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 preparing for decades, but the reasons for hoarding nonperishable foods, water, and other necessities have changed dramatically over time.
During the Cold War, some Americans built underground bunkers where they could live for years in case of a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union.
Preppers have since become somewhat of a stereotype, with many considering them to be quite conservative and conspiracy-minded.
Right-wing personalities like Alex Jones and televangelist Jim Bakker have been warning their audiences for years about an impending government collapse and urging them to prepare. Their clarion call was loudest during Barack Obama's presidency.
Although Jones' platform is still involved in bankruptcy auctions, both men have been extremely successful at selling things to their listeners, such as food that can be stored, radios, camping gear, and water filtration systems.
But now that Democrats have been swept from power, liberals are expressing their own fears of a Republican Party trifecta with Trump at the very top. Possible efforts to further roll back issues like abortion and contraception are at the top of their minds.
That's why Juli Gittinger, professor of religious studies at Georgia College, has stocked up on Plan B pills.
A family tests a Cold War atomic bomb bunker containing survival equipment, food and water in May 1955
Right-wing personalities like Alex Jones and televangelist Jim Bakker have been financially successful by selling doomsday prep items to their respective audiences
However, there is a smaller contingent of liberals who also like to prepare. Juli Gittinger, pictured, is one of them and started it after Trump was elected in 2016
Gittinger started preparing after Trump was elected president for the first time in 2016, she told The Atlantic.
She said she has enough water at home for 30 days and enough food for 100 days. She also has iodine pills to protect herself from radiation and a machete in case she has to cut her way through the bushes of rural Georgia to escape.
Interestingly enough, the Plan B pills she bought are not for herself, she said. Rather, they are aimed at young women who may need it in case elected Republicans at the state and federal level decide to restrict access to contraception.
So far, Republicans have not come out and said they want to ban contraception, but last summer they blocked a Democratic bill that would have codified the right to contraception.
Gittinger isn't the only liberal-minded prepper to grab Plan B for others.
Buying necessities not only for yourself and your family, but also for the surrounding community, is a common sentiment among the more than 4,500 members of the Leftist Preppers subreddit.
In a post on the subreddit days after Trump became president, someone asked what items are at the top of people's prepper lists.
“My plan is to prepare not only for myself, but for others as well. I buy plan B. We investigate what other forms of birth control you can buy in bulk. This is not necessary for my family, but if it ceases to exist, we want to keep it available for others,” one person replied.
Another person wrote: 'I loaded plan b. Not for myself, I am outside those concerns, but for the young women in my life who may need it.'
Some people on the subreddit are recommending that people make sure their passports are up to date in case they need to leave the country
Others talked about buying fluoride toothpaste and getting all their necessary immunizations for themselves and their children before Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could possibly become Minister of Health.
Other things on people's list included over-the-counter medications, soil, seeds and insect repellent.
Some recommended people make sure their passports are up to date in case they need to leave the country.
There was also talk about purchasing fluoride toothpaste and getting all necessary vaccinations for themselves and their children.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump's pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, has raised doubts about the use of fluoride in drinking water to keep people's teeth healthy and about the effectiveness of various vaccines , including the Covid shot.
Zoe Higgins, one of the subreddit's moderators, 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 started preparing in 2013 after learning survival techniques from her father.
Now living in Virginia, Hsu has six months' worth of meals stored away and does her own pressure canning, drying 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 the name 'Leftist Prepper' on TikTok, has created her own guide to what it takes to be prepared for a Trump presidency
On TikTok, Higgins is called “Leftist Prepper” and she has created her own guide on what she believes it will take to be truly prepared for a Trump presidency.
Higgins said it's important to be personally prepared with your own supplies. This is especially true for her because she lives in New Orleans, a city that often experiences hurricanes, most notably Katrina in 2005.
But as many of her fellow Redditors have said, she suggested that survival in a disaster scenario is much more likely if you connect with people in your city or neighborhood.
She recommended people join a mutual aid group no matter where they live, saying that if their neighborhood doesn't have one, “I would start one.”
Nafeez Ahmed, an author who has written about global crises, told the Guardian in 2016 that surviving after society collapses is not as easy as living off cans of beans.
“There's a survival response that goes, 'I'm going to hide all by myself,'” Ahmed said. 'You probably won't survive like that, you have to work together with other people.'
'The more people unite, the greater the chance that you can rebuild something like a society. So I say share those baked beans,” he added.
Michael Mills, a senior lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University in Britain, who researches doomsday prep, estimates that about 15 percent of preppers in the U.S. are liberals.
He added that there are probably millions of preppers, all with a range of different political beliefs.
Michael Mills, senior lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University in the UK, says preppers of all political persuasions have 'a lack of confidence in political progress' and are 'skeptical of political leadership'
What drives all preppers, left or right, to conserve resources and have backup plans is a lack of trust in government, Mills said.
“There is a 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 toward political leadership,” he said.
Americans on both sides of the political spectrum have historically low confidence in Congress, big business and the presidency. What liberal and conservative preppers don't seem to agree on is what the real threats to society are.
Liberals worry that climate change will cause more natural disasters, while conservatives are more likely to worry about the left running amok.
Mikhail Merkurieff, a prepper who makes a living selling survival gear he invents, told Business Insider in 2019, “We're kidding, man, we've got 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 concerns prep-happy liberals have about Trump are economic and largely center on his plans to dramatically raise tariffs.
Trump has proposed a widespread 10 percent tariff on global imports to boost government revenues and has threatened China with tariffs of up to 60 percent if they don't do more to reduce the amount of fentanyl flowing through Mexico to the United States.
As tariffs raise the price of imports, many have rushed to buy consumer goods that typically come from outside the country or contain components assembled or sourced abroad.
These include vehicles, auto parts, technology and appliances. Higgins said she recently bought a new car out of an abundance of caution.
A survey of 2,000 Americans from redactie.com in December found that a third of people bought more because they were afraid of rates.
