Christian | Family Man | PhD, Cornell University | Author of Resilient Citizens | Localism | Homesteading | Army (views my own not DoD)
Washington State
Joined February 2021
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Feeling anxious, stressed, or out of control? It doesn't have to be that way.
Resilience is a mindset. Learn how others have seized their agency and how you can not just live - but thrive.
My new book is now available Resilient Citizens: The People, Perils, and Politics of Modern Preparedness.
Find out more at resilientcitizens.com
From war zones to wildfires, pandemics to power outages, the threats we face today seem bigger, scarier, and more unrelenting than ever before. Why, then, does society take a critical view of those who prepare for the worst while hoping for the best? Why do so many people write them off as crazy, conspiracy-minded “doomsday preppers”?
In Resilient Citizens, Army officer and disaster expert Dr. Chris Ellis challenges the myths, dismisses the fearmongering, and takes a much-needed, long-overdue scholarly look not just at prepper culture in America, but our overall social, physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual health. This isn’t another doomsday prepper guide or government-endorsed emergency brochure. It’s a deep dive into the people, perils, and politics of preparedness—from ranchers in the Rockies to policymakers globally—and a call to action for those who refuse to outsource their safety to luck or bureaucracy.
Unpacking thousands of hours of research, Dr. Ellis will help you—
§ Learn the traits and strategies of those best equipped to survive and thrive amid disaster.
§ Understand the psychological roadblocks that keep people stuck in denial or helplessness.
§ Discover how different belief systems, subcultures, and nations approach long-term resilience.
§ Debunk popular myths about “preppers” and discover the truth behind America’s growing culture of preparedness.
§ Examine the historical and political roots of America’s preparedness paradox.
§ Reveal the number one resilience item every household must own.
Whether you’re a concerned parent, a curious skeptic, or a seasoned survivalist, Resilient Citizens will challenge your assumptions and inspire you to think bigger, prepare smarter, and ensure your own survival in a chaotic world and uncertain future.
This was a nice (but intense) chat. A bit more global and macro in its scope than I usually focus on, so a good mental stretch session.
Of note, I appeared strictly in my private capacity.
Diesel prices are skyrocketing and a massive energy crisis is coming whether we like it or not. The Iran war is about to spiral out of control. I sit down with Active Duty U.S. Officer to break it all down
youtu.be/2j1FGKzfN7s?si=N1jI…
You can prepare your family and your neighborhood for shocks like these.
resilientcitizens.com/
Many moons ago, in the age of dragons, people would have to physically show up to a bank teller to withdraw money.
Crazy I know.
Yes, you could still commit fraud, but you had to put in some real leg work and not dial it in. On the plus side, you got your 10,000 steps a day.
Digital ID is going global. Bots are the new excuse.
US banks say they can't tell you from an AI agent inside your account.
Meanwhile, Sam Altman's World is selling banks an iris scan as "Proof of Human."
Same guy who sells the bots. xitter.cf/MadisonMills22/status/…
I’m sitting at a Naval clinic right now. All of the team leads gathered to start the week with the Sailor’s Creed.
WAGMI.
This is a positive disaster trend.
- You participate in a group (social cohesion).
- You put your body in a demanding situation (physical exposure).
- You're learning (intellectual stimulus).
- You're in a safe environment that still stimulates a fear response (emotional regulation learning).
All in all, you hit 4/5 domains of a human.
theguardian.com/world/2026/o…
Prediction:
You are going to hear senior politicians in various countries speak more about national resilience in the future.
A lot more.
The government is right to be thinking seriously about resilience and growth, because the pressures now building are significant.
We should not underestimate what is happening across the world right now.
There is a convergence of issues that will have global ramifications for some time to come.
• Strait of Hormuz challenged = trade reduced to a trickle
• Red Sea threat increasing = trade severely impacted
• Pipelines disrupted = alternative routes limited
• Conflict affecting the Black Sea = major grain corridor severely impacted
Together, these routes carry a significant proportion of the world’s oil, gas, fertiliser and grain.
The significance is not simply that each is under pressure. It is that these pressures compound one another.
Why does that matter?
Tighter oil and gas supplies mean higher energy costs. But the impact does not stop at the pump or the household energy bill. Energy feeds into transport, freight, manufacturing and the cost of producing almost everything else.
Fertiliser is part of the same chain. Ammonia is a critical input in nitrogen fertiliser. When its movement is disrupted, supply tightens and costs rise. If that pressure persists into planting seasons, farmers face higher input costs and greater pressure on future yields.
At the same time, continued disruption in the Black Sea constrains one of the world’s most important grain-export corridors. Russia and Ukraine together account for around a third of global wheat trade. Less reliable supply means greater pressure on global food prices.
