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There are days when I wonder what history will call this time. A breakdown. A coup. A slow-motion collapse.

Will it remember those of us that pushed back, that stood up and said “not today, not on my watch”? Or will it focus on those that deep down knew they were on the wrong side of history, but liked the way it felt?

Because on the days when I’m extra tired. When I have to push through the non stop onslaught of bad news, I think about this. I think about my legacy decades before I should be.

And I know that you are tired too.

Tired in a way that sleep doesn’t fix. Tired from carrying grief in one hand and rage in the other, trying to keep both from falling while making breakfast or paying bills or helping a child with their homework.

Tired of pretending this is normal when every part of us knows it isn’t.

But if no one has told you this today, let me be the one to say it:

You’re doing it right.

There is no right way to live through a fascist takeover. There is only your way. And if you’re still standing, still resisting, still finding joy where you can, still telling the truth, then you are doing it exactly right.

Because this week, the lies got louder. But the resistance did too.

In California, Governor Newsom announced a coalition of governors forming a new Public Health and Safety Alliance, because the federal government has walked away from its most basic responsibility: protecting public health.

Trump dismantled the CDC, replaced science with ideology, and left states to fend for themselves. Now, this alliance of governors is stepping in to safeguard access to vaccines, medication, and life-saving data from being twisted by politics.

“Politics has no place in public health,” Newsom said.
Because when science is silenced, people die.

But there’s another layer here, one we can’t ignore.

We’re still paying federal taxes. Still funding a government that abandoned its post. And now states like California are left scrambling, stretching their own budgets to cover what used to be federal responsibility. That’s not just dereliction. That’s theft.

And while I’m thankful for Newsom and every governor standing up to do the right thing, it also feels like the beginning of something we haven’t named yet. A soft kind of secession. A slow, forced unraveling of what was once united.

What happens to the people trapped in states where science has been erased? Where public health is a culture war battlefield? Not everyone can pack up and move. “Just leave” isn’t a solution, it’s a surrender. They deserve protection too.

Because I still believe in the United States of America.
Not Trump’s version. Not the divided states he’s carving out, one crisis at a time.
The real version. The one we were taught to believe in, even when it failed us.

And while this alliance is the best option we have right now, it still leaves millions behind. It still costs us more. It still makes us more vulnerable.

Because viruses don’t stop at state lines. They don’t check for party affiliation. They don’t care where you live or who you voted for. Public health is national. Global. Collective.

So yes, I’m grateful Newsom is doing this. But I hate that he has to.
And I hate that even when we lead with courage, we’re still playing defense.

Meanwhile, air traffic controllers are sounding the alarm, not just for themselves, but for all of us.

The FAA has furloughed over 11,000 employees, halting essential services like training new air traffic controllers, conducting aircraft certification inspections, and overseeing safety programs. Another 17,000 are working without pay, including the very people guiding our planes, inspecting our skies, and keeping passengers safe.

But how long can they keep showing up?

They’re not superheroes. They’re human. Many are already stretched thin, commuting long distances and working brutal shifts. When paychecks stop, gas tanks do too. Groceries run out. Childcare disappears. And eventually, even the most dedicated worker has to make an impossible choice: show up unpaid or stay home and survive.

In a system as intricate as aviation, you can’t just remove thousands of people and expect nothing to give. This is one of the most complex, high-stakes networks in the world. A single lapse, a misread altitude, a missed maintenance check, a tired voice in a control tower, can lead to catastrophe.

We’ve been here before. After Reagan fired over 11,000 air traffic controllers during the 1981 PATCO strike, it took more than a decade to recover.. The system became leaner, more fragile, and dangerously dependent on the goodwill of overworked professionals.

Now we’re repeating that history, this time under the weight of a politically driven shutdown.

This isn’t sustainable. This isn’t safe. This is sabotage by neglect.

And the only reason this government is shut down is because Republicans chose cruelty over care. They chose posturing over policy. They held funding hostage, not because Democrats refused to compromise, but because they refused to cave to a plan that would gut healthcare subsidies, slash social programs, and shift the burden onto working families.

This isn’t a fiscal debate. It’s a power play.

And Mike Johnson is taking it one step further.

He is still refusing to seat Arizona’s newly elected Democratic Congresswoman, despite her election being certified. It has been weeks now. Over 700,000 constituents, American citizens, have no voice in the House of Representatives because one man decided the rules don’t apply to him.

Why? Because if she’s sworn in, it would allow Democrats the votes they need to further the release of the Epstein files.

That’s what this is about. It’s not justice. It’s delay. It’s another test balloon to see how far they can stretch the Constitution before it snaps. If they can silence one certified voice now, what will they do when multiple Democrats win in 2026 or 2028?

Will they block them too? Will they leave entire states voiceless?

This is how autocracies grow, not with a bang, but with the quiet normalization of obstruction. With procedural sabotage. With the slow erosion of norms that used to be sacred. Every time we allow it, it becomes precedent. And every precedent becomes the new floor from which they sink lower next time.

This isn’t just about one seat. It’s about whether your vote still counts if the other side doesn’t like who you picked.

Because if elections don’t translate to representation, we’re not a democratic republic anymore.

While Republicans are busy erasing representation and dismantling domestic programs, Trump is quietly reshaping how the world sees us, and how we’re allowed to see the world.

This week, for the first time in modern history, the U.S. passport dropped out of the top ten most powerful travel documents in the world. That may sound like a bureaucratic shift, but it’s actually a warning sign, a red flag waving over our global standing.

Under Trump’s isolationist policies, American travelers now face more restrictions than they have in decades: mandatory visas for countries we once entered freely, new financial bonds, tighter background checks, and additional layers of scrutiny. Our mobility is no longer assumed. It has to be earned, country by country.

This isn’t just about travel. It’s about control. It’s about restricting our access to information, to global perspective, to connection. Because the more you see, the harder it becomes to fall for the lie that America is the only place where people are free. Or were free.

When you leave the borders of your own country, you see how others live. You hear how their governments treat them, how their children are educated, how their healthcare systems work, how their workers are valued. You begin to question why we can’t have those things too. And people who question don’t blindly comply.

That’s why autocrats fear open borders, not because they let people in, but because they let ideas out.

This is not accidental. It is deliberate.

Trump doesn’t want Americans traveling freely. He wants us walled in, physically, politically, psychologically. He wants our vision of the world limited to cable news and propaganda that he controls, not personal experience and connection.

And this matters not just for individuals, but for our democracy. Isolation breeds misinformation. It breeds fear. And fear is how they keep control.

And while everyday Americans are losing access and credibility abroad, Trump just quietly doubled a bailout package for Argentina, from $20 billion to $40 billion.

No congressional debate. No transparency. No accountability. Just a backdoor deal pulled from private funding streams.

Sometimes, yes, global stabilization efforts are necessary. Supporting other nations during economic collapse can help prevent regional chaos and broader international fallout. But that’s not what this looks like. This isn’t a strategic act of diplomacy, it’s a pattern of erratic, secretive spending with unclear motives.

Argentina is in economic crisis. That much is true. But this is also the same country now selling soybeans to China, a deal that once belonged to American farmers before Trump’s own tariff war drove China to seek suppliers elsewhere.

So now, in an ironic twist, we’re pumping billions into Argentina, after our policies pushed them to the front of the line, and our farmers are left with empty silos and broken trade promises.

And if it was $20 billion last week and $40 billion this week, what’s it going to be next month?

Where’s the oversight? Where’s the benefit to the American people?

Because while Trump sends billions abroad without process or explanation, our own economy is stuck in shutdown mode. Federal workers are going unpaid. Military families are rationing groceries. Families are wondering if their childcare subsidies will vanish next.

This isn’t smart global strategy. It’s reckless favoritism. A distraction. A headline he’ll use to inflate his image as a dealmaker, while we foot the bill.

And while the financial screws tighten and shutdown chaos grabs the headlines, something even darker leaked out, something that should have set off alarms in every newsroom and hallway of power.

2,900 pages of Telegram chat logs. Not from some anonymous fringe militia. But from the National Young Republicans.

This is not a college club. This is not a group of immature teens saying reckless things online. These are staffers. Operatives. Future candidates. People between the ages of 18 and 40, working in politics today or positioning themselves to run tomorrow. The name might say “young,” but these are grown adults. And their messages were not just edgy or offensive, they were violently explicit.

They joked about watching people burn in ovens, like in the Holocaust. They praised Hitler. They shared rape fantasies. They talked openly about violence as a political tool.

And when confronted with the horror of these messages, the Vice President of the United States, J.D. Vance, didn’t condemn them. He didn’t call for resignations or an investigation or a moral reckoning.

He dismissed it all with a smirk and a single line:
“I’m sick of the pearl-clutching.”

That is the second-highest official in our government. That’s the voice of power, telling a generation of extremists: don’t worry, you’re fine. Keep going.

This is not normal. And it cannot be normalized.

Because this is how democracies don’t just die, but rot from the inside out. Not with one loud crash, but with a quiet shrug. When hatred becomes networking. When cruelty becomes culture. When resumes include fascist talking points and party leaders look the other way.

It starts with Telegram chats. It ends with legislation, raids, and orders signed in the dead of night.

We are not alarmed because we’re delicate. We’re alarmed because we’ve seen this before. And history doesn’t end well for the countries that ignore the warning signs.

And the rot doesn’t stop in group chats or private channels.
It climbs ladders. It wears robes.
It settles into the highest court in the land, rewriting the rules not with slurs, but with silence.
Because some power doesn’t shout.
It whispers through rulings.

The Supreme Court is now preparing to gut the Voting Rights Act, again.

This time, they’re going after the requirement that states with a proven history of racial discrimination must prove their voting maps aren’t designed to suppress minority voters.

That protection has been a lifeline. It kept some of the worst abuses in check. It ensured that districts couldn’t be carved up to silence Black communities or dilute their power.

Now, the Court wants to call this burden “unfair.” They say it’s time for “race-neutral” redistricting.

But that’s just a mask over the same old suppression.

Jim Crow didn’t vanish. It morphed.

No more literacy tests at polling places. No more poll taxes or jelly bean jars to count.
Now the tools are digital. Quiet. Calculated.
The suppression lives in the software, hidden in algorithms, behind legal jargon, buried in district lines.

It’s surgical. And the outcome is the same.

Black and Brown communities cut into pieces. Their voices divided across counties, their power dissolved.

And when they protest? The same forces that gerrymandered them out of representation will call it “election integrity.”

If this protection falls, Republicans would gain a powerful tool to redraw dozens of districts without oversight. According to Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter, weakening or striking down Section 2 of the VRA could hand Republicans at least 19 additional seats in the House, just from map manipulation alone.

This isn’t just a legal debate. It’s a power grab.

And just when you think the script can’t get any darker, they turn the page, from erasing votes to erasing voices.

That plan includes this: the State Department just revoked the legal visas of six foreign nationals who had spoken out against Charlie Kirk after his assassination.

They had done nothing illegal. They broke no law. They were not inciting violence. But they expressed dissent, and the government punished them for it.

This isn’t just a bureaucratic decision, it’s a warning shot. Six foreign nationals legally here on visas were deported because they criticized Charlie Kirk. They didn’t incite violence. They didn’t break laws. They spoke out, and they were punished.

Today it’s visas. Tomorrow, it could be green cards. Naturalized citizens. Children born here with only one parent who was an American by birth.

The lines always move in regimes like this. The goalposts shift until no one feels safe unless they’re silent.

Then came the announcement: Trump’s administration plans to fire missiles from U.S. warships onto California land.
Not in response to any threat. Not for defense. But for a spectacle.

Missiles. Fired from American warships onto American soil.
During fire season.
While shutting down one of California’s major freeways, a vital artery connecting cities, businesses, and families.

This isn’t policy.
It’s propaganda.

It’s the kind of authoritarian distraction meant to flood the news cycle.
To drown out the sound of protestors chanting “No Kings” in cities across the country, rallies that shake the ground.
Rallies Trump wants everyone to forget.

Governor Newsom was clear: “Put aside your vanity parade and pay our troops instead.”

Because while this president plays war for the cameras, our troops are unpaid.

This is not about national security.
It’s about national dominance.
It’s the kind of power performance authoritarians use when they’re losing control.

But not everyone is surrendering.

Brown University rejected a White House backroom deal offering special treatment in exchange for loyalty. They said no. Because academia matters.

Authoritarians always target universities. They fear ideas. They smear the educated. They call inquiry elitist and truth propaganda.

But Brown said no. And they are not alone.

When the Department of War, now rebranded under Pete Hegseth, demanded that journalists sign new contracts surrendering their First Amendment rights, they walked out.

CNN. NBC. Even Fox. Even Newsmax. They refused to comply. Only OANN signed.

