Blood moon rising: Doomsday scenarios find ready believers on America’s religious right

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An image used to promote the recent Survivalcon event in Boise, Idaho, where speakers laid out a range of doomsday scenarios. Graphic: Survivalcon

Published: 12:26pm, 11 Feb 2016Updated: 12:26pm, 11 Feb 2016

In the Republican presidential debate last Saturday, Ted Cruz laid out a dark scenario to demonstrate the need for a beefed-up missile defence system – the same one Rick Santorum and Ben Carson had raised before him in earlier debates.

He said that North Korea was working on a satellite, which could spell doom for America: “As it would orbit around the Earth, and as it got over the United States, they would detonate that nuclear weapon and set off what’s called an EMP, an electromagnetic pulse which could take down the entire electrical grid on the Eastern seaboard, potentially killing millions.”

The very day before Cruz spoke, in the tatty, cavernous but crowded Expo Idaho Centre in Boise, speaker and entrepreneur Ben Gilmore laid out a much more elaborate version of the same catastrophe.

Speaking to a rapt audience at prepper expo SurvivalCon , Gilmore pointed to a projected map showing much of the North American continent swathed in a deep red.

David D'Eugenio, founder of the US HomeSafety Academy which gives classes and instructions on what to do and how to prepare for catastrophic events, is surrounded by generators, communication radios, food and other equipment in his trailer that will be used as a self-contained survival station in the event of a catasptrophe. Photo: Reuters

“An EMP bomb 300 miles (480km) up gets all of the United States, and parts of Mexico and Canada. This is the worst-case scenario, and it is the most probable because currently the military model is that if we are struck by a nuclear bomb we are supposed to absorb it.”

The apocalyptic prediction was thus spiced with a factoid that has long exercised millennial thinkers on the right like Joel Skousen – Bill Clinton’s change to the United States’s deterrent posture at the end of the cold war.