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From The Economist magazine, August 6th-12th 2016 pages 24-25<br>
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The last big frontier<br>
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<b><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://tinyurl.com/ja49bvv">http://tinyurl.com/ja49bvv</a> <br>
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A movement of staunch conservatives and doomsday-watchers to the
inland north-west is quietly gaining steam<br>
Aug 6th 2016 | BONNERS FERRY, COEUR D’ALENE AND SANDPOINT, IDAHO |
From the print edition<br>
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<p>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”.</p>
<p>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”.<br>
</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<p class="xhead">A red dawn</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.<br>
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<p>MORE of the story at the link: <b><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://tinyurl.com/ja49bvv">http://tinyurl.com/ja49bvv</a> <br>
</b></p>
<p><b><br>
Ken<br>
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</b></p>
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