Starting in 2009 and especially after Citizens United, I’ve been advising Americans who can get out to do so. I recognize that many people can’t: you have to “shelter in place”, but for those who are able to leave America and haven’t, well, the advice is the same, but more urgent.
The US is no longer meaningfully a Democracy. The funneling of wealth and income to oligarchs continues unabated and even accelerated during the pandemic. Official economic statistics from the US are now almost entirely fantasy based: completely unrelated to reality due to how inflation and other statistics are “calculated” and due to the over-reliance of GDP, which is no longer tracking welfare.
The massive increases in necessities like food is a very very bad sign.
The possibility of civil war is real, and so is the chance of collapse. Nothing is going to get better for the majority of Americans; everything is going to get worse.
So, at the least, if you can get a second passport, do it. If you don’t have any passport, apply for one. If you can go somewhere reasonable and make a decent living, consider it. If you’re rich enough to set up a second citizenship and home, get it done.
Where to go is difficult. If you speak Mandarin and they’ll let you in, China’s not a bad choice. Avoid the UK unless you have no other options: Britain is in terminal decline. In general Europe is in decline and the chance of the Atlantic Meridian Overturning Current (AMOC) stopping makes it questionable for those who are younger or who have children, but while Europe is going down, the welfare state still exists and will take longer to go away, so long as you choose your destination carefully. (Obviously Greece is out of the question.)
Canada is trending right hard, and is “too close” to America, but if you can’t get anywhere else and have money or skills in demand, it might work for you. This is especially true if you’re healthy, younger and comfortable on the frontier, of which there is still plenty.
The truth is that there are no longer any completely “safe” choices. But there are places where government and society are more functional and more caring, and where the destruction of the welfare state (which includes, oh, universal healthcare, functioning power and sewage) is less far along.
If you have to stay and indeed if you’re in many countries, do what you can to improve your “grid collapse resistance.” Brownouts and blackouts and failures of water systems will become worse. A couple of big camping batteries + solar recharging may keep key electrical appliances running. Find some way to store or produce water and keep some surplus food around. If you’ve got power, water and a way to boil said water, something as simple as a lot of vacuum packed rice and beans can keep you going for quite a while.
In general, take measures. Assume that things are going to keep getting worse for the rest of your life. There will be some exceptions, but there’s no way the majority of people can or will avoid these trends.
Don’t sleep on this. Back in 2009 it wasn’t urgent, but we’re now at the point where local collapse or violence is a real possibility: we don’t know when exactly, but we do know the conditions have been met. Once that happens, when is hard to predict, but bad is dead simple to predict.
Dead being the operative word.
Dermot O Connor
I moved to the US from Ireland in 1993/4. Not a perfect country then, but it still had a lot to offer. Post 2000 (Bush V. Gore) and 2001 (911, Patriot Act) were a Voyager spacecraft style gravity assist towards Planet Hell. Both parties are now heading there, just at slightly different speeds. By the late teens I could finally take no more and decided to move back home. My wife (American) told me before the ceremony that if I’d told her I wanted to stay in the US the wedding would be off – a reasonable stance, I’d have felt the same). We both decided around 2020 that we’d leave no later than 2023, as 2024, being an election year, was too risky. We ended up having our hand forced to go in 2022, as my landlady (a nice woman) had to sell the house to pay for medical treatments).
It was a very stressful process, but well worth it in the end, as we’re now in the west of Ireland, semi-rural (but not too rural). So for those with passports or spouses married to them, go sooner rather than later. You don’t want to do this when you’re too old. Biggest issues for us in moving were in finding accommodation in Ireland, as the neo-liberal FF/FG/Green government has utterly f*cked housing, to where there were only 700 rentals in the ENTIRE COUNTRY – and those that are there are expensive (with scammers preying on the desperate). So try to get that sorted before the move, or have some idea of where you’ll live, if possible. That was by far the most stressful aspect, one of the most grueling things I’ve gone through. We were even thinking about buying a camper van and living in that (winter would not be fun). Advantage would be being able to buy a tumbledown and live in the van as the work happens on the house – I have cousins doing that, but it is not easy, and not for everyone.
