Certain hobbies set off warning bells

I remember when survivalists were predominately hippie types who feared a right-wing generated apocalypse - like corporatism collapsing the economy, or warmongers starting WW3. The back-to-nature ones learned self-sufficient organic farming, the tech ones bought nitrogen-filled plastic bins of grain, and they all grew weed. Then when rednecks joined the club it became more about homemade ammunition and defending the perimeter.

I think hippie 'survivalist' material can be foundbunder 'homesteading' more easily. Still a portion of exclusionary-supremacists and superstitious-dogmatics, but somewhat fewer in my experience. More sustainable growing techniques, with the guns chapter further back in the book. More mutual aid networking, less barrel frotting.
I clearly relate more to this first batch than the second one but for me it is about being able to survive in Nature no matter why. I do not fear a right-wing apocalypse either, I only want to survive no matter what happens.
- Good luck with surviving no matter what happens. Most of us are highly dependent on services we take for granted - reliable electricity and water, stores stocked with food, open roads, a monetary system, communications, nearby doctors, firefighters, police, etc. As in, "What have the Romans ever done for us?"
If you go far enough left or right, you end up in the same spot.
- If you insist on putting everything on a one dimensional scale, you come up with stupid, obviously false conclusions.
- Hitler was 🤏 this close to a classless, stateless, moneyless society. /s

Bushcrafting content has a fine line when it pushes over into doomsday prepper. I can get the ideas of having a bit of food/water stocked up for a normal emergency. But if you are preparing industrial quantities of things to survive for years in a bunker you should seek help.

"prepper" vs "Prepper" with a capital "P".

The first learns and practices actual useful skills -- gardening, food preservation, repairing their own things, etc. The later are dorks buying a ton of unnecessary shit shilled by right-wing influencers cosplaying as "entirely self-sufficient".
- Gardening, sewing, soldering, and communication are the most important doomsday skills
- Well if you just get a commercial freeze dryer, generator and alcohol fuel distillation setup you can be completely self sufficient!
  
  Freeze drying on a large scale takes a LOT of time. You need to be ready to treat food prep like a full time job for it to make serious financial sense.
  
  I would think other preservation methods are easier to go with really. Salt, dehydrate, smoke, pickle, fermemt.
  
  For many things, yes. Canning can be done for some things (although you want to be really sure about what you're doing; you can kill yourself pretty fast with botulism if you do it wrong), freezing is good for other things (although not great if you have power outages). If you're trying to live off the land, you do need to be aware that certain parasites are not adequately dealt with by salt curing, smoking, dehydration, or even freezing; feral pigs and bear both have trichinosis, and must be thoroughly cooked to be safe. In wild populations, the parasite has been demonstrated to be highly resistant to freezing, etc.
  
  Dried, etc. things should be vacuum sealed with desiccants and oxygen absorbers for maximum preservation. I test the e.g. apples that I've dried every so often (I live in an area with a lot of orchards; apples can be very cheap when you buy them by the bushel directly from the orchard), and as of this year, the apples I dried six years ago are still good.
  
  One thing that freeze drying can be very good for is complete meals. E.g., if you make a stock pot full of jambalaya, you can freeze dry it in individual portion sizes, vacuum seal it in 9mil mylar, and you've got a meal that should be good for 10+ years.
  
  For anyone that's seriously considering a freeze dryer, check this video out. Yeah, I still want one, but seriously, it can take a lot to make it practical. I'm not enamored of the control system that they use; a blended automatic and manual control system would probably work better than something that supposedly takes the guesswork out of it for you.
  
  I think I would preserve apples in the form of cider. Perhaps fortified with some apple brandy to help it last longer.
  
  But really isn't it kinda unnecessary to preserve most things for multiple years?
  
  Well, I hope it's not necessary. But you don't know until you actually do need to, and once you need enough for multiple years it's too late to start stockpiling.
I will point out that we're right now entering a time when basic foodstuffs are going to become very expensive, and a lot of day to day items are likely going to rise sharply in price, or become unavailable. Having industrial amounts of these day-to-day things is a hedge against that.
- Then buy grains, they already come in a form you can store long term. Honey, jam and tinned goods too.
  
  'Course, the good news about the reciprocal tariffs is that soybeans are gonna be very cheap domestically. You can make a very functional flour out of soybeans with a good grain mill/stone grinder, although you'll want to add gluten to it if you're going to try to make bread. And soy is very high in proteins (compared to most grain flour), so you can live off it when other protein sources are too expensive.

maybe the best part of being trans is that your trans friend group can buy a ranch in the mountains and stock up on guns and alpaca and you never get mistaken for a race war wisher

Guns and Alpacas, the two most precious resources in the world! We should combine them a a single element since an Alpaca without a gun is totally useless! /s
- Brings a new meaning to 'pack animal'

Man, I was really invested in that in like 2016 but in 2018 was the election of Bolsonaro. Some time before, during the election and until now every fucking content creator or community around this hobby became a cesspool of right wing dickheads worshipping this fascist.

As someone from a small town in the pacific northwest, it feels like they always have been. It was just a case of the quiet part not being said out loud or them masking it enough those with lower exposure didn't see it.

I drive a pickup, grew up hunting and fishing and I'm tall, pretty thick, tattooed all to hell and bearded... the amount of "hell yeah brother" followed by some vial, racist, homo/transphobic shit I have said to me is staggering. The moment of pushback has become a high for me. I'm almost baiting them from a conversation about tree stands and elk piss formulas into some fucked statement about trans athlete's just too feel something.

That said, it isn't all of us so I don't want to gate keep survivalism and general outdoorsiness. Always willing to teach a flytie, how to dig a shit hole and the easiest way to catch water with a tarp.
- One thing I get a trill from when I receive these kinds of comments is to act like I do not get what the person means so, as an exemple, they need to go from a veiled reference to "darker people" to an outright racist statement. Then, I keep on acting like I don't understand what they mean, This is often very funny although sad at the same time but having someone trying to explain their racist/*phobic joke while they realize how much they need to expose themselves is pretty fun to me.
  
  Heck yes friend. This is also a fantastic strategy. Likely the same perverse curiosity that makes Clint Eastwoods rants compelling in Gran Turino. Standing there making mental notes about what the hell that means but knowing its foul.
- Same boat here (PNW big bearded dude). I actually got handed a 'White Pride's card last week. Before I had the full beard nobody ever said racists shit to me unless it was accusatory. Now they think I'm on their side.
  
  Doesn't help that I'm into survivalism, permaculture, and off-grid living. I'm constantly fighting the algorithm that wants to feed me ultra conservative bullshit.
  
  The algorithm is insane for that crap. I'm in a band with a bunch of other 40 something dudes and the shit they get inntheor feeds is wild. I'm too paranoid to raw dog the Internet or have conventional social media so I miss most of the hateful crap. The screen shots they share in the group chat are wild.
  
  One of the guys owns a roofing business and that's likely the most toxic feed I've seen. Its a miracle he isn't fully maga-activated.

The prepper response to covid absolutely broke my heart. I already had an emergency pandemic kit good to go and my whole family in N95 masks from day 1 (in America). We had plenty of canned food and water. I thought, "This is it. We're ready for this." And then all the others sided with the fucking virus. 🤮😭

Dude. This. I grew up camping. I am into bushcraft, survival stuff too, and every interesting survival youtuber seems like a ticking time bomb, if not already openly right wing crazy.