Panicked liberals are prepping for Donald Trump's presidency with trips to the doctor & stocking up unusual items
Liberals fearful of Donald Trump's return to the White House are furiously stockpiling essentials and more unusual items including Plan B and machetes.
Americans have been prepping for decades but reasons for hoarding non-perishable foods, water and other supplies have changed drastically over time.
In the Cold War-era, some Americans built underground bunkers that they could live in for years in case of a nuclear strike from the Soviet Union.
Preppers have since become somewhat of a stereotype, with many thinking of them as quite conservative and conspiracy-minded.
Right-wing personalities like Alex Jones and televangelist Jim Bakker have warned their audiences for years of an impending government collapse and have urged them to prepare. Their clarion calls were the loudest during Barack Obama's presidency.
Though Jones' platform is still tied up in bankruptcy auctioning, both men have been extraordinarily successful at selling their listeners things like storable food, radios, camping gear and water filtration systems.
But now that Democrats have been swept out of power, liberals are expressing their own fears about a GOP trifecta with Trump at the very top. Possible efforts to further roll back things like abortion and contraception are at the top of their minds.
That's why Juli Gittinger, a religious-studies professor at Georgia College, has stocked up on Plan B pills.
A family tests out a Cold-war era nuclear bomb blast bunker in May 1955 that contains survival gear, food and water
Right-wing personalities like Alex Jones and televangelist Jim Bakker have been financially successful selling doomsday prep items to their respective audiences
However, there is a smaller contingent of liberals that like to prep too. Juli Gittinger, pictured, is one of them and started doing it after Trump was elected in 2016
Gittinger began prepping after Trump was elected president the first time in 2016, she told The Atlantic.
She said she has enough water in her house to last 30 days and enough food to last her 100 days. She also has iodine pills to protect herself from radiation and a machete in the event she has to cut her way through the bushes of rural Georgia to make an escape.
Interestingly, the Plan B pills she bought aren't for herself, she said. Rather they're for young women who might need it in case elected Republicans at the state and federal level decide to restrict access to birth control.
So far, Republicans haven't come out and said they want to ban birth control but they did block a Democrat bill last summer that would have codified a right to contraception.
Gittinger isn't the only liberal-minded prepper grabbing Plan B for others.
Buying supplies not just yourself and your family but for the surrounding community is a common sentiment among the more than 4,500 members of the Leftist Preppers subreddit.
In a post made to the subreddit days after Trump won the presidency, someone asked what items are on the top of people's prepper lists.
'My plan is to prep not just for myself but others. I'm buying Plan B. We're looking into what other kinds of birth control you can buy in bulk. This is not necessary for my family but if it ceases to exist we want to have it available for others,' one person replied.
Another person wrote: 'I loaded up on plan b. Not for myself, I am beyond those concerns, but for the young women in my life that might need it.'
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Some people on the subreddit recommended people make sure their passport is up to date in case they feel its necessary to leave the country
Others talked about buying fluoride toothpaste and getting all their necessary immunizations for themselves and their kids in advance of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. possibly become the Health Secretary
Other things on people's lists were over-the-counter medicines, soil, seeds and bug repellant.
Some recommended people make sure their passport is up to date in case they feel its necessary to leave the country.
There was also talk about buying fluoride toothpaste and getting all their necessary immunizations for themselves and their kids.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump's pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, has cast doubt on putting fluoride in drinking water to keep people's teeth healthy and the effectiveness of various vaccines including the covid jab.
Zoe Higgins, one of the moderators of the subreddit, told The Atlantic that she has a month's worth of freeze-dried spaghetti, beef stroganoff, chicken alfredo, and other meals.
If that's not enough, she also has flashlights, headlamps, waterproof matches, fire starters, water-purification tablets, camping stoves and propane tanks.
Genevra Hsu, another subreddit moderator, said she actually began prepping in 2013 after learning survivalist techniques from her father.
Now living in Virginia, Hsu has six months of meals stowed away and does her own pressure-canning, dehydrating, and freezing. Her social media profiles show her dehydrating and freezing powdered eggs in case of a bird flu epidemic.
Zoe Higgins, who goes by 'Leftist Prepper' on TikTok, made her own guide on what it takes to be prepared for a Trump presidency
On TikTok, Higgins goes by 'Leftist Prepper' and she made her own guide on what she believes it takes to truly be prepared for a Trump presidency.
Higgins said it's important to be personally prepared with your own stockpile. For her, that's especially true because she lives in New Orleans, a city that is often in the path of hurricanes, most notably Katrina in 2005.
But like many of her fellow Redditors have said, she suggested that survival in a disaster scenario is much more likely when you connect with people in your town or neighborhood.
She recommended people join a mutual aid group wherever they live and said if their neighborhood doesn't have one, 'I would be starting one.'
Nafeez Ahmed, an author who has written about global crises, told the Guardian in 2016 that surviving after society collapses isn't as simple as living off cans of beans.
'There's a survivalist response which is "I'm going to hide away all by myself,"' Ahmed said. 'You’re probably not going to survive like that – you have to cooperate with other people.'
'The more people who band together, the more likely you are to be able to rebuild something like a society. So I’d say share those baked beans,' he added.
Michael Mills, a senior lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University in the United Kingdom, studies doomsday prepping and estimated that about 15 percent of preppers in the US are liberals.
He added that there are likely millions of preppers all with a range of different political beliefs.
Michael Mills, a senior lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University in the United Kingdom, says preppers of all political bents 'lack of faith in political progress' and have 'skepticism towards political leadership'
The thing that drives all preppers, left or right, to conserve resources and have backup plans is a lack of trust in government, according to Mills.
'There’s this common thread that I think unites preppers of all political persuasions, which is a lack of faith in political progress as a whole and a skepticism towards political leadership,' he said.
Americans on both sides of the political aisle have record low trust in Congress, big business and the presidency. What liberal and conservative preppers appear disagree on are what the true threats to society are.
Liberals are worried about climate change causing more natural disasters, while conservatives are more often fretting about the left running amok.
Mikhail Merkurieff, a prepper who's made a living selling survival gear he invents told Business Insider in 2019: 'We kind of joke, like, man, we have to get a Democrat back in the White House and sales will go back up.'
Mikhail Merkurieff, pictured, shows off one of his survival products, which is billed as a heated survival shelter
The most concrete worries prep-happy liberals have about Trump are economic in nature and largely center on his plans to dramatically increase tariffs.
Trump has proposed a widespread 10 percent tariff on global imports to raise government revenue and has threatened China with tariffs as high as 60 percent if they don't do more to reduce the amount of fentanyl flowing into the United States through Mexico.
Since tariffs increase the price of imports, many have rushed to buy consumer goods that typically come from outside the country or have components that are assembled or sourced in foreign countries.
These include vehicles, auto parts, technology and appliances. Higgins said she recently bought a new car out of an abundance of caution.
A December survey of 2000 Americans from creditcards.com found that a third of people were buying more because they feared tariffs.
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