CANTERBURY, England — “Doomsday prepping” or stockpiling food, medicine, weapons and other supplies in case of an apocalyptic scenario has long been considered peculiar behavior only exhibited by conspiracy theorists and other extremists in the United States. However, such prepping has actually been steadily on the rise in the U.S. over the past decade. So, what’s causing this surge in stockpiled rice packets and underground bunkers? One group of researchers say it is an ever growing sense of impending doom in American culture.
Many have speculated that this surge in doomsday preppers over the last 10 years was linked to an extreme political reaction among many conservatives to Barack Obama’s initial election in 2008, but a new study out of the United Kingdom finds that neither the Obama presidency nor extreme right-wing conspiracy theories in general are the main cause of this growing phenomenon.
the best president US ever had drove many white nationalists nuts and this pushed preppers from fringes to the mainstream. I know there are businessmen smiling all the way to the bunk(pun) even as their marks fill their attics and basement with food stuff
Was it mental illness when the left built bomb shelters in the 1950s?
The Dems would destroy this economy in a heartbeat and take us back to the days of the Obama economy.
What kind of economy has almost 100 years of ever increasing debt?
We are in a war with Islam for 1400 years, don't you know?
Plus the economy is a house of cards built on a mountain of debt, don't you know?
The Democrats want to abolish the freedoms given by God and enumerated in the Bill of Rights and you cannot have prosperity where there is no freedom.
There still is. My neighbor is friends with a recently retired colonel who was in army Intel. Col. is building a huge bunker. My neighbor asked him why? He said anyone that knew what he knew would build a bunker and live in it.
No, but I do have some food and water on hand in case of tornado or something like that.
I do carry a lot of food in the winter because I lived through a blizzard here in Indianapolis in 1978, perhaps the worst blizzard in Indianapolis in the history of recordkeeping.
In an emergency, food on hand is better than money.
Because of ethanol, it is difficult to stockpile gasoline, but there are stabilizers.
In the old days, a lot of people had gasoline around in some quantity.
Also, there is the problem of medicine as insurance companies will not let you have very much at a time.
Another problem is guns and ammo as the police are unavailable in a widespread emergency.
I live in an upper-middle class area and many people have built-in generators with large fuel tanks and I am sure that they have large pantries with large supplies of food.
If you had a two-million dollar house, wouldn't you be prepared?
Who knows. I am not a prepper. I keep a few couple months of food and always have a diesel tank full that could run my generators if need be. That's more for weather disaster than anything else.
You and @Reynolds are perfectly rational men. Preparing against a natural disaster makes every sense. I don't think this is paranoia. This is wisdom. The motives for prepping are what sets you apart. But things like economic meltdown,nuclear war, race or civil war,Obama term(s)..such relatively iimplausible events then we have a problem.
I wonder how much cash Alex Jones made selling his survivalist kits. I know it's a lot. That's the irrational sort of prepping.