in taking it from them by force you’re not a prepper; you’re just a bandit.

I’ve looked at three of the biggest moral issues that we’re likely to face in a major crisis, but there are many more. For example a lot of us have religious beliefs that disapprove of sex outside marriage. What happens if a collapse is permanent and there’s nobody left to register marriages? Are you going to let humanity die out because there isn’t a pastor handy? You might think alcohol is immoral – but will you have the same opinion when you need a broken arm reset and a bottle of rum is the only effective painkiller you have left?

The end of the world as we know it will throw a lot of challenges at us. Surviving them is going to take work. Don’t put yourself in a place where that work becomes harder, and you and your loved ones are put in unnecessary danger, because of moral values that don’t fit the situation. You need to look at where you can redraw the limits to survive the crisis and still be a decent person at the end of it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Fed will not save the market this time

The fractals, the repeating structures. The symmetry in time or space. History and the conclusions we draw from it. Mathematics in the price trend. The ignorance towards the history, the price evolution and the experiences of the generations that slowly only belong to our memories. Today’s ignorance of mathematics and its role in the pricing of what we buy every day. The history of the stock market. The prices, their laborious observation, which began in Japan 300 years ago and led to the introduction of derivatives, still foreign to most Europeans. The situation on the stock exchanges, which, as they say, reflects the nearest future in a flash (mainly thanks to the modern algorithms and computerized HFT trading) and only reacts to the coming(!) events now…

Consider the history of the last years and the current situation.

The Fed has been playing into the hands of Wall Street billionaires for years: every time there was a 20% or so drop in stock prices, the helicopter money came in the form of dollars to rescue the assets. This magic 20% of the free fall from all-time highs was supposed to mean the beginning of a bear market for most analysts and economists. If there was turbulence in the stock market, new shiny measures were immediately announced: bonds were bought, interest rates were lowered, money printed out of thin air was pumped into the veins of the banking system. Why such a violent reaction? 55% of the savings of future U.S. retirees are invested in risky assets like stocks, mainly through the 401(k)* program, which is a tax shield for U.S. citizens. That’s why the FED and the U.S. government need to pay close attention to the stock market. Even Alan Greenspan acknowledged that the level of stock indexes determines the level of the economy, not the other way around. If the American retiree gets a statement from his account every month and sees that he has more and more money, he might buy a new car, a cottage in Florida, or at least afford a trip to Vegas. If this is not the case, the demand in the country where consumption is responsible for the 70% of the GDP decreases and the electorate of the party currently in power is lost.

In fact, however, an average American gained little from the Fed’s mild interest rate policy: although he was able to live lavishly on cheap credit and collect dividends on his retirement account during the last 13 years of the “perpetual” bull market, at the same time his purchasing power sank like the Titanic along with the weakening dollar. The money was and is with the banks, not the people. Trump’s voters get that, and in the future they will probably speak up more with their social demands like the truck drivers in Canada did a few months ago. Apropos of the U.S. lower and middle classes, who supposedly could do nothing but increase consumption with their transfers of over $1200 per capita per month created out of thin air during the Corona crisis: the average Mr. Schmidt from Kentucky and Arizona, if he was smart enough, shunned cash, didn’t spend it all, invested in stocks, REITs (Real Estate Investment Trust), corporate bonds and other risky assets like cryptocurrencies, even if not consciously and personally, then passively and unconsciously as a contributing member of the pension funds that did it for him. The bubble in the market thus grew to proportions never seen before.

Now, at the moment of writing, the biggest bubble, Nasdaq, is down 30% from its all-time highs, which, by the way, we have warned about several times in our bulletins. Not a peep is heard from Powell on the subject of easing monetary policy. What a turnaround! Investors are now listening only to him, soaking up his words like a sponge, as if they were a coin at face value, hoping that the Fed will loosen its monetary and interest rate policy again after all, in view of the falling stock prices, and guarantee the eternal bull market, but he constantly wants to tighten his monetary policy, unaffected by the circumstances. Why? Perhaps he also sees fractal similarities with the last great crash of 2008, when the crash on Wall Street helped dampen inflation. Just compare the sections from S&P price trends circa 2008 and today, compiled with inflation.

