“We are really good at finding what’s wrong with each other,” says author and podcaster Margaret Killjoy. “We really need to challenge ourselves to be ready to let people be better.” In this episode of “Movement Memos,” Killjoy talks with host Kelly Hayes about preparedness, collective survival, and the organizing lessons we need in these times.

Music by Son Monarcas, Curved Mirror, Pulsed & David Celeste

Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.

Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about solidarity, organizing, and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Today, we are talking about preparedness, community defense, protest, and how we can move through these disastrous times. We’ll be hearing from Margaret Killjoy, whose newsletter, Birds Before the Storm, is a favorite of mine. Margaret is a transfeminine author, podcaster, and musician based in the mountains of Appalachia. She is the host of the radical history podcast “Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff” and co-host of the preparedness podcast “Live Like the World is Dying.” She is the author of The Sapling Cage, Escape From Incel Island!, The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion, and many other books. She is also the principal songwriter for the feminist black metal band Feminazgûl.

In the weeks following the 2024 presidential election, a refrain from Margaret’s newsletter echoed across social media: “Deescalate all conflict that isn’t with the enemy.” At a time when many people were at each other’s throats about how Donald Trump got reelected, and about how various forces on the left have failed each other, not everyone was ready to hear those words, but for many of us, Margaret’s message was essential. Today, we’re going to talk about deescalation, when it’s called for, and what this moment demands of us.

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[musical interlude]

KH: Margaret Killjoy, welcome to “Movement Memos.”

Margaret Killjoy: Thanks for having me.

KH: How are you doing today?

MK: Today, I am good, but obviously it is a very up-and-down time to be a person in the United States.

KH: Yes, and I know the question, ‘How are you doing” can be a weird and awkward one in these times. Sometimes, people just look at me like, “Are you serious?” and I totally get where they’re coming from. But you know, I think too many people don’t get asked that question, in any given week, by someone who really welcomes an honest answer. And I think we all need to have those moments where, if we want to, we can talk about what’s good or rant about what’s terrible, and it’s all completely welcome, so I keep asking.

MK: No, it is, it’s a good question for us to ask earnestly of each other right now in particular. I don’t know what your social circles are like, but a lot of what happens on my phone is people checking in and being like, “No, really? How are you today?” Not because I’m in particular… that makes me sound like anyway, whatever. Yeah.

KH: Well, I am glad that you’re doing well today and so glad you’re here. Can you take a moment to introduce yourself and tell the audience a bit about the work you do?

MK: Yeah. My name is Margaret Killjoy. I am an author and a podcaster and a musician, and I am really lucky that I get to do a couple different things for a living. I write fiction is one of my main things, but I also, I podcast professionally and that’s kind of nice, as you might be aware. I read history books for a living, for a podcast called “Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff,” just looking for all the people in history when they’re confronted with terrible things, learn how to do good things. I also write. I write science fiction and fantasy and just try and write about the kinds of worlds that I like to escape into.

KH: Well, we could all use some fantasy worlds to escape into right now, and as I mentioned before we hit record, I’ve really appreciated the insights you’ve shared in your newsletter over the past year, and especially since the election.

MK: Thank you. The newsletter has been really interesting. It’s taken off recently and I started it off thinking, “Oh, I’m going to write a lot about a lot of topics,” and I write a lot about the strategic value of hope and how to avoid despair, but that wasn’t the main thing I was doing. Then slowly as the political landscape started to transform, it became more and more important. I write a weekly pep talk to myself that goes to whoever wants it. It’s more or less what happens right now.

KH: Well, I really appreciate your exploration of hope and I think those insights are really needed right now. Something else that you talk about, in the newsletter and in your podcast, is preparedness. We are living in unpredictable times, and I think the pandemic gave many of us a jolt, in terms of realizing just how unprepared we were for disastrous events. Now, with Trump sowing even greater destabilization, on a landscape where catastrophes are a steady occurrence, we all need to think about preparedness. In your writing and podcasting, you talk about preparedness as a community-oriented practice, which I really appreciate. Can you talk about how your approach to preparedness differs from the hyperindividualistic prepper culture some of our listeners may be familiar with, and how individual preparedness can aid community preparedness?