These are not separate shocks. Energy affects fertiliser. Fertiliser affects food production. Energy and conflict affect shipping and freight. All of them ultimately feed through into the cost of the goods, food and energy people rely on every day.
That is why the cost-of-living implications matter — but there is a wider lesson too.
We cannot think about foreign policy, national security, energy security, food security and domestic economic policy as separate silos. They are interconnected parts of the same system.
That system is national resilience: our ability to absorb shocks abroad without allowing them to become crises at home.
It is going to be a tricky 12 months.
That’s why I’m confident our Labour Government will continue to do what it takes to make our country more resilient, protect working families across the UK and face these challenges together.
Like I was saying:
xitter.cf/unusual_whales/status/…
Dr. Chris Ellis retweeted
☣️‼️I’ve now been in contact w/current, highest level mil/intel/diplo/homeland security officials in biological threat arena and report w/authority that USG has all eyes on the plague outbreak in Russia and is not letting up. ☣️
Read BIOLOGICAL WAR: A SCENARIO. All of them have. Get informed. Stay informed.
🚨☣️BREAKING: Plague outbreak expands, Russia BSL-3 lab accident - FIVE hospitals now quarantined🚨☣️
The plague outbreak in Siberia, Russia has expanded w/5 hospitals now under QUARANTINE: Irkutsk Hospitals No. 1, No.3, No.10, Ivano-Matreninskaya Children's Hospital, and an unnamed maternity hospital (Lyudi Baikala news, Moscow Times).
Quarantine is NOT voluntary. Even in the U.S., quarantine is among the most extraordinary measures gov't can impose on American citizens who haven't been convicted, or even accused, of committing a crime. Quarantine means being forcibly confined and medically examined by law. U.S. quarantine can be imposed on anyone infected by a legally quarantinable disease listed below (this can change). One should assume Russia's quarantine protocols are even more severe. As of 2026, under Executive Order 14047, legally quarantinable diseases in the U.S. are:
■ Plague
■ Smallpox
■ Viral hemorrhagic fevers
■ Cholera
■ Diphtheria
■ Yellow fever
■ Infectious tuberculosis
■ Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)
■ Flu that can cause a pandemic
■ Measles
Photo: Russia’s RKhBZ defense troops perform nuclear, biological, and chemical defense training (w/permission from the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation) — from BIOLOGICAL WAR: A SCENARIO by Annie Jacobsen (Dutton, 2026).
ALT Russia’s RKhBZ defense troops perform nuclear, biological, and chemical defense training. (Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation), from BIOLOGICAL WAR: A SCENARIO by Annie Jacobsen (Dutton, 2026)
This is a good way to think about tiered responsibility in disaster planning.
🏠 How much of a home’s resilience is in a household’s hands?
🏛️ Governments shape planning
🏗️ Businesses invest in resilience
👨👩👧👦 Households prepare & act
🤝 Safer homes are a shared responsibility.
Take part ➡️ ow.ly/298s50ZTNGe
#ResilienceStartsAtHome #DRRDay
ALT Infographic showing disaster risk reduction as a shared responsibility among governments, households, and private sector with specific roles.
FORTRESS America is not a new concept. We are returning to the mean as a country and as a globe.
I trace the origins of Fortress America, its pinnacle, and it's fall in my book Resilient Citizens: The People, Perils, and Politics of Modern Preparedness.
The best way to understand where we are going is to know where we have been.
.@SECWAR “Today—at my direction—we are launching FORTRESS America—a national insurance policy for the American homeland.
FORTRESS stands for: Federal Operations for Resilience, Troop Resources, Energy, Supply, and Survivability.
And here is what FORTRESS calls for:
Every major military installation in America is going to generate its own power. Independent of the civilian grid. If an adversary takes down the grid—by cyberattack, by sabotage, by any means—our bases stay lit. Our aircraft keep flying. Our command centers never go dark.
We are bringing our critical supply chains home. The rare earths, the specialty metals, the semiconductors, the propellants—mined in America, refined in America, built in America, by American workers.”
I’ve been calling for this for years.
Bring on the microgrids and SMRs.
Now allow more food production on bases: orchards, livestock, bees. Resiliency is multi-dimensional.
.@SECWAR “Today—at my direction—we are launching FORTRESS America—a national insurance policy for the American homeland.
FORTRESS stands for: Federal Operations for Resilience, Troop Resources, Energy, Supply, and Survivability.
And here is what FORTRESS calls for:
Every major military installation in America is going to generate its own power. Independent of the civilian grid. If an adversary takes down the grid—by cyberattack, by sabotage, by any means—our bases stay lit. Our aircraft keep flying. Our command centers never go dark.