Still, no regrets. My neighbours out here in the west are very friendly, no bother, and I don’t have to worry about guns (the wife used to teach in the US, so they had shooter drills, and one near-miss in the city we used to live in. I heard the sirens as the cops sped past our house as an attempted school shooter was wrestled to the ground). Do not miss that.
For anyone looking at Ireland, if you have ONE grandparent with an Irish birth cert, you can apply for citizenship. The process for spouses is very easy, as with the marriage cert. your passport is stamped at the airport on entry, you get another stamp at the nearest garda station, and you’re good to work. None of the shite that I’ve heard spouses of Americans have had to go through in the Land of the ‘Free’.
Dan
I’ve been a long-time reader of your blog and I’ve thought about this a lot too. But unfortunately the only place me and my family are in a position to emigrate to is Nigeria (where my wife is from), which is already in economic and climate collapse.
Jan Wiklund
It seems that the most alarmist study of AMOC suggest a collapse around 2057, but most don’t seem to think so – “High-quality Earth system models indicate a collapse is unlikely and would only become probable if high levels of warming (≥4 °C (7.2 °F)) are sustained long after 2100.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_meridional_overturning_circulation).
If I were to bet, I would rather bet on a US-Europe state breakdown. Or perhaps that the Europeans would return to sense when the US breaks down and they can’t hide in its skirts.
Soredemos
Really hard disagree on the civil war part. As an American, I don’t think you properly appreciate how comfortable a majority of people here are, even with all the caveats of decline. Those who are struggling are too busy focusing on that for anything else, while those further up the chain talk a lot, but not else. On the right they buy Oregunian and family of gun stickers for their trucks, but will never actually do any kind of uncivil resistance. Meanwhile the vichy left are too busy wearing pussy hats and crying about pronouns. Things will have to get much, much worse, well into material collapse, before people actually go out and do anything in meaningful numbers. Americans are lazy, cowardly loudmouths. Don’t take their whinging seriously. I don’t, and I’m one of them.
Willy
Another good thing about Ireland is that wet bulb refugees from shithole countries are gonna have a far greater Rio Grande to wade across.
Speaking of “birdbrain” brownies, how about that JD Vance? No FDR hide-the-wheelchair moments from that guy. He’s a proven big strong male, plus he’s good at keeping his own domestic birdbrain brownie under his strict Godfearing masculine control. So if you’re a white masculine male (potential, meaning that closeted or reformed gay men shall be included) then you too could be forgiven by MAGA after bending the knee to Trump. You’ll get to hide in plain sight!
If a newly Red Cap’d Log Cabin Republican, or an Uncle Candace Owens negro, or a Mark Rubio citizen, starts rounding up their own for internment, then you’ll be exempt.
All women will of course, have to live fully domesticated lives. But thus far, you’ll be allowed to be any color as long as you behave white enough. So try to keep the uppity under control ladies.
And so in closing, I think Ian’s ominous warning only applies to males colored darker than the pickled oak seen on the Minwax color chart. But look at it this way. If you’re not that, then you’ll be living outside of the batshit USA.
jrs
I’m a college dropout who manages to make an ok income in the states, my partner has a criminal record and a hard time finding a better job than the one they have. Where exactly are we to go? And meanwhile the old folks need some care. Like sure I wish I was a lot more successful in life too, and maybe I could easily escape, but I’m the relatively functional one to come out of my abusive family, and that’s only relatively.
Joan
I have family in Europe but they’re right up against Russia, plus close friends (“found family”) in Japan, which has China to contend with. I’ve lived abroad and it’s been a life goal to permanently emigrate, but I’m not sure where is “safe enough.” I don’t want to hop out of the frying pan and into the fire.
coloradoblue
Research Canada’s immigration rules carefully. I took a quick look about a decade ago, and they were big on young people who had skills they wanted/needed; unable to contribute, sorry Charlie. A friend later told me REALLY rich could also get in. I haven’t bothered looking since, but I’m old(er), divorced, no kids, no brothers/sisters and should be able to survive reasonably well as aging slowly takes me.