And if you like fractals (marked as rectangles above, marked as swings from highs to lows within months below), the graph also gives you an incentive to rethink. The stock market crash of almost 100 years ago and today’s price development of the US stock market look (too) similar.

The small investors keep buying, the big ones have long since pulled out. U.S. companies are sitting on cash; the Corona era has halted corporate investment. Cash will burn in the future. Will corporations and the small fry put it back into stocks after the coming big reset? Is there really no other choice?

According to FEMA whistle blower Celeste Solum, left, Americans have been cast in the role of Jews in Nazi Germany and will meet the same fate. 
Global governance means we’ll have to play by a “totally new set of rules.”

If Celeste Solum is right, we are in much worse trouble than we think. She comes from an Illuminati background and worked as a FEMA planner for 20 years. So she is in a position to know.
Her horrifying vision is the darkest you will find. I cannot confirm that it will transpire but this may be a case of “forewarned is forearmed.” Prepare for “a world of hurt.”
She doesn’t write so I couldn’t find a text to repost. Instead she gives interviews to people like Mike Adams, Dave Hodges and David Icke. I listened to a few and provide some of her claims:

With robotics, most human beings have become redundant to the Illuminati. When there are famines and power blackouts, people will stream to “reception centers” (at Costco’s and Walmarts of all places?) where they will be interned and sent to concentration camps where they will be gassed or guillotined.  The goal is to offload 90% of the population.

Covid tests are intended to collect your DNA. The vaccines contain aborted fetus stem cellsand human proteins that have been bred in plants and mice (“a human in a mouse suit.”) They also contain “hydrogels” – nanoparticles that permanently fuse with your tissue, that connect with a 5G computer network that “monitor your health” at all times and determine if you can go to work or buy food. 
Speaking of food, meat will be phased out and concentration camp rations –“micronutrients” — introduced for the general public. There will be no “going to the supermarket.” We will not be allowed “to take anything from nature” and must downsize to half our carbon footprint. If we live in a mansion, we must move to a bungalow. (I know it sounds crazy.) 
 FEMA estimates only 3% of gun owners will resist gun confiscation by force. 

 They are making an inventory of everything of material value. All private property “will be federalized.” 
CRACKPOT?It is tempting to dismiss Solum as a crackpot and a fear monger. There were many red flags. She tends to exaggerate, claiming she grows 500 varieties of tomatoes on her farm in Montana and there are “seven million drones” monitoring us. She places a lot of emphasis on cosmic changes: “2000 year cycles’; “the sun has gone silent” and the “magnetosphere” has weakened. We are in the “end times.” She claims that a second Wuhan virus was released- a “plant destroyer” that decimated her orchards in Montana. 

On the other hand, consider her message in the context of what is actually happening. Trillions have been spent and millions of lives have been disrupted or destroyed for a virus that has a .25% mortality rate. 68,000 Britons have been fined for lockdown breeches. A young couple was terrorized by 12-man SWAT team who thought they were having a party. An 82-year-old grannie was watching TV in bed when police arrived to warn her about having tea in her garden with two friends earlier that day.  A Michigan restaurant owner was led away in shackles after publicly warning Americans they were being enslaved. 
Make up your own mind. But my view is prepare for the worst and pray for the best.

According to Mike Braun: Joe Biden is the worst president in our history and intent on destroying our country with open borders, runaway inflation, and the woke mob. Donald Trump is the GOP nominee to defeat Biden and save America – there is no third option and if you are a Republican elected official who refuses to support Trump then you are helping Joe Biden and hurting America.

Joe Biden will go down in history as the most corrupt, dishonest, disingenuous presidents of all time. Every thing that he’s done, EVERYTHING HES TOUCHED, has turned to rot.

Below are the most despicable things he has done and at the same time the reasons why he does not deserve the position of president!

1. Afghanistan withdraw. Did you see Kabul airport and 1000s of people running to cling onto the outside of the jumbo aircraft to escape the incoming taliban? The solders who were blown up shortly after because intel was not handled?

