In The Post-Epstein World, You Always Have 10 Days to Get Ready

If you don’t watch City Prepping, you should. Their main guy, Kris, delivers some of the sanest breakdowns of world events on the internet. You don’t even have to call yourself a prepper to appreciate his insights.

In his latest video, Kris warns us against taking the ceasefire with Iran at face value. And if you’ve kept up with the news, you already know some of the things he covers. Namely, none of the headlines add up to a reassuring path to peace. Instead, ships remain stranded outside the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s long-term proposal has zero chance of impressing American politicians, not because they’re unreasonable points, but because it amounts to a dismantling of the U.S. empire, and the stewards of that empire are never going to sign off on it.

This ceasefire looks like the ceasefires we usually see:

It’s a chance to refuel and rearm.

It’s a breather.

So if that’s the logic, if the U.S. is using the ceasefire to restock and prepare, it stands to reason the rest of us should be doing the same thing, in whatever ways we can, and doing our best to help others do the same.

Meanwhile, Iran has been dropping some devastating propaganda in the form of Lego videos. I’ve just learned about these, and whew…

It burns (in a good way):

Iran has become the District 13 of the post-Epstein world. In many ways, they always were. They’re the ones standing up to the global ring of human traffickers, the predator class, they’re the ones shouting that line:

“If we burn, you burn with us!”

I’ve wondered what to call this world we live in now, what kind of name gives justice to everything we’re seeing and feeling right now.

I think “post-Epstein” does the job.

In a post-Epstein world, Epstein is dead. The networks he built are being exposed, and the public is learning the truth about who was always running the world and ruining their lives. His ideology lives on, but it’s flailing. And that’s not to minimize the threat it still poses. These men, and the women who protect them for personal gain, are never more dangerous than when they’re cornered.

That’s when they can do the most damage.

They’ll torch us to save themselves.

In the past, they had their reputations. Like Homelander, they’ve always cared about their image, more than they want to admit. Take away their image, reveal them as the monsters they always were, and watch them become a thousand times more destructive, because they have nothing left.

There’s only one thing worse than a Homelander.

A Homelander with nothing left to lose.

They’re going to stop at nothing to protect themselves, their money, and their power now. Consider this: If the world already knows you’re a depraved pedophile rapist and child murderer, why wouldn’t you just go ahead and start threatening to destroy entire civilizations? Why wouldn’t you just go ahead and rig the elections?

What’s holding you back?

Nothing…

That’s what we’re dealing with now.

As many of my readers know, I’m a prepper. I’m not the kind of prepper who digs bunkers and sits around waiting for nuclear war. I’m the kind of prepper who learns how to build food dehydrators.

It’s easy to laugh off the preppers and survivalists, but here’s the thing. The last year in particular has validated us. We wish it hadn’t.

Many of us wish we’d been wrong.

I’ve lost count of the times I’ve found great comfort in second-guessing myself, only to watch the other boot drop and then thank myself for taking the time and making the sacrifices to prepare us a little. Life would’ve been so much easier if I could’ve just kept teaching my classes, publishing my articles in obscure little journals, and raising my family in a little house in the midwest.

That’s what I wanted.

Not this.

That’s the future most of us wanted, a life we didn’t have to prep through, a government that used our tax money to take care of us and our neighbors, instead of using it to subsidize oil companies, build massive data centers, prop up weapons manufacturers, and enrich child traffickers.

Now we’re in the middle of a war with our version of District 13, the country that our leaders decided to make our enemy, a war we didn’t want, but didn’t do much to stop either, and it’s converging with the climate crisis to bring real pain to Americans, even more than we’ve already experienced.

So when Kris from City Prepping tells you take to heed, to use the next 10 days to prepare in whatever way you can, I would listen.

I’ve written my own guide explaining what we can do to get ready. I’m not selling it. You can get the whole thing for free. I’ve put it under a creative commons license. You can take it anywhere to have it bound and printed. And I’m not writing these pieces just to plug my guide. I’ve been writing about these topics for years, and now I finally have one coherent piece of work that just lays out the basics someone can do if they want to try and get through this, if they want a little stability. I’m not the only one with a guide, but mine will work just as well. I’m going to keep working on my guide over the months and years, but what’s there is enough.

It’s harder to prep now than it was a few years ago. In a few months, it’s going to be harder to prep than it is now.