Free press is not conditional. It is the last firewall against unchecked power. It was the press that uncovered Abu Ghraib. The Pentagon Papers. Watergate. Without reporters behind those walls, we lose the stories that could save us. We lose the oxygen that makes resistance possible. Every journalist who turned in their badge this week became a first responder in the fight to save our democracy.

Some days I can’t catch my breath between the headlines. Some days I’m folding laundry while reading court rulings, or stirring dinner while replaying the sound of sirens from a protest video. And still, I feel everything. That’s part of the resistance too, refusing to harden, refusing to disappear into numbness. We are still human. That matters.

So if today you are grieving, raging, laughing, marching, calling, hiding, writing, teaching, parenting, healing, or simply surviving, you are doing it right.

Because someday, history will give this moment a name.
A chapter heading. A warning. A line that students underline in textbooks.

But you? You’ll already know what it felt like to live through it.
To hold the line. To whisper the truth when others went silent.

And that matters. More than they want us to believe. You are what hope looks like when it gets tired but doesn’t quit. You are the firewall.

Still here. Still resisting. Still refusing to forget what this country is supposed to be.

Let history name it later. For now, we live it, and we don’t back down. We keep going.

That’s how we win.

I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather

You can also access the latest news at this address: www.whatfinger.com

Today, millions of Americans say that they believe that the United States is on the verge of a major economic collapse and will soon be entering another Great Depression. But only a small percentage of those same people are prepared for that to happen. The sad truth is that the vast majority of Americans would last little more than a month on what they have stored up in their homes. Most of us are so used to running out to the supermarket or to Wal-Mart for whatever we need that we never even stop to consider what would happen if suddenly we were not able to do that. Already the U.S. economy is starting to stumble about like a drunken frat boy. All it would take for the entire U.S. to resemble New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina would be for a major war, a terror attack, a deadly pandemic or a massive natural disaster to strike at just the right time and push the teetering U.S. economy over the edge. So just how would you survive if you suddenly could not rely on the huge international corporate giants to feed, clothe and supply you and your family? Do you have a plan?

Unless you already live in a cave or you are a complete and total mindless follower of the establishment media, you should be able to see very clearly that our society is more vulnerable now than it ever has been. This year there have been an unprecedented number of large earthquakes around the world and volcanoes all over the globe are awakening. You can just take a look at what has happened in Haiti and in Iceland to see how devastating a natural disaster can be. Not only that, but we have a world that is full of lunatics in positions of power, and if one of them decides to set off a nuclear, chemical or biological weapon in a major city it could paralyze an entire region. War could erupt in the Middle East at literally any moment, and if it does the price of oil will double or triple (at least) and there is the possibility that much of the entire world could be drawn into the conflict. Scientists tell us that a massive high-altitude EMP (electromagnetic pulse) blast could send large portions of the United States back to the stone age in an instant. In addition, there is the constant threat that the outbreak of a major viral pandemic (such as what happened with the 1918 Spanish Flu) could kill tens of millions of people around the globe and paralyze the economies of the world.

But even without all of that, the truth is that the U.S. economy is going to collapse. So just think of what will happen if one (or more) of those things does happen on top of all the economic problems that we are having.

Are you prepared?

The following is a list of 20 things you and your family will need to survive when the economy totally collapses and the next Great Depression begins….

#1) Storable Foo

Food is going to instantly become one of the most valuable commodities in existence in the event of an economic collapse. If you do not have food you are not going to survive. Most American families could not last much longer than a month on what they have in their house right now. So what about you? If disaster struck right now, how long could you survive on what you have? The truth is that we all need to start storing up food. If you and your family run out of food, you will suddenly find yourselves competing with the hordes of hungry people who are looting the stores and roaming the streets looking for something to eat.

Of course you can grow your own food, but that is going to take time. So you need to have enough food stored up until the food that you plant has time to grow. But if you have not stored up any seeds you might as well forget it. When the economy totally collapses, the remaining seeds will disappear very quickly. So if you think that you are going to need seeds, now is the time to get them.

#2) Clean Water

Most people can survive for a number of weeks without food, but without water you will die in just a few days. So where would you get water if the water suddenly stopped flowing out of your taps? Do you have a plan? Is there an abundant supply of clean water near your home? Would you be able to boil water if you need to?

Besides storing water and figuring out how you are going to gather water if society breaks down, another thing to consider is water purification tablets. The water you are able to gather during a time of crisis may not be suitable for drinking. So you may find that water purification tablets come in very, very handy.

#3) Shelter

You can’t sleep on the streets, can you? Well, some people will be able to get by living on the streets, but the vast majority of us will need some form of shelter to survive for long. So what would you do if you and your family lost your home or suddenly were forced from your home? Where would you go?

The best thing to do is to come up with several plans. Do you have relatives that you can bunk with in case of emergency? Do you own a tent and sleeping bags if you had to rough it? If one day everything hits the fan and you and your family have to “bug out” somewhere, where would that be? You need to have a plan.

#4) Warm Clothing

If you plan to survive for long in a nightmare economic situation, you are probably going to need some warm, functional clothing. If you live in a cold climate, this is going to mean storing up plenty of blankets and cold weather clothes. If you live in an area where it rains a lot, you will need to be sure to store up some rain gear. If you think you may have to survive outdoors in an emergency situation, make sure that you and your family have something warm to put on your heads. Someday after the economy has collapsed and people are scrambling to survive, a lot of folks are going to end up freezing to death. In fact, in the coldest areas it is actually possible to freeze to death in your own home. Don’t let that happen to you.

#5) An Axe

Staying along the theme of staying warm, you may want to consider investing in a good axe. In the event of a major emergency, gathering firewood will be a priority. Without a good tool to cut the wood with that will be much more difficult.

#6) Lighters Or Matches

You will also want something to start a fire with. If you can start a fire, you can cook food, you can boil water and you can stay warm. So in a true emergency situation, how do you plan to start a fire? By rubbing sticks together? Now is the time to put away a supply of lighters or matches so that you will be prepared when you really need them.

In addition, you may want to consider storing up a good supply of candles. Candles come in quite handy whenever the electricity goes out, and in the event of a long-term economic nightmare we will all see why our forefathers relied on candles so much.

#7) Hiking Boots Or Comfortable Shoes

When you ask most people to list things necessary for survival, this is not the first or the second thing that comes to mind. But having hiking boots or very comfortable and functional shoes will be absolutely critical. You may very well find yourself in a situation where you and your family must walk everywhere you want to go. So how far do you think you will get in high heels? You will want footwear that you would feel comfortable walking in for hours if necessary. You will also want footwear that will last a long time, because when the economy truly collapses you may not be able to run out to the shoe store and get what you need at that point.

#8) A Flashlight And/Or Lantern

When the power goes off in your home, what is the first thing that you grab? Just think about it. A flashlight or a lantern of course. In a major emergency, a flashlight or a lantern is going to be a necessity – especially if you need to go anywhere at night.

Solar powered or “crank style” flashlights or lanterns will probably be best during a long-term emergency. If you have battery-powered units you will want to begin storing up lots and lots of batteries.

#9) A Radio

If a major crisis does hit the United States, what will you and your family want? Among other things, you will all want to know what in the world is going on. A radio can be an invaluable tool for keeping up with the news.

Once again, solar powered or “crank style” radios will probably work best for the long term. A battery-powered until would work as well – but only for as long as your batteries are able to last.

#10) Communication Equipment

When things really hit the fan you are going to want to communicate with your family and friends. You will also want to be able to contact an ambulance or law enforcement if necessary. Having an emergency cell phone is great, but it may or may not work during a time of crisis. The Internet also may or may not be available. Be sure to have a plan (whether it be high-tech or low-tech) for staying in communication with others during a major emergency.

#11) A Swiss Army Knife

If you have ever owned a Swiss Army knife you probably already know how incredibly handy they can be. It can be a very valuable and versatile tool. In a true survival situation, a Swiss Army knife can literally do dozens of different things for you. Make sure that you have at least one stored up for emergencies.

#12) Personal Hygiene Items

While these may not be absolute “essentials”, the truth is that life will get very unpleasant very quickly without them. For example, what would you do without toilet paper? Just think about it. Imagine that you just finished your last roll of toilet paper and now you can’t get any more. What would you do?

The truth is that soap, toothbrushes, toothpaste, shampoo, toilet paper and other hygiene products are things that we completely take for granted in society today. So what would happen if we could not go out and buy them any longer?

#13) A First Aid Kit And Other Medical Supplies

One a more serious note, you may not be able to access a hospital or a doctor during a major crisis. In your survival supplies, be absolutely certain that you have a good first aid kit and any other medical supplies that you think you may need.

#14) Extra Gasoline

There may come a day when gasoline is rationed or is simply not available at all. If that happens, how will you get around? Be certain to have some extra gasoline stored away just in case you find yourself really needing to get somewhere someday.

#15) A Sewing Kit

If you were not able to run out and buy new clothes for you and your family, what would you do? Well, you would want to repair the clothes that you have and make them last as long as possible. Without a good sewing kit that will be very difficult to do.

#16) Self-Defense Equipment

Whether it is pepper spray to fend off wild animals or something more “robust” to fend off wild humans, millions of Americans will one day be thankful that they have something to defend themselves with.

#17) A Compass

In the event of a major emergency, you and your family may find yourselves having to be on the move. If you are in a wilderness area, it will be very hard to tell what direction you are heading without a compass. It is always a good idea to have at least one compass stored up.

#18) A Hiking Backpack

If you and your family suddenly have to “bug out”, what will you carry all of your survival supplies in? Having a good hiking backpack or “survival bag” for everyone in your family is extremely important. If something happened in the city where you live and you suddenly had to “go”, what would you put your most important stuff in? How would you carry it all if you had to travel by foot? These are very important things to think about.

#19) A Community

During a long-term crisis, it is those who are willing to work together that will have the best chance of making it. Whether it is your family, your friends, a church or a local group of people that you know, make sure that you have some people that you can rely on and work together with in the event that everything hits the fan. Loners are going to have a really hard time of surviving for long.

#20) A Backup Plan

Lastly, it is always, always, always important to have a backup plan for everything.

If someone comes in and steals all the food that you have stored up, what are you going to do?

If travel is restricted and your can’t get to your “bug out” location immediately do you have a Plan B?

If you have built your house into an impregnable survival fortress but circumstances force you to leave do you have an alternate plan?

The truth is that crisis situations rarely unfold just as we envision. It is important to be flexible and to be ready with backup plans when disaster strikes.

You don’t want to end up like the folks in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. You don’t want to have to rely on the government to take care of you if something really bad happens.

Right now the U.S. strategic grain reserve contains only enough wheat to make half a loaf of bread for each of the approximately 300 million people in the United States.

How long do you think that is going to last?

Now is the time to get ready.

Now is the time to prepare.

The United States economy is going to collapse and incredibly hard times are coming.

Will you be able to survive when it happens?

You can also access the latest news at this address: www.whatfinger.com

I’d been hearing the word “resilience” everywhere these past few months: on panels, in mission statements, in board retreats, staff meetings, and strategy decks. And I started to feel uneasy. Because while the word was being used constantly, it was often deployed like a mantra—vague, moralizing, strangely empty. Something you’re supposed to have. Something you’re supposed to be. Or, worse, I hear people equating endurance with resilience. Holding on. Pushing through. Grinding. That never sat right with me. Endurance may get you through the week, but it doesn’t teach you how to recover, adapt, or evolve. I wanted more to offer leaders and teams than “hold tight.” How do we actually build it, in ourselves, in our teams, in our organizations?

That hunger to be useful sent me searching. Strangely enough, it carried me into archaeology.

The Study

My curiosity led me to a recent study published in Nature that spanned thirty thousand years of human history. A team of researchers from across the globe analyzed 40,000 archaeological radiocarbon dates from sixteen regions. They identified 154 collapses—moments when populations shrank, fields failed, or settlements emptied out.

But the study wasn’t just about collapse. The researchers asked: How did societies recover? How quickly? How fully? The findings startled me. Societies that faced frequent disruptions recovered more fully. Collapse wasn’t only devastation. It was rehearsal. Rehearsal built reflexes. Reflexes became culture.

Four Lessons from the Long Arc of Collapse

The more I sat with the study, the more I recognized patterns that spoke to the organizations I work with today.

Lesson 01: Disturbance Builds Capacity

In the Cape of southern Africa, drought was not an occasional catastrophe but a recurring reality. Foragers learned to move with the seasons, sustaining wide networks of exchange so that when one valley failed, another could provide. What looked fragile from the outside was in fact a culture trained by repetition. Each disruption rehearsed the next.

Lesson 02: Agriculture Brought Both Risk and Resilience

In the Andean highlands, farming exposed people to famine, pests, and crop failure. But fragility also forced invention. Terraced fields carved into steep slopes, irrigation canals that stretched further each season, storage pits that carried food through lean years—risk drove adaptation, and adaptation became resilience.

Lesson 03: Collapse as Cultural Transmission

In India’s Middle Ganga Valley, collapse did not erase knowledge; it repurposed it. Rituals, political institutions, and new settlement patterns emerged from disruption. Memory became instruction. Collapse became story, and story carried survival forward.

Lesson 04: Not All Collapses Are Equal

Rigid systems broke. Flexible ones bent. In northern China, monocultures left communities brittle. When the climate shifted, their systems cracked and recovery lagged. By contrast, in Eastern North America, migration and coalition were already part of the cultural fabric. Flexibility allowed people to bend and recover more quickly.

Framing the Diagnostic

As enlightening as these learning were, the great and my big takeaway surprise was this: Resilient societies weren’t the biggest or the most resource-abundant. They weren’t the ones that managed to avoid collapse altogether. They were the ones that learned how to recover.

I used that knowledge to design a diagnostic that would allow my clients to evaluate organizational resilience. What I am offering is a mirror. A way of asking: What are we practicing, collectively? What systems help us bounce forward?

The resilience diagnostic features three key pillars. They are rooted in the archaeological lessons and combined with core principles of Adaptive Leadership, developed by Ronald Heifetz and colleagues at Harvard, which focuses on leading through change, especially in times of uncertainty, complexity, and disruption.

Organizational Resilience Diagnostic

🔁 Pillar 1: Learning, Adapting, Evolving

• Our organization reflects on past challenges to inform current decisions.
  
• We treat mistakes as learning moments, not blame moments.
  
• We have mechanisms (e.g., after-action reviews) to extract and circulate lessons.
  
• We evolve our strategy or operations based on what we’ve learned—not just what we planned.
  

⚙️ Pillar 2: Innovating and Collaborating Under Pressure

• During pressure periods, we pivot rather than double down on failing plans.
  
• Psychological safety allows for experimentation and dissent.
  
• Cross-functional collaboration increases under stress.
  
• We have individuals or teams who model adaptive thinking and bring others with them.
  

🧠 Pillar 3: Shared Learning and Cultural Transmission

• When one team learns something, others can easily access it.
  
• We codify and carry knowledge (templates, mentorship, storytelling).
  
• New practices are reinforced—not just introduced and forgotten.
  
• Senior leaders model openness to learning and adaptation.
  

What Leaders Discovered

When I introduced the diagnostic to a group of thirty senior leaders from a national organization I had been supporting at their summer retreat, the shift in the room was immediate. These were people who had lived through wave after wave of disruption—political attacks, funding uncertainties, leadership changes, reductions in force—and they were hungry for a way to name and measure what resilience actually looked like in practice.

As we worked through the framework together, patterns started to emerge. Collaboration under pressure came easily to them. They knew how to rally in a crisis, how to close ranks and deliver when it mattered most. But as the discussion deepened, another reality surfaced: their learning didn’t always travel. Insights remained trapped within teams. Institutional memory leaked away with every staff departure. What they carried in strength at the level of grit and urgency, they lacked in the systems that would allow resilience to compound over time.

It was a sobering realization, but not a paralyzing one. In fact, the candor seemed to free them. People began voicing practical next steps: codifying postmortems, building rituals for storytelling, mentoring newer colleagues so that knowledge didn’t just vanish with turnover. I watched resilience move from abstraction to something tangible, something they could actually embed, measure, and improve. In that moment, it no longer felt like a buzzword. It felt like a practice they could own.

The CORE Framework

In the midst of developing the organizational diagnostic, I found myself remembering the CORE framework. It was something I had first encountered during the pandemic, when so many of us were trying to name and strengthen our own reserves. Sitting with the archaeology study, the connections came back to me with new urgency

Developed by the Center for Creative Leadership amid the COVID-19 outbreak and building on psychological research, the CORE model defines resilience as a dynamic capability that lives at the intersection of four domains:

• Mental resilience
• Emotional resilience
• Physical resilience
• Social resilience

Resilience is not a fixed trait. It is a system of habits, mindsets, and behaviors that can be practiced and strengthened. Each of these domains maps to one or two specific behaviors. I flipped those behaviors into questions—are they drivers of change, or are they reinforcing the status quo? That translation became the foundation for the Leader Resilience Diagnostic.

Leader Resilience Diagnostic

Use this as a reflection tool for yourself or with peers. Rate each item, then choose one practice to strengthen over the next 30 days.

Rating scale: 🌱 = Rarely or never  🌿 = Sometimes  🌳 = Consistently (Or use numbers: 1, 2, 3.)

01: Physical activity

• Self-check: I engage in regular movement that sustains my energy at work.
• Team mirror: My schedule and norms make it possible for my team to move and reset.
• Your rating: 🌱 🌿 🌳

02: Sleep

• Self-check: I protect the quantity and quality of my sleep, especially after push periods.
• Team mirror: I do not reward heroics that trade sleep for output.
• Your rating: 🌱 🌿 🌳

03: Mindfulness

• Self-check: I create short pauses that help me notice, name, and reset during the day.
• Team mirror: Meetings include brief moments for arriving, breathing, or reflection.
• Your rating: 🌱 🌿 🌳

04: Cognitive reappraisal

• Self-check: I can reframe setbacks and model constructive thinking under pressure.
• Team mirror: We ask “what is the learning and the next move” when plans fail.
• Your rating: 🌱 🌿 🌳

05: Savoring

• Self-check: I notice and amplify small wins and moments of meaning.
• Team mirror: We regularly name what is working so people feel progress.
• Your rating: 🌱 🌿 🌳

06: Gratitude

• Self-check: I offer specific appreciation tied to behaviors and impact.
• Team mirror: Gratitude is visible and routine, not performative.
• Your rating: 🌱 🌿 🌳

07: Social connection

• Self-check: I invest in trusted relationships across lines of role and identity.
• Team mirror: People have allies beyond their immediate team.
• Your rating: 🌱 🌿 🌳

08: Social contact

• Self-check: I maintain visible, regular, reliable contact with my team.
• Team mirror: My presence is predictable, especially in stressful periods.
• Your rating: 🌱 🌿 🌳

When It Gets Personal

After working through the organizational diagnostic, the group took the CORE diagnostic at the individual leader level. That’s when the conversation shifted from systems to selves. Sitting with thirty leaders who had already been candid about their teams, I watched them turn inward.

The honesty that followed was striking. Some admitted they had never modeled rest for their staff, confessing that they still carried the belief that grinding without pause was proof of their commitment. Others reflected on how little time they gave to gratitude or connection, acknowledging that their drive to execute often came at the expense of presence.

Because the framework was presented not as judgment but as a mirror, the responses were unguarded. No one postured or pretended to have resilience figured out. Instead, the group recognized that resilience wasn’t a trait that some people had and others didn’t. It was a system they could choose to strengthen, one they had a responsibility to practice, and one they could see clearly laddered up into the culture and performance of the organization itself. In that space of vulnerability, I saw leaders beginning to imagine what it would look like to lead differently.

The Resilience System

After introducing both tools, I zoomed back out with the group to show how they fit together. The organizational diagnostic gave them a way to see resilience at the systems level: how their culture, structures, and practices helped or hindered their ability to bounce forward. The CORE diagnostic, by contrast, brought the lens down to the individual leader: how habits, mindsets, and daily behaviors shaped the very culture they were trying to build. Taken together, the two tools reveal resilience as a system that moves between levels. The ancient lessons provide the blueprint. The CORE framework offers the architecture. The behaviors become the rituals that bring resilience to life.

Resilience, in this light, is not a cliché. It is not sloganeering. It is a practice leaders can design, measure, and embed over time. Collapse is rehearsal for what comes next. The question isn’t whether disruption will come—it already has. The real question is: What are you rehearsing right now, and what will you pass forward?

Resilience in Practice: Ancient Blueprints, Human Architecture, Modern Rituals

An Invitation

I designed these tools to be used. If you are curious, take the leader diagnostic for yourself. Try the organizational diagnostic with your team. See what surfaces. Notice where you’re strong, and where resilience slips through the cracks.

Shortly after introducing the framework to the leaders this past summer, the chief people officer wrote to me: “Thank you for giving our team a concrete way to talk about resilience. It moved us beyond abstraction into actions we could measure and embed.” That is exactly the point. Resilience becomes real when it is practiced, not simply admired.

And if you want support—if you’d like a partner to help you introduce this framework, or to build something similar for your organization—feel free to reach out. My hope is that these tools give you a mirror and a starting point. Resilience is not just something to invoke in crisis. It’s something you can strengthen, beginning now.

You can also access the latest news at this address: www.whatfinger.com

Governments exist either because they have come to power through force and violence or they have been elected and given power by the people. The force and violence crowd usually have their roots in the military and we like to call them Dictators. There have been a ton of them throughout history; Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Kim Jong iL and now his son, Saddam, Gaddafi, the list goes on and on. Dictators don’t care about the people and usually kill anyone who gets in their way. It is a fact that government has killed more people than any other cause, disease or reason.

Is it true that communism has killed 100 million people?

It’s a phrase that has been repeated time and time again. The number can vary from 20 to 50 to 100 to even 200 million, usually depending on how adherent to the orthodox school of Cold War historiography.

A poster from the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation

The generally most cited source is the Black Book of Communism, which estimates 94+ million deaths. It is a collection of essays published in France in 1997, whose main author was Stéphane Courtois, along with Nicolas Werth, Andrzej Paczkowski, and Jean-Louis Margolin among other academics. Courtois was the editor, therefore he was in charge of the majority of the book’s conclusions.

However, there is some pretty questionable methodology as to how the Black Book got up to such a high death count. In fact, many of the other authors, specifically Margolin and Werth, noted Courtois was “obsessed with reaching a death count of 100 million”. So sometimes when he fell short of 100 million, he added more numbers out of nowhere.

Now let’s look at the three countries on this list with the highest death tolls (not all of them since this answer will be too long!). I do not necessarily support all of the policies implemented around those time periods.

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Soviet Union

Lenin and Stalin are the most discussed leaders in this book, so let’s focus on their time periods.

Starting with Lenin: The number of victims of the Red Terror is estimated to be 100,000.

The Russian famine of 1921 is often cited as a direct result of Soviet policies. But what should be remembered is that it occurred at around the same time as the Russian Civil War, which with a death toll of 7–12 million people, is known as one of the costliest civil wars in history.

During the civil war, all factions — the Red, White, Black armies, etc. — fed their armies and supporters by seizing food from many of the farmers in their territory as many of those soldiers were underfed and war was their main priority. The Red Army, however, usually confiscated some of the food if the peasants around that area already had a decent supply of food. Some farmers deliberately destroyed part of their food storage and grew fewer crops so the armies couldn’t take them.

The kulaks, the wealthier peasants, employed landless peasants to work the large swathes of farmland they owned which was more than they could work. They withheld their surplus grain to either hide it from the Red Army taking it, or sold it on the black market.

However, the kulaks did not necessarily need the grain for survival because the occupying armies didn’t take a large fraction out of their supply, it was mostly to gain a profit. What accelerated the famine even more was a drought.

Lenin, upon decreeing the NEP, witnessing various peasant rebellions, and permitting post-WWI humanitarian aid from the West, later tried to level out the famine. Another thing that should be noticed was that the confiscation of food wasn’t a specifically Soviet tactic — the other factions in the war carried this out, as well.

As for Stalin: let’s start with the Soviet famine of 1932, often nicknamed the Holodomor. The Black Book of Communism repeats the premise that it was a deliberately orchestrated “famine-genocide” implemented by Stalin to destroy Ukrainian opposition to Soviet power.

That wasn’t not exactly the case. The concept behind the 1932 famine being intentional actually originated from a Nazi propaganda campaign facilitated by Goebbels and William Randolph Hearst, an American newspaper proprietor (known as the father of the “yellow press”) who was reportedly a friend of Hitler’s and aided him in his campaign against the Soviet Union.

First of all, the famine did not only take place in Ukraine. Kazakhstan actually had a higher mortality rate than said republic, and some cities in Southern Russia such as Rostov-on-Don and Tambov had a comparable mortality rate to Ukraine.

Part of the reason why was that there was a grain shortage in 1931–32 because of the inefficiencies of the new large-scale mechanized farming among peasants unaccustomed to machines, as well as some regions that were even more prone to famine because modern agricultural methods were not fully adapted yet. Other factors were harsh weather, a major drought in five basic regions, and the burning of crops/slaughtering of livestock from the kulaks who later tried to avoid collectivization (which in fact, was a grievous blow to Soviet agriculture — i.e. some of the collectives were torched, the number of sheep and goats reduced from 147 million to about 50 million, etc.).

The government later sent millions of pounds worth of aid to regions affected by the famine.

In addition, the Black Book of Communism came up with a death count of 6 million from the famine because the editors added a nonexistent 2 million deaths to the 4 million actually reported deaths.

The toll of the Great Purges was about 800,000.

More recent evidence from the archives opened up by the post-Soviet Yeltsin government indicate that the total number of death sentences over the 1921-1953 interval, which covered more than a few years of Stalin’s time in power, was between 775,866 and 786,098. Also, although Stalin definitely played a role in the Purges, local officials played a great role in instigating the Terror — sometimes even more than Stalin himself. Roughly 90% of all executions (700,000 out of 800,000) took place during the 2 years when Yezhov was leader of the NKVD. He was later executed for misuse of public office in 1940.

As for the GULAG system: First of all, that penal labor system was around before the Soviet Union — but it was called the Katorga.

Secondly, the number of people in Soviet prisons and labor camps from the 1930s to the 1950s averaged about 2 million of whom 20-40% were released each year. 

Approximately 18 million people in total were imprisoned in the labor camp system, while a total of 1,053,829 died around the time period from 1934–1953.

What should also be noted was that the annual death rate for the interned Soviet population was approximately 4%, which incorporates the effect of prisoner executions. Most of the arrests under Stalin were arrested for crimes such as theft, banditry, misuse of public office for personal gain, and smuggling, with less than 10% being for political reasons.

People’s Republic of China

The Cultural Revolution’s death toll is estimated to be about 400,000, and Mao killed approximately 4–6 million people in the Great Leap Forward.

Stephane Courtois says this about the Chinese famine:

Loss of life linked to the famine in the years 1959–1961 was somewhere between 20 million and 43 million people. The lower end of the range is the official figure used by the Chinese government since 1988. This was quite possibly the worst famine not just in the history of China but in the history of the world.

He is right that the Great Chinese famine was one of the worst famines in recorded history. However, this book assumes that the highest end of the death toll (48 million) is correct and that this famine was a direct result solely of Mao’s policies.

The highest scholarly estimates of the Great Chinese Famine are considered to be about 30 million. Courtois’ claim of “40 million” comes from adding the drop of birth rates and assuming that people not having kids is the exact same thing as child malnutrition.

One thing to note is that between the years 108 B.C. and 1911, there were 1,828 famines in China.

Although government policies and reactions such as, for example, the initial cover-ups and the Four Pests campaign did play a role in the famine, what propelled it were mostly the result of natural causes such as floods, typhoons, and disease. For example, drought caused significant crop failures in Shaanxi, where output decreased by more than 50%, and Hubei where it fell 25%.

According to the China Statistical Yearbook, crop production decreased from 200 million tons in 1958 to 143.5 million tons in 1960. In 1961, the northern provinces suffered years of droughts, while the southern provinces endured yet more flooding.

Some of the efforts to deal with the famine included, for example, the organization of “people’s communes”, collectives which permitted farmers to work in a more effective manner than the previous techniques they had used. It resulted in the construction of large-scale irrigation works and a large-scale production of fertilizers.

Power structures were reorganized so that the management for these issues was more decentralized so that elected councils had a greater say in combatting the famine and developing small and medium scale heavy industry.

Soviet scientists, such as Terentiy Maltsev and Trofim Lysenko, also aided in developing more efficient agricultural systems.

Cambodia (Democratic Kampuchea)

Pol Pot was actually not a communist. 

“We are not communists … we are revolutionaries” who do not ‘belong to the commonly accepted grouping of communist Indochina.’”

The first public admission that the leading party of Kampuchea was even a Marxist-Leninist party was publicly revealed in a Pol Pot speech for a memorial service for Mao Zedong, in 1977. The likely reason was to get support from China, and the reason why China supported them was their hostility towards Vietnam, not their ideology.

The Khmer Rouge in practice was far from what a proper Marxist-Leninist party should have been. They practiced a form of Kampuchean nationalism and sternly rejected internationalism. Furthermore, they expropriated the entire surplus value from the workers that tried to reach their goal of “three harvests per month”.

They were extremely anti-intellectualist and espoused an idea called “Year Zero” which basically stated that all culture and traditions within a society should be demolished and have a new culture replace it. That is very contradictory to the basic Marxist concept of historical materialism, which states that history is the result of successive technological development and improvements in the mode of production/material conditions. Basically, you can’t build socialism without another system (capitalism) preceding it, and you can’t have capitalism without mercantilism, feudalism, etc.

The CIA also funded the Khmer Rouge, and the regime was taken down by Vietnamese communists.

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The book was also condemned — particularly by the Wiesel Commission consisting of Holocaust survivors — for “comparative trivialization” of the Holocaust in Courtois’ pursuit to portray communism as more evil and bloody than fascism.

They also count some of the anti-Semitic White Army officers who oversaw Jewish pogroms, Nazis, and their collaborators in World War II as yet another list of “victims of communism”. For example, here’s a paragraph from the book — they do that while talking about the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, a nationalist paramilitary group who helped build up pogroms in Ukraine where they exterminated tens of thousands of Jews, Poles, and others alongside the Nazis, like in the infamous Babi Yar, for example.

This would be a more realistic table of the death count in some (although not all) socialist countries:

Since 2020 the nation has gone through some radical changes. There are more people prepping now than ever before. That should tell you just how much has changed in such a short time in our nation. While the federal government is working to figure out this moment in history, state level governance is stepping in, too.

Along with mother nature, each state is starting to get a clearer picture of its threat profile. The first step in eliminating all this fear is to understand what it is that threatens you. Then you can prepare for it.

Below you are going to find all fifty states and a threat profile for each state. This should help you decide what to prepare for depending on your state:

Alabama

Natural Disaster: Severe Storms, Flooding, Hurricanes, Tornadoes

Civil Threats: Alabama has a contentious history with a massive constitution that has been amended over nine hundred times. Most areas are not densely populated but there is a high poverty rate.

Poverty Rate: 15.5

Alabama is home to two nuclear power plants and several military installations. This makes them a target in warfare. Their natural disaster profile is no laughing matter either.

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Alaska

Natural Disaster: Blizzards, Floods, Wildfires, Landslides

Civil Threats: Low population but high crime rates

Crime Per 100,000: 4185.5 (2nd Highest)

Poverty Rate: 10.1

Alaska is a massive state that requires a special kind of person to live and enjoy the place. It has the second highest crime per capita.

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Arizona

Natural Disaster: Wildfires, Drought, Flooding, Extreme Heat

Civil Threats: Arizona is a border state and the crime and chaos that comes along with that.

Crime Per 100,000: 3151.7

Poverty Rate: 13.5%

Arizona is home to multiple military bases and two nuclear power plants. The issues with the border and serious issues with drought and heat give people lots to prepare for in Arizona.

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Arkansas

Natural Disaster: Floods, Hurricanes, Tornadoes, Droughts, Ice Storms

Civil Threats: Crime and political corruption along with poverty are big concerns in the state of Arkansas.

Crime Per 100,000: 3456.6

Poverty Rate: 16.2%

Arkansas has a four military bases, a nuclear power plant, high crime, and poverty with serious threats like hurricanes and tornadoes.

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California

Natural Disaster: Wildfires and Earthquakes

Civil Threats: Densely populated areas are overrun with homelessness

Political: Political corruption is at an all-time high in California

Crime Rate Per 100,000: 2827.8

Poverty Rate: 11.8%

During the year 2020 many people left the state because of stringent COVID-19 restrictions and unfathomable tax rates and the natural disaster threats.

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Colorado

Natural Disaster: Wildfires, Flooding, Winter Storms and Tornadoes

Civil Threats: Colorado has major cities and suburbs that can rough for preppers.

Crime Per 100,000 3068.8

Poverty Rate: 9.3%

Colorado is a very diverse state that has some really great places and then some places where you will have to prepare for civil threats and natural disasters.

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Connecticut

Natural Disaster: Hurricanes, Floods, Winter Storms

Civil Threats: Old state with lots of political corruption and high population

Crime Per 100,000: 1888.4

Poverty Rate: 10%

Connecticut is a state of political prowess, wealth, and corruption. There are lots of people, a nuclear powerplant and some serious natural disasters to deal with.

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Delaware

Natural Disaster: Severe Storms, Snowstorms, Flooding, Drought

Civil Threats: The proximity to large cities can make places in Delaware prime for civil unrest and

Crime Per 100,000: 2748

Poverty Rate: 11.3%

With a nuclear power plant and major air force base there are significant targets in warfare. The highly populated east coast is also dependent on civility and supply chain to survive.

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Florida

Natural Disaster: Hurricanes, Floods, Landslides, Severe Storms, Wildfires

Civil Threats: Florida is one of the most diverse states in the union and has a serious population density in large cities like Miami.

Crime Per 100,000: 2666.7

Poverty Rate: 12.7%

Southern Florida has a serious set of natural disasters and conditions to deal with. It also has a tremendous number of military installations in the state and two nuclear power plants that are in the path of hurricanes.

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Georgia

Natural Disaster: Tornadoes, Hurricanes, Floods, Ice Storms

Civil Threats: Georgia’s population has grown rapidly an in densely populated areas you must prepare for civil unrest

Crime Per 100,000: 2900.3

Poverty Rate: 13.3%

Georgia is a southern city that is facing the reckoning of the past, like many places in our nation. It is also fighting to keep its economy afloat in hard times. The leadership is questionable, and Georgia deals with its share of disasters.

Also, there are many military installations in this state including Fort Benning. They draw power from two separate nuclear facilities.

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Hawaii

Natural Disaster: Volcanoes, Tsunamis, Wildfires, Earthquakes

Civil Threats: There is a lot of police corruption and even some echoes of racism towards white people that is rarely talked about. Tourism is key to the island’s survival

Crime Per 100,000: 3118.9

Poverty Rate: 9.3%

Everything has to be shipped into Hawaii. In times of calamity, it is very bad place to be. Not to mention it is a volcanic island in the Pacific which comes with many threats. Cost of living is also very high and taxes, too.

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Idaho

Natural Disaster: Wildfires, Floods, Winter Storms. Wildfires are very common in Idaho

Civil Threats: Sparse population density means there is very little by way of civil threats

Political: Recent considerable rising tax rates

Poverty Rate: 11.2%

Idaho is another top location for preppers. Wildfires are a concern in some locations, but it is a very liberty minded state. Cost of living is increasing in Idaho.

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Illinois

Natural Disaster: Severe Storms, Floods, Winter Storms

Politics: Mayor Lightfoot told reports that she would only be doing interviews with black reporters. The city’s gun crime and violent crime stats are massive despite thorough gun control laws.

Civil Threats: Chicago and the surrounding areas are dangerous and civil unrest is highly likely in a long term disaster.

Crime Per 100,000: 2336.9

Poverty Rate: 11.5%

Home to one of the America’s most dangerous cities for gun violence, Illinois is a highly populated location with highly suspect political leaders. They utilize the nation’s highest six nuclear power plants and have four military installations in state.

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Indiana

Natural Disaster: Severe Storms, Floods, Winter Storms, Tornadoes

Civil Threats: Low population density and good leadership in many places.

Crime per 100,000: 2561.6

Poverty Rate: 11.9%

Sparse military bases and no operating nuclear power plants make Indiana less of a target for war. However, they face their share of natural disasters.

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Iowa

Natural Disaster: Floods, Severe Storms, Tornadoes, Winter Storms

Civil Threats: Low population density in most places.

Crime Per 100,000:1941.6

Poverty Rate: 11.2%

Prepare to deal with the potential for serious flooding. There are no military bases and one nuclear power plant.

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Kansas

Natural Disaster: Tornadoes, Severe Storms, Winter Storms, Flooding

Civil Threats: Low population density in most towns and cities makes civil unrest less of a threat.

Crime Per 100,000: 3072.9

Poverty Rate: 11.4%

Furthermore, Kansas faces its share of serious natural disasters. With few military installations and one nuclear power plant it is less of a target. Its location helps.

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Kentucky

Natural Disaster: Severe Storms, Tornadoes, Wildfires, Winter Storms

Civil Threats: Louisville and Lexington maintain decent populations for civil unrest

Crime Per 100,000: 2174.5

Poverty Rate 16.4% (4th Highest)

No nuclear power plants and sparse military bases make it less of an inland target. However, large populations centers and high poverty raise the potential for civil unrest.

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Louisiana

Natural Disaster: Floods, Hurricanes, Severe Storms, Tornadoes

Civil Threats: Lots of decent sized southern cities and potential for serious natural disaster.

Crime Per 100,000: 3813.5 (3rd Highest)

Poverty Rate: 19% (2nd Highest)

Louisiana has a serious history with natural disaster. It has the second highest poverty rate and third highest crime rate per 100,000 in the nation. There are two nuclear power plants and five military bases.

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Maine

Natural Disaster: Severe Storms, Floods, Winter Storms

Civil Threats: Low population density

Crime Per 100,000: 1469.9 (3rd Lowest)

Poverty Rate: 10.9%

Maine’s tough winters have to be prepared for, but population is low, crime is low and there are only two military bases on the coast. No nuclear power plants.