2. The southern border. During ongoing Covid mandatory lock downs, Biden was letting them thru with a test and without a plan. 7 million and. Counting now. Bidens Fed agents have welded the wall gates in Arizona open so that they cannot be closed off and for two months AZ is the highest entry port. Our tax dollars are going to people who for the most part are not seeking asylum. The courts are so overwhelmed by this crap it’ll be a decade or more before they are all process. Roughly 70% are denied asylum because they have misrepresented their story and the courts deport them. We don’t have trillions of dollars to pay a majority of these unvetted undocumented people.

3. Student loan debt and lies to win votes and circumvent the law by illegal action.

4. drugs in the White House.

5. Special treatment and sweetheart legal deals for his Son Hunter who is a disgrace.

6. Bidens total and complete disregard for democracy in the sense that he’s weaponized the DOJ to file a barrage of “trumped up” charges that has empowered states to try and follow suit. More the 63% of voters in a poll recently reported that they believe the charges against Trump are political. This should be absolutely clear to every American with a brain.

7. interference with IRS and blocking ability to see the shell companies that have siphoned more than 50 million dollars from countries that we are either at odds with (China Russia) and others that we have sent billions to for war. uS banks are required to notify the federal government of suspicious activity and foreign money being deposited j to account. For a majority of Americans, they receive 0 in their lifetime. To have 1 will tarnish the records and be highly suspect. The Us banks, and there are several, in Toyo’s l have flagged 174 alerts to the irs and it’s just now being exposed only because of the two whistle blowers.

8. The main stream news has been complicit in cover up joes wrong doings but the abiden administration has regularly been working with social media companies to have target info from targets people removed. It got so bad a state sued them and got an injunction that barred the federal government from communicating with social media companies to make sure requests. The federal government appeals the temporary injunction and it was lifted. The trial will drag out and Biden will be dead before anytime gets serious in court.

9. the disgusting trans mutilation of children and not taking a firm stance on the lunacy that ran rampant.

10. The constant lying and lunacy on the world stage that makes us look like fools. We are about to reach the cliff and it’s crash max burn. The US dollar will no longer be the world standard and everything that goes along with it too. we are broke. Not enough gold to support our debt and that’s how it all starts . We should be cutting spending, it’s not rocket science.

Clearly, if you are asking the question seriously, you have not been paying attention. But, let’s say you claim you have, I could be persuaded to agree with you because no major main stream media reports on negative thing of Biden until it’s like it is now and cannot be ignored. But then that’s doesn’t explain why you’re asking the question. There are so many more things but no doubt we will get a bunch of people suffering from trump derangement syndrome and hate/ignorance is all they know.

Trump will go down as one of the bravest and best presidents in the 21st century. We had none of the above aa issues and the majority of people have the most untrue thoughts and beliefs about trump that are factually a lie and could be substantiate as lies. Trump has made several bold accusations that have proven true. He doesn’t not lie, he’s not a 47 year politician. Trump has his flaws, so do you. So do I. He’s a lot of things that are not ideal, are not ones we’d hope for. But in the race and the options, the one who’s been charged conveniently now is a burden meant to drown him out. Who would have thought our government was like that’s. It’s truly a sad state of affairs.

It sounds like something out of a Cold War era movie. Boxes of medical supplies stacked high in government warehouses to help citizens in the event of a public health emergency.

However, this huge stockpile is very real. It is called the Strategic National Stockpile, and “Once Federal and local authorities agree that the SNS is needed, medicines will be delivered to any state in the U.S. in time for them to be effective. Each state has plans to receive and distribute SNS medicine and medical supplies to local communities as quickly as possible.”

For security reasons, the location and the number of warehouses that comprise the SNS are classified information – as is much of what is in them. “If everybody knows exactly what we have, then you know exactly what you can do to us that we can’t fix,” Greg Burel, director of the program told National Public Radio in a recent interview. “And we just don’t want that to happen.”

The SNS started in 1999 with an approximate $50 million budget. Since then, it has built an inventory in multiple warehouses that is valued at just over $7 billion. “If you envision, say, a Super Walmart and stick two of those side by side and take out all the drop ceiling, that’s about the same kind of space that we would occupy in one of these storage locations,” Burel said.

The SNS extensive inventory includes massive amounts of small pox vaccines, antivirals in case of deadly flu pandemic, medicines to treat radiation burns and sickness, chemical agent antidotes, wound care supplies, antibiotics and IV fluids.

