Early Election Readiness

Hello again, everyone, and welcome back to the underground. I am completely overwhelmed with a lot of projects I’m working on at the moment. I still have a lot of work, so I decided to take a break from some of that today and discuss what I think is a valuable topic for some of you. These are the things that I’m doing and thinking about in the early stages of preparing for what is very likely to be a pretty crazy election cycle. Right up front, I am still determining what will happen. We all think that things will get pretty crazy, or they may be pretty crazy. We’ll talk more about that as the election season gets closer. For now, I want to talk about some things I’m thinking about and trying to do in the very early stages. So, think of this as an early-stage election preparedness. As the election gets closer, I will reexamine the topic in the summertime as a mid-range thing. And then, just a couple of weeks before the election, I plan to do another one and talk about some last-minute preparations you might want to take if things start looking like they will get out of hand. So, I’ve got my notes, and let’s go ahead and get at it.
Looking at all the ideas I have written here, I realized that much of what I have to say is scary. I don’t intend for it to be, but I’m at a crossroads where it’s straightforward to focus on many of the terrible things in the world. Likewise, it’s also straightforward to focus only on the good things and ignore the wrong things to the point of being very dangerous. I see this happening all over the internet right now. We’ve got the Doomer culture, which is a cultural thing. Still, we’ve also got people, mainly in the commercial space, who ignore these problems because they want their livelihood to be preserved if they identify some of the causes of these problems. I am trying to take the best of both ideas. I won’t ignore all the bad things right now to protect a business model.
We all have to do that to some degree, and I think that this starts to matter now because, as you know, we have always tried to make the balanced approach where we talk about the bad stuff no matter how scary it is and just as a way of acknowledging it and preparing for it. But we don’t dwell on it. We learn from it, and we can focus on the good stuff. Learning about the bad is a way of moving into the good stuff. However, this is challenging now because it turns out that when it comes to most things, even talking about the bad stuff to learn about it is so horrifically awful that there’s no natural way to make it sound not scary. So please keep that in mind. I am not trying to scare people with this stuff, but some of these ideas are heavy. So, full disclosure: I will talk about some heavy stuff today. And when it comes to what I’m trying to think about for moving forward, you know, the beginning part of 2024, as we move into the summer and get closer to what’s probably going to be pretty crazy, I’ve got two different ideas and two different things I’m thinking about. One is the stuff that you probably want to hear about the most but matters the least:
The gear stuff.
The standard prepper stuff.
The things that you can buy online.
Your standard preparedness things.
I’m focusing on this, so we’ll talk about that. But the more essential things are some of the ideas that I’m trying to work through and prepare for and considerations to consider right now. Try to make these decisions now rather than wait until later and face a moral dilemma when the chips are down. So, enough rambling on all of that. Let’s talk about some of the physical things that I’m doing and some of the more practical things that I’m doing to ensure that we have many more options moving into the future. And that’s one of the themes when it comes to preparedness, and that’s something that goes unspoken in the prepping world when it comes to buying and selling gear and stockpiling. But why do we do this, right?

Why do we prepare for things? The main reason is that we can have options when others do not. Not necessarily because we’re trying to be better or more prepared than them, but we want to keep our options open as long as possible. And it turns out prepping allows us to do that often. Now, concerning COs over, we went through that gamut of everybody jumping on the prepping train and learning many things. And I think we learned a lot about ourselves and others during CO. One of the things that I think the prepping community learned is, you know, it was a good shakedown, right? It was a good shakedown exercise. People learned a lot of the things that we now know. Don’t buy food unless you can eat it, right? Don’t buy things unless you’re going to use it. So hopefully, now that a couple of years have passed since everybody went out and panic-bought, they know, okay, you know, maybe not buy 50 cans of food you don’t like to eat to stockpile it. So, general things like food, water, shelter, sanitation, and the basics are included. You know, chances are, if you’re watching this, you probably already have most of that covered. But this is a good reminder to check everything and ensure you’re ready. And this is a clue for later: make sure you’re starting to think about people you might not be planning for. I will go into more detail in just a moment with personnel concerns, but this is kind of the thing where everybody loves the memes, right? They love to talk hard on the internet. And when your unprepared neighbors come knocking, right, when they can’t get food at their grocery store and know that you’re the only one who has food, this is a different internet debate we can go down another day. But I’m just saying, when it comes to certain people, co-workers, friends, neighbors, close contacts, I’m not talking about strangers out there, but I’m talking about people who you may know who have your phone number, who may call you at 3 in the morning because their child has no food and they know you’ve got some. So, we want to avoid these moral dilemmas in the first place. And if you can do that by helping others, encouraging them, or preparing a little bit in some way, maybe that’s a good thing to start thinking about now. But again, this is a huge debate, and I don’t possess one opinion or another, right? How strange for someone online to say, “I don’t know how to think about this”? When was the last time you heard anyone say, “I don’t have an opinion on this”? You know, I feel this way when preparing for other people. I don’t know how to feel about it, but I can tell you, you know, I know what I would do in that situation. And if that means I have to go hungry, so be it. So, yeah, I want to avoid that situation in the beginning, and if we can do that now, start thinking about it now, say it right. Regarding other preparedness things, you know the basics, such as food, water, and shelter. If you don’t have the basics down, go to the FEMA website and download the FEMA list of three-day emergency supplies. That’s the best place for people without any idea where to begin. We all have feelings about FEMA, but for people who are a little bit put off by the crazy Uber-apocalypse prepper website, a government website is probably a little bit more socially acceptable to some people who may not be