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Maryland

Natural Disaster: Floods, Hurricanes, Winter Storms

Civil Threats: There are many highly populated areas and some very dangerous like Baltimore and the Surrounding DC area.

Crime Per 100,000: 2502

Poverty Rate: 9% (3rd Lowest)

Maryland has some terrible gun laws, dangerous cities and can be wacked by severe disasters. It has one active nuclear power plant and many military installations.

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Massachusetts

Natural Disaster: Tropical Storms, Hurricanes, Flooding, Winter Storms

Civil Threats: A highly populated state with horrible traffic problems so you need to be prepared for population density issues.

Crime Per 100,000: 1061.4

Poverty Rate: 9.4%

An old state that is rife with political corruption, Massachusetts is a highly populated state that can be affected many types of natural disasters and civil unrest.

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Michigan

Natural Disaster: Floods, Severe Storms, Winter Storms

Civil Threats: Some densely populated areas pose a serious threat

Crime Per 100,000: 2102.9

Poverty Rate: 13%

Michigan has a few densely populated cities besides Detroit. Winters are harsh. There are four nuclear power plants and a handful of military installations.

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Minnesota

Natural Disaster: Winter Storms, Floods, Severe Storms

Civil Threats: Radical leadership and high populations in cities has created serious potential for civil unrest in Minneapolis

Crime Per 100,000: 2214.2

Poverty Rate: 9% (2nd Lowest)

It’s cold and they get snow all the time. You have to be prepared for winter weather and cold. There are two active nuclear power plants and no military bases.

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Mississippi

Natural Disaster: Hurricanes, Floods, Tornadoes, Severe Storms

Civil Threats: Low population density in most towns and cities

Crime Per 100,000: 2637.4

Poverty Rate: 19.6% (HIGHEST)

With the highest poverty rate in the nation and huge potential for natural disasters there are threats in Mississippi. There are many military installations and one large three unit nuclear power plant.

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Missouri

Natural Disaster: Severe Storms, Tornadoes, Floods

Civil Threats: A couple larger cities pose civil unrest threats

Crime Per 100,000: 3149.2

Poverty Rate: 12.9%

Serious threats from mother nature and a creeping crime rate are things to prepare for. The cities are getting more dangerous.

Also, there is one nuclear power plant and three military bases.

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Montana

Natural Disaster: Wildfires, Winter Storms, Floods and Severe Storms

Civil Threats: Low population density means little or no civil unrest threats

Poverty Rate: 2870

Montana is home to the largest Minute Man missile base in the US which makes it a significant target in war. There are some natural disasters to worry about.

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Nebraska

Natural Disaster: Floods, Tornadoes, Severe Storms, Winter Storms

Civil Threats: Low population density and low threats

Crime Per 100,000: 2364.7

Poverty Rate: 9.9%

If you can weather the storms of mother nature you will be safe. There is one nuclear plant and one military base.

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Nevada

Natural Disaster: Droughts, Extreme Heat, Wildfires

Civil Threats: There are some large cities in Nevada with potential for civil unrest.

Crime Per 100,000: 2979.3

Poverty Rate: 12.5%

Nevada is a desert and there are serious concerns with that. Areas like Las Vegas are big with lots of people and potential for chaos.

There are four military bases in Nevada and no nuclear power plants.

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New Hampshire

Natural Disaster: Floods, Severe Storms, Winter Storms

Civil Threats: Low population density

Crime Per 100,000: 1421.7 (LOWEST)

Poverty Rate: 7.3% (LOWEST)

New Hampshire is not a place that faces a lot of threats and with the lowest crime and poverty rates in the nation, you are not dealing with civil threats.

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New Jersey

Natural Disaster: Hurricanes, Winter Storms, Tornadoes, Floods

Civil Threats: Home to some massive populations and surrounded by other giant American cities you are going to have to prepare to bugout in a long term disaster.

Politics: There is a lot of corruption and strong arm politics and law enforcement in New Jersey

Crime Per 100,000: 1613

Poverty Rate: 9.2%

New Jersey has some crime ridden areas, high population, and corrupt government. Natural disasters befall them from time to time and there are military targets and nuclear power plants.

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New Mexico

Natural Disaster: Wildfires, Severe Storms, Drought, Severe Heat, Flooding

Civil Threats: Highly populated areas and proximity to the border create threats of crime and civil unrest.

Crime Per 100,000: 4276.3 (HIGHEST)

Poverty Rate: 18.2% (3rd Highest)

New Mexico boasts a collection of military bases, no nuclear power plants but high incidences of poverty and the highest crime rate in the nation.

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New York

Natural Disaster: Severe Storms, Floods, Hurricanes, Winter Storms

Civil Threats: Areas with dense populations are a serious concern

Crime Per 100,000: 1791

Poverty Rate: 13%

New York is a diverse state both in its population and geography. NYC is obviously a prepper’s worst nightmare but there are very remote locations in the state of New York.

There are five military bases and four active nuclear power plants in New York.

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North Carolina

Natural Disaster: Severe Storms, Floods, Hurricanes

Civil Threats: Growing cities make for increased civil unrest threats.

Crime Per 100,000: 2871.7

Poverty Rate: 13.6%

North Carolina faces all the threats of any coastal southern state. Their growing cities are a concern for preppers. There are three active nuclear power plants and extensive military presence in North Carolina.

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North Dakota

Natural Disaster: Floods, Severe Storms, Winter Storms

Civil Threats: Low population density

Crime Per 100,000: 2320.8

Poverty Rate: 10.6%

North Dakotans battle with Mother Nature as its true threat. There are two military bases in ND.

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Ohio

Natural Disaster: Floods, Severe Storms, Tornadoes, Winter Storms

Civil Threats: The cities of Ohio like Columbus and Cleveland are suffering from the outbreak in crime that most big cities in the nation are suffering.

Crime Per 100,000: 2,348.85

Poverty Rate: 15.9%

Ohio faces its share of natural disasters but if you live outside of the city you won’t have to contend with the agendas and the crime that go along with those places.

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Oklahoma

Natural Disaster Tornadoes, Floods, Wildfires, Winter Storms

Civil Threats: Crime rates and civil threats are actually on the decline in 2021. That is saying a lot as many states and major cities are setting records for violent crime.

Crime Per 100,000: 3277.08

Poverty Rate: 15.7%

Oklahoma ranks #3 in the nation for the most natural disasters per year. It’s a big deal because #2 and #1 are California and Texas. Which are states that are much larger than Oklahoma.

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Oregon

Natural Disaster: Wildfires, Floods, Coastal Erosion, Landslides, Tsunamis

Civil Threats: Portland has been the epicenter for Antifa violence and civil unrest.

Crime Per 100,000: 3179.5

Poverty Rate: 11.4%

Oregon is a beautiful place that can be affected by a variety of natural disasters. The cities and politics seem to invite the current environment of civil unrest.

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Pennsylvania

Natural Disaster: Floods, Severe Storms, Winter Storms, Hurricanes

Civil Threats: High population cities and surroundings suburbs are a threat.

Crime Per 100,000: 1795.9

Poverty Rate: 12%

Pennsylvania is a big state but there are densely populated areas that pose a serious threat. There are four nuclear power plants and five military bases in PA.

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Rhode Island

Natural Disaster: Hurricanes, Winter Storms, Floods

Civil Threats: You are dealing with densely populated areas and that is always something to prepare for, COVID cases are pretty high and there are issues with homelessness.

Crime Per 100,000: 1880

Poverty Rate: 10.8%

Its costs a lot to live in Rhode Island, taxes are high and restrictions on guns and homeschooling make it a place that is tough preppers. You need to be prepared to deal with a place that is opposed to much of what you believe.

They also have a two unit nuclear power plant.

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South Carolina

Natural Disaster: Severe Storms, Floods, Hurricanes

Civil Threats: Low population except in major cities

Crime Per 100,000: 3505.9

Poverty Rate: 13.6%

South Carolina faces coastal state issues on the East Coast and has smaller southern cities that could face small pockets of unrest.

There are five military bases and four nuclear power plants in SC.

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South Dakota

Natural Disaster: Floods, Severe Storms, Winter Storms

Civil Threats: Low Population Density

Crime Per 100,000: 2133.4

Poverty Rate: 11.9%

Like North Dakota the battle here is with Mother Nature. There is just one military base in South Dakota.

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Tennessee

Natural Disaster: Severe Storms, Flooding, Wildfires

Civil Threats: Low population except in major cities

Crime Per 100,000: 3449.1

Poverty Rate: 13.9%

Tennessee has a surprisingly high crime rate. It faces typical threats from Mother Nature. It has two nuclear power plants and four military bases.

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Texas

Natural Disaster: Hurricanes, Tornadoes, Flooding and Wildfires are the most common natural disasters in Texas.

Civil Threats: The greatest civil threat in Texas is the open US border

Political: Texas is experiencing rapid political change in its biggest cities

Crime Per 100,000: 2778.1

Poverty:13.6%

Texas is a massive state and there is a lot of space. The threats at the border, the changing political climate bleeding out from cities due to an influx of people moving from others states and a decent profile of natural disasters offers up plenty to prepare for!

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Utah

Natural Disaster: Wildfires are one the major natural disaster in Utah. The residents also face things like flash floods that are the most damaging. Winter storms and landslides are also things to prepare for.

Civil Threats: Civil threats are low in Utah as the state has very low population density even in Salt Lake City.

Crime Per 100,000:2610.6

Poverty Rate: 8.9% (LOWEST)

Utah is one of the most favorable places for preppers.

However, there are some serious natural disasters that you need to be prepared for. You should be equipped to deal with snow, particularly if you are moving there from a place where you don’t get lots of snow.

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Vermont

Natural Disaster: Flooding, Severe Storms, Winter Storms

Civil Threats: Low Population Density

Crime Per 100,000: 1455.1 (2nd Lowest)

Poverty Rate: 10.2%

There are no military bases in Vermont or nuclear power plants.

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Virginia

Natural Disaster: Hurricanes, Floods, Severe Storms, Earthquakes

Civil Threats: Home to the nation’s Capital Virginia has tremendous corruption and civil unrest potential

Crime Per 100,000: 1865.8

Poverty Rate: 9.2%

Virginia is a state with moderate natural disaster threats, political corruption, two power plants, a major naval base, and significant targets in warfare. Potential for serious civil unrest in some location, too.

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Washington

Natural Disaster: Flooding is the most common disaster in Washington. There are about one thousand wildfires a year and you could also prepare for winter storms, landslides and possible earthquakes.

Civil Threats: Seattle is a west coast hub for civil unrest and major political upheaval

Crime Per 100,000: 3257.7

Poverty Rate: 9.8%

The west coast crime and homeless waves are pervasive in the major cities. Being prepared for floods and wildfires would be important if you plan to live outside the cities in Washington.

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West Virginia

Natural Disaster: Floods, Severe Storms, Tornadoes, Drought

Civil Threats: Low Population Density

Crime Per 100,000: 1775.5

Poverty Rate: 16%

There are no nuclear power plants in West Virginia and just two military bases.

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Wisconsin

Natural Disaster: Severe Storms, Floods, Tornadoes, Winter Storms

Civil Threats: Low Population Density

Crime Per 100,000: 1855.3

Poverty Rate: 10.4%

Wisconsin’s greatest threat comes from Mother Nature.

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Wyoming

Natural Disaster: Wildfires, Winter Storms, Landslides, Droughts, Severe Storms

Civil Threats: Low population density and low threats

Crime Per 100,000: 1997.3

Poverty Rate: 10.1%

Wyoming has to face off with nature but has low population and concerns if civil unrest.

Final Words

Which of these states surprised you? Did you know as much about your state as you thought?

A strong base level preparedness will allow you to react and survive many of the disasters and threats in your state. Then you can begin to tailor your preparedness plans to the particular threats of your state.

Then again, it might be time for you to move on to greener pastures!

The war in Ukraine (2022–present) brutally reminded the world that modern life can shatter overnight. One day you have running water, electricity, and a safe home; the next, you’re melting snow for drinking water and huddling in a basement as missiles fall. Ordinary civilians in Ukraine—families in Kyiv high-rises, neighbors in rural villages—were thrust into survival situations most Westerners only imagine. Yet amid the chaos, they improvised ways to endure. Their experiences offer hard-earned lessons for preppers everywhere.

Water: Sourcing and Rationing Life’s Most Vital Resource

When municipal water systems were knocked out by fighting, Ukrainians had to get resourceful fast. In besieged cities like Mariupol, all taps went dry early in the siege.¹ Families suddenly found themselves collecting snow and rainwater to stay alive. One survivor described how on days of heavy shelling they couldn’t even venture out, so “our husbands collected snow and rainwater and boiled it” to have something to drink.² In other regions, people turned to any available source. In Pokrovsk (eastern Ukraine), when a pipeline was cut off, engineers managed an improvised solution: pumping water out of defunct coal mines and filtering it with portable equipment.³ This desperate fix worked for a while, but when even that failed due to damage, residents fell back on a classic rural resource – wells.⁴ Throughout rural villages, private wells and hand pumps became lifelines as centralized systems collapsed.

