60 Minutes - 11/6/2022: Angry in America, Buses from the Border, Ready or Not

Episode Date: November 7, 2022

On this edition of “60 Minutes,” in the final days before the midterm elections, Republicans are attacking Democrats, and Democrats are returning fire. A lot of this is happening on social media. Bill Whitaker explores the impact social media is having on American life. Anderson Cooper examines how New York City has been dealing with the influx of migrants arriving on buses from Texas, and some of the glaring systemic problems the crisis exposed. No longer the sole province of militants and conspiracy theorists, prepping has gone mainstream. Jon Wertheim travels throughout the US and meets with preppers who are trying to ensure they are prepared for any disaster situation that may arise. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

With midterm elections in just two days, America is in a very angry moment. Republicans attack Democrats, and Democrats return fire. Social media is a showcase of our anger, and it's everywhere, including America's schools. As a professor, what do you do? I just avoid controversial topics. Really? Yes. Isn't that what college is for?

It used to be. This summer, buses largely paid for by the state of Texas and the city of El Paso started arriving in Manhattan, filled with thousands of Venezuelans who hoped to be granted asylum. But they were stepping into a city still struggling with COVID, crime, and an unstable economy, and an asylum system that's desperately backlogged and broken. Is this a Democratic failure, a Republican administration failure? It's both.

When the sun rises on America, post next major crisis, the moneyed class will find comfort here. 60 Minutes was shown a decommissioned nuclear missile silo, with 16,000-pound doors and luxury apartments buried deep underground. The end of the world as we know it, they'll feel fine sitting poolside. Unless they'd prefer to go rock climbing. The survival condo has armed guards at the gate and a five-year supply of stored food. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories and more tonight on 60 Minutes.

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Terms and conditions apply. Visit bmo.com slash viporter to learn more. With midterm elections in just two days, America is in a very angry moment. Republicans attack Democrats, and Democrats return fire. Social media is a showcase of our anger. An analysis by the New York Times this fall found that online use of the phrase civil war has exploded. Now, leading voices in academia and tech are saying that rather than simply reflecting the polarization in society, platforms like Facebook and Twitter are helping to create it. 60 Minutes first met Tristan Harris in 2017.

The co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology argued that social media platforms were addicting us to maximize profit. Now he's warning they are generating billions by making us angry. The more moral outrageous language you use, the more inflammatory language, contemptuous language, the more indignation you use, the more it will get shared. So we are being rewarded for being division entrepreneurs. The better you are at innovating a new way to be divisive, we will pay you in more likes, followers, and retweets. In his 2020 documentary, The Social Dilemma, Tristan Harris made the case that social media platforms have hijacked our attention. Now, he cites a new study of Twitter showing that attacking political opponents is almost guaranteed to draw attention.

TRISTAN HARRIS, Each individual term referring to your political out-group increased the odds of that post being retweeted or reshared by 67%. Your out group being your opponents, people on the other side. Yeah, exactly. These platforms, are they not just reflecting who we are and what we think and the divisions that are already there? They're supercharging a hundred or a thousand times to one the worst parts of ourselves. Here's an example from the day the Department of Justice released a photo showing classified documents in former President Donald

Trump's Florida home. A tweet highlighting a straight news story on the subject received about 2,000 likes. But a tweet from a Republican congresswoman calling Trump's opponents dumbasses was liked 10 times as much. And a tweet from the left labeling Donald Trump a traitor was liked 20 times more. The straight news story, you know, got retweeted a couple of times. Right. The angry stories, exponentially moreentially more truths. Exactly. Exactly. And Harris says anger skews the political landscape. Why is it that the world knows more about Marjorie Taylor Greene than they know about

all the other hundreds of congressional candidates? It's because the enraging, inflammatory stuff goes the most viral. We are tribal creatures who love to do us versus them, and we're now learning to coexist with a technology that tries to force that down our throat, that tries to make us angry all the time. Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist and professor at NYU's Stern School of Business. In studying social media platforms' drive to keep us glued to our devices and to their ads, he traces our current troubles to the invention of the like, share, and retweet features a decade ago. These changes in the technology that made everything much more viral and explosive,

it's as though it gave everybody a dart gun. It's like it gave everybody the ability to complain, attack, criticize anyone at any time in a very short space with no need for evidence, no accountability. Haidt says the people most likely to fire their social media dart guns are those on the far right and the far left. What percentage of the population are they? It's about seven or eight percent on each side. That's it? Yeah, that's right.