MK: Yeah, this is one of my favorite questions because it’s the kind of thing that started off as this almost hypothetical position, because I became interested in preparedness a while ago, and I spent most of my young adult life traveling to be sort of… I didn’t have a fixed home and I lived in a van and I traveled around to do a lot of activism and just sort of see the world. So on some level, preparedness was just always part of life when you don’t really have much in the way of resources, so you always need to make sure you have a little bit of food on you and things like that. Then I started, as it felt like the political system and the economic system of the United States started to feel more precarious, I started finding myself doing things like putting buckets of beans and rice and whatever collective punk house I was living in, whereas no one else in the house really understood why I was doing it.

There’s been this divide, the prepper community has only very recently kind of opened up demographically away from center-right and far right, usually middle-aged white men who just want to collect guns and fill a bunker full of beans and rice and things like that — with the goal of shooting anyone who comes to take it in times of crisis, which is nonsensical and so immediately and obviously nonsensical as a survival strategy that most people therefore end up dismissing preparedness, or preppers at all. If you talk to people who grew up in societies that weren’t quite as stable as the United States was through the past several decades, they know that a level of preparedness is just part of life. Overall, I started seeing more and more I would say anarchist or leftist attempts to deal with disaster because most preparedness isn’t really actually for the zombies or the end of the world or whatever.

It’s for disasters, it’s for natural disasters, it’s for interruptions in the supply chains and things like that. Most of the response was this beautiful mutual aid-focused community disaster response. I also find that really fascinating, but yet the podcast that I do, one of my other podcasts, I have a podcast called “Live Like the World is Dying” and I pitch it as individual and community preparedness. It’s about both because I’m tired of seeing them as a dichotomy. There’s obviously more we can do together than as individuals, but that still doesn’t mean there isn’t a point in having those beans and rice sitting in your basement or wherever. The most immediate way I can illustrate this relates to Hurricane Helene that hit Western North Carolina where I had been living for a very long time. I had recently moved away from, and I’m living elsewhere in Appalachia and I have a basement full of prepper stuff.

I have solar generators and I have food and I have water jugs and all of these things. And on some level I was like, “I wonder why I do this?” My current disaster plan is to go drive elsewhere where more people are if a crisis comes to me,” and just because where I’m at. But then, when a bunch of my friends were suddenly without power and without water and without a certain way to get food, I was like, “Well, I have a van and I have a basement full of prepper stuff.” And so I connected up with a mutual aid group and drove into the disaster area and distributed the supplies that I brought down and then used my van to drive around and help people get stuff. I’m not saying this to be like, “And then I saved the day.” I didn’t, but I did get water and food to some of my specific friends who needed it.

Then, I talked to people and I did a couple podcast episodes based on this. And one of my friends who lived there, the point of this story is that he worked at this bar and immediately after the disaster he was like, “Well, we lost power, so we better go cook all of the food that’s in the freezer.” The bar had a kitchen. He just goes and does it. He was able to do it because of his own individual preparedness. Because people would come up and be like, “Hey, do you need anything? Do you need water?” Then they would kind of look at him and he’d be like, “No, wait, you already have all this stuff, don’t you?” “He is like an old punk and a prepper, and he is like, “Yeah, no, yeah, I’m all right.” Because of the fact that he didn’t have to make sure his household was taken care of, because it already was, he was then immediately able to go into the taking-care-of-other-people position.

And a lot of the immediate response to Hurricane Helene came from people who had a high degree of self-sufficiency — and maybe not… none of us really should aim to have total self-sufficiency, but you might have access to something like there was someone with a well and a pickup truck who was like, well, I have a big water tank you can put on the back of a pickup truck, and just was like, “Well, I’m going to fill up this with water and drive down and figure out who needs water.” Then he had all the tools to set up 50-gallon drums to make sure that he could fill up water wherever he went.

