This weekly column features news stories and event announcements from around the American Redoubt region. (Idaho, Montana, eastern Oregon, eastern Washington, and Wyoming.) Much of the region is also more commonly known as The Inland Northwest. We also mention companies of interest to preppers and survivalists that are located in the American Redoubt region. Today, we look at another tarbrush smear against Redoubters in general and JWR in particular. (See the Region-Wide section.)
Region-Wide
Bradley Onishi (an outspoken “former Christian Nationalist” and “ex-evangelical minister”) published a book early in 2023 titled Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism–and What Comes Next.
JWR’s Comments: Needless to say, I do not recommend his book, since it is surely incredibly slanted. There is a full chapter in the book about The American Redoubt movement. Onishi’s X-Twitter page is replete with zingers such as: “The White in “White Evangelical” has always been the most important part. It drives the ship. The car says Christian on the side, but the engine runs on racism, xenophobia, and nationalism.” Notably, Onishi is also the co-host of a podcast called Straight White American Jesus.
I’ve previously warned SurvivalBlog readers about Onishi. He runs with an interesting crowd. Onishi was a guest speaker at the National Atheist Convention.
In an interview with WNYC’s nationally syndicated The Takeaway, Onishi mischaracterized me. Onishi said in the interview:
“The American Redoubt is a movement that began about a decade ago, that really signifies Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana Eastern Washington and Eastern Oregon. In 2011, the writer and survivalist James Wesley Rawles dubbed that region the American Redoubt because redoubt means refuge or stronghold. He said this is the last part of the country where we can gather and we can create a Christian separatist society and prepare for the collapse of the United States as we know it, the coming civil war, and the opportunity to rebuild the nation in our own image.”
For the record, I have never made a call to “rebuild the nation in our own image”. Onishi, like so many other liberal Redoubt Haters, conveniently leaves out the fact that I’m an outspoken anti-racist and that from the very beginning, I created the American Redoubt movement to seek conservative Christians and Jews to relocate to the region. These glaring omissions are nothing short of character assassination. Onishi also took another swipe of his tar brush when he said in the same interview:
“If we take Idaho it is something like 93% white and so when Rawles calls for a Christian separatist movement, he’s doing so in the context where 9 out of 10 people in the region where he is talking about are white.”
“Context”??? Here, Bradley Onishi is using an equivocating weasel word that borders on slander. He seems to be calling me a racist without doing so directly. For the record: I was attracted to Idaho because of its low population density, not for its racial demographics!
An aside: Onishi’s publisher, Broadleaf Books, prides itself as follows: “We are committed to publishing authors who bring thoughtful perspective to explorations in religion, spirituality, social justice, culture, and personal growth with credibility and authenticity.” Broadleaf Books is “an imprint of the adult nonfiction imprint of 1517 Media, the publishing house of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). The oh-so-fringey and declining ECLA denomination has plenty of detractors and has inspired more than a million people to quit its ranks. It is perhaps the fastest-shrinking denomination in America. The ELCA is radically liberal, and even pays for abortions for any reason for those in their insurance plan, funded by church offering dollars! It has been reported: “The ELCA ordains practicing homosexuals and now also transgender pastors.” They are so far left-wing, in fact, that they’ve been chided by some liberal Lutheran church leaders. Here is a quote from an article about the ECLA “The once 5 million member denomination is now 3.7 million and growing smaller every month.”Continue reading“SurvivalBlog’s News From The American Redoubt”