NPR science writer Nell Greenfieldboyce recently visited an SNS. She was told she was the first reporter ever to visit the secret warehouses, and she had to sign a confidentiality agreement not to describe the location or the exterior of the facility.

A locked section of the warehouse stocks painkillers than can be addictive. A giant freezer is filled with medicines that need to be kept frozen. Greenfieldboyce described a humming sound that comes from the rows of ventilators that are charged once a month and sent out for maintenance once a year.

With an annual budget of more than half a billion dollars, the SNS is charged with deciding what to purchase for the stockpile. In order to do so, officials must determine which threats are realistic and which are not.

“That’s where we have a huge, complex bureaucracy trying to sort through that,” Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University, told Greenfieldboyce.

The government recently hired a firm called Gryphon Scientific to analyze how well the stockpile could respond to a range of health disaster scenarios.

Although he said he could not be specific on results of the study, Gryphon Scientific’s Rocco Casagrande told the NPR reporter, “One thing we can say is that across the variety of threats that we examined, the Strategic National Stockpile has the adequate amount of materials in it and by and large the right type of thing.”

However, he pointed out that the studies were based upon a single type of attack at a time or a single type of weapon.

The brief shelf life of some of the newer medicines is a problem for the SNS. “These are often very powerful, very exciting and useful new medicines, but they are also very expensive and they expire after a couple years,” explained Dr. Tara O’Toole, a former Homeland Security official who is now at In-Q-Tel, a nonprofit that helps bring technological innovation to the U. S. intelligence community.

Another problem is the time it would take to get the medicines from the warehouses to the people who need them in the event of real emergency. “It is not going to be easy or simple to put medicines in the hand of everybody who wants it,” O’Toole told NPR.

The warehouse Greenfieldboyce visited contains 130 shipping containers, but who will be on the receiving end of these shipping containers during an actual emergency?

“While they do have plans for emergencies, and lists of volunteers, they’re volunteers,” said Paul Petersen, director of emergency preparedness for Tennessee. “And they’re not guaranteed to show up in the time of need.”

Local public health officials have had severe budget cuts and are underfunded, Petersen told NPR. “Over and over, I heard worries about this part of the stockpile system.”

O’Toole said, “We have drastically decreased the level of state public health resources in the last decade. We’ve lost 50,000 state and local health officials. That’s a huge hit.” She commented that emergency drills would be helpful, adding, “The notion that this is all going to be top down, that the feds are in charge and the feds will deliver, is wrong.”

Meanwhile, the secret warehouses continue to stockpile supplies. “We have the capability, if something bad happens, that we can intervene in a positive way, but then we don’t ever want to have to do that. So it’s kind of a strange place,” Burel told NPR.

“But we would be foolish not to prepare for those events that we could predict might happen.”

According to Wikipedia: Gun control, or firearms regulation, is the set of laws or policies that regulate the manufacture, sale, transfer, possession, modification, or use of firearms by civilians.

Most countries have a restrictive firearm guiding policy, with only a few being categorized as permissive. Jurisdictions that regulate access to firearms typically restrict access to only certain categories of firearms and then to restrict the categories of persons who will be granted a license to have access to a firearm. In some countries, such as the United States, gun control may be legislated at either a federal level or a local state level.

Many Prepper and survivalist web sites contain an abundance of material about the likelihood of gun confiscation in the aftermath of a major disaster. The general premise is that government agencies and/or military units will be going door to door after a declaration of martial law to forcibly deprive you of weapons and ammunition. You resist – you die, or end up in a prison cell on the back side of some undocumented FEMA camp in the middle of nowhere; or so the theory goes.

Unfortunately, the distinction between local or regional disasters, such as a hurricane or earthquake, and a wider SHTF or “end of the world as we know it” event, are rarely made. In any historic disaster that you can name, government has always continued to function at both the state and federal levels. A varied collection of mostly nameless bureaucratic agencies have always been able to respond to a recognized need. The degree to which they were timely in their response, or even effective, is not an issue. The point is that a constituted and functional government (the people who you think you elected), were responding to a recognized need because they had a political motivation or statutory obligation to do so.

