44 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / MARCH 2020didn’t have to cook: oranges, grano-
la and almond milk, peanut butter
and jelly. I ate in my tent, and with
my hand-crank flashlight, I read
Rick Austin’s book. It didn’t take
more than twenty minutes; I fin-
ished pretty bummed out that I had
spent $35 on the thing. Though it
contains some good ideas, it suffers
the lack of editorial attention typi-
cal of self- published works, offering
only the vaguest recommendations,
with eccentric punctuation and ter-
rible photography, and it included
the only instance of overt racism
(putting aside the MAGA gear and
Confederate flags) that I saw all
weekend: a photo of the “zombie
hordes” that Rick Austin believes
will be swarming the land and steal-
ing his food during the apocalypse,
credited to the Associated Press, ac-
tually depicts desperate brown peo-
ple wading with their children to
dry land.
I thought back to something Jen-
sen had said at the anti-kidnapping
class: “As a soldier, though I’m a
Christian, I have to dehumanize
the people I’m fighting against.”
All day, I had been set back on my
heels by the survivalists’ suspicious
attitude toward others. You could
only treat suffering people as “zom-
bies” if you stripped them of all
their humanity.5.To be great is to be misunderstood.I
went back out into the dusk, sad
and lonely. The air was hazed
with smoke from campfires and
smelled of delicious hot food. The
campers had hooked up their
phones and speakers to electrical
outlets and were playing classic rock
while they cooked. Boxer dogs
seemed to be the favorite animals of
these survivalists. Little kids rode
along zip lines. The faint smell of
sewage came off the pond, and a tu-
lip tree by its edge was shedding yel-
low leaves. Older children jumped
off the dock; parents called for them
to come back to eat dinner.
It would all have been so ordinary
if it hadn’t been for the End Times
hanging like a sword over our heads.The first part of the night’s offi-
cial entertainment was the episode
of National Geographic’s Doomsday
Preppers that featured the Austins.
It was called “You Said It Was
Non-Lethal,” and in it Rick and
Jane describe their decision to flee
suburbia after their neighborhood’s
economic ruin—to the point that
some nearby single-family homes
were being shared by four and five
families and Jane was carjacked
while leaving work.
Watching the episode, I felt a little
hurt on behalf of the pair: the tone
of the show was im-
pressed—by the
preppers’ ingenuity
and the genius of
their great hidden
garden full of
food—but it was
also very clearly
poking fun at them.
Jane came across as
wild-eyed and man-
ic, showing off a hy-
gienic invention in
case toilet paper is
no longer available
in the future: a pump- action garden
sprayer filled with an herbal tisane
and called a “heinie hydrant.” Rick
and Jane were shown in goggles,
thick rubber gloves, and respirators,
making a Mace-like spray out of ex-
tremely hot peppers from their gar-
den; then weeping and spitting and
hacking when their protection
proved insufficient. At the end of the
episode, the couple was given a grade
of 89 out of 100 for preparedness and
a twenty-month initial survival time,
which, I think, made the onscreen
Rick a little sad. I don’t know wheth-
er the Austins had registered the rid-
icule in the way they had been de-
picted, though if they had, I have a
hard time understanding their
screening the episode for a group of
people who admired them.
Doomsday Preppers was followed
by a feature film: 2018’s Death of a
Nation, by Dinesh D’Souza, a work
whose promotional materials fea-
tured an image of Abraham Lincoln’s
face split with Donald Trump’s, the
man least like him in temperament
and policy ever to set foot in the
White House.The film’s premise is that, just as
Democrats worked against Lincoln,
they are now working to retard the
social progress represented by Don-
ald Trump. When we reached the
part presenting Adolf Hitler and the
Nazis as liberals—“this is done by
the do-gooders ... the people who
want to improve society”—I sat in
the viewing tent surrounded by an-
gry survivalists, swarmed by mosqui-
toes, and felt my grasp of reason and
history assaulted.
And as the spectacle proceeded, I
found language for the questions
that had been
growing in me all
day. What in the
world did right-
wing conspiracy
theories have to do
with preparing for
disaster? What was
the purpose of this
exhibition of base-
less propaganda? I
looked around me,
but the faces I saw
were rapt: Why did
it seem that I was
the only person who saw how in-
credibly stupid this film was?
My loneliness drifted into fear
when I imagined what would hap-
pen if my poker face slipped and the
preppers could see all the disdainful
liberal thoughts bouncing around in
my head.
At a certain point, something be-
gan to seem more wrong with the film
than merely its lies. The music was
pompous and loud, but the dramatiza-
tion of Hitler and Eva Braun’s suicides
took place with no explanation, as
though it were an old-time silent
movie. D’Souza was depicted onscreen
first during a reenactment of his child-
hood in India; then as the adult
D’Souza in New York City, speaking
gravely. This is when it became obvi-
ous that some of the strangeness of
the film was due to a technical prob-
lem: the spoken track was missing
entirely, and only the background
music was playing. D’Souza just
flapped his lips. This felt appropriate.
I left before the volunteers re-
solved these difficulties, trudging
with my windup flashlight through
the darkness to my campsite. I had