We are bringing our critical supply chains home. The rare earths, the specialty metals, the semiconductors, the propellants—mined in America, refined in America, built in America, by American workers.”
You can look at these charts like a hurricane forecast. Not all disasters telegraph where things are going.
Bonds do. Prepare accordingly.
Dr. Chris Ellis retweeted
Fintwit is rife with doomers and people with massive followings who do nothing but promote everything negatively.
If you're sick of this stuff, and want to listen to a legitimate expert who advises people at the top echelons of national security on matters of disaster preparedness, resilience, etc, follow @Prep4Disasters and listen to his interview with @DanielaCambone
youtube.com/watch?v=W9ME5fYO…
Lots of hot takes on AI.
@JOEBOTxyz looks at this philosophically with a dash of religion.
THE RACE TO "PACE AI" IS A RUSE
Reliable sources tell me Anthropic and OpenAI are working with the Department of Justice to hash out a coordinated "pacing the frontier" plan.
The legal issue is that cross-company coordination might break antitrust rules—even a voluntary "pacing" agreement that doesn't affect competitors.
Such "pacing" would actually buy time for stragglers like xAI and Meta to catch up. Frontier "pacing"— if voluntary—wouldn't impact the second-rate open source models at all.
Much of this "pacing" effort is in response to the viral AI Doom freak-out that started building with the Hugging Face hack and exploded with that pasty Anthropic "whistleblower" saying what everyone paying attention already knew:
The frontier AI execs believe their baby golems could one day come alive like some mutant brood in a subterranean lab, break containment, and launch an End of the World party that'd leave nothing but A-bomb craters and a surviving handful of human-robot symbiotes swimming in semi-animate oceans of nano swarm gray goo.
Well, that's what I envision every time Elon Musk says "radical abundance" anyway. If you have a better doom dream, let's hear it.
—
The current "pacing the frontier" effort has continuity with another ongoing DoJ deal going back to July. That deal would allow frontier companies—including Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google—to form an industry-led standards body. Adherence to these standards would be voluntary.
I have no doubt any of these companies would secure regulatory capture if they could, especially Anthropic.
Be that as it may, all these smooth-brained "COORDINATED ASTROTURFED PSY OP" conspiracy theories about "ONE WORLD EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM REGULATORY CAPTURE" triggered by "CYBERATTACK FALSE FLAGS" unleashed by the Antichrist are missing one important element:
What is actually happening at the DOJ right now: the avoidance of hard regulation.
Even with a "pacing" plan in place, there's every reason to believe the top dawgs at Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, xAI, and various upstarts—all given cover by the coordinated astroturfed e/acc psy op—will continue their shared mission to build digital God in a server rack.
Every ambitious man wants to be first. Even those "pacing" their maniacal mission to build God.
—
For that philosophical reason alone, it's prudent to view every frontier AI exec as you would a pagan priest whose gods are hostile to your bloodline.
Don't trust their motives. Never support their efforts. Disregard their cheerleaders and mouthpieces. Block them at every turn. Employ any legal way to bring them to heel.
Force transparency. Enforce accountability for harms. Impose outside evaluators. Criminalize involuntary data collection and surveillance. Ban their worst products at the state level. Ban the big ones on the federal level.
Ban AI in public classrooms.
Ban suicide bots for kids.
Ban goonbots for incels.
Ban AI slop from all platforms.
Halt mass surveillance.
Ban lethal autonomous weapons.
Halt the Greater Replacement.
Ban artificial superintelligence.
If ASI is not possible to build—and if a nuanced ban wouldn't affect your struggling start-up or your crappy open source AI running on basement GPUs—then why do you care if imaginary superintelligence is banned?
On the other hand...
If ASI is actually possible, why do you want to see it built?
Don't we have enough infernal gods without creating a new one who can conduct cyberattacks and drone strikes?
Ban it.
Ban any AI development and the deployment of any AI that decreases quality of life, reduces cognitive ability, or is designed to replace meaningful work.
Or, considering the difficulty of passing and enforcing such laws in the current political climate, just refuse to use their bots or buy into their bullshit propaganda.
Or maybe you'd rather carry water for these tech-adled megalomaniacs. You're free to parrot their paranoid, hypocritical, and obviously "coordinated astroturfed psy ops" all you want.
Outsource your mind.
Love the clanker.
Take the trode.
It's a free country. For now.
There is plenty of ink about how China is beating the US in the AI race and several other tech markers.
But when it comes to central bank and household gold purchases, it's mostly crickets.
Why is the American populace not told to compete with China via sound money?
zerohedge.com/precious-metal…