Most frequently cited in Prepper articles is the warning that gun confiscation is an inevitable consequence of a declaration of martial law. In the case of Hurricane Katrina, law enforcement personnel were, in fact, going door to door to confiscate firearms. There were numerous highly qualified Search and Rescue teams that refused to go to New Orleans because they were not allowed to carry firearms for their own protection.

If the entire system were to suddenly go sideways, what is the probability of an enforceable martial law declaration, followed by gun confiscation? For example, if a solar coronal mass ejection (CME) event took out the entire national power grid could you realistically expect an army platoon to break through your front door in search of firearms, ammo and surplus food? I think not.

In order for martial law to be effective, you must first have a means of declaring it to the general populace. Second, you must have a means of enforcing it. The absence of either factor renders the declaration a moot point. Even without a means of communication, citizens will realize that a major catastrophe has happened. If there are no lights on at city hall, it won’t take a genius to figure out that civilization has gone south. Without a means of communication (TV, radio, Internet, posters on telephone poles, etc.) there is no way the general populace would know that martial law has been declared.

Second, if the command and control communications infrastructure has been disabled, government will have no ability to issue notifications or orders to law enforcement agencies (federal, state, county or local). By using the term “infrastructure,” I refer to computer based network communications, the ability to transmit communiqués via radio, the ability to contact and muster enforcement personnel, and essential coordination of resources. Stated a bit more directly, Fort Bliss will not dispatch a battalion of troops from the 1st Armored Division to Albuquerque, New Mexico (a distance of 225 air miles) to confiscate your firearms. They won’t be doing it in Humvees, M1-A1 tanks or Blackhawk helicopters. And they most assuredly won’t be on foot.

Finally, the enforcement of martial law (including gun confiscation) presupposes that county and local law enforcement personnel will be willing to carry it out on a national scale. It is one thing to suppress looters and arsonists, but requiring the military or state/county law enforcement to confiscate 350 million legally owned firearms is an entirely different proposition; especially if they are faced with determined resistance. Importantly, there are an increasing number of county sheriffs across the U.S. that have gone on record to refuse cooperation with federal initiatives that would lead to gun confiscation.

Doing house to house searches – whether vacant or occupied – is a very time-consuming and labor intensive process; not to mention the risks involved. Based on national averages, patrol officers number about 2 per 1,000 residents across the country. In rural communities, that number may be as low as one per thousand. In crime ravaged cities like Chicago, Washington DC and Baltimore, it can exceed four per thousand. When you consider housing and population density in urban areas, gun confiscation would be a daunting task to assign to any police force.

Excluding overseas deployments, the number of active duty Army and Marines in the contiguous U.S. is significantly less than 500,000. That is less than 1.5% of the entire population. The number of Army/Marine personnel that would be trained and equipped to deprive you of your personal defense weapons would actually be less than one per 10,000 population. Within a matter of days, every state-side military installation will be in the same situation that you will face: No gasoline, no diesel or jet fuel for vehicles or aircraft, no resupply for commissaries or mess halls, and no direction from the federal or state branches of government. They will be eating MREs for breakfast, lunch and dinner. If the grid is down for you, it will be down for them, too. If you don’t have fuel, or if the semiconductor circuits in your vehicle have been fried, do you think the military will escape a similar fate? You can think of it as an ‘equal opportunity’ form of calamity.

A More Probable Scenario

In my view, the disintegration of government and the abandonment of Constitutional rule of law would rapidly lead to a collapse of civil order. Without a functioning government, looting, arson and home invasions would erupt within hours – if not minutes – in major population centers. Any form of effective law enforcement (civil or military) would quickly evaporate. Instead, as the realization that civilization as we know it has come to an end, local communities and individuals would institute their own versions of martial law, but in a distinctly reverse manner.

The important distinction is that communities would be relying on citizen’s firearms to prevent being overwhelmed by refugees and looters. In other words, if you are inside the compound or town limits, and have possession of a firearm, you will be a defensive asset to the community. Moreover, local law enforcement will likely be aiding your collective defense. The enemy will be on the outside of the barricade.

In a total SHTF scenario, I believe that you are far more likely to be engaged in defending your family, property or survival community from raiders than you would be from government-backed confiscators of your weapons. The more tangible danger is from a still-functioning government that has abandoned Constitutional rule of law.

