The Enemy is everywhere.
There’s a common misconception in the Survivalist community. “I’ll retreat…get away from the major population centers…work to live off the grid…and let the urban hellholes rot.”
Well…about that.
Rural living is, for all intents and purposes, a better way to live. We’re more in tune with the natural world by and large, not in spite of it, and for the most part the lifestyle lends itself well to harder people used to doing without. And for people like me, there’s nothing that replaces the generations-deep connections to your homeland. The people there are your people- and in spite of differences, there is a deeply ingrained love of place. It is home.
Sounds good until the problems begin to bubble up. The first issue is questioning exactly how many in those rural areas are actually self-sufficient. That answer is probably few. And the rates of addiction and substance abuse is in turn shockingly high, correlated with the inevitable poverty rate. This was not by accident. The trailer-hood is a thing. Opioids were dumped on our population by Big Pharma, just as with the rise of decentralized meth manufacturing two decades earlier, and the crack epidemic which made its way into rural America just the same as the well-publicized urban epidemics during the 1990s. Home invasions and thefts are the norm.
No, not quite the retreat paradise the suburbanites had envisioned…is it?
Dusting off the old sociology coursework, I’d argue rather convincingly that this creates a populace primed for violent revolution. Decades of institutionalized poverty have created a primed pump. This in turn is a reality that one group on the Left whole-heartedly is attempting to exploit (albeit self defeated at times): Redneck Revolt.
Redneck Revolt is active in spaces in which white supremacist groups also often recruit, including country music concerts, flea markets, gun shows, NASCAR events, rodeos and state fairs. Chapters provide firearms and first aid training, food and clothing programs and community gardens and host needle exchanges, potlucks and educational events.
Interesting bit there. While the Left is no stranger to infighting, at a possibly even worse level than their counterparts on the Right, Redneck Revolt admittedly is correct in focusing on rural areas as a vanguard for fomenting revolution. This is reflective of the strategy employed by Che Guevara’s opinion on the same from his work Guerrilla Warfare. They are seeking to exploit the social and economic realities for their benefit. While the gun community snobs look down on guys with inexpensive gear, cheap weapons and optics, and a general lack of cool-guy bravado, they wholly embrace it. Its a more effective recruiting model than belittling a guy to whom $20 may mean the difference between if his kids eat why he can’t afford a NightForce and BCM AR-15.
As I keep telling you guys: Never, NEVER underestimate the enemy.
(Via WRSA and Jack Lawson)
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Interesting group (just looked them up). Have seen no sign of them around here. I’ll keep an eye out. I don’t think they’ll get much purchase with “real” rural folk.
They’re just commies trying to get other people to grind an ax.
But if you’re going to go rural, the best time is 10 years ago. The second best time is tomorrow.
I think that the writer forgets that politics is, as they say “downstream from culture.” It’s not accident that the leader in the picture is a social science professor from UNC Chapel Hill, and it is likely that his “recruits” are also students in Chapel Hill. In other words, they are run-of-the-mill leftists from an urban/suburban leftist island with pretensions of being representative of rural folk. They are not.
The key here is culture. These “rednecks” are not rednecks. They don’t have the backgrounds, values, or history of those of us farther away from the ivory towers. Yes, there are social problems in rural areas, but the culture is still basically evangelical Christian and conservative. In my small town, at the beginning of the school year, pastors from churches in the area come to the high school and do a prayer walk-through to bless each classroom. And nobody, opioid user or not, has a problem with it.
I read an article some months ago discussing why American liberal Jews are choosing Progressive antisemitic anti-Israel positions, which intuitively seems against their best interest. The answer, according to that writer, is that while their ethnicity is Jewish, their *religion* is secular Progressivism/Humanism. And, when push comes to shove, people choose their religion over everything else. Hence, you have gay solidarity for Islam, white Progressive academics who embrace racial self-loathing, etc.
It’s not the economics. Appalachia has been poor ever since it’s existed. It’s not the poverty. It’s not even the drug use, and such. It’s the religion and culture. And while there has been a great decrease in church attendance and belief among mainline Protestant churches, the evangelical and charismatic congregations are growing . Where I’m living, the area is becoming more, not less conservative. As a neighbor put on his gate a few months ago “Prayer will get you into heaven. Trespassing will get you their right now.”
