Juli Gittinger keeps a bag packed with iodine pills and a machete. “It’s good for getting through brush,” she explained to me recently. Gittinger’s mind churns with images of a future in which she might have to flee her home with just a backpack, bushwhacking her way through rural Georgia to safety. She has enough water in her house to last 30 days, and enough food to last 100 days.
Gittinger, a religious-studies professor at Georgia College, is a prepper, but unlike the stereotype that term commonly conjures—a bunker-bound, right-wing conspiracist—Gittinger is liberal. She began prepping after Donald Trump was elected in 2016. Among her prepping supplies are Plan B emergency contraceptive pills that she’s bought ahead of Trump’s second inauguration, in case his administration introduces new restrictions on reproductive health care.
Gittinger is representative of a small number of preppers who oppose Trump and who are gearing up for whatever disasters the next four years might bring. Across Reddit boards and Facebook groups, they are stocking up on and freeze-drying food—and say that others should be too.
Precise numbers on prepping are hard to come by, but the United States has likely millions of preppers of all political persuasions, says Michael Mills, a senior lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University, in the United Kingdom. Liberals make up a small percentage—about 15 percent, according to Mills. Like their conservative counterparts, liberal preppers are worried about the stability of the economy and the power grid, but unlike the conservatives, they also worry about climate-change-induced disasters and the potential that Trump will weaken America’s security through foreign-policy snafus. Mills is skeptical that the number of liberal preppers has dramatically increased, but the moderators of several liberal-prepping forums told me they’ve seen a spike in interest and activity since Trump’s reelection, in November. Several preppers I interviewed mentioned getting current on their vaccines, in case the new administration alters the rules for vaccine insurance coverage, or updating their passports, in case they feel they have to leave the country.
In addition to being a prepper herself, Gittinger has studied prepper groups and written about them in an academic book, American Apocalyptic. Starting in 2018, Gittinger surveyed several hundred liberal preppers (and a few conservatives) on Facebook. When she asked what got them into prepping, 31 of the 300-some respondents mentioned the election of Trump, and 35 mentioned “political anxieties.” Among the calamities they feared would strike were both the politically driven—economic and societal collapse, an attack from a foreign power—and the completely random: a pandemic, a natural disaster. “The country is so divided that anything could ignite riots like we haven’t seen before,” one respondent told her.
Lots of Americans are doing some version of prepping for Trump’s second term, even if they don’t call it that. Some providers of Plan B and abortion pills say they noticed an increase in orders immediately after the election. The election prompted many to rush to buy electronics, cars, and other goods ahead of Trump’s promised tariffs. Spending on vehicles, auto parts, and appliances rose in November, The Washington Post reported. Along with stocking up on food and water in anticipation of tariffs, Gittinger recently bought a new phone, and Zoe Higgins, another liberal prepper, bought a new car.
Genevra Hsu, a moderator of the Leftist Preppers subreddit, grew up learning survivalist techniques from her father, but she began prepping in earnest around 2013, when she moved to a rural area of Virginia. Some of her friends got into gardening, and she would give them tips. She now has six months of meals on hand—she does her own pressure-canning, dehydrating, and freezing. She’s at high risk of complications from COVID, so when the pandemic started, the stores provided an “animal comfort that comes from knowing there’s enough on the shelf that I don’t have to go anywhere,” she told me. Recently, she has started dehydrating and freezing powdered eggs in case of a bird-flu pandemic. On the subreddit, preppers discuss stocking up on toothpaste with fluoride, which Trump’s chosen health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., opposes adding to tap water. They’re buying up birth control and medical textbooks for treating vaccine-preventable diseases.
The line between prepping and emergency readiness is hazy. Indeed, some of the liberal preppers I interviewed seem more worried about act-of-God disasters such as hurricanes than a Handmaid’s Tale–type dystopia. KC Davis, the author of How to Keep House While Drowning, moved to Houston after 2017’s Hurricane Harvey and became concerned about flooding and losses of power. Now she keeps canned water, headlamps, thermal blankets, life jackets, rechargeable lanterns, and 30 days of emergency food on metal racks in her garage. She also has a generator, which fired up while we were talking.
In New Orleans, Higgins has a month’s worth of freeze-dried spaghetti, beef stroganoff, chicken alfredo, and other meals. She’s procured flashlights, headlamps, waterproof matches, fire starters, water-purification tablets, camping stoves, and propane tanks, along with something she calls a “bug-out binder” containing 400 pages of emergency checklists and instructions. Some preppers admit that the gear they’ve accumulated is less a preparation for a specific, Trump-related emergency and more a consequence of prepping gradually becoming a hobby, with ever more complicated gadgets for ever more outlandish scenarios. Among Gittinger’s prep is a Faraday bag—a backpack that blocks electromagnetic signals, in which Gittinger keeps a spare phone and a computer—to be used in case of an extreme solar flare.
Over and over, liberal preppers told me that they differ from their conservative counterparts because they are less conspiracy-minded and more concerned with helping their community rather than only their immediate family. (Gittinger wouldn’t need Plan B herself, but she bought it for other young women who might.) But like their right-wing counterparts, liberal preppers do tend to own guns, according to Gittinger: 121 of the 198 people who answered her survey question about weapons said they owned a firearm. Whom, exactly, they would use them against is less clear. “I think a lot of that is just out of a response to general uncertainty,” Hsu told me.
Another major commonality between liberal and conservative preppers is a distrust of the government, a feeling that institutions won’t help you if the worst comes to pass. For liberal preppers, this feeling has grown only more pronounced since the first Trump presidency. The rise of Trump, the fall of Roe v. Wade, and Republican victories in the states have given liberals the sense that they are on the ropes. “My general feeling, especially about Texas, is that there’s not a lot of community safety-netting when it comes to emergencies,” Davis says. “It feels like sort of every man for himself.”
Her sentiment fits with what the pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson calls a “cross-partisan rise in distrust” of institutions. Republicans and Democrats now share similar levels of distrust of Congress and big business. Americans on both the left and the right feel unsupported; preppers are just doing something about it. “There’s this common thread that I think unites preppers of all political persuasions, which is a lack of faith in political progress as a whole and a skepticism towards political leadership,” Mills told me. Conservative preppers were once worried about Barack Obama, and liberals are most worried about climate disasters, but they both worry that the government doesn’t have your back.
Some of my conversations with liberal preppers served as good reminders to buy bottled water and flashlights in case of a natural disaster, but some of them had an air of paranoia. Many of their worst-case scenarios seemed unlikely to ever take place. What are the odds that American citizens would actually be banned from international travel? What is the likelihood that Republicans would outlaw not just Plan B, but also birth control, which is used by 82 percent of reproductive-age women?
Then again, we live in outrageous times, during which a reality-TV host can become president, for the second time, after a failed coup attempt. That president picked another TV host to be in charge of the nation’s defense. His chosen health secretary has urged parents to ignore the CDC guidelines for childhood vaccinations. Abortion is completely banned in 12 states. There really has been a global pandemic that shut down much of the world for years. There’s a sense that literally anything can happen, so you’d better be prepared.
Gittinger pointed out that when the coronavirus pandemic broke out, she had N95 masks on hand. Who’s too paranoid now?