In the summer of 2020, from Minnesota to London, a global protest movement erupted in response to incidents of racial profiling and police brutality against Black Americans. As illustrated by Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama in 1965, the Kent State Massacre in 1970, the MOVE Bombing in Philadelphia in 1985, Ferguson in 2014, and the many more countless deaths of Black people at the hands of police, this form of violence and discrimination is not new to the United States. But what has steadily evolved over time is the militarization of both federal and local law enforcement, from the increasing use of military-grade equipment in police raids and protest response to the use of tactics borrowed from military operations abroad. This blog outlines some of the key programs and dynamics contributing to the militarization of US law enforcement and its impact on civilian harm.

Police Militarization Defined

In this post, we define police militarization as the influence of military equipment, tactics, and mindset on domestic law enforcement. This phenomenon exists in at least three distinct areas:

1. Transfer of military equipment to domestic law enforcement agencies;
2. Regular flow of personnel from the military to local law enforcement agencies; and
3. Adoption of military tactics by law enforcement.

A recent paper published by Brown University scholar Jessica Katzenstein notes that while militarization has always been a feature of US law enforcement – starting as early as militarized slave patrols and colonial militias – the US response to 9/11 has significantly exacerbated police militarization. Although certain military attributes like discipline and a clear chain of command may contribute to improved accountability and professionalism in law enforcement, militarization also blurs the lines between military and law enforcement in ways that can increase the risk of civilian harm.

Key Factors Contributing to the Police Militarization Pipeline and Impacts on Civilians

Equipment

Law enforcement agencies can purchase military grade equipment directly from private companies, a costly route for most departments whose funding comes from local taxes. As an alternative, several federal government programs allow the free transfer of military equipment to local agencies. These include:

Department of Defense 1033 Program: Created to support “War on Drugs” counter-drug and counter-terrorism policies in the 1990s, the 1033 Program allows federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to loan or purchase excess or obsolete military equipment and weaponry as well as office supplies. The program, administered by the Defense Logistics Agency in the Department of Defense, has provided equipment free of charge to 8,200 agencies throughout the United States in 49 states and 4 territories valued at approximately $7.4 billion.

The 1033 Program recently made headlines, as scenes of police in riot gear and tanks quelling protests during the 2020 George Floyd demonstrations led many to wonder why police appeared equipped for war and not protest, and how locally-funded agencies could afford military grade equipment. The 1033 Program is the most heavily criticized of the three equipment transfer programs. During a Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigation into the 1033 Program in 2017, a fake law enforcement agency was able to obtain $1.2 million in equipment, including simulated rifles and simulated pipe bombs. Senator Brian Schatz proposed a failed amendment to the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to scrap the 1033 Program entirely; however, the Senate instead approved an amendment to codify the Obama administration’s policy of restricting the resale of tracked, armored vehicles and drones. Critics of the program suggest this measure is more symbolic than impactful, as the Department of Defense says it does not actually supply these particular items to local police agencies.

Department of Defense 1122 Program: Established by section 1122 of the 2014 NDAA, the 1122 Program allows local enforcement agencies to purchase new military equipment at the same discounted price enjoyed by federal agencies for the purposes of counter-drug, emergency response, and homeland security activities. Because the 1122 Program is not a grant or transfer program, it is not monitored for compliance.

Homeland Security Grant Program: This program consists of three grants administered by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The program, intended to help local agencies prepare for and prevent terrorism incidents, can be used to purchase advanced equipment like helicopters, but not weapons. Funds from this program can also be used to transport 1033 Program equipment. The program provides $1 billion to law enforcement agencies annually.

Proponents of these equipment transfer programs often cite natural disasters or terrorism to justify the programs’ utility. However, these programs also militarize domestic law enforcement and have been shown to contribute to civilian harm. For example, a 2017 study found that, “when controlling for civilian demographics, violent crime rates, and rates of drug use, 1033 Program transfers correlated with increased police killings of civilians.” Military equipment has also played a prominent role in the excessive use of force by law enforcement in responses to civilian protests, as seen in Ferguson in 2014, Standing Rock in 2016, and the many racial justice protests of 2020; and has been used by Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), contributing to the militarization of the US border and facilitating harsh immigration enforcement.