Those Redneck Revolt folk won’t do all that well once they leave Durham/Chapel Hill/Asheville. North Carolina is a lot more purple than it used to be. But that’s not because the rural areas are turning blue. It’s because the rural areas are disappearing and/or being marginalized. Northern Virginia may rule the state, but Northumberland County, VA is redder than it’s ever been.
And, no. In the rural areas, you don’t have to be “self sufficient” in the way the author pretends. You have to be *productive* enough to produce more than you consume of something you can barter. I grow more fruit than I can eat. My neighbor on one side doesn’t grow fruit, but has chickens that make more eggs than she can eat. My neighbor on the other side doesn’t have chickens or fruit trees, but keeps bees and makes more honey than the entire neighborhood can eat. And of the five homes nearest me, three have private shooting ranges on their property. But none of us are wholly self-sufficient in the bug-out cabin-in-the-woods survivalist sense. If and when things get bad, our *community* will work together, centered around our churches. Which is why this pandemic has been used as a tool for attacking churches.
Well said.
Ditto
An excerpt from an article about Dave Strano, the founder of both the John Brown Gun Club and Redneck Revolt:
“I came across an interview Dave did with a paper from Philly back in 2011. I don’t know if he assumed no one would challenge him, or that no one from KS would see it, but the exaggerations as to the origins of RR are astounding. Here are a few quotes and examples…
“We managed to table at over 30 different gun shows in a three year period, and distribute hundreds of copies of anti-racist and anti-Minutemen literature during that time period.”
This is a great exaggeration at best, I think the possibly highest number of shows that the JBGC tabled at was 10. Also, the name itself was a joke the first time we tabled at a show. We needed a group name and Dave came up with on the spot, and then without really checking in with anyone it became a “thing”. John Brown is his weird crazy idol and I can see why in a lot of ways. Zealotry, martyr complex, pseudo racist ‘guised as revolutionary anti-racist. These shows were incredibly unsuccessful. We gave away very little literature. We did meet some interesting people and build some relationships, but the idea that we “distributed hundreds” of pieces of literature is a good sound bite at best. The shows themselves were sketchy and we got into a number of confrontations with open white supremacists and members of the far-right.
“Kansas Mutual Aid was mostly comprised of working class anarchists, few of who seem to meet the normal demographic of ex-punk and ex-middle class backgrounds. The majority of the folks that made up the John Brown Gun Club working group even went as far as to openly identify as rednecks. Our shared experiences of growing up in poor or working class white communities, in trailer parks and run down apartment buildings, surrounded by redneck culture, made it easy to find commonality.”
KMA was for sure a good portion of some poor folks. But “redneck” was never a term thrown around really by many besides Dave. It totally ignores that the collective changed membership…a lot. A huge cause of that was Dave (and myself at times) being heavy handed in our roles in that collective. But it was certainly a mixed bag. There were people from the middle of nowhere KS and people from one of the richest counties in the country (Johnson County), I don’t think the non-white people or the trans folks really threw around the term “redneck” and I don’t remember it being a central tenant of a collective primarily of punks in the most liberal town and county in KS.
It was, and obviously still continues to be a term that is important to Dave himself. But I began to question his redneck identity when I spent the holidays at the giant homes of both his parents in their gated communities, and learning that his father’s military background, while forcing him to move a few times as a child was not of some grunt but of a doctor, and a good/well paid one at that.
“The efforts of the John Brown Gun Club were definitely more successful than the efforts in Colorado in this area of struggle. In Kansas and Missouri, we were on a first name basis with gun show organizers.”
I have literally no idea what Dave is referencing here. I remember antagonisms and a vendor/promoter relationship. Dave has at times spoken about a relationship with a dealer at the shows, again this is an exaggeration. There was one dealer we legally purchased firearms from who we saw a few times at different shows, and had a friendly relationship with but nothing beyond “they sell guns, we buy guns”.” https://davestrano.noblogs.org
Sic transit gloria mundi…