Soredemos
Claiming Europe is in danger from Russia is dubious ti begin with, but in what world does Japan ‘have China to contend with’? China has said and done literally nothing to indicate any desire to go to war with Japan, other than posturing over various meaningless islands. If any conflict arises there, it’ll be because of Japanese beligerence, trusting too much in its vassal status and that the US would be able to protect it.
Feral Finster
To be fair, the US has not been a democracy for a long time now.
Rather, the US is an oligarchy featuring vestigial trappings of democracy and unlimited political bribery.
Eric Anderson
I’d be interested to hear what steps you’re taking Ian.
Personally, were we willing to sell we could afford to emigrate elsewhere. NZ would be my pick because language and common law roots + progressive orientation and high value placed on natural amenities. My kinda place.
But, damn. I struggle with it Ian. This red state insurgent understands the risks and doesn’t want to run. And, I’m largely in agreement with Soredemos — at least as far it goes being a cis white man myself. I’ve experienced more than my fair share of “tough guy” MAGAs in my neck of the woods. They’re like dogs. They love to puff and bark, but two hard steps in their direction and they get submissive.
I fight. It’s what I do for a living. I was bullied as a kid b/c I was a late bloomer, but I never took it. I punched back like my Dad taught me and it served me well. I’ll be continuing that tradition with my son.
Fear is the mind killer.
GrimJim
Y’all forget that Americans are all happy and chill…until they miss a few meals.
Remember, when the Collapse comes… The Big One, not just some local blackout or shortage of toilet paper, but the big, nation-wide stoppage of… Everything… It will take maybe three days before things start getting nuts, because people can’t get food.
This is far easier done than anyone suspects, and that it hasn’t happened yet has been all I needed to know about there not being any real terrorist threat to the US.
The whole system is one huge Just In Time Mongolian Cluster Fuck waiting to happen. An unholy House of cards. Throw a big enough wrench in the system, or enough little ones, and it all falls down. BOOM!
And these Reactionary Republican loonatics are planning on doing it all in first 100 Days of Trump’s second (permanent?) term.
They plan to completely destroy the social safety net, everything from Social Security on down. Cold turkey.
Do you have any idea of the socioeconomic shocks that will cause? It will destroy the middle class overnight.
Suddenly, all those well to do folks whose parents were surviving on Social Security and Medicare will end up having to take care of them, because they won’t be able to afford to take care of themselves.
A vast number will have to drop out of the work force to take care of them at home. Same for everyone who has a member of the family subsisting on Disability.
All gone, overnight.
And that’s just for starters.
The vast majority of Americans buy their crap at Walmart and the various Dollar Store types of places.
When Trump dumps his massive tariffs on just about everything China exports to the US, those prices, already sky high due to existing inflation, will double again, and more.
BOOM. There goes Walmart. And guess who is the single largest employer in the US?
And that’s when they are just getting STARTED.
They are going to destroy the so-called “Deep State,” by which they mean any Federal bureaucrat that does not sign a loyalty oath to Trump and the Cause.
These careerist are what keeps the government functioning.
The government functioning is what keeps the American Empire running.
The American Empire depends on a massive web of international relations, the likes of which cannot be managed by MAGA-minded individuals whose only qualifications is loyalty to Trump and dogma.
The American Empire is what keeps the US dollar the world’s reserve currency, and without that, and the full web of treaties, understandings, and agreements, Americans will no longer be able to command 25% of the world’s resources while only being 5% of the population.
BOOM. Can you survive on 20% of the resources you currently command?
Actually, unless you are rich, you won’t even have that much anymore…
And that, again, is just part of the plan for the first 100 Days.
It will be like Weimar on acid and steroids taken to 11…
mago
Hmm, given global environmental and cultural degradation, refuge is elusive.
Clean water, local and sustainable agriculture and distribution, a sound local economy and politics are rare and hard to find.
Having lived on both coasts of the US and in the intermountain West along with Northern Europe and the Mediterranean, not to mention Central America, I’ll take my last stand where I am for many reasons including those described in paragraph 2 above. (Damn, outdid myself in the run on sentence department there.)
