Hundreds have escaped America's 'cultural revolution' and are building an off-grid desert outpost



Army Col. Chris Ellis studies extreme disaster preparedness. In his 2021 doctoral dissertation, "Are You Ready for it? Examining Security in Contemporary Disaster Preparedness, From Normal to Noachian," Ellis noted that at least 11.4 million people "have the means to survive at home for 31 days or more after a disaster."

Earlier this year, Ellis told Reuters that the number of "preppers" — survivalists who "take a variety of active steps to prepare for future disasters at levels often far beyond official recommendations of 3-14 days — has grown to roughly 20 million people. Ellis reached this conclusion on the basis of household resiliency data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Attendees of the March Longmont Survival and Prepper Show in Boulder provided Reuters with some indications of why the number of preppers has ballooned in recent years. Supply chain disruptions during the pandemic, lawlessness, power grid issues, and phone signal outageswere among the reasons cited.

While millions are preparing for the worst, others aren't bothering with the wait.

On a 1,245-acre plot of land in Juab County, Utah, 55 miles west of Santaquin and roughly 40 miles north of Delta, a group of homesteaders have been developing a community committed to one of the prepper's key objectives: self-reliance.

'Now, with everything that's happening, we wonder if it's far enough.'

Philip Gleason, the founder of the Utah [Operation Self-Reliance] Land Co-op at Riverbed Ranch, told Deseret News that some of the 130 predominantly Mormon families who have secured 2-acre parcels on the property came to escape the "cultural revolution in the U.S." underway.

"At the start of any cultural revolution, the people that control their food are the ones that come out on top," said Gleason.

A mother from California sought refuge to escape what she perceived to be LGBT propaganda in schools. A couple from Portland told DeseretNews they simply "needed to get out," noting "[t]hey've lost their minds."

Others journeyed out for health reasons.

According to Gleason, most "just want a safe place to raise family and food."

"When we first came out here, we thought it might be too far away," said Gleason. "Now, with everything that's happening, we wonder if it's far enough."

Despite having similar goals, fears, and literature, Gleason suggested the people who have joined his off-grid community since he settled down in 2021 are nevertheless resistive to the "preppers" label.

Upon purchasing a lot, shareholders reportedly agree to build a house, a barn, and a greenhouse; install a septic system; produce solar energy; and dig a well. There are no sanitation utilities or shared power systems. Fortunately, under the valley flood is a flowing freshwater aquifer, meaning well-building is not an exercise in futility.

According to the Riverside Ranch website, residents — who are apparently "very pleased" with their Starlink Internet connections — must still pass Juab County's building inspections, which follows the International Residential Code. Extra to meeting building codes, residents still must pay county taxes.

Apparently, there are plans to build similar communities in Arizona, Wyoming, Idaho, and Alberta, Canada. Gleason's company, OSR Green LLC, has apparently bought up 1,298 acres near Snowflake, Arizona, where it will build Coslor Cove, which will allegedly become the state's largest off-grid community.

Whereas other rural refuges such as the Vivos Global Shelter Network's bunker systems appear to be highly individualistic and private, Riverbed Ranch appears to offer a far more integrated communitarian approach.

Deseret News noted that the community's over 70 children are home-schooled with some parental crossover in the way of instruction. Medical troubles are addressed by volunteers — although Gleason admitted to requiring a life-flight helicopter ride back to civilization when he broke his femur last year. While cash trades hands for various purchases, trades are reportedly also conducted in livestock, bread, and dairy.

"When we have this all built out," Gleason told Deseret, "we might be the third or fourth largest community in the county."

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CBS talking head floats the possibility of a 'black swan event' in 2024



CBS News' "Face the Nation" held a roundtable on Christmas Eve, affording various talking heads an opportunity to make predictions for 2024. While most of the predictions were relatively banal, one among them stood out, prompting critics to puzzle over its possible significance.

Network correspondent Catherine Herridge, the wife of a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force, suggested that "2024 may be the year of a black swan event. This is a national security event with high impact that's very hard to predict."

Statistician and former options trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb popularized the term "black swan event" in his 2007 book "The Black Swan."

Taleb defined the term thusly: "First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable."

The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the rise of the internet, the personal computer, the breakdown of the Soviet Union, and the Pacific tsunami of December 2004 apparently qualify as black swan events. According to Taleb, the term is not, however, a catch-all term for "any bad thing that surprises us."

For instance, the statistician told the New Yorker that the COVID-19 pandemic was not a black swan event because it had been wholly predictable.

Herridge told the other CBS News panelists Sunday there were a number of concerns that factored into her "dark" prediction, including that "this sort of enduring heightened threat level that we're facing, the wars in Israel, also Ukraine, and we're so divided in this country in ways that we haven't seen before. And I think that just creates fertile ground for our adversaries like North Korea and China and Iran."

— (@)

The three regimes Herridge referenced have all expressed anti-U.S. sentiment in recent months and evidenced the wherewithal to adversely impact American interests.

China, which continues to deepen its ties with Russia and seeks to displace the U.S. on the world stage by 2049, has grown increasingly antagonistic toward the United States in recent years. The communist regime has subjected Americans to intimidation and coercion campaigns on U.S. soil; aerial threats by People's Liberation Army fighter jets; bombastic threats over political visits to Taiwan; espionage and political destabilization efforts by communist agents; a deadly influx of fentanyl via its informal Mexican cartel partners; and hacking campaigns.

North Korea's communist regime threatened to pre-emptively launch a nuclear strike on rivals after conducting an intercontinental ballistic missile test earlier this month, reported the Associated Press.

Iran threatened last week to seal off the Mediterranean Sea if the U.S. and Israel continue to commit so-called "crimes" in Gaza.

Instigation of a negative impactful event by one or more of the hostile nations identified by Herridge would not be wholly unpredictable, meaning — according to Taleb's definition — such would not qualify as a black swan event.

Despite Herridge's allusions to the anti-American triad, some critics on X suggested that the CBS correspondent was simply priming the pump regarding a predictable election-year event that might preclude former President Donald Trump from possibly retaking office.

CBS News correspondent Robert Costa, also on the panel, left little up to the imagination, following Herridge's prediction with the suggestion that the GOP might face a crisis if Trump is convicted of a federal crime. Another panelist piled on by suggesting the Supreme Court "is not going to save Donald Trump from the criminal trial."

The moderator for the CBS panel, Margaret Brennan, wrapped up the roundtable conjectures by stating, "Anyone who tells you what is going to happen with this election and how it's going to play out over the next year is selling you something because there are just so many different variables that all of us are tracking, and all of us are weighing. … But it's also why none of us will sleep very much in the next few months."

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