preparing right now. I can guarantee that I would probably have a better success rate by giving someone the FEMA list with that FEMA logo. And it’s not a bad list, the basic three-day supply. You could add up to seven days, two weeks, or whatever. It’s a good basis from which to start. You can find, you know, the International Red Cross, you know, the American Red Cross kind of lists. Again, political feelings about some of these institutions aside, their documentation is very good for people who don’t understand the severity of what’s happening. So, another thing to think about is finance. I don’t want to get too much into this, but we all know what happened in Canada about the trucking protests and some perfectly peaceful demonstrations. We know what happened to the concept of digital banking and online banking. So, in that case, cash is king. Just a good reminder that the only way that someone can take your cash and prevent you from spending your money with cash is if they come and physically take it from you. So, it’s straightforward to click some buttons and shut down your bank account. We already know that everything with a one and a zero attached to it, every transaction, every text message, and every piece of digital information, is monitored somehow. Just because it’s monitored doesn’t mean that actions are taken on it, but it does mean that that’s a vulnerability. And you don’t want to get into a situation where your bank account gets shut down because you donated to the wrong GoFundMe website, and you’re screwed. So, something to think about. You know, having cash on hand helps. You know, alternative currencies, we’ll talk about that another day. I know people want to immediately bring in things like precious metals and crypto and things like that. That’s another talk for another day. I’m just thinking about early on, you know, maybe now’s the time to get some cash back every time you go to the grocery store. It might help later on. Just saying. These physical preparedness things are, you know, again, I don’t want to get into the habit of predicting a specific event will happen because I think it’s disingenuous. I think that I mean, nobody can tell right now. But we can generally tell protests are going to happen. We already know what has already happened. Checkpoints are being set up. There are checkpoints in New York City on the subway system right now. We already know what’s happening. We see the trends. This is not fear-mongering to say that you’ll probably have to show papers again at some point. This has already happened, and because it happened once, it’s probably going to happen again, maybe for a different reason, maybe for the same one; who knows? All I know is that preparing to live in a situation where you’ve got checkpoints you’ve got mandates, you’ve got papers, you’ve got a lot of people with a lot of rifles walking around, this might be something to prepare for, especially if you live in kind of like an urbanized center. So, we all know that’s exactly what’s going to happen as soon as riots start happening, you know, National Guard comes out and, you know, just creates a lot of problems for people like us who
aren’t going to be rioting, you know? We’re just trying to sit at home and live our lives, right? But we’re still going to be affected by these checkpoints. So, something to think about. I know people don’t want to talk about it, right? But we’re all thinking about it, so I might as well say it. Another thing I’m thinking about is comms and radio stuff. I know everyone’s least favorite topic except for those who like radio. I wouldn’t say I like working on radio stuff. It makes me the most frustrated ever. You know, I often get a super bad migraine when working with radio stuff. So please don’t think that I’m some radio guy. I’m not. I wouldn’t say I like this stuff. But I have to learn this stuff because if my profession is in the information space, that’s my contribution at the moment to, you know, a better world, I guess, if you want to call it that. So because of that, I think that if a person works in an information space kind of job, if they have information to send and can’t send it, what good are you, right? If I can’t send those wired reports out via radio at some point, what good am I? If

So, what good am I? I’m just going to sit here and look at my computer screen, you know? It’s useless. So that’s why I have to develop these kinds of things. You know, I think that the GhostNet plan that we’ve created for kind of, you know, HF radio is kind of like an emergency stopgap sort of thing, you know? That’s probably the largest network created by people who detest radio worldwide. You know, there are more people on that frequency many times than on the main JS8 call frequencies, so, you know, I think that’s a cool aspect of it. Please don’t think that I love radio. I don’t. I have to get used to it and have to use it. So, for those who are not into radio and don’t see any value in any radio stuff, please know that I understand. I do. That’s why I created those couple of tutorials on how to get started with this stuff for free, so that you can get your foot in the door, understand the frustrations, and understand the problems with it. You don’t need a license to get started listening. You don’t need to buy anything to get started listening. You can use your internet browser to learn how to set this stuff up. That’s how I recommend getting started if you’re interested. Not everybody will be interested, and of course, I don’t want to act like the stuff I’ve done is the greatest thing ever. It’s not. It’s quite poor, I think, in terms of the capabilities it provides for the effort you have to put into it. However, it’s all we’ve got, and I think having some options, no matter if they are not a great fit, is better than nothing. We’ve already had multiple cell phone outages nationwide, internet outages, platforms going down, and social media. Just because it goes offline for an hour, people seem to forget about it, but, you know, like, look, this is important stuff. During these outages, I could hop on the GhostNet, pull up JS8 calls, pull up some of these HF radio tools, and see people sending their local news reports from their local area. Like, how amazing is that? That is awesome. When there’s nothing out there, you know, at least I caught at least half a dozen people from my area pushing local news reports from their local area. A couple of people are even transmitting the wire. So, yeah, I am receiving my news report via radio; that’s pretty cool. So anyway, along with the radio stuff, I’m focusing a lot on energy needs again to make sure that, you know, if I lose power or, you know, I have to operate where I don’t have power, you know, energy needs are important as well. Now, when it comes to some of the more theoretical things, you know, I’m focusing on the basic preps, you know, checking and making sure that, you know, all my stuff’s good to go on that front. I think we’re all squared away, at least me. I’m personally squared away. You can always be more prepared, but in terms of what I’m likely to be doing, I’m sitting behind a computer during a contingent situation, battling stuff and pushing out reports. That’s my role to fill. If you’re an