It wasn’t that he was a prepper, he was just a guy who had a farm, so he was able to do that. I just immediately, I’m just like, “No, the point of being individually prepared,” I know is a long tangent about this, “but the point of being individually prepared is it positions you so well to help take care of other people, by the whole put on your own mask before you help the person next to you or whatever.”

KH: I really appreciate that insight, because I think, too often, people think about community needs and individual needs as though they exist in opposition to each other. Like, I am either taking a bubble bath and completely focused on my own comfort, or I am martyring myself for the people. We really do need to understand that, yes, the community comes first, and also, I am part of the community, so caring for me is part of caring for the community, and part of caring for whatever movement I’m a part of.

I’m also thinking about the differences between what it means to do this kind of preparedness work when you have a farm, or you have a basement, and when you don’t. I think about this a lot as someone who lives in a one bedroom apartment in Chicago, whose closets are over-stuffed with coats and whatnot. What are your thoughts around preparedness for those of us who don’t have a lot of space?

MK: Yeah, I think that people get lost looking at the super preppers, even from a lefty perspective. People shouldn’t try to imitate the way that I live. At a certain point, it almost just becomes a hobby for me. The thing is that most of the time you are preparing for three hours to three days to maybe three weeks of interruption in services. The things that you prepare for the first three days, the first 10 extra cans of food you put in your pantry are infinitely more valuable to you than the 590th to the 600th can. Someone in an urban area, I think mostly it’s just a matter of you look at what the threats that are facing the area you’re in. One of the main things, especially for people in urban areas, but also people in rural areas is like a “go-bag.” This is no larger than a backpack, a small day bag you put in your front closet or under your bed or whatever. I know space can be very limited. I’ve helped friends brainstorm through this and sometimes it means carving out space for a couple five-gallon buckets in their closet that they previously had things already there and they chose to get rid of those things.

I understand how tight space can be, but that first little bit is what matters. I would say what I hope is that most people have three days worth of food, three days worth of water and three days worth of backup power for their cell phones, which is just a couple power bricks that are the size of cell phones. I think those will be so much more important than the big stuff. Although, the big stuff’s fun too.

KH: I used to have a go-bag and I have to admit, I have cannibalized it over the years when I’ve needed stuff.

MK: Oh yeah.

KH: I really need to rebuild my go-bag. So, as a refresher for me, and for our listeners, what belongs in a go-bag?

MK: It’s so easy to cannibalize your go-bags. One of my tricks is that I put in protein bars that I don’t like because I’m both addicted to sugar and I eat a lot of protein as a vegan, so I’m always looking for the like, “Ah, I need a protein,” and I don’t feel like cooking. I run and go eat the protein bars out of my go-bag way too quickly. I have to put the ones that I think are terrible. I feel you on cannibalizing it. What I’ve done is I’ve kind of tried to build up a habit about once a month, I’ll kind of pull everything out and look at it and be like, “Oh, I really need to remember to put socks back in here. I totally took some out the other day when I didn’t feel like doing laundry.”

In a go-bag, it’s important to think of a go-bag, not as the way that right-wing prepper culture has made people think about go-bags, it’s like you need a hatchet, and a saw and probably some skinned deer already in there or something for some reason. Most people don’t need a go-bag to go live in the woods. That is not what most people, even me, I live in the woods, that’s not what my go-bag is. Instead, a go-bag is: What would I need if I was driving somewhere and an ice storm came and I had to pull off [to] the side of the road and sleep in my car rather than drive through the ice storm? In that case, you probably want a hat, you probably want some socks. You probably want enough calories that you’re not going to be hangry sleeping. A couple bars of food or whatever. You’re going to want medications. You’re going to want that you already take or whatever, you’re going to want over-the-counter medications.

I basically… I see it as a hygiene kit, a first aid kit and a survival kit are the things that go in a go-bag, plus enough sort of stuff to make your life okay. You might need it if there’s a fire and you need to evacuate and it has copies of your important documents, digital copies or physical........

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