To quote the Beatles: and it really doesn’t matter if I am wrong or right/where I belong I’m right/where I belong. . . .
StewartM
As you know, I’ve been planning to relocate for some time due to your warnings (I agree with them). I have some possible destinations (Ireland I’ve already heard about and is attractive). None are perfect, all have some problems (residency requirements, climate change issues, etc) but I’d feel better in most of them than staying here.
Trump winning the election would speed up the process, and maybe not voluntarily. If a democrat wins, I’ll still go, but I can do it with less immediate urgency.
Soredemos, as someone who grew up in the South, with an active KKK in a neighboring county, what I think Ian means is that there will be South American-style repression and acts of violence where the perpetrators go unpunished in part because many of them are off-duty police officers, or know the police. And just overall, there will be no rule of law—even if you’re legally in the right, and even have a court declare you in the right, the enforcer class will simply blow any court order off (that’s the real reason for Project 2025, to end the rule of law and staff the executive branch like Hitler did, with oaths of loyalty not to the country, not to the Constitution, but to Hitler personally. And even before that, Trump was blowing off SCOTUS decisions he didn’t like). Criminal law, like it was in places in Weimar Germany in the early 1920s, will be a mere extension of policy–it will be prosecuted with the utmost ferocity against people-we-don’t-like while people-we-like will get slaps on the wrists, if even that.
So if you’re one of the “enemies of the people” class, you have no protection if the locals see you that way. Even if you’re not one of the ‘enemies’, but try to help one of those “enemies” out of pity for their plight, you can be targeted (in places like Mississippi, the Klan would burn down white businesses who dared cross the color line, and in South Africa security forces would also target white churches sympathetic to ending apartheid).
This is why I think if you do stay and ‘hunker down’, make sure you are in (or move to) an area where you are liked and needed and the craziness is low. I believe that–initially at least–this is more important than most other considerations. To give a historical analogy, during the Holocaust the greatest number of Jews either murdered directly or sent to the camps were in Eastern Europe—because Poles, Baltic State peoples, Ukrainians, etc who lived there had high concentrations of people who were prejudiced against Jews, and who would indeed either “out” Jews to the Nazis or even help the Nazis catch escapees from the extermination camps:
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f088a46ebe405013044f1a4/05ebd4c3-9e77-4107-abc0-89bcb05f7707/rates.jpg?format=1000w
By contrast, only about 50 Jews in Denmark died during the Holocaust—because the Danes just clammed up, refusing to help the Nazis in any way to identify or round up Jews. You want to be in somewhere like Denmark.
Bukko Boomeranger
I’m with ya, brother! Or rather, ahead of you. I was born in the U.S., lived there until middle age. My (now-ex) wife and I were living in San Francisco, your typical peace-marching anti-war hippie types. We were so morally disgusted at the actions of the Cheney/Bush regime in Iraq that we spent the entire summer of 2004 telling everyone “If Bush gets reelected, we’re moving out of the country.” He did, so we did.
But as others in these comments have noted, it ain’t easy. Not like moving to another state or province. More like applying to join a country club. Fortunately for us, I had a mid-life career change when I had to reluctantly go back to school and become a nurse. Not easy as a guy in his 30s! But it paid dividends. If one has a licence to wipe peoples’ bums and jab syringes in them, one can live anywhere they choose in the English-speaking world. (If one jumps correctly through all the bureaucratic hoops.) In 2005, we bailed out to Australia on a work visa. I also lived in Vancouver, via a work visa, when the wife decided she hated Oz, so we shifted up there. Bum-wiping, mate — it’s the Golden Ticket! No knock on Canada, fine country, but DownUnda is more fun, so I made like a boomerang when she bailed back to San Francisco in 2012.