Even in cities that weren’t fully occupied, Russian strikes on power plants often shut down water treatment and pumping stations. In late 2022, millions across Ukraine experienced periodic water outages. Those who had stored water in tubs, cisterns, or bottles were a step ahead. In one frontline town (Lyman), a mother of two kept jugs of water in the basement alongside a woodstove and blankets, knowing that if shelling cut off access, her family had a backup supply.⁵ Sanitation, too, became a survival issue. After Chernihiv’s power was knocked out, one man found himself digging a makeshift latrine in the yard two days into the siege because the plumbing had failed—his high-rise apartment was suddenly “no light, no water, no heating and no toilet”.⁶ It was a stark lesson in how quickly modern conveniences can disappear in war.

Takeaways – Water

Everyday Ukrainians learned the hard way that water is truly life. To be prepared:

• Store ample water in your home for emergencies (at least 1–2 gallons per person per day for 2+ weeks).
• Cache water in multiple ways: fill bathtubs or barrels when a crisis is looming; keep some sealed bottled water, and consider a rainwater catchment system if possible.
• Equip for purification: have a portable water filter, water purification tablets, and fuel for boiling water. In Ukraine, boiling snow or rainwater made it safer⁷ – you should be ready to do the same.
• Identify sources near you: know the location of ponds, rivers, or public wells, and keep basic tools (wrench, siphon hose) to access water heaters or pipes in a pinch. People survived Mariupol by scrounging water wherever they could – preparation will give you an enormous advantage.

Communication: Staying in Touch When the Grid Goes Down

When war knocked out cell towers and internet service, Ukrainians discovered that old-school communication tools suddenly became invaluable. In many besieged areas, mobile coverage and internet access vanished, leaving people in an information blackout. “We felt we were cut off from the entire world,” recalled a Mariupol resident of the first days of siege when phones went dead.¹ In this void, basic battery-powered radios emerged as literal lifesavers. Communities that had portable radios tuned in to get news and crucial updates. In fact, Ukrainian families trapped under occupation recount how radio broadcasts guided their decisions: one family in Hostomel (a suburb of Kyiv) spent a week hiding in their cellar until they started listening to a little transistor radio. Through it, they learned about relatively safe evacuation routes (“green corridors”) and enemy movements, information that helped them escape safely.^{8 9} Others in cities like Izium and Mariupol similarly “listened to the radio and found their way to safety, thanks to the information they received. Radio saves lives.”.¹⁰ It’s telling that in some occupied towns, people frantically searched their attics for any long-forgotten radio and spare batteries.¹¹ In the age of TikTok, Ukraine’s war brought back the relevance of WWII-era tech: the humble FM/AM radio and word-of-mouth communication.

With phones down, face-to-face messaging filled the gap. Neighbors would relay news to each other on the street or by knocking on doors. In many high-rise apartment blocks, residents formed group plans—agreeing that if communications failed, they’d meet at a certain time or place each day to share news. In some cases, messengers were sent: for example, someone with a working car or a bicycle might venture to an area with reception to make calls on behalf of others, or to retrieve updates from officials. In the absence of official channels, human networks became the channels. What limited communication remained was often low-tech: handwritten notices on walls about evacuation buses, or volunteers with megaphones announcing aid deliveries.

Takeaways – Communication

The Ukrainian experience shows that when the digital grid goes dark, you need analog backups. Consider these steps:

• Own a battery-powered or hand-crank radio. Pre-tune it to emergency frequencies and keep spare batteries. It could be your only link to the outside world.¹¹
• Get walkie-talkies (two-way radios) for your family or group. In an urban neighborhood, even cheap FRS/GMRS radios can let you coordinate if cell service is out.
• Have an emergency contact plan. Don’t count on phone apps. Decide on meetup spots and check-in times with family. Keep a list of important addresses and phone numbers written down in case your phone dies.
• Learn basic ham radio or CB radio use. If you’re ambitious, a ham radio license and portable unit can reach help when nothing else works. In conflict zones, many amateurs and volunteers pass critical info this way.
• Invest in signal boosters or satellite messengers. Some Ukrainians used satellite internet (like Starlink) to reconnect communities. A personal satellite communicator could send a lifesaving message if infrastructure is down.

Above all, don’t rely solely on the internet or cell network. When they failed in Ukraine, those who had a radio or a prearranged communication plan with neighbors coped much better than those who didn’t.

Escape and Evacuation: Knowing When and How to Get Out

War in Ukraine showed how important it is for civilians to bug out early and how dangerous procrastinating can be. Cities like Mariupol, Kharkiv, and Irpin went from peace to full-scale assault in hours, trapping those who hadn’t fled. In Mariupol, many families believed fighting wouldn’t reach them until it was too late. “We did not believe war was happening…we constantly read the news, hoping it would be over soon. But it only got worse,” one survivor said.¹ By mid-March 2022, escape was a life-or-death gamble. When a brief window opened, one woman’s husband organized a small convoy of cars. “One morning, my husband came and said that we were leaving… he’d organised for other people to leave at the same time, so there were several cars,” she recounted. They drove through the ruins of their city, praying they wouldn’t be shot, and managed to reach safety hours later.¹² The lesson? Don’t wait until the last minute. As preppers say: if you leave early, you can always turn back if it’s a false alarm—but if you leave too late, you might not make it out at all.^{13 14}

Thousands of Ukrainians who did escape in time had one thing in common: they grabbed their go-bags and ran. Many had packed essentials in advance during the tense weeks before the invasion. Those who didn’t often regretted it. A young couple from Kharkiv recalled how they hesitated and delayed evacuating; when the bombardment became unbearable, they finally fled by train. In the rush, they took almost nothing beyond some water and the clothes on their backs. “It’s hard to pack your survival bag while panicking,” the wife admitted. “Now I understand why smart people said to pack it before the war.”¹⁵ When you’re already hearing explosions, it’s too late to calmly decide what to bring. Others faced the brutal choice of what (and whom) to take. Pets, for example, became a heartbreaking dilemma. Many Ukrainians stayed in dangerous areas longer than they should have because they couldn’t abandon their dogs or cats. “After figuring out what to do with their families, the hardest question many grapple with is what to do with their pets,” observed one volunteer in Irpin, noting he met numerous locals who simply would not leave without their animals.¹⁶ Some volunteer evacuators encouraged people to bring the pets along if possible rather than risk their lives by staying.¹⁷

Takeaways – Escape

If war or any disaster strikes, having a plan and acting early can save your life. Key points include:

• Plan multiple evacuation routes now. In Ukraine, main highways jammed or came under fire. Know at least two or three ways out of your city (back roads, walking paths, etc.), and keep maps handy (don’t rely on GPS).
• Prepare a bug-out bag for each family member in advance. Include vital documents, some cash, medicines, basic food/water, a change of clothes, flashlight, and other survival gear. Pack as if you’ll have to leave in 5 minutes – because many did.
• Keep your vehicle ready. Maintain at least half a tank of fuel at all times if you can. In an invasion or crisis, gas stations either run dry or have mile-long lines. If you have no car, identify a friend or neighbor with one, or local authorities’ evacuation points.
• Practice “go” decisions. Decide your personal red lines. For example: “If conflict (or disaster) is reported within 50 miles, we leave.” This reduces second-guessing. Normalcy bias (“it won’t happen here”) trapped many in Ukraine.^{18 19} Be willing to move when others are still debating.
• Account for family and pets. Have pet carriers and supplies ready to go. Make sure everyone in your household knows the plan – where to meet if separated, who grabs what. If you have elderly or disabled family, arrange how to evacuate them before an emergency.
• Team up if possible. Convoys like the Mariupol group show there’s safety in numbers.¹² Coordinate with neighbors or relatives to leave together, which can deter looters on the road and provide mutual support.

Finally, always keep a listen for official evacuation advisories, but don’t rely on them alone. Be proactive. As one prepper wisely put it, “the time to bug out is before the masses do”.¹⁹

Shelter: Fortifying Homes, Basements, and Bunkers

When running wasn’t an option, Ukrainians hunkered down and turned their homes and basements into fortresses and lifelines. This war has been as much about enduring as escaping. Civilians learned how to harden their shelters on the fly. In apartment blocks from Kyiv to Kharkiv, residents taped up windows to reduce shattering from blasts, pushed furniture against walls, and identified the safest interior spaces (usually corridors or bathrooms away from exterior walls). But in heavy bombardment, often the only safe place was underground. Across Ukraine’s cities and towns, basements, cellars, and bomb shelters became second homes. In Lyman (Donetsk region), for example, constant shelling meant Tetiana’s family kept their basement door open 24/7 – they might need to sprint below ground at any moment.²⁰ They outfitted that basement with a small wood-burning stove (“potbelly stove”), firewood, stored water, warm blankets and clothes.²¹ For months during occupation, they sometimes lived in that dark, damp cellar for days at a time, only dashing upstairs when the lull in fighting allowed them to cook or fetch well water.²² For her children, the basement was scary at first, but it soon became the normal bedroom. In countless other cases, neighbors turned basements of schools, churches, and public buildings into communal shelters, cleaning them out and equipping them with stoves and makeshift toilets. In Kyiv’s high-rises, residents sheltered in parking garages or metro stations overnight, then returned to their apartments during the day. Any shelter is only as good as the supplies you stock in it. Ukrainians who prepared their hideouts with food, water, and heating had a far easier time.^{23 24}  That level of preparedness became the difference between mere survival and something resembling livable conditions.

Fortifying a shelter also meant tackling problems of heat, power, and sanitation. In winter, lack of heat was potentially deadly. Many urban Ukrainians obtained camping stoves, generators, or battery-powered heaters. Others reverted to burning wood or coal in metal barrels or improvised stoves, even inside partially-destroyed buildings (with ventilation jury-rigged for safety). Rural families often had woodstoves or fireplaces and stockpiled firewood. In the city of Mariupol, families with no gas or electricity built outdoor fires for cooking and warmth. One group sheltering in a kindergarten basement set up a “field kitchen” outside on a wheelbarrow frame, where men lit fires to cook soup and boil water for dozens of people.² They scrounged any burnable materials to keep the fire going. Lighting was another issue: flashlights and candles were gold. Many used car batteries or power banks to charge phones or radios occasionally. As weeks of war turned into months, even candles became scarce, teaching the value of storing plenty of backup lighting. Sanitation required creativity. As noted, people dug outhouse pits in yards, lined buckets with garbage bags as indoor toilets, and used chlorine or lime to neutralize waste.⁶ In crowded basements, hygiene was a challenge – many got by with baby wipes and limited water for sponge baths, emphasizing the need for wet wipes, sanitizer, and basic medical kits in any shelter.

Physical fortification was also improvised. Civilians filled sandbags and reinforced basement ceilings with wooden beams or even books to buffer shrapnel. In village houses, some folks boarded up windows with plywood or removed important belongings to interior rooms expecting outer walls might be hit. Others dug trenches in their gardens to lie in during extremely heavy shelling. Essentially, whatever could be done to absorb blasts or provide cover, people tried it. Not every effort was effective (no basement could survive a direct hit), but even psychological protection matters. Taking action to fortify your space gives a sense of control and can reduce panic. Ukrainians found that a well-organized, provisioned shelter not only kept them alive but also kept them sane by creating a routine in chaos.

Takeaways – Shelter

Your home can quickly turn from castle to trap in a disaster—unless you prepare. Here’s how to apply Ukraine’s shelter lessons:

• Identify your safest room or shelter area now. Ideally an inner room or basement with no windows. Clear it out and stock it with emergency supplies (water, food, first aid, lights, radio, etc.). If you don’t have a basement, know the nearest public shelter (and keep a key to the building if possible).
• Strengthen entry points: Install heavy-duty locks and reinforce doors if you anticipate lawlessness. In war, some Ukrainians faced looters once order broke down. Even basic door bars or braces can buy you peace of mind.
• Prepare for heat and power loss: Have alternatives for heating and cooking that don’t rely on the grid. A propane camp stove or kerosene heater (and fuel), a solar phone charger, plenty of batteries – these aren’t luxuries, they’re lifesavers when the power is out for weeks. If you have a wood stove or fireplace, stock up on fuel.
• Store sanitation supplies: A portable camp toilet or even a bucket with lid, trash bags, bleach, and toilet paper will be worth their weight in gold if water/sewage systems fail. Likewise, store hygiene items: soap, wipes, feminine products, etc. Illness can spread quickly in cramped conditions, so cleanliness is part of survival.
• Think structural safety: If you expect literal bombardment or tornado-force winds, consider basic fortifications. Sandbags or filled garbage bags can reinforce windows and walls (at least against debris). Know how to shut off your utilities (gas, water, electric) to prevent fires or flooding if damage occurs.
• Drill and practice: Make sure your family (especially kids) knows what to do when the sirens wail or when a storm is approaching. In Ukraine, children learned to grab their “emergency backpack” and rush to the cellar in seconds. Regular drills make the response automatic and reduce panic when it’s real.

