02.04.12

Monetizing the kooks

Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Extremism, Imminent Catastrophe at 4:48 pm by George Smith

Reality television is the perfect place for monetizing kooks. In this case it’s National Geographic’s Doomsday Preppers series on what I’ve called End Timers. I caught a commercial and won’t be tuning in. (It begins airing Tuesday.) Topics common to the blog have already shown all one needs to know.

The central focus, of course, is the collapse of the power grid, the end of American civilization and the people determined to be ready for it. One of the reasons for this belief is, of course, because it has been published ad nauseam in the news over the last decade.

Whether it’s an electromagnetic pulse from a barge-launched a-bomb, a cyberattack on the national infrastructure, or man-made plagues and totally unrealistic terror onslaughts, it’s been pounded into gullible heads, often several times a week, as probable, easy to do and often imminent.

The prepper movement shows all the collateral damage it has wrought on the suggestible and unbalanced.

Conspicuously, this increasingly nuts demographic is almost entirely white, far right, heartland, fundie Christian religious and breast-beatingly patriotic.

It is not a surprise that cable television feels this niche large enough to monetize. Death cults/apocalypse believers have always been part of the American experience. However, until social media, micro-casting and the Internet there wasn’t an easy way to cynically gather all of them up into a nice exploitative package for advertising.

Up until the last decade small fringe book publishers catering solely to the militias and violent survivalist far right used to be the only place for it.

Not any more.

A quick look at YouTube shows you the bottomless pit of it.

Watch too many of them and you’re deeply discouraged.

While all the individuals in the videos appear painfully sincere with the aim being to give advice to help survive the travails said to be coming, all they’re really successful at is showing how idiosyncratic insanity can be mainstreamed as entertainment. They leak intolerance like a fine sweat. Eternal damnation for the lazy, the unprepared, all the outsiders. is a constant current.

Ready your Bugout place for when the SHTF.

Readers may remember Rosa Klebb the Patriot Nurse
from this recent post on Newt Gingrich, electromagnetic pulse doom and the attraction to End Timers.

Sadly, she disables embedding after places like this link to her videos.

So I can only link directly to this one on the societal death waves coming when the grid collapses.

“The first wave of death will be those with chronic disease,” she informs. A second wave of death will overtake the more healthy and it will be caused by diseases and lack of sanitation incubated and spread by the weak and sick. I didn’t last long enough to get to any more waves.

In another video the prepper survivors are advised to keep a book of hymns and prayers on hand because music helps one through the hard times. A dulcimer, an instrument from the Appalachian hill country, is recommended. It served the poor in the olden days and will again.

So will banjos. How do I know? I saw Deliverance.

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