infantryman, if you’re a grunt, you have a different role to fill, so, you know, that might be something to think about. That’s my job to fill, and, you know, that’s just kind of the way that it is. So, I feel like I’m the only person on the internet or on YouTube who is not a grunt. I’m not an infantry guy. I won’t be out there standing and holding a rifle, you know, on the BM. And if I am, things have gone very wrong, and you won’t see any more intel from me. Planning for the most likely scenario is probably a little bit better of a solution. You know, it’s more likely for me to grab a computer, go to work, and do my best rather than trying to go out there and be something I’m not. I’m certainly not skilled in those ways, and this kind of plays into some of the more theoretical things I’m thinking about, the long-shot thoughts, right? About personnel concerns. So, this is kind of a tough one, right? And we start getting into, well, this is a personal choice. Still, one of the things that I learned a lot from CO and the kind of lockdowns and interesting situations that arose from that when it comes to the freedom of travel is that many people are spread out a lot. People have a lot of family, friends, and co-workers all over the city. They’re not, you know, sure. Based on the economic situation, many people are moving back in with either parent, or they’re moving parents back in with them or have a more communal way of living. But many people out there, you know, have kids away at school, or they have, you know, friends and contacts who live on the other side of town. People are spread out a lot, and that’s a huge concern for readiness. Just getting things right out in the open, I got many emails from many people. We’re talking about hundreds of emails from people during CO who said, “Hey, look, I had Grandma across town. A riot broke out, and I had to go rescue her because her house was like a neglected area, and she had to get out of Dodge.” So here’s me and my minivan having to launch a rescue mission, unarmed and unprepared, in the middle of an afternoon when I can take an hour off from work as an emergency. And I got these emails. I got a lot of these emails. So it seems fairly common for people to launch these half-hazard, unplanned, high-risk rescue missions, if you want to call it that, when a riot goes down. We’ve all seen the footage of people, you know, the absolute gridlock when somebody gets shot, and it doesn’t look like it’s a good shoot to the media at first. And we see a riot potential breaking out, and everybody, as soon as 5:00 hits, they’re out of town, right? So there’s absolute gridlock on a lot of these highways. We’ve seen this multiple times in multiple cities. So that might be something to prepare for a little more than you think. And I have two main thoughts about that. My first thought is something people probably don’t want to hear, which is me coming at things from a public-response attitude. And that is
It’s much easier to evacuate early than during a contingent situation.

You are so, getting people out of harm’s way, out of Dodge, before the crisis is much easier. Evacuating early really is the best shot for most people. Again, I’m not saying you must evacuate now to temper any scary thoughts. You don’t need to grab your bugout bag and head for the hills. You’re likely not going to have to do that. Most people probably aren’t even, no matter how crazy things get. This country is spread out. If you’re in a city, you might face some challenging situations. So that’s why I’m talking about it in the beginning. But it may be easier to grab Grandma and have her sleep in your spare bedroom for a couple of days if something looks like it’s getting ready to pop off. And the reason that you want to do this is because it’s easier and safer.
You assume less risk of evacuating or transferring personnel before the crisis happens. The other reason that you may want to consider something like this is really along the lines of some more like military doctrine, sprinkled here and there. And that goes back to places like Vietnam or South Sudan, where the concept of protected villages is most certainly in effect. You bring people out of the countryside where the bandits are and into a village, a concentrated area where you can protect them. Now, I have some thoughts on that, and we’ll be doing a dedicated video on this idea in the future because that can take a very dark turn for some of you who may be able to identify the problems with this—not going to get into that now. If you’ve got Grandma across town, you’ve got your aunt and uncle over in the next town. You’ve got the space, you know, it might be a little bit better to bring them in for a couple of weeks, you know, have a little vacation, bring them in for a couple of weeks just while things are crazy so that you don’t have to worry about them. Because if I’m sitting in my house or whatever and I’m thinking about Grandma because she’s in an evil part of town or a place that could become a bad part of town, and I’m thinking, “All right, when is she going to let me evacuate her?” You know, that’s the kind of thing you’ve got to think about, and it’s a lot easier if they’re, you know, take the hostages out of the equation, so to speak if you know what I’m saying, right? It’s easier to do it that way. Again, this is something people aren’t going to want to hear and probably won’t want to do. Many very independent-minded people don’t see the need to go this far. They may say, “Ah, this is just an overreaction. I won’t crash on your couch for weeks, man. I’m fine. I’ve got my apartment. Don’t worry about it. I’m living in the dorms. It’s okay. We’re all good here. We’re perfectly safe, right?” We’ve all heard this before. So, for people like that who still want to be pretty independently minded but still realize, “Look, man, they are not prepared,” maybe it might be a good idea to just help them out a little bit with supplies or logistics or things like that. If you’ve got an aunt or an uncle and they’re living by themselves in an apartment or out in the middle of nowhere or someplace like that, go, you know, take them a load of groceries, you know, just some extra supplies to get them through a couple of weeks of craziness if it looks like that might be an option. I’m not saying go crazy now, but I guarantee it will be appreciated. And while you’re at it, here’s an excellent opportunity to talk about things like radios and MeshTastic. Suppose you must bring a small AM/FM radio, a tiny shortwave receiver, and a little cheat sheet on how to work it. You see where I’m going with this. You can prepare people on the cheap without expending too many resources. And we get into what I was talking about at the beginning of, well, if they’re not going to prepare now, I’m not going to help them. That’s a partial solution.

A more crucial aspect of preparation, especially for those with demanding work schedules, is the concept of work schedules themselves. For many people, prepping is a luxury, and taking time off to work on radios or respond to potential issues is also a luxury. I recognize that most jobs in America would still expect employees to show up at 8:00 a.m. the next day, even in the face of a catastrophic event.
