Related Stories
What preppers and survivalists tell us about America's apocalyptic readiness
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
Posted: February 14th, 2016
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/10/preppers-surv...
In the Republican presidential debate last Saturday, Ted Cruz laid out a dark scenario to demonstrate the need for a beefed-up missile defence system the same one Rick Santorum and Ben Carson had raised before him in earlier debates. He said that North Korea was working on a satellite, which could spell doom for America: As it would orbit around the Earth, and as it got over the United States, they would detonate that nuclear weapon and set off whats called an EMP, an electromagnetic pulse which could take down the entire electrical grid on the eastern seaboard, potentially killing millions. The very day before Cruz spoke, in the tatty, cavernous but crowded Expo Idaho Center in Boise, speaker and entrepreneur Ben Gilmore laid out a much more elaborate version of the same catastrophe. Speaking to a rapt audience at prepper expo SurvivalCon, Gilmore pointed to a projected map showing much of the North American continent swathed in a deep red. An EMP bomb 300 miles up gets all of the United States ... this is the worst-case scenario, and it is the most probable. But also in a stroke of luck Gilmores own company, Techprotect, makes Faraday bags in which electronic items can be shielded from electromagnetic pulses. This mixture of End Times thinking, geopolitical speculation and rightwing ideology was repeated not only in the other formal presentations, but in conversations on the floor of the Expo Center. The Idaho show showed continuing strong links persist between prepping, religious fundamentalism and the far right.
Note: The above article fails to mention that fear mongering about a possible "rogue state" or "terrorist" EMP attack against the US has been used to push a pro-war agenda since 2005.
Related Stories
Latest News
Key News Articles from Years Past