Personnel

A significant number of military service members go on to domestic law enforcement upon leaving the military, a phenomenon that may contribute to police militarization through mindset, background, and training. For example, research by Jessica Katzenstein notes that approximately 19 to 28 percent of law enforcement officers are military veterans, while only about 7 percent of the general population in the United States has served in the military. CBP reports about one third of its force as military veterans. Oftentimes, law enforcement is seen as an attractive option for military veterans due to its familiar organizational structure and emphasis on discipline, which allows them to apply certain skills gained in the military. Law enforcement also actively recruits from the veteran population; for example, CBP’s website cites a “military community culture.”

The disproportionate number of former military service members in law enforcement can contribute to a militarized culture and mindset and present unique challenges to citizen-officer relations, in large part because the police and the military play different roles in American society. The military is tasked with using force to protect the homeland from foreign threats, while police are meant to serve as a civil force tasked with keeping communities safe. As a result, this personnel transfer may contribute to increased use of force and resulting harm by law enforcement. For example, a case study by the Marshall Project suggests that veterans working as law enforcement officers are more likely to discharge their weapons than non-veteran officers.

Mindset, Tactics, & Training

Militarized law enforcement responses are often characterized by a war mindset: to galvanize the public, political leaders often use war as a metaphor for the need to act on a domestic problem or issue, as seen in terms like “War on Drugs” and “Global War on Terror” – both of which coincided with policies that contributed significantly to the militarization of domestic law enforcement. Most recently, in calls with governors regarding responses to the 2020 George Floyd protests, then-acting Defense Secretary Mark Esper said governors must “dominate the battlespace” to quell protests, while the media compared the streets of DC to scenes from US counterinsurgency operations in places like Kabul and Baghdad.

Beyond militarized rhetoric, the adoption of military tactics and training by law enforcement agencies also contributes to increased militarization and civilian harm. These include:Counterinsurgency Tactics: Dating back to the 19th century, modern counterinsurgency tactics were developed to combat guerilla warfare during the US occupation of the Philippines by dispatching small elite units, normally at night, to surround, search, and destroy combatants. Sociology Professor at The University of Chicago, Julian Go, details how search and destroy tactics from this period were adapted on indigenous populations, specifically the Sioux in the Great Plains region during the 1800s. Common tactics also included the surveillance of targeted communities and recruitment of informants.

Many modern police tactics have been adapted from foreign wars for domestic use. For example, former service members like Orlando Wilson, known as the father of law enforcement ethics, returned from enforcing martial law in Germany after World War II and wrote the most widely-used police administration textbook. After Wilson revolutionized the Chicago Police Department in the 1960s, his tactics played a key role in the 1969 assassination of Fred Hampton, a Black Panther and labor rights activist, by the Chicago police. Drugged by a police informant, Hampton was asleep with his pregnant girlfriend when the police raided his home and fired into the home 99 times, initially killing one person, before fatally shooting an already wounded Hampton inside his home. These continued to be common tactics utilized to dismantle civil rights and Black resistance organizations.

The adoption of counterinsurgency tactics in the form of small elite units, community surveillance, and confidential informants has resulted in a militarized approach, facilitated civilian harm by law enforcement, and contributed to the significant degradation of police-community relations.SWAT Teams & No-Knock Raids: Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) police units, adapted from small unit tactics discussed above, have often been deployed to combat the “War on Drugs.” According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 62 percent of SWAT raids between 2011 to 2012 were drug raids, and 72 percent involved executing a search warrant. A component of these raids is often no-knock warrants, which allow law enforcement to enter a property without immediate notification of residents, for example by knocking. During such raids, units generally arrive heavily-armed (often through the 1033 and other programs discussed above) in armored personnel carriers – colloquially known as tanks – and enter homes using flash grenades to disorient occupants. As the ACLU notes, these raids are particularly dangerous because half of households in the United States own a gun. New York Times reporter Kevin Sacks estimates that, at minimum, 94 people, including two police officers, were killed in SWAT raids from 2010-2016. The actual number is unknowable since there is no national database for excessive use of force incidents.