Currently, many individuals are struggling with multiple jobs, and some are even having difficulty affording food in First World nations. This weighs heavily on me, and I understand that suggesting people take free time is not practical when no one seems to have any. That’s why I’ve taken on multiple roles and responsibilities. For instance, I started doing daily wire reports, which I hadn’t planned on initially, but they’ve become necessary, and people find value in them. So, I’ll continue doing things like that to the best of my ability.
I’m also committed to working on automation and creating videos that make complex topics easier to understand. This way, individuals won’t have to spend 16 hours a day trying to figure out even the most minor details, like how to operate a radio. I know how frustrating it can be to scour the internet for answers amidst endless forums, so I want to make it easier for those striving to be more prepared and capable.
In summary, while preparing for oneself is crucial, leaving the door open to help others, even in small ways, can ultimately benefit everyone. It’s about finding practical solutions that fit our current realities’ constraints, whether busy work schedules or limited resources.
This is a sad and inflammatory topic, so please be advised. I understand this is controversial and that it gets spiritual very quickly. I don’t intend for it to be, but there’s no way that it can’t be. This is the concept of explicitly leaving the door open for people who may want to change their lifestyle or profession, especially their profession when things get more severe.
I know that it may not seem like it, and I don’t mean to trivialize people’s experiences and hardships out there, but in the United States, as hard as things are, I can say pretty confidently that the United States hardship right now is not nearly as bad as it can be. There are a lot of very suffering places, and there are a lot of very desperate people on this Earth. Right now, the United States thinks it’s dealing with hardship, but it’s not in most places. There are desperate places, as we can see all over the internet and social media, so I don’t mean to trivialize it. We’ve got, you know, Zombie Land out there in some places of the country, but by and large, you know, the United States has been very lucky not to have to deal with widespread famine, not to have to deal with widespread disease and issues like that.
So, with that being said, there will be people in the future who want to make a change. They want to see the light, stop being a part of the problem, and start being part of the solution. As much as I want to let my personal feelings cloud the issue and say, you know, there’s no good, there are no good people left in some of these institutions, that’s what I want to think, but I can’t plan for that if I’m trying to be a little bit more open-minded about things. I worked in or with the federal government for about ten years before COVID-19 hit. My plans changed willingly and unwillingly. I realize that there are a lot of people working in very, very, very bad institutions that 6 to 10 months from now may realize, “Alright, enough’s enough. I’m going to take the brown shirt off, and I’m going to start helping people instead of hurting people.”
As painful as it is to see a lot of the very, very bad things coming from a lot of institutions in the United States, I am pretty confident that, you know, in the future, we’re still going to have some good people come forward and say, “Look, you were right, I was wrong, and I can’t support this behavior anymore.” It’s going to be very few, very few people, and as time goes on, it’ll be even fewer. Right now, we can see a purge amongst many, for instance, in US government institutions, where the number of good people in specific jobs is rapidly dwindling.
But I also know, and this is what I’m trying to do personally; it’s challenging, but I’m also recognizing that there is always time to do the right thing. And it’s challenging for me, it is, you know, because I see what some of these people have done, and I don’t want to get into the habit of saying, “Look, you want to let these people in who have caused so much harm, you know, we want to let them into the fold after this.” Let me share one reason why we need to leave the door open and allow the opportunity for people to do the right thing, even if it’s at a late hour.
Just me sharing a personal anecdote that may help. In the later part of my career, one of the issues I was working on overseas was targeting Iraq and Syria. It was part of the overall mission to take the fight to ISIS and eliminate ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Now, as many of you know, that was a very, very, very bad mission, and I do not support most of what happened and what I saw. Because of that, I and a few others, even though we were targeting, were trying to figure out ways and working with the local Iraqis and Syrians, in some cases, trying to figure out how we avoid killing these guys. War is never good; it will always have terrible things happen, and again, I don’t want to get into it too much.
But one of the things that we found out very early on is that one of the main reasons why people continued to be in ISIS, maybe not join ISIS, but stay in ISIS, is because they felt like they had nowhere else to go. They felt like their villages had abandoned them, their family had written them off, and their family had said, “You can’t come home anymore.” So these dudes, very young, very young kids in a lot of cases, they were outcasts from their society, they were kicked out of their village, their family had disowned them, and they felt, “Well, you know, might as well put on that vest over there.” That’s what they felt like. They felt like they had nowhere else to go.

Like it or not, it may have been a better option to get the locals to bring these people back into the fold. Because a person who wants to stop killing but feels like they have no choice but to continue is hazardous. Now, take that idea and apply just a tiny bit of it to the United States. If we want people in some of these institutions like the military, national federal agencies, and local police, in some cases, to stop the behavior they’re committing against the American people, if you want to get nasty, you’re probably never going to get the worst of the bad. But if you’ve got people who feel like they have nothing better, they have nothing else, they might as well stay on the payroll. That’s not good. So, we want to offer them the door and allow them to change their ways so they don’t feel like a social pariah. It’s challenging, and I’m afraid I must disagree with it in many cases, but I’m telling you this will matter. And this is something people tend to leave out and forget.
Look at what happened already, and this has been completely forgotten. Look at all those military service members who did the right thing regarding the COVID-19 vaccine. They refused an illegal order. We know this order was illegal; it has been proven in every court in the land that it is illegal. And how many people got kicked out for that? Around 8,000 or so, and it continues to happen. You had service members endure torture; you had service members endure retributions and retaliatory actions that are continuing to this day. And what have the American people done for these people? The American people were shouting at all those National Guard soldiers holding shields against the American people. When those people decided enough, I would start doing the right thing and leave this institution. What did the American people do? They ignored it. They said, “Great, good job, fine,” and then returned to their Netflix and Starbucks.