Your shelter is your refuge. Stock it, fortify it, and plan to live there for an extended period if necessary. As Ukrainians showed, it’s possible to turn even a dank cellar into a lifeline with enough preparation and will.

Community: Neighbors Helping Neighbors

One of the most inspiring aspects of Ukraine’s civilian survival was the power of community resilience. While preppers often emphasize individual readiness, the war showed that having trusted neighbors and local networks can make the difference between life and death. In city apartment blocks and rural villages alike, people came together to share resources, skills, and information. For example, in Mariupol when supplies ran out and all stores were closed, one supermarket (the last one open) became a focal point for the neighborhood. There, locals self-organized a system to avoid chaos: they set up a list so people could take turns buying what little was available, rather than stampeding the shop.²⁵ Prices skyrocketed, bread disappeared, and tempers were high, but this bit of community organizing imposed some fairness and prevented violence over food. Neighbors also bartered amongst themselves—trading extra candles for some flour, or a bit of diesel fuel for a few liters of potable water.

In frontline towns like Orikhiv, with shelling day and night, community basements became not just shelters but social hubs. In one large shelter under a school, volunteers like Svitlana (a local social worker) helped set up a space where “people can shower, wash clothes and eat a meal” together.²⁶ These communal shelters provided not only physical safety but emotional support—residents would share tea, tell stories, celebrate small occasions, and look after each other’s children. “Companionship in basements” kept spirits up even as war raged overhead.²⁷ In the capital Kyiv, when the power was out for long stretches, community volunteers created “Points of Invincibility” – essentially warming centers with generators, hot drinks, and internet, open to all. This concept, supported by local businesses and officials, gave millions of people a place to charge their phones, get news, and feel human for a moment during harsh winter blackouts. It was community solidarity in action.

Rural communities often fared better thanks to tight-knit ties and self-reliance. Neighbors in villages pooled their resources: one might have a working well, another a generator, another extra vegetables from a cellar. By sharing, they all got by. There are accounts of farmers helping evacuate towns by driving convoys of cars and tractors to pick up anyone stranded. In western Ukraine, residents took in huge numbers of displaced families from the east, often complete strangers, simply because it was the right thing to do. That hospitality saved innumerable lives in the bitter early weeks of the invasion.

Crucially, community support also acted as a security force. In many areas, local civilians formed watch groups to prevent crime and defend against saboteurs. In the absence of police, they patrolled streets at night, organized checkpoints, and kept an eye on vulnerable neighbors (like the elderly living alone). In Mariupol, the men in one neighborhood shelter took turns standing guard on the street when there was a lull in fighting.²⁸ Just their presence deterred would-be looters and also allowed them to sound the alarm if danger approached. This kind of grassroots defense isn’t often talked about in prepping, but Ukraine proved its worth.

Takeaways – Community

Self-sufficiency is important, but no one survives alone in the long run. Building community resilience is as critical as stocking your pantry. Here’s how you can foster it:

• Get to know your neighbors now. Exchange phone numbers or radios, discuss basic plans. In a disaster, these are the first people who will either help you or need your help. A simple neighborhood meeting about emergency readiness can lay a foundation of trust.
• Create a mutual aid group. Identify folks on your street or in your building with useful skills (medical, mechanical, etc.) and resources (maybe someone has a generator, another has a well). Talk about pooling efforts if things go bad. You might be surprised – many people want to help if someone takes the lead.
• Share information and resources. In Ukraine, those with generators ran charging stations for others; those with extra food opened communal kitchens. Plan for similar sharing: if you have abundance of an item, trade or gift it to strengthen bonds. Likewise, set up a way to communicate locally (a bulletin board or signal) for news updates.
• Organize security if needed. Community defense doesn’t mean vigilantes; it means looking out for each other. Something as simple as a nightly fire watch or patrol in a blackout can keep everyone safer. Coordinate with willing neighbors to take shifts keeping watch. And if you hear an alarm or call for help next door, respond – you’d want them to do the same.
• Stay human – little things matter. Brew an extra pot of coffee for the block, host a meal from combined supplies, mark birthdays or holidays even in tough times. Boosting morale is a survival tool, too. Banding together not only multiplies practical resources, it also multiplies hope.

The Ukrainian people showed that communities who stand together can endure the unendurable. As a prepper, don’t just aim to be the lone wolf survivor; aim to be the one who can lead and support those around you. In a crisis, a neighborhood of prepared, cooperative citizens is far stronger and safer than any one person on their own.

Psychological Resilience: Enduring Fear, Loss, and Stress

Survival isn’t just about physical needs—it’s also about mental fortitude. The Ukraine war inflicted profound psychological stress on civilians: constant fear from shelling, grief for lost loved ones, uncertainty day after day. Yet many Ukrainians displayed remarkable resilience amid these conditions, and their coping strategies offer guidance for all of us. A common theme was purpose and determination. People found strength in having a role to play—whether it was a mother holding her family together, a grandfather protecting the home, or a volunteer aiding others. Eighty-four-year-old Alla, who had already lived through World War II, exemplified this spirit. In 2022, when her nursing home was hit by rockets, she refused to succumb to despair. Instead, she focused on helping care for other residents and even took comfort in tending to her pet dog. “We have to live, to not give up and support others,” Alla said firmly.²⁹ Her vibrant, mindful approach to each day—reading books, reminiscing about better times, sharing a smile with others—became her shield against the trauma surrounding her. Helping others proved to be a powerful antidote to fear.

Many Ukrainians also coped by leaning on faith, hope, and small joys. Some found solace in prayer. A family evacuating Mariupol described how they “drove and prayed all the way” out of the city, believing that their prayers gave them a chance to survive.³⁰ Others took hope from signs of normalcy: a blooming flower in the ruins, a favorite song on a battery radio, children laughing while playing in a bunker. Keeping a positive focus, even symbolically, was crucial. People celebrated tiny victories—“Today we found some apples for the kids” or “Our building survived another night”—reinforcing gratitude and hope. Humor was another survival tool. Ukrainians often used dark humor about the enemy and the situation to deflate fear. Jokes shared in shelters gave stressed civilians a brief emotional release.

At the same time, acknowledging feelings was vital. Those who bottled up fear and panic sometimes made rash decisions or froze when action was needed. Ukrainian psychologists advising civilians encouraged them to talk about their fears with others in the shelter, to cry when necessary (out of the enemy’s sight, as one resident quipped), and then to pick themselves up and keep going.³¹ The long duration of the war—now years—taught people the importance of routine and mental breaks. In between air raid alerts, people tried to resume pieces of normal life: children drew pictures and did schoolwork; adults repaired homes or cooked meals as if it were a normal day. Routine fights off the mental paralysis of uncertainty. For preppers, this highlights that in a protracted crisis, you must manage stress actively: establish a daily schedule, set small goals, and create moments of rest or distraction (reading, music, exercise) to recharge your mind.

Finally, community again plays a role in psychological resilience. Social support is one of the strongest buffers against trauma. In Ukraine, families, friends, and even strangers became each other’s therapists in a way—listening, encouraging, sharing burdens. As Alla noted, just knowing “amazing people” around her who keep a positive outlook made her glad to be alive.^{32 33} If you face a disaster, surround yourself (if you can) with people who uplift you, and be an uplifter yourself. Leadership in a crisis often simply means showing confidence and compassion, which inspires others to follow. Psychological resilience can be contagious.

Takeaways – Mental Resilience

Your mindset in crisis can save your life just as much as your supplies. Here’s how to cultivate it:

• Have a mission or role. Decide now what your purpose will be if disaster strikes. Are you the protector, the medic, the organizer? Focusing on how you can contribute keeps you out of the victim mentality and gives you drive.
• Practice stress-coping techniques. This could be breathing exercises, prayer, or even just remembering a calming mantra. Train yourself to stay cool under pressure with drills or simulations. The more you’ve faced controlled stress (through training, serious hobbies, etc.), the better you’ll handle real chaos.
• Build a routine in chaos. Even if you’re living in a bunker, make a daily schedule for meals, chores, and relaxation. Routines give a sense of control. Include something positive each day – like reading to your kids or doing a few exercises – to mark the day as more than just surviving.
• Stay connected with loved ones. If you’re separated, try to communicate when possible (even through letters or messengers). If you’re together, talk to each other and especially listen. Supporting others will also heal you.
• Embrace adaptability and humor. Laugh when you can – it’s free medicine. Be ready to change plans and improvise; rigidity causes panic when things inevitably go sideways. Mentally prepare for things to get worse before they get better, as this war has shown. But also believe that you can endure. History is full of ordinary people surviving extraordinary trials, largely through endurance and willpower.

Conclusion: Be Ready to Lead

The war in Ukraine taught a grim but empowering truth: civilians are always on the front lines when systems collapse. In today’s world, that could happen via war, natural disaster, cyberattack on infrastructure, or any major crisis. The question is, will you be prepared to protect yourself and help those around you? The Ukrainian survivors we’ve discussed were not super-soldiers or trained preppers; they were teachers, IT workers, farmers, grandparents, kids. They suffered greatly—but those who made it through did so by quickly adopting a survival mindset and using every tool at their disposal. We in the West must not look at their story and think “that could never be us.” Instead, we should think, “If that were me and my town, would I know what to do?”

Take the lessons of Ukraine to heart: store water and supplies as if your life depends on it (one day, it might). Organize your household and community for mutual resilience. Plan for communication blackouts and have backups. Know your evacuation routes and have your bag ready before the storm hits or the tanks roll in. Fortify your shelter and your psyche for the long haul. And perhaps most importantly, be the one who others can turn to—the neighbor with a spare battery or warm meal, the friend who keeps calm and says “we’ve got this” when everyone else is in shock. In every Ukrainian neighborhood under fire, someone stepped up to lead and care for others, whether they intended to or not.

War is closer than we think, and even if it never comes to your doorstep, some crisis will. Don’t wait for authorities to save you; often, they can’t. You are your own first responder, and possibly the first responder for your whole block. The ultimate prepper mindset isn’t about paranoia or hoarding—it’s about responsibility. It’s saying: if the worst happens, I’ll face it head-on and help others through it. So stock up, team up, and steel yourself. Be that steady hand in the dark, the prepared neighbor who can lead when everyone else is lost. The experiences of Ukrainian civilians are written in blood and courage. Learn from them, act on them, and be ready to lead when fate calls. Your community is counting on you, whether they know it or not.

This article was first posted in 2022 but recently updated.

For those of us who study propaganda critically, and seek to do this all-important work as public intellectuals, these last two years have been uniquely challenging, and even dangerous, forcing us into a painful double bind.

On the one hand, we have never had so much to work with, nor has there ever been a greater need for our peculiar expertise. Whereas in the “democratic” West, propaganda used to be most evident as an intensive episodic practice, flaring up in wartime, in political campaigns and following immense state crimes like JFK’s assassination, 9/11 and the subsequent anthrax attacks (among other national traumas engineered by governments), the propaganda blasting all of us non-stop today is no longer national, or merely multinational, but global; and the former intermittency of those most awful crises, with decades going by between one trauma and the next, has given way to a mind-numbing strategy of serial bombardment — one cataclysmic fuss after another (with, sometimes, one within another), as under openly totalitarian rule.]

Thus, throughout 2020 — Year One of the now-endless Covid crisis — we were inescapably suffused with terror of “the virus,” and thereby bullied into locking down (despite the scientific fact that lockdowns do more harm than good), while also masking all the time, and everywhere, and “social-distancing” as well (despite the scientific fact that neither practice “slows the spread” of any respiratory virus). While masking was imposed, ostensibly, to make us less afraid of Covid-19, it only made us more afraid of one another, and so compounded that disabling fear with a ferocious anger at all those not wearing masks (despite the scientific fact that masks would not prevent transmission of “the virus” even if the entire global population wore them all the time).