That’s how life works.

Of course, maybe you’ve noticed something about all the prepper videos, all the posts, all the articles, all the warnings. They always speak with a sense of urgency. They always tell you that you’ve got 10 days to get ready.

When the pandemic started back in 2020, we had ten days to get ready. When new variants popped up, we had ten days to get ready. When Russia invaded Ukraine, we had ten days to get ready. When news of bird flu started hitting mainstream news, we had ten days to get ready. When Trump won reelection, we had ten days to get ready. When he upended the world economy with tariffs, we had ten days to get ready. Now, once, again, we have ten days to get ready.

We’ve gone through this a few times.

I’m sure you’re skeptical.

You might be thinking that it’s a scam, because maybe you didn’t prepare, or you did prepare, and you’re still here.

There’s something in prepping circles called the paradox of preparedness. If you prepare for a disaster, and you survive, your brain plays a little trick on you. It tells you that it wasn’t that bad. You overreacted.

So next time, you don’t take the warnings as seriously.

You don’t prepare as much.

The paradox of preparedness has a corollary:

Survivorship bias.

The ones that survive each wave of disaster and upheaval don’t think about the ones who didn’t. We look at the planes that land, the pilots who make it back, but we don’t see the planes that crashed, the ones that got shot down.

Because of that, we develop a warped sense of what it means to survive. We start to consider ourselves invulnerable, and we grow complacent.

We put armor on the wrong parts of the plane.

But what if you survived simply because you were lucky?

What if you were saved by TACO?

Trump Always Chickens Out?

Every time that happens, every time we squeak through, countless others perish. We don’t see them parish. They simply “fall by the wayside.” They sink through the cracks, and nobody stops to help them. Nobody learns the lesson. (Almost nobody. There’s you, right? You’re learning. So am I.)

Look at the last five years. We know a lot of us didn’t make it. The numbers don’t lie. They’re just being hidden from us, especially now.

For many of them, it wasn’t their fault. They tried. It was just too much. We live in a system that grinds people up like cattle.

But for many, they had a choice. They chose not to prepare. They didn’t take warnings seriously. They succumbed to survivorship bias and the paradox of preparedness. They could’ve acted. They could’ve taken simple precautions. They decided not to do that, and they paid for it, with everything. Even worse, they hurt others. They made other people perish, with their own complacency.

Nobody among the Cassandra crowd will judge you if you can’t see everything or take every precaution. We should all just be trying. If we just tried, if we just acknowledged the warnings, things would go much better. As with every crisis, the one we’re dealing with now didn’t start this year. It didn’t start with this administration, it goes back years and years, with voices trying to warn us, and being ignored, not just by MAGA, but by a much larger majority. The truth tellers weren’t just ignored. They were shouted down. They were ridiculed and belittled. As we excoriate the monsters, as we indulge in every latest salacious update, we should also look at ourselves and ask the harder questions about why we didn’t listen.

And of course, if you were among the truth tellers, you get a little break on that front. But here’s the hard thing for you: The hard thing is going to be resisting the “I told you so” moments, and doing your best to help everyone learn the lessons without rubbing their faces in them, because that won’t help.

It will feel good, but it won’t help.

So if there’s any ultimate lesson here in the post-Epstein world, it’s not just that we’re ruled by monsters and mobsters, it’s that we ignored the voices who were trying to tell us that the whole time, and now we’re paying for it.

The monsters have already eaten half the world.

They’re trying to devour the rest.

The greatest prep of all isn’t measured in how many food buckets you have. It’s not measured in how much kale you can grow. It’s not measured in how many gallons of gas you can store, or how many guns you own.

The greatest prep of all is measured in how good you are at listening. It’s measured in how much uncomfortable truth you can tolerate. It’s measured in how long you can sit with unpleasant facts, and make some kind of plan, even if it’s not a plan you like very much. It’s measured in how much you can assess and accept your own shortcomings and vulnerabilities. It’s measured in how much you can acknowledge your own responsibility for the current state of the world. It’s measured in how much you can look at your own behavior, examine your own thinking, and not fall into the easy, comforting habit of simply pointing your finger at the bad guys, and blaming everything on them, even if most of that is true.

So that’s the deal. You always have 10 days to get ready.

Until one day, you don’t.