Yes, we had crowdfunding for many people who experienced more high-profile incidents, and that’s fantastic. But by and large, there are many service members out there who quietly got out, who did their time, and they said, “You know what, enough’s enough.” They may even be jabbed themselves because they felt they had no other option. And then they realized afterward, “Oh my gosh,” and then they got out.
Think about it like this: somebody who enlisted in the US military in 2020, the year 2020, after all of this happened, right? They’re coming to the end of their first enlistment now. So, they’re looking, and we want to make sure that that soldier out there says, “Hey, I should leave these institutions than be caught up in a bad situation where I’ve got to make a moral decision that may or may not be good for me but probably won’t be good for anyone else.” So, we want to offer a better life. It’s the same with many of these corrupt, everything from corrupt law enforcement to corrupt politicians to some big companies that leaned hard into the woke ideology. We want to offer them a chance to improve and make that option available. Now, I know this gets tricky. I know it gets very, very sticky, and many people out there have the mentality of no amnesty for what was done to them or their families during the past couple of years, and in most cases, I completely agree with that idea. I do. I’m not saying that we need to ignore everything happening, and you know, the lovely lady living down the street, your neighbor Sally, who turned you in to the police for having more than three people in your home. I’m not saying we should forget that; I’m not saying you need to assume operational risk just for taking the high road. We need to think about this, and I don’t know of any other way to do it than to allow people the chance to do better and not demonize them for it. Because if all of these people are doing terrible things right now, many people will enjoy this, right? Why do you think the IRS has had tens of thousands of people apply? Many people working for the federal government enjoy hurting people, and that’s why they get into these specific jobs.
Now, I’m not talking about those people. I’m not talking about the sadistic people who get into a job because they have a shiny piece of metal on their shirt that allows them to hurt people, and that’s why they get into that job in the first place because they’re sadistic and they enjoy it. If you have yet to notice, there are many of those people. But many people may have been 11 Bravos, who were in the military and who got out. What better job for a grunt in the early 2000s than to be a street cop? They are trying to help their community and do their best, right? They get into the job, do their best, and realize, uh-oh, many people around me don’t want to do this, you know? It’s the same with any other public service, the medical field, good grief, right?
We talk about how awful it is to be fed these days and how awful and evil these people are. Let me tell you something: the medical field, oh boy, you know? I have met a lot of very, very sadistic people in the medical field, and it’s sad because you know it’s a field where altruism really can shine if you let it. Like what more wholesome thing can there be than someone who wants to help people? Good grief, that’s the best job you can have. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people out there who are in it just for the money. Many people are in it for other reasons, and we’ll talk a little bit more about some of that dark stuff later if I can figure out a way to do it without sounding utterly hostile. But this unscheduled rant encourages people to realize that slamming the door in the face of people who may help you later is not the best thing, even though we may want to do it. I’m not saying we need to go out there and start drinking Bud Light because they said they’re sorry. No, words without actions are useless. If someone out there genuinely wants to make a change and says, “I’m going to make a change,” and they do it, you know? They start saying, “Hey, look, I’m not going to be a part of these institutions anymore. I’m not going to be a part of these harmful things, and I’m going to start doing something else,” that’s great. We need to support more of that, right?

We need to think about this because it is so easy to get stuck into ‘us versus them.’ It’s so easy to get stuck into, ‘Well, you know, these people are beyond saving.’ You know, that may be the case for most people out there, but I know that there are some good people left who want to do the right thing, and they are screwed. I want to make them less screwed, so just thinking about that. We need to have a whole, you know, ‘Kumbaya’ moment; just saying something to think about may not wholly void people who may want to help in the future because it will happen. As bad as things are right now, it can get so much worse, and when it does get worse, there will be many people who did not see the light because they were insulated from it. They were far away and didn’t see the badness, and they would want to make some changes. There may be better ideas to avoid these people.
Now, another thing that I am trying to work on personally because I suck at this is stress management. Many of these dualities are very, very, very stressful, and these times that we’re living through right now are the kind of times that test both your faith, your convictions, your core values, all of this stuff. You know, I thought I had life all figured out. Many of us thought we had life all figured out. We had our careers planned, we had our education planned, we had a whole plan for the future, and now, you know, I think many of us, myself included, are just living day to day, just trying to make it, and this is going to increase in the future. And all this means that stress is undoubtedly a part of our lives and extreme health problem-inducing stress.
One of the things that’s stressful for me, and it’s directly related to the last point, is look; I don’t have the luxury of dealing with or interacting with super friendly people often. I know, strange. But people ignore this. The people out there who get on YouTube and have a great, fantastic community that’s all wholesome with the white picket fence and, you know, they’re able to defend their community and work together and things like that, they may argue here and there. Still, they’re all driven together by a common goal. I don’t have that, and many of you probably don’t.