The dangers of these raids made headlines most recently in the killing of Breonna Taylor, who was killed by police gunfire during the execution of a botched SWAT search warrant. In another case in 2014, police in Cornelia, Georgia were searching for a suspect accused of buying $50 worth of drugs. In the resulting no-knock raid – executed in a home where the suspect did not live – the flash grenade set off by police landed in the crib of 19-month old Bounkham ‘Bou Bou’ Phonesavanh, creating a hole in the baby’s chest and injuring his face. Critics of no-knock raids also cite fourth amendment rights to be secure against unlawful search and seizure, which such raids may violate.K-9 Units: Today, law enforcement uses canine (K-9) units for drug and bomb searches, captures of fleeing suspects, evidence location, and public relations initiatives. As Tyler D. Parry outlines in The Washington Post, the use of K-9s was first introduced in the American context to track, capture, and kill indigenous people in the Americas as early as the 1490s by Spanish colonizers, and later by “slave patrols” to track, capture, and sometimes kill people escaping enslavement throughout the American continents. K-9s were later used by the British military during World War II to search and find survivors in debris from German air raids, and by Nazi Germany to patrol Nazi concentration camps. The modern use of K-9 units for law enforcement was brought to the United States in 1954 by an ex-marine dog trainer in Dearborn Michigan and first deployed in Baltimore City in 1956.

Since canines cannot exercise judgement and are trained for maximum aggression, their use can endanger civilians and expose police departments to excessive use of force claims. A 2006 study by general surgeon Dr. Peter C. Meade found that police dog bites resulted in higher rates of hospitalization and surgery than domestic dog bites, and that the majority of police dog bite victims are Black and Hispanic. K-9 units have been involved in a number of recent incidents of excessive use of force and civilian harm, including attacks on Black protesters in California’s Bay Area this past summer, the 2019 killing by police of Elijah McClain in Colorado, and the August 2020 use of a K-9 against Jeffrey Ryans in an incident that led the Salt Lake City police to suspend its K-9 program.

Militarized Law Enforcement at the Federal Level

The law enforcement response to the racial justice protests of 2020 demonstrated the significant militarization of federal law enforcement responses in addition to the militarization of local police units. Notable examples include:

Use of the National Guard

During the summer of 2020, President Trump repeatedly threatened to send in the military to quell racial justice protests in some cities. During this time, 17,000 National Guard members were deployed in 24 jurisdictions to support local law enforcement responding to protests. The National Guard was involved in at least one lethal use of force incident and used to violently remove protests from Lafayette Square in Washington, DC using tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets, and batons. In a particularly egregious example of militarized law enforcement, the Guard also used a low-flying military helicopter to intimidate and disperse protesters, a technique borrowed from overseas counterinsurgency operations.

Deputization of Federal Agents

Expanding on a 2002 authority initially used to help increase security on federal property (40 U.S.C. § 1315), then-acting DHS Secretary Wolf deputized federal law enforcement agents to patrol federal property in Portland, Oregon, where unidentifiable federal agents without name badges or insignia were accused of using excessive force and unlawfully detaining protesters. Wearing camouflage, gas masks, and tactical gear, and armed with flash and chemical smoke grenades, acoustic weapons, and other military-grade equipment, the agents’ response had the appearance of a military intervention. These agents were later identified as ICE, CBP, and US Federal Marshal Services agents. When asked, Secretary Wolf stated that DHS has the authority to pursue and arrest individuals that commit crimes on federal property even if suspects are no longer on federal grounds. However, then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper expressed concerns that the militarized response may be confused with a military crackdown, and Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Hoffman noted in a press conference that “we want a system where people can tell the difference.”

CIVIC has condemned the US government’s militarized response to demonstrations and urged security forces responding to protests to protect the right to freedom of peaceful assembly, limit the use of force, and comply with international human rights standards. As CIVIC’s Executive Director Federico Borello has said, “Terms such as ‘battlespace’, ‘urban warfare’, and ‘insurrection’ have no place in a government’s policy for managing public safety during protests and demonstrations… The public is not an armed opposition group.” As an alternative, CIVIC calls on state and federal authorities to de-escalate and de-militarize law enforcement responses and engage with communities on their concerns and needs to ensure they receive the accountability and protection they