I’m not looking to preserve my life with all this globe-trotting. I’m a white male with a bit of extra money, so I’d have done OK in the U.S. It’s more about conscience. By staying in the U.S., I would have been participating in the War Machine. As I am by paying taxes in Australia and (formerly) Canada. But they are small cogs in the machine. And I can sleep easier by telling myself “I did what I could to resist; then I got out when I could do no more.” I still protest march here in the anti-genocide rallies, try to spread awareness amongst my social circle, so I’m not merely patting myself on the back and resting on my laurels.
For those of you who CAN’T get out, do what you can to live a decent, conscious life. The Automatic Earth blog, in the days when “Stoneleigh” (a Canajun!) was there, had a great “primer” post about “How To Build A Lifeboat”. It was about prepping for Big-C Collapse. I won’t drop a hyperlink to it here, but it’s a great resource to read. Backs up what Ian says, and more. Check it out via a (hopefully non-Oogle) search engine.
Daniil Adamov
It’s funny, I’ve long thought that if I wanted to be safe, I should be trying to get into Canada or something. From what you say here and elsewhere, though, staying in Russia seems like a better bet than trying to move to some English-speaking country. Not sure if that’s true. Still, it’s what I was going to do regardless, so it’s funny to think about.
Anonymous
Civil wars happen either when a segment of the ruling structure decide to go for the brass ring themselves or when a string enough alternative power structure comes into being to resist the existing power structure.
Given the PTB’s complete control on Ukraine and Gaza and Biden’s pudding brain, and their continued ability to infiltrate and destroy any alternate centers of power (witness what they’re doing against very weak opposition put up by anti-genocide protesters and the Green Party), it seems like a civil war is still a good distance away. What’s more likely is that when the US structure cracks under a large external shock of a undeniable military defeat or dollar depreciation, it’ll revert to a period of warlordism where local power structures such as local military bases, police/national guard, and perhaps large local business interests step in to maintain order.
So I don’t think collapse is likely to happen immediately. China and Russia (and rest of the”Jungle”) are doing everything they can to avoid a quick Western collapse because they understand that a cornered injured animal is most dangerous and their odds for dealing with the confrontation dramatically improves over time.
I would think that the last 3 years show that most of Europe is in even worse shape than North America. The governing elite is even more biddable and indifferent to the plight of even its national bourgeoisie. They are also closer to the victims of American initiated conflicts, more immediately impacted by climate change, and lack energy resources to keep their light and heat on.
Latin America is risky because a retrenching hegemon might turn its attention further towards tighter control of its neighbors, but hopefully the leftist oriented governments will be able to obtain the military and security apparatus sufficient to resist.
Malaysia might be a good relocation option for English only speakers for folks who can’t afford/qualify for Ireland/ANZ/Canada. If you have regular income from an annuity or pension, France, Spain, and Portugal are fairly easy to move to without family ties and I think you can qualify for residency/citizenship after 5 years. Mainland China is hard – the nationality laws are very strict and there are hundreds of millions of people who speak better English than you speak Mandarin, probably with better subject matter expertise, and with local connections that you don’t have. Unless you have unicorn skills or can figure out a way to build your own business there, you’re probably out of luck. Taiwan or Hong Kong would be easier, but the former has a stagnant economy and war danger, and the latter is a has-been with extremely high cost of living.
Mary Bennet
Mr. Welsh, maybe you Canadians think you are still a part of Europe, but we Americans who are not part of the neo-con faction know we are not. This continent and this country is where I belong and I am not willing to see what remains of our resources turned over to cold-hearted foreigners and fanatical religious who had little or no part in building what we have here. Hard times is part of life, no one, much less God or any other deity ever said live would always be easy and convenient.
Willy
People forget the destructive Super Bowl celebrations from days of old, and the even more destructive race and antiwar riots from even older days. A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.
I’m old and observant enough to see what happens to those who “fall down”. Few individuals will strike out at the true source of their angst, reflexively choosing soft targets instead. Sure, there may be the occasional dweeb courageous enough to walk straight down the middle of golf course play, but only if they’ve been lucky enough to find a sack of automatic weapons after a failed driveby.
The missing ingredients for the expression of individual angst are group courage, tribal justification, and just one good ole boy “Yeehaw!” moment, as played in the old Gone With The Wind movie. For a more recent example think January 6th.