Now, I’ll talk more about community development in the future and some of the challenges that you will have to overcome that many people need to pay attention to because they don’t or maybe not ignore. Still, they need these problems. I’ll talk more about that in the future, but I have to interact with many people I don’t like, and it’s in the interest of being better and doing better. And the number of people, like, I’m a pretty easygoing guy, like, in my day-to-day life, I can get along with pretty much anybody. And, you know, it’s getting tough for even me. I’m not saying I’m the best at this kind of thing, but in my professional life, I’ve worked many jobs, and in every place I’ve ever worked, people will say that I can get along with anybody. I can get along with anybody under any circumstance or in any situation. There are very few people that I can’t get along with in some form or fashion to get the job done. However, the world is rapidly eclipsing my skills and abilities. Every day that goes by, I’m getting older, and it’s starting to make me a little bit more ‘soggy. But I feel that you know, a lot of times, I’m having to talk with people and interact with people and plan and work with people, you know, outside of my family unit, outside of my organization here, but like, in my daily day-to-day life, and I’m just getting nowhere. I’m up against a brick wall a lot of times. It used to be, man, I could probably go into a riot in the middle of a fistfight, and I could break it up, you know? I could probably get in there, start meeting people, start getting to know people; the more they know you, the faster you can establish a personal connection with somebody, and the less likely they are to hit you; you can move in and do stuff like that. Nowadays…”

“I can’t do that anymore, you know? If I’ve either lost that skill or society has degraded to a point where it’s just tough for me to work with many people now. And I must compromise a lot to have the effectiveness I had in the past. Sometimes, it feels like I have to compromise on my core values and personal beliefs, and that I will not do. So, you know, we’re in a rock in a hard place, and that’s super stressful when people give you nothing. And I feel like I’m not meeting people across the aisle; I feel like I’m not compromising; I feel like I’m jumping across to their side. Getting people to talk to you now and not treat you like garbage is challenging. It is hard, even in the community that I work in, to have a person who is kind to you. You know, it’s tough. And because I have had so much difficulty with this in my personal life, I feel very committed and dedicated to trying to be nicer to people than I should be because you never know. People are going through some callous times now, so they are more blunt and stressed and at the end of their rope than you think. I know that’s the case, probably even with me, but trying to do the best you can and leaving the door open for people to have a little bit more leeway sometimes is probably not harmful.
On the other hand, we can have this whole debate of, ‘You can’t give people an inch anymore; you cannot yield one centimeter to anyone because they will take that rope and hang you with it.’ That’s an unfortunate part of living in the world today. But in the interest of not being super negative all the time, I’m willing to let people talk a lot more nowadays. I’m willing to let people vent. I don’t know what about me, but my family has also experienced it. You’re just going out to the grocery store and, you know, just talking with the cashier or talking with somebody in the aisles, and the number of people that have just vented their life to me, you know, standing at their card in a grocery store, is pretty high lately. It happens almost every time, and I just let them talk. And some people need to talk to a complete and total stranger, which indicates many things to me. And one of those is that people are very stressed; they’re at the end of their rope many times, and they need to be able to function in the world today, and that’s very hard to do. So, things that I can do to make that more accessible for people is to not shut that door for them, make it so that people who want to do the right thing have that option, and they don’t feel like, ‘well, they’re never going to accept me now because of what I’ve done to people.’ It’s a complex, tricky, brutal thing, but I’m trying to get these ideas out there because we may need to start thinking about this a bit more. There are going to be people who want to make a change in their lives; there are going to be people who are so stressed that they do very, very, very serious things because they feel that they have no other option left. We want to make these people feel like they have options, can change their ways, and don’t have to live super, super stressed all the time because they’re conflicted internally with what they’ve done or continue to do. So, yeah, that’s a heavy topic. I don’t expect anyone to talk about these very severe and weighty issues. Still, it’s probably a good idea to talk about them early on to build on these ideas as we get closer to a crazy time.
Now, one of the final ideas I wanted to discuss is the concept of money, or rather the lack of it. I’ve been thinking a lot lately, and there are better analogies for the United States. Still, I’ve been doing a lot of soul-searching and research, and one thing that weighs on my mind a lot is the concept of extreme poverty, extreme famine, and extreme desperation. I know, cheery topic. But everybody goes through phases, right? My latest phase is the idea of desperation prevention. And, you know, I read a lot of stories about extreme situations around the planet. I’ve even seen quite a few myself firsthand. And though it is very challenging to put a situation of widespread famine and, you know, widespread hyperinflation and things like that into an American context, it’s tough to cherry-pick that knowledge because America is such an exciting and unusual place. And I’m not saying that the United States is going to become Darfur or anything like that. In the content creation culture, many people currently recommend buying costly things that will solve your problems. And I’m thinking more broadly than that. Now, I will agree. Things like basic preparedness and trade tools are right? Firearms, you need your tools of the trade, right? Defensive things, like night vision and thermal, and things that may be a year’s salary for some people, are necessary. You know, body armor is not cheap, and all this tactical stuff, you know, you can get away with as minimalist of a setup as possible. However, you’ll still have to spend a lot of money to maintain a baseline of self-defense capability.
I want to start talking about this now because what’s around election time, Christmas? We’ve got the holiday season coming up. As the later parts of the year start creeping in, financial desperation will be widespread. So, people are going to have fewer options financially. They’re likely to spend a lot or a significant portion of their income on the holidays, travel, and energy costs like energy bills.

“Like my local co-op, you know, over December and January inexplicably just raised the rates, you know? And they just did it. Can they do it? No. Did they do it? Yes. It’s going to happen for a lot of people. I’ve got an energy bill where I can measure my consumption. My consumption didn’t change; it went down a lot because I tried to use a lot of wood heating, and the bill went up, skyrocketed, and increased by 40% to 50%. And so I’m planning for that in the future, and if you’re going to have to economize to have options later in the year, it might be better to do it in the summertime. Trying to plan early on in the year is good so that you’re okay by the time you get to the end of the year. You know, you don’t have high energy costs, high costs for just surviving, high food costs, and now you’ve got to deal with the impacts of rioting, unrest, checkpoints, or something like that. It’s better to have options later, and if you’re going to have to economize, it’s better to do it in the summertime and the springtime rather than wait until much later.
