20 Million Americans Are Active Preppers

In 2020, more than 20 million Americans, nearly 7 percent of all U.S. households, were actively planning for an emergency, according to the latest analysis of Federal Emergency Management Agency data.

Those stockpiling canned goods in the cupboards, caching ammunition and hoarding toilet paper now come in all stripes - from suburban 'guardian moms' to multi-millionaire tech gurus.

All the indications are that the numbers are rising rapidly, and the 'prepper' movement has spread to many other nations as well.

The self-proclaimed largest survival community anywhere is in the Black Hills area of South Dakota.

575 hardened concrete bunkers cover 18 square miles of grassland, 'strategically and centrally located in one of the safest areas of North America'. It's high and dry at an altitude of 3,800 feet above sea level and 100-plus miles away from the nearest 'known' military targets.

Originally built in 1942 as an army ammunition depot known as Fort Igloo, California-based firm Vivos began repurposing the site in 2017 to accommodate up to 10,000 people wanting to protect their families 'when all hell breaks loose,' according to their website.

The shelters, which cost between $35,000 to $45,000, plus an annual ground rent of more than $1,000, are fortified to withstand a 500,000-pound blast and have air purifiers designed to 'eliminate all pathogens and radioactive particles'.

Even higher up the financial scale, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, one the world's leading pioneers of artificial intelligence, became a frontman for the San Francisco Bay Area 'prepper' movement after he said in a 2016 interview that he had amassed 'guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to'.

That admission made some people understandably nervous when the remarks resurfaced again this year, amid concerns that super-intelligent machines may one day decide to turn on their masters.

'It was like a fun hobby…,' Altman reassured a journalist in April. '[But] none of this is going to help you if [artificial general intelligence] goes wrong,'

Other California techies are on the trend too. Steve Huffman, co-founder of Reddit, revealed in 2017 that 'buying a house in New Zealand' is code within the tech community for having 'apocalypse insurance'.

'Once you've done the Masonic handshake, they'll be, like, 'Oh, you know, I have a broker who sells old ICBM silos, and they're nuclear-hardened, and they kind of look like they would be interesting to live in,' he told The New Yorker.

The vast majority of us cannot even dream of buying a bolthole with the global elite in New Zealand, but there is still plenty that ordinary folk like us can do. Having several weeks worth of dried and tinned food, bottles of fresh water and jerry cans of fuel is an absolute basic. As is moving out of any and every big city, because these are destined to be death-traps of anti-white racist pogroms, looting, disease and collective madness. You have been warned!

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