Yes, American individuals are doughy-weak mentally-compromised loudmouth cowards. But gangs of Americans a different thing entirely. Plutocratic elites know this. They might take inspiration from El Presidente Ortez and just lock them all up, in only their underwear. That’s why the more targeted approach is better. I think of how the Iranian mullahs played along with the White Revolution, then struck when the moment was right. Not suggesting that as an example to follow, but as an example of the way things can work out. Or… be worked out.
NR
I don’t know how likely a full U.S. civil war is, but consider this: it would only take about one out of every thousand Republicans to decide to start killing the people they don’t like for America to have actual, literal death squads. The police wouldn’t even have to openly support them; all they’d have to do is slow-walk the investigations, “lose” key pieces of evidence, etc. Hell, some of them would probably even join the death squads if it came to that.
Lots of ways things can potentially go wrong short of a full-on civil war.
Ian Welsh
Chris, I’m fifty-six and have had cancer three times, and I’m poor (in large part because of the health stuff. I wasn’t before.) I’ll die in Canada. However I am concerned for other people, especially my readers.
So if you don’t think I’m serious, you may be making a big mistake.
Dan Kelly
It’s interesting to note that literally no one talked about the difficulty of just up and leaving relationships with family and friends. There was some talk of god forbid having to take care of immediate family members, parents or children, as things get worse.
Also, there is absolutely no sense of ‘place’ evident in the comments here. Most seem almost entirely rootless already. I imagine this is what the internet has done to people.
People in homeless encampments often act better.
Stormcrow
Ian, I’m afraid I agree with your overall analysis. There are a few quibbles about details, but my own assessment is that on the political side, we reach the “singularity” part of the American collapse, the point past which we cannot even guess at the near-term trajectory, in mere months. Not even years. Don’t even get me started about the environmental piece or the epidemiology of emerging diseases.
Long story short: I’m fucked. I figured that out more than a dozen years ago, and the conclusion still stands to analysis.
In a few more days, I’ll be 74. And I’m unemployable anyway; I worked in a subsector of IT, so I don’t have to explain about the ageism. My career, such as it was, was effectively destroyed by the collapse of the Real Estate Bubble back in 2007. I had to retrench just 5 years ago, when the pathetic remnant of my savings, which the previous ten years had ground away, dropped to the point where I knew the mortgage on my house was no longer a sustainable expense.
Right now, I’m “stable”, meaning that my financial input exceeds my output over a time span of multiple years. So I’m operating at a positive level of savings, even living on SSRI.
But I simply cannot afford to pack up and move, even if another country would take a retiree on the high side of 70. I’d have to put my condo on the market prior, which would put me on the street. And any destination south of the 49’th parallel by more six hundred miles or so, would simply be a over-complex extended suicide, given my well understood long-standing health issues.
And “preparation” cannot go very far, when you live in a condo surrounded by pavement, and your last social links went west decades ago. And you have other issues affecting your prospects for building new social links, which you do not even bother talking about, because (fortunately for them) your audience does not share enough of the context to understand an explanation.
Mark
Cowards run.
Democracies do not exist unless good people fight for them to exist..
It’s not someone else’s job to save our country, it is our job.
So you’re either with us or against us.
If you’re against us, then sure, leave. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. Also, save your bellyaching and bitching for another time and place.
If you’re with us, buckle up, stiffen your spine, volunteer for a Democratic election campaign, call out the lies and propaganda, no matter their source, every time, and get ready to help save our country. It’s worth saving.
Ian Welsh
This just in, American colonists and immigrants who left their countries because they were unhappy w/how their countries were run, or frightened for their freedom and lives were cowards.
different clue
My gaselectric utility is DTE Energy. I get both my NatGas and my Electricity from them.
Last month my average gas-use per day was 0.2CCF per day. ( CCF means ” hundred cubic feet”. So I used 20 cubic feet of NatGas per day). And my electricity use was
1.4 kilowatt hours per day.
