The Americans Prepping for a Second Civil War
Many now believe that the U.S. could descend into political violence. Some are joining survivalist communities, canning food—and buying guns.“Did he say fight?” Drew Miller asked me. It was July 13th, and we were in rural Colorado, near an outpost of Fortitude Ranch, a network of survivalist retreats that Miller has constructed in anticipation of civilizational collapse. News of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump—the first one—had just pinged: a young man named Thomas Crooks had shot at Trump from a rooftop near a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, striking his right ear. Trump had stood, with blood on his face, and shouted to his crowd, “Fight, fight, fight!” The shooter’s motives were unknown, but Republicans were blaming Democrats. “File charges against Joseph R. Biden for inciting an assassination,” Representative Mike Collins posted on X. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene accused the “evil” Democratic Party of attempting “murder.” Miller’s phone began to make the sound of a dog barking—his ringtone—as members and employees of the ranches sent texts and e-mails.
A salesperson in Nevada was seeing a sudden increase in requests to join: “Member interest. I’m already getting previous leads texting me.”
A member in Colorado wondered if it was time to mobilize: “Should we do an alert?”
As the barking continued, I asked what Miller thought. “This could stir things up,” he said, after a heavy pause. “Things could escalate.”
Miller, a fit and unnervingly analytical sixty-six-year-old, was wearing a Fortitude Ranch T-shirt and had a handgun holstered on his cargo pants. He grew up in Nebraska, and served as an intelligence officer in the Air Force for thirty years before retiring as a colonel, in 2010. He has long maintained a fixation on disaster. A “Unabomber-type person,” he told me, could release a bioengineered virus to kill off “mammalian weeds,” as one prominent scientist has called humans; an electromagnetic-pulse attack could cause months-long blackouts. After retiring, Miller had an idea that combined his interest in readiness for such events with an entrepreneurial streak: establishing a survival community that was both comfortable and armed to the teeth. He reached out to real-estate agents in West Virginia. “I just said I wanted a remote location with year-round water, off the beaten path, accessible in all kinds of weather,” he told me. “The first one said, ‘Oh, you’re looking for a survival location.’ ” After several more agents had the same response, Miller asked one how they knew what he was after. The agent replied, “We have people from every three-letter agency in D.C. with little places out here.” Miller told me, “She even showed me a few! I thought, God dang it, people, you shouldn’t do that!” In 2015, Miller opened the first Fortitude Ranch in the mountains a couple of hours outside D.C. Its proximity to the capital was strategic. “That’s the obvious big target,” Miller told me. At the time, foreign terrorist attacks were at the top of people’s minds. “Now, for many, it’s civil war,” he said.
According to an analysis of FEMA data, some twenty million Americans are actively preparing for cataclysm—roughly twice as many as in 2017. Political violence, including the spectre of civil war, is one of the reasons. A recent study conducted by researchers at U.C. Davis concluded that one in three adults in the U.S., including up to half of Republicans, feel that violence is “usually or always justified” to advance certain political objectives (say, returning Trump to the White House). In May, Ray Dalio, the billionaire founder of Bridgewater Associates, one of the world’s largest hedge funds, told the Financial Times that he believed there was about a thirty-five-per-cent chance of civil war breaking out in America. “We are now on the brink,” Dalio said, noting that a modern civil war—though it might not involve muskets—would see the fracturing of states and widespread defiance of federal law. In June, Dalio upped his estimate to “uncomfortably more than 50 percent,” predicting “an existential battle of the hard right against the hard left in which you will have to pick a side and fight for it, or keep your head down, or flee.”
Fortitude Ranch has more than a thousand members of all political persuasions, including doctors, engineers, restaurant workers, pilots, and entrepreneurs. “I’m not some hard-core prepper survivalist,” George, a retired C.I.A. officer in Texas, who asked that I use only his first name, told me. “I don’t want to live without running water or air-conditioning or run around in the woods for long. But it’s like the old saying goes: When trouble is on the horizon, a wise man takes precautions. Civil war is a definite possibility.” A man named Pat, who works as a computer scientist in Colorado, agreed. “The potential for violence across the country scares us,” he told me. “Fortitude Ranch is insurance.”
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The Americans Prepping for a Second Civil War
Many now believe that the U.S. could descend into political violence. Some are joining survivalist communities, canning food—and buying guns.
