[Vision2020] The last big frontier

[Kenneth Marcy]

 From The Economist magazine, August 6th-12th 2016 pages 24-25

The last big frontier

*http://tinyurl.com/ja49bvv

A movement of staunch conservatives and doomsday-watchers to the inland 
north-west is quietly gaining steam
Aug 6th 2016 | BONNERS FERRY, COEUR D’ALENE AND SANDPOINT, IDAHO | From 
the print edition

*

ASKED by an out-of-stater where the nearest shooting range is, Patrick 
Leavitt, an affable gunsmith at Riverman Gun Works in Coeur d’Alene, 
says: “This is Idaho—you can shoot pretty much anywhere away from 
buildings.” That is one reason why the sparsely populated state is 
attracting a growing number of “political refugees” keen to slip free 
from bureaucrats in America’s liberal states, says James Wesley, Rawles 
(yes, with a comma), an author of bestselling survivalist novels. In a 
widely read manifesto posted in 2011 on his survivalblog.com, Mr Rawles, 
a former army intelligence officer, urged libertarian-leaning Christians 
and Jews to move to Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and a strip of eastern 
Oregon and Washington states, a haven he called the “American Redoubt”.

Thousands of families have answered the call, moving to what Mr Rawles 
calls America’s last big frontier and most easily defendable terrain. 
Were hordes of thirsty, hungry, panicked Americans to stream out of 
cities after, say, the collapse of the national grid, few looters would 
reach the mostly mountainous, forested and, in winter, bitterly cold 
Redoubt. Big cities are too far away. But the movement is driven by more 
than doomsday “redoubters”, eager to homestead on land with lots of 
water, fish, and big game nearby. The idea is also to bring in enough 
strongly conservative voters to keep out the regulatory creep smothering 
liberty in places like California, a state many redoubters disdainfully 
refer to as “the C-word”.

Estimates of the numbers moving into the Redoubt are sketchy, partly 
because many seek a low profile. Mr Rawles himself will not reveal which 
state he chose, not wanting to be overrun when “everything hits the 
fan”. But Chris Walsh of Revolutionary Realty says growing demand has 
turned into such a “massive upwelling” that he now sells about 140 
properties a year in the north-western part of the Redoubt, its heart. 
To manage, Mr Walsh, a pilot, keeps several vehicles at landing strips 
to which he flies clients from his base near Coeur d’Alene.

Many seek properties served not with municipal water but with a well or 
stream, ideally both, just in case. More than nine out of every ten 
Revolutionary Realty clients either buy a home off the grid or plan to 
sever the connection and instead use firewood, propane and solar panels, 
often storing the photovoltaic power in big forklift batteries bought 
second-hand. They also plan to educate their children at home. The 
remoter land preferred by lots of “off-the-gridders” is often cheap. 
Revolutionary Realty sells sizeable plots for as little as $30,000. 
After that, settlers can mostly build as they please.

Lance Etche, a Floridian, recently moved his family into the Redoubt 
after the writings of Mr Rawles stirred in him “the old mountain-man 
independence spirit—take care of yourself and don’t complain.” He chose 
a plot near Canada outside Bonners Ferry, Idaho, cleared an area with a 
view, put down gravel, “and they dropped the thing [a so-called “skid 
house”, transported by lorry] right on top of it”, he says—no permit 
required.

Some newcomers are Democrats keen to get back to nature, grow organic 
food or, in Oregon and Washington, benefit from permissive marijuana 
laws. Not all conservatives dislike this as much as Bonny Dolly, a 
Bonners Ferry woman in her 60s who says: “We don’t want liberals, that’s 
for sure,” and carries a .45-calibre handgun “because they don’t make a 
.46”. But lefties who move in and hope to finance tighter regulations 
with higher taxes often get the cold shoulder. Mr Walsh weeds out 
lefties from the start, politely declining to show them property, noting 
that they wouldn’t fit in anyway. This discrimination is legal, he says, 
because political factions, unlike race or sexual orientation, are not 
legally protected classes.

A red dawn

Todd Savage, who runs Survival Retreat Consulting in Sandpoint, Idaho, 
works with the more usual sort of client: political migrants who rail 
against “morally corrupt” nanny government elsewhere. He does a brisk 
business helping them set up their food-producing fortress-homesteads. 
Staff train clients in defensive landscaping, how to repel an assault on 
their property with firearms, and the erection of structures “hardened” 
to withstand forced entry and chemical, biological, radiological or 
explosive attack.

Very few redoubters, however, wish to secede from the United States. The 
Confederacy’s attempt fared badly, notes Mr Rawles. He did, however, 
exclude the politically conservative but mostly flat Dakotas from the 
Redoubt because mechanised units could manoeuvre easily there. The same 
went for swathes of Utah, a state also left out because it has little water.

MORE of the story at the link: *http://tinyurl.com/ja49bvv
*

*
Ken

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