If that is as low relative to the “average” one-person retail residential user living alone by himself as I like to think it is, then I like to think that “low usage” may give me some sort of personal performance credibility to have taken seriously whatever thoughts I might have to offer on living conservingly.
If anyone here is using even less gas or less electricity per day at home than that, I hope they might care to describe what they are doing and how they are doing it here in these threads.
different clue
And one might offer this addendum to Ian Welsh’s ” this just in” announcement . . .
those who are descended from those ” American colonists and immigrants who left their countries because they were unhappy w/how their countries were run, or frightened for their freedom and lives ” are descended from those very cowards.
My ancestors came here from the savage heart of Darkest Europe. I don’t blame them for leaving and I don’t consider them to have been cowards for not “staying” and
“fighting”.
One does need to add the further add-addendum-dum that most of us here are too old or too poor or too anchored in or too etc. to be able to leave. So fate has committed us to survival-in-place, if that is possible. So since we are committed to survival in place by fate, perhaps we can at least be passive-obstructive against those people who actively work to make America unlivable and unsurvivable. Grudging obedience with zero cheerful compliance, uncivil obedience, sand in their gears, glass in their shoes, attriting and degrading their parts of the economy as best we can, making their lives as painful and miserable as we can in return for the pain and misery they maliciously and spitefully seek to bring to our lives. ( But of course only if we have spare time and energy left over after having secured our own lives against their conspiracy against our lives first).
I like an approach hinted at by Mark Ames in an article he once wrote in The eXile called ” Elite versus Elitny”. Here is the link.
https://exiledonline.com/elite-versus-elitny/
( Now . . . Mark Ames also wrote another article called We The Spiteful which deserves careful thought but not immediate support and identification with. At some point he decided that nasty meanness was very basic to the identity of large parts of America and those types of Americans are happy to inflict pain on themselves and eachother as long as they feel they can be guaranteed to be inflicting even more pain on some other targeted group of disliked Americans. And the Upper Class farms, cultivates and guides that sense of hateful spitred (( spitred is to spite as hatred is to hate)) for its own greater power and profit. My doubts about the premise of that article are these . . . that the nasty meanness did not used to exist to such a degree here. It was itself carefully seeded and cultivated by the Upper Class. It existed to a very much lesser degree during the Great Depression. But the article still has things worth consideing, especially in light of the article referrenced just above this one. Maybe attitudes and information-seeking guidance may be taken from both articles
and put to use in improving our lives by ruining the lives of our enemies. Anyway,
here is the link.
https://exiledonline.com/we-the-spiteful/ )
tc
I think you got it backwards. The time for urgency was 2000 or so, now is the time to prepare to meet your fate, whatever that may be.
I always wanted to emigrate to Yerp or even Montreal in my youth. My desire was unrequited so Ive just wandered the US.. Im 61 and retired in the Pac NW, and as bad as the future looks here, I dont see anywhere else in the US or world that looks less scary as far as climate, politics, economy.
Canada and Mexico will get dragged down with the US . 20 years ago Canada’s grass seemed so much greener, then came the Fords and feckless Trudeau. Maybe marginally better than the US, at this point but not worth the hoop jumping. I loved Ireland in the 80s. My Irish friends who’ve been there since the late 90s say dont go back, way too expensive, too much like the US. Also their economy depends on arbitrage, being a tax haven back door to EU, those are legs that could get cut off in the blink of an eye. New Zealand is another overpriced hell due to all the immigrants trying to get ahead of the apocalypse.
Portland was great before Trump and the protests against him. It got so much better when trump got covid and the proud boy trash took their violence to DC. I dread the next Trump term and I hope the antifa protestors get smarter and figure out something more effective than making this city a punching bag for the fascists again (they wont). Most people have no idea what it was like here in the summer of 2000, but Im pretty sure that will be our future on a national scale come January (or maybe dec or nov depending on how badly the election stealing antics go)
different clue
@tc,
I don’t know, but I suspect, that Upper Peninsula Michigan, Northern and Western Wisconin or maybe Northern Minnesota may be less scary and more safe than the Pacific Northwest. A major problem would be figuring out how to keep yourself entertained.