As propagated fiercely by the media — both corporate and “alternative” — throughout 2020, that sanctimonious division of ourselves into benevolent maskers and self-centred “anti-maskers” was just a pestilential variant of the “red”/”blue” divide that the media, with very few exceptions, had already fiercely propagated since the rise of Donald Trump; and that incapacitating tribalist division deepened, in mid-2020, with the George Floyd incident, and the emergent cult of BLM, whose blurry mission against “white supremacy” was suddenly and ostentatiously extolled throughout the media worldwide (George Floyd’s beatification being yet another stroke of global propaganda, the same big graphic of his quasi-tragic face popping up at rallies as far afield as France, Ghana and Japan), and anomalously hailed by Jeff Bezos, Mitt Romney, Jaimie Dimon, Bill and Melinda Gates, Nancy Pelosi, and other wealthy players not notable for their concern about black lives (on the contrary). Whereas the anti-lockdown protests flaring up (organically) that spring had been denounced throughout the government and media as lethal “super-spreader events” (despite the scientific fact that no respiratory virus ever has been known to spread asymptomatically, as even Dr. Fauci publicly admitted at one point), the multitudes of BLM protesters were applauded for assembling, although many wore no masks, or had their masks below their chins (nor were the rioters who followed them condemned for “putting everyone at risk,” either by their masklessness or by their vandalism, arson and/or physical assaults in cities nationwide — crimes pointedly denied throughout the media).

Now reaffirmed as a distinctly racial melodrama, with BLM (and Antifa) facing off against the “white supremacists” supporting Trump and (just like him) not masking, the mass division between Us and Them so thunderously propagated — and exacerbated — by the media exploded one more time, on January 6, 2021, when, during the gigantic peaceful protest going on in Washington that day (to move the Supreme Court to look into the evidence that Joe Biden’s election victory had been stolen), an ebullient little horde of (unarmed) “white supremacists” — including over 20 FBI assets — “forced their way” into the US Capitol (having been urged in by Capitol police), their noisy antics universally and stridently misrepresented, by the Democrats-and-media, as an “attempted coup.” As a propaganda sideshow to the mammoth protest going on outside the Capitol that day — a protest as diverse as it was peaceable — this FBI-backed “insurrection” served the purpose of impugning that far larger gathering, intended to protest the likely theft of the election, as a “fascistic” mob intent on taking “our democracy” by force; and since the anti-Biden vote was driven mainly by resistance to the stringent “Covid measures” favoured by the Democrats, the propaganda over “January 6” served to advance those measures, by demonizing their opponents as “extremists,” while making it now practically illegal to voice any doubts about Joe Biden’s inexplicable election “victory.”

Meanwhile, with millions now fixated on that raging “anti-fascist” propaganda drive (whether they believed it, or resisted it), Year Two of the Covid crisis started with the rollout of the most fascistic “Covid measure” of them all — the long-awaited “vaccination” program, which Bill Gates, in a televised exchange with Stephen Colbert, had hyped, indiscreetly, as “the Final Solution.” Thus, the propaganda inescapably instructing everybody to mask up (“Wearing is caring”), on the lunatic collectivist presumption that your mask will not “protect” you unless everybody’s wearing them, was now suddenly and inescapably instructing everybody to “get vaccinated,” as if anyone not getting jabbed was thereby (somehow) putting all those jabbed “at risk.” Thus, “vaccination” was now not only certified as “safe and effective” — by governments at every level, and by all the media, both corporate and “alternative,” and by hundreds upon hundreds of celebrities, and by every pharmacy, and by the schools, from grade schools up to colleges and universities, and, of course, by the “vaccine” manufacturers, along with Dr. Fauci and Bill Gates — but one’s own “vaccination” was now urged weirdly as (to quote Pope Benedict) “an act of love.”

And having thundered on through 2021, and into 2022 — with all those blithe assurances of “safety” and “effectiveness” disproved ever more dramatically by data out of country after country, harrowing research by independent scientists and doctors the world over, Pfizer’s and Moderna’s own clinical trials, and the ever-rising global toll in “sudden deaths” and incapacitating “vaccine injuries” — all at once that propaganda seemed to stop (the “Covid measures” abruptly dropped or modified by states and cities all around the world), as we were suddenly and (yet) still inescapably confronted, and surrounded, and pervaded, by another propaganda drive entirely; or so it seems.

This propaganda drive is, or was, not about “the virus,” or the “measures” used (allegedly) to stop it, but, exclusively, about Ukraine — and yet this drive is (or was) essentially the same as what preceded it; for just as that one had us all obsessed with Covid, the benevolence of those who followed every rule for “fighting” it, and the evil of all those who disobeyed, this one has (or had) us all obsessed with Ukraine’s struggle to defend itself against the monster Putin, the benevolence of all those who “stand with” Ukraine, and the evil of all those who don’t. And just as Covid once had everyone applauding, every evening, those courageous “frontline workers” in the hospitals (all “overrun,” reportedly, by Covid), so are (or were) we now attending vigils for Ukraine, signing petitions for Ukraine, sending money to Ukraine, and wearing Ukraine’s blue-and-yellow on our backs, and in our hair, and on our nails and our lapels, and hanging Ukraine’s blue-and-yellow in doorways and/or windows, and marvelling at public monuments now bathed in blue-and-yellow lights, to show our solidarity with that upright democracy against the Nazi Putin’s bloody effort to assassinate its noble leader, wipe out its brave soldiers, and exterminate its people, in his ruthless drive to conquer all the world.

I put that rough description of this latest propaganda drive in both the past and present tense lest this one soon ends, or seem to end, as suddenly as it upstaged the Covid propaganda; and since it too, in turn, will surely give way to some other inescapable campaign, it is appropriate to note the several further crises that the media, and heads of state, have variously floated, on and off, these past two years. (Such terroristic forecasts of imminent ordeals are in themselves a way to keep the widespread fear and anger simmering.) The possible next acts include a cyber-attack (“by Russia”); a breakdown of the world supply chain, and consequent food shortages, or famine (likely to be blamed on Russia); a heightened “climate crisis,” necessitating further lockdowns; “terrorist” attacks, by “white supremacists” and angry blacks (portending war between the races); an “alien attack” on Planet Earth, as in The War of the Worlds or Independence Day; and — of course — another plague or two, or three, caused by some further Covid “variant,” smallpox (Bill Gates’s favourite), the Marburg virus, and/or whatever other pathogen, real or imaginary, might serve the same old purpose (though this next pestilence is likely to be blamed on Putin, not the CCP). Such looming sequels to the Covid propaganda, which has arguably killed or injured millions through the mass injection program, and the Ukraine propaganda, which could bring on a nuclear war (and whose origins in 2014 led indirectly to the current bloodshed in that country), would also each inflict a vast amount of further suffering on humanity — and so those of us who study propaganda critically, as public intellectuals, must speak out loud and clear, to set things right.

This means, first of all, doing what the “fact-checkers” claim to do, and doing it far more conscientiously, and thoroughly, than they “debunk” whatever facts or theories contradict, or complicate, the narrative pumped out by governments and media. Whereas the “fact-checkers” do quick and sloppy work, and then move on, we work in depth, in scholarly commitment to the truth, which may take decades to discover — as with JFK’s murder, and the other key assassinations at that time, and 9/11; and just as we persist in careful refutation of the propaganda still obscuring those historic crimes, and others, so, throughout these last two years, have we been digging for, and trying to tell, the widely buried truth about the Covid crisis, its true origins, the actual lethality of SARS-CoV-2 (whatever that may really be), the PCR tests used to measure “cases,” the “Covid measures” hatched (allegedly) to “slow the spread,” the absolute futility of lockdowns, and their catastrophic harms, the homicidal impact of the standard Covid “treatment,” and the actual availability of valid remedies, the cynical redefinition of such key terms as “pandemic,” “cases,” “herd immunity,” “vaccine” and, “fully vaccinated,” the likely motives driving this whole crisis (and those still to come), the actual low number of those killed worldwide by Covid, and — above all — the ever-growing global toll of the experimental “vaccination” program; and now that Covid, and its “variants,” and “vaccination” have been pushed out of the spotlight by “Ukraine” (though governments-and-media continue warning us hysterically of “Covid” and its “variants,” and shouting at us to “get vaccinated”), we strive to find, and tell, the buried truths about that conflict — how and why it started, how it’s being fought on either side, and the fact that dozens of “atrocities” ascribed to Russia have turned out to be as bogus as those crimes charged to “the Hun” in World War One, the Iraqi army in Kuwait in 1990, and Bashar al-Assad, president of Syria, from 2011 until his imaginary barbarism was eclipsed by “the coronavirus,” and then Putin’s barbarism in Ukraine.

And yet our goal must be not merely to instruct the public in those many truths blacked out by the propaganda over Covid, or Ukraine, but to urge the public toward a firmer grasp of propaganda overall, and so our larger goal must be to explain the factors that have ultimately helped turn the West’s “free press” into the propaganda juggernaut now keeping millions upon millions in ferocious ignorance. That real-life Ministry of Truth was not set up ex nihilo by some iron faction of totalitarian oligarchs but gradually took shape out of a corporate media cartel with interlocking boards, heavily dependent on the advertising revenues of Amazon, Big Pharma (especially Pfizer) and the media’s own parent companies (among other giant players), and with its assets closely managed by BlackRock, Vanguard and UBS; and as that vast commercial system has become more unified, it also has maintained, or even tightened, its covert relations with the military and “intelligence community” — essentially the same caste of untouchables that engineered JFK’s murder, and the media’s long cover-up thereof. And while the commercial media system has been thus corrupted top to bottom, through and through, the “public” media and “alternative” press — from NPR, PBS, the BBC and CBC (et al.) to nearly every single outlet on “the left” — have also been absorbed into the juggernaut primarily by their funding through such sturdy CIA pass-throughs as the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Open Society Institute.

Such is the “free press” that has been turned into a bio-fascist fear machine, its propaganda services assured by Bill Gates’ “strategic media partnerships,” and the concomitant “fact-checking” operation that he also largely funds. The propaganda gushing daily, hourly, from that system also has depended on the wisdom of such global PR firms as Weber Shandwick, Edelman and Hill+Knowlton Strategies, the keen participation of innumerable celebrities, and, within the Fourth Estate, the rise to managerial authority of “journalists” prepared, in university, to be far less concerned with honest journalism than with (somehow) serving “social justice.” And all the false and hateful “content” pumped out by this wholly-owned “free press” is, every minute, amplified enormously on “social media,” where millions serve (for free!) as avid vectors of the propaganda, while those who contradict it, or just question it, are censored and defamed.

This brings us to that double bind in which we propaganda analysts have found ourselves these past two years; for, while there has never been so great a need for our analyses, there having never been so much disinformation, or so much highly poisonous disinformation, to correct, nor has there ever been so huge and powerful a propaganda system to explain, neither has it ever been more difficult, or dangerous, to contradict its claims, or show exactly how it works. Today, we recognise in Julian Assange a ravaged brother to us all, his long, brutal punishment on Airstrip One having anticipated the abuse now threatening anyone who dares to cast a shadow on the propaganda narrative roared everywhere by governments and media, as he, or Wikileaks, did with “Collateral Murder,” the gunship footage that lit up the dark side of the heroic “war on terror” propaganda. His long ordeal for that unpardonable sin foretold the (mostly lesser) punishments now undergone by doctors, scientists, journalists, and academics who have variously gone off-script, especially these past two years (although such heretics were also punished long before the rollout of “the virus”).

All such dissidents are doing what we do, in one way or another; and so — since every winning propaganda drive depends on censorship — all dissidents have been blacked out on “social media,” kept off the air by “our free press,” and/or variously cancelled by “woke” activists. Since they can’t argue with the dissidents, whose claims are either indisputable or largely true, the propaganda managers have heaped us all with slime, without (of course) allowing us to answer it; nor is that all, as those countering the propaganda also have been fired, delicensed, jailed, involuntarily consigned to psychiatric wards, and, evidently, even killed, to shield the narrative. Most of those thus punished have been Covid dissidents; though those now speaking out against the “Ukraine” propaganda also are at risk, especially those living in Ukraine, where the Nazi forces have been seizing, torturing and murdering dissident reporters, and where American-Chilean commentator Gonzalo Lira disappeared on April 15, re-emerging six days later, having been detained by the SBU.

What, then, are we to do, as analysts of propaganda? For now, under this ever-rolling thunder of Big Lies, all we can do is keep on doing what we’re doing, while maintaining a thick skin, and taking due precautions, as it is ever more important that we tell the truths we know to those still capable of hearing them, and then of looking for them on their own. (This is especially true of younger people who are largely more receptive than their elders.) In the longer term, however, we must re-conceive and rebuild all our democratic institutions, whose absolute collapse has brought this whole world to the brink. Specifically, we need to rebuild journalism, so that it actually reports the news, just as we need a whole new medical establishment — one that will reclaim its Hippocratic duty to make people well instead of very profitably sick (or dead). And, of course, we need a new Academy, to educate its students, not indoctrinate them, teaching them not what to think but how to think, while introducing them to all the arts and sciences that better us as fully human beings; and, as we have learned so painfully these past two years, what these new schools must finally do — and not only our colleges and universities, but all our lower schools as well — is teach our students about propaganda: how to recognise it when it’s everywhere they look, and even (or especially) when they find themselves agreeing with it.

Only when We the People finally know what propaganda is, and how it works, will we be free at last to live our lives and rule ourselves.