Going out and suggesting to people to buy an extra load of groceries for a family member might only be financially viable for some people. Many people, especially in my local area, can’t afford the entire sea of groceries anymore; they barely make it. So, suggesting that might be disingenuous, but you can do a lot for very little in this country, even if it is as expensive as it is now. We’ve still got options, and it might be a good idea to start taking advantage of some of those options. And the reason that I think about it is, I go back to kind of the era where, you know, I can’t go to my local grocery store because they require papers to get in, and they’ve got an armed individual standing out in front of the grocery store checking people’s papers. I will not do that; I refuse to do that in this country. So I’ve got to drive an hour and a half out of town, wasting all that gas money, to pay even higher prices at the next town over. I don’t know about anybody else, but many people had to do that during COVID-19, but I can tell you that I can’t afford to do that now. So, you know, it’s going to be tough, and we’re going to have to make a lot of tough decisions, and we’re going to have to examine alternative ways of getting logistics, and doing that is not easy, and it’s most certainly not cheap.
So, you want to allow yourself for Murphy’s Law to kick in for checkpoints, high prices, papers, and all this bad stuff that increases your costs. It would help if you prepared for that to come crashing down all on the same day, on the same weekend, because that’s probably what will happen. I’m not saying it will, but it would be a pretty good idea to plan for, right? You know, and again, one of the reasons why I’m so focused on this is that people are complaining about high prices and high food prices in America, but you know, they’re not having to deal with widespread famine. You know, we’re not talking about hundreds of thousands of people dying a year because of malnourishment. Now, food insecurity here in the Western world is getting worse, and I am leaning forward to this to prevent this as much as possible.
To show one random statistic here, last year, in the fourth quarter of 2023, so over the winter time, the grocery store chain Bernardos in Ireland did a study in which they found that over 40% of Irish citizens had or were skipping meals so that they could feed their child. You know, 40%. You’re 40% in a Western nation, in a nation where the economy is not wrong, you know, it’s not like Somalia, right? This is the Western world, and 40% of people skip meals to feed their children. For me, this makes me incredibly, blindingly angry beyond all comprehension. But it also motivates me to try to do what I can to help prevent this. I can’t do very much.
If you’re watching this alone, the average person can’t do much, but you can do something. You know, you can do something. You know, in the United States, Canada as well, I guess, Western Europe, you know, the UK, places like that, I think that there’s a lot of discourse and there’s a lot of anger, angst, conflict between the haves and the have-nots, between the left and the right, the up and the down, whatever, right? There’s a lot of conflict between us versus them. As complex as this situation is, there will likely be a lot of have-nots helping out a lot of other have-nots. You know, it’s going to be pretty, pretty rough, and I think that in a lot of situations, it’s not going to be like 2003 again, you know, where the average soldier in Iraq is handing out his MRA to a starving kid. It will be like that soldier being starving, too. We will have people manning and working with food banks facing food insecurity themselves. We will have people running charity events that are barely above that charity threshold themselves, and it will be very tough. And we need to cut people a lot of slack when it comes to this because it’s tough and will get even more challenging for people out there.
Let’s do our best, and we might have to temper expectations. There will be no savior with a blank check showing up and helping us. We must do it ourselves; in doing so, we must have the capabilities we can. I know that every generation that has existed since.”

“The dawn of time has seen people complaining about the times they’re living in. Every generation has had the story of, ‘Well, when I was a kid, I had to go to school, you know, walk to school through the snow uphill both ways,’ right? We all have that. Even the ancient philosopher Cicero talked about how ‘kids these days don’t listen to their parents, and all they want to do is write their books.’ We’ve had this idea going around for a long time. But, at the risk of sounding disingenuous, this period we’re living through, maybe not this one generation, but the time we’re living through, is extraordinary. Those who come after us will write books about us either way, so we could make these books worth reading.
We must live our lives to be worthy of the admiration and respect people may or may not attribute to us in the future. We won’t achieve this respect by shouting louder than the next guy or having an ‘us versus them’ mentality. But we’re not going to achieve this by lying down and giving up because there are a lot of deliberate attacks on the people who built human civilization and kept civilization going. So, I’m not saying those people need to give in and let these people take over. No, we’re not going to do that. But in any case, I’m just some random guy on the internet. I don’t know much. I hardly know anything, to be honest. But I do know this: small things help. And working on the small, achievable goals you can make will be a prerequisite for the big stuff, for working on the significant actions and working on bigger, more complex issues. If I’ve got somebody on my team and they can handle a simple task, I’m going to give them a small task, right? So it’s the same thing in society. We must get the little things right before doing the big things right.
And I don’t know if it’s just me, but there’s a sense of pressure, like a sense of foreboding, if you want to call it that, but it’s not necessarily negative. It’s a sense of urgency, like the clock is ticking, you know? Maybe not to a specific event, but we’re rapidly approaching something. What it is, I don’t know. I’m not saying the apocalypse will happen tomorrow—I mean, who knows? But I’m just saying that I feel this pressure daily to do the absolute best I can. It’s something I have tried to implement in my life over the years, but nowadays, it’s happening. You know, and it’s happening naturally. I’m not trying to do this; it’s just something that’s just a drive that you feel every single day. Maybe it’s just me, I don’t know.
And going back to what I said at the beginning, one of the ways to wrap this up is to realize that keeping your options open is going to be very important when it comes to physical preparedness, you know, prepping if we want to call it that. You keep your options open by having water, food, shelter, sanitation, and things like this—physical gear that can keep your options open when those options are removed from society when the water doesn’t work, and when the electricity is turned off. You want to have options. The option to eat and have water and things like that—that’s what it means to prep. Well, guess what? We also need to prepare more socially. And I think that beyond prepping, many of the issues we’re facing in society will come to a head on a social front, more along the lines of a preparedness front.
You can stockpile as many cans of beans as you want, but many people find out those beans need to be helping them build their community together. Now, it’s the bare minimum. We could stockpile cases and cases of ammo for the SHTF situation, but a lot of times, people have found out that spending 15 years accruing a decent-sized armory has yet to solve any of the problems that they’re facing today. Preparing for social problems is also a thing—being able to understand yourself, understand the world around you, or at least try to, and try to realize a lot of dualities. I don’t have everything all figured out. I’m sorry, but I don’t have many answers, and I’m searching for them right now. I don’t know what to tell you in some regards. I think a lot of the population is unsavable. When it comes to what we can do as humans, I think that they’re unsavable. And I’m not speaking to them; it’s the same thing with, unfortunately, a lot of the community around me. They may have similar values, but those differences are just enough to be worth standing your ground on.
On the other hand, I want to keep the door open for anyone willing to realize that they need to make a change in their life. And I want to do this because I would have wanted someone to keep that door open for me, you know? So, it’s just about keeping your options open physically with preparedness, but also when it comes to the people in your life or people who may be in your life or may come into your life. We need to work on this more than we are right now—I certainly do. All of this is to say that I have never, ever, ever regretted having more options in a contingent situation or during an emergency. And unfortunately, a lot of the emergencies that we’re likely to face as this year gets a little bit crazier are not going to be oriented with gear. The emergencies and the preparedness you might have to make might be with your community. This is why, as scary as this stuff is to talk about, I am excited. I am, you know? After ranting for an hour about how awful the world is, I don’t want to end
on a negative note here. No, I want to talk about the bad, but end on a good note: this is fascinating stuff. Can you imagine how amazing of a time this is to live? We’ve got all the bad stuff, but let me tell you something: we can do good for every bad thing that happens in the world. This is amazing. We have the chance to do some great things. We don’t live in uninteresting times; we have a chance to do something. Now, this doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy; it’s not going to mean that we’re not suffering and have some pretty tough times, right? What is it they say? That the best things in life are free.”

“That’s very true, but you know what’s also true? Nothing worth having comes easy. Just because it’s free doesn’t mean it’s easy. And you’ll find that some of the most accessible things in the world are very difficult and present daily challenges. So, we have a choice, don’t we? We can wallow in fear, buy random junk on the internet, and stare at our phone screens every single day of our lives. Or, we could do something about it.
Now, I know that opinions vary pretty widely on how to improve the world around us, but here’s the good news: as this world gets a little bit more severe and as things go downhill, the good stuff, the reasonable courses of action, are going to be a lot easier to identify. Right now, it’s a good thing. How many people do you see planting trees and picking up trash on the street? These little things that used to be a part of daily life many years ago are very much appreciated now. It’s the little things that are not debatable. The little things to improve the world around you, not just physically, but socially. You know, getting to know people, understanding people’s life experiences, and working through that, especially with people you may disagree with. We’ll never change the world by simply shouting at each other back and forth.
And I don’t want to hear any of this ‘it’s too hard’ garbage. No, I don’t want to hear any of this, ‘but they are too powerful.’ I don’t want to hear this; these are just excuses. Yeah, I get it; you’re not going to change the world; you’re not going to change the US government in one fell swoop; that’s not going to happen. But these little things add up. And let me tell you something: the kids out there are watching you. The kids in the world today, those young people, are watching what we are doing right now, and they’re basing their worldview on it. So, imagine yourself daily as if someone is watching you, right? That’s what integrity means: doing the right thing even when nobody’s watching. Every day that goes by imagine yourself teaching the future generations that will come after us. We may not be able to change the world within our generation; it may not be within two or three generations, but it will happen soon. The pendulum is swinging; things will equalize and pan out.
You know, someone said once that very few generations have the honor of being able to defend freedom in its hour of maximum danger, and that person was right. But there’s more to it than that. It’s not just freedom at stake; it’s the way of life on this planet that is at stake in many different ways. I hate to sound like it’s so severe, but it is, and we have a chance to do the right thing. And we’re going to start by doing tiny things first. I could go on for hours and hours about the little things that help. But at the end of the day, you must decide that for yourself.
We’ve got a lot of big ideas here; we’ve certainly got our work cut out for us, and there’s a lot of work to be done. One could argue I may think that the amount of work we have to do is based on the time we have left; I can do the math here, and we need more time to do the needed work. But that’s okay; it doesn’t mean that’s not an excuse not to try. I am still determining what’s going to happen with this election season. I think that, generally, and this is probably just a lazy assessment, things will get crazy. You’re probably going to have the same stuff that happened come back: riots, all kinds of stuff. We know how the election will go, and that’s pretty clear. Even though people somehow are still debating it, I don’t understand. But we all know how that’s going to go.
I’m also leaving the assessment open for events that may happen. We may have some severe false flag attacks, natural attacks, etc. We’ve got, just read the news, you know, we’ve got some pretty serious issues here. And some of these issues will come to a head pretty soon. But in terms of the grand experience, correct? We’re just getting the early look. The grand thing of things to start thinking about, and, more importantly, the ways of thinking. This is what I’m thinking about for now.
So, I’ve rambled on long enough. This gives me plenty to think about. I look forward to moving forward into the more exciting stuff of deliberate preparedness and specific things I’m trying to do to provide as best I can for people during this crisis. And we’ll get to those topics at a later date. Thank you all for watching and putting up with my ramblings here, and I mean it when I say that I am very excited about the good things we can do. Because, as I said, we can focus on the bad, we can let that consume us, or we can be overly excited about the potential that for every bad thing in the world, there’s a chance for us to do the right thing. And I will always take advantage of an opportunity to do the right thing, or at least try to. That’s the mentality I’m moving forward with, and I hope it helps many of you out there. Even if, for now, we may have to fight in the shade.”