Recently, I discussed how doomsday preppers — often white men who hate the government — frequently view an apocalyptic meltdown of society as a good thing.
Many of these heavily armed guys dream of hanging out in their fortified complexes, free to do whatever they want and immune to the threat of immigrants and drag queens and vaccination campaigns. It’s their fantasy.
But let’s be clear. There are other types of people who are also prepping for the end of the world.
For starters, you have your classic evil billionaire. These oligarchs are “buying up luxurious bunkers and hiring military security to survive a societal collapse they helped create.”
Sure, some of them are living out their dream of becoming a Bond villain, but for many of these money-hungry sociopaths, Armageddon is the predictable endgame of their “selfish and isolationist outlooks.”
This is a new worldview for the uber-wealthy, who traditionally have focused on indulging in extravagances and procuring status symbols. Never before “have our society’s most powerful players assumed that the primary impact of their own conquests would be to render the world itself unlivable for everyone else,” and neither have they ever had “the technologies through which to program their sensibilities into the very fabric of our society.”
Basically, for these tech bros and crypto schemers, it is no longer about living in a mansion with a fleet of expensive cars and weekends on the mega-yacht. It’s about surviving civilization’s destruction in relative comfort and “exercising control over the rest of us.”
The good news is that the “probability of a fortified bunker actually protecting its occupants from the reality of, well, reality, is very slim.” So all those smug rich dudes who think they’re going to ride out the chaos and destruction that they have instigated? Yeah, if society implodes, they’re probably going to die miserable deaths in those bunkers.
So we’ll have a happy ending after all.
In any case, there is another type of prepper, one not nearly as loathsome as the people whom we’ve discussed so far. And that is the ethnic minority and/or liberal who is “waking up to the reality of needing to be prepared.”
Some experts say the number of preppers has doubled in the last decade, with “much of that growth from minorities and people considered left-of-center politically, whose sense of insecurity was heightened by Donald Trump’s 2016 election, the pandemic, more frequent extreme weather, and the 2020 racial justice protests.”
To the surprise of right-wingers, “a new breed of Americans is getting ready to survive political upheaval and natural catastrophes, a pursuit that until recently was largely associated with far-right movements such as white nationalists.”
As I said, I’m not a prepper. But if one of my fellow Latinos is gathering supplies and firearms because he believes America is going to crumple into an authoritarian hellhole, well, I get it.
Lots of progressives and ethnic minorities are taking courses in survival tactics, picking up guns, and preparing for the worst. As a result, prepper culture (if that is the correct term for it) is diversifying “amid fear of disaster and political unrest.”
So for all those white supremacists who thought DEI was over, and that the future belonged to Aryan thugs in camouflage, the joke’s on you.
Even in an apocalypse, you can’t stop diversity.