So the extremes have been handed the power to dominate, even though they are fewer in number. That's right, exactly. The moderate majority, Haidt says, is either exhausted or intimidated. It's what I call structural stupidity. That is, you have very smart people, highly educated, highly intelligent, but you put them in a situation in which dissent is punished severely, and what happens? They go silent. And when the moderates or when anyone is afraid to question the dominant view, the organization, the institution gets stupid. Take the case of Ronald Sullivan,

a professor at Harvard Law School who was also the faculty dean of Winthrop House, an undergraduate residence hall. In January 2019, Sullivan joined Harvey Weinstein's sexual assault defense team under the principle that every accused criminal is entitled to a robust defense. So at Harvard, some students objected. Now, great, let them object to Ron Sullivan defending Harvey Weinstein. That's what you should do in school. You should make an argument, and then he can answer back. That would be great, but that's not what happened.

What happened was that a Harvard undergrad demanded in a Facebook post that Sullivan step down as dean, calling his defense of Weinstein deeply trauma-inducing for sexual assault victims. The students use a discourse, a dialogue, of he is dangerous. His presence near me is threatening to me. Within a few months, Harvard responded by removing Sullivan as dean of the residence hall.

It's not just professors on the firing line. In a recent survey, more than half of college students said they're afraid to express views on political and social issues in the classroom. As a professor, what do you do? I just avoid controversial topics. Really? Yes. Isn't that what college is for? It used to be.

Tristan Harris says the intimidation and anger cut across political lines. I think the deepest, like, perverse thing about these platforms is that they have captured the meaning of social participation in society. That they've colonized and privatized that social participation means I'm on TikTok, I'm on Instagram, I'm on Facebook. And competition is fierce among those platforms for our attention and for the advertising dollars that attention generates. Facebook isn't saying, let me make design decisions that are going to strengthen democracy. They're saying, how do I evolve the product in a direction that will get more engagement from people? Because if I don't do that, I'm just going to lose to the companies that do. Companies like TikTok.

Companies like TikTok. And TikTok has become like one of the most popular apps around the entire world. TikTok has done that by serving up an addictive mix of short videos. Some are silly. Others, overtly political. It's owned by a Chinese company called ByteDance. And Harris says the version that's served to Chinese consumers, called Douyin, is very different from the one available in the West. In their version of TikTok, if you're under 14 years old, they show you science experiments

you can do at home, museum exhibits, patriotism videos, and educational videos. And they also limit it to only 40 minutes per day. Now, they don't ship that version of TikTok to the rest of the world. So it's almost like they recognize that technology is influencing kids' development, and they make their domestic version, a spinach version of TikTok, while they ship the opium version to the rest of the world.

The version served to the West has kids hooked for hours at a time. The impact, Harris says, is predictable. There's a survey of preteens in the U.S. and China asking, what is the most aspirational career that you want to have? In the U.S., the number one was influencer. Social media influencer. And in China, the number one was astronaut. Again, you allow those two societies to play out for a few generations,

I can tell you what your world is going to look like. TikTok tells us it gives American users tools to limit screen time, but those tools are entirely voluntary, and national security concerns have triggered new calls this past week for TikTok to be banned in the U.S. Twitter points out that it asks users to think twice before sharing potentially harmful posts. But within days of buying Twitter, Elon Musk tweeted a conspiracy theory about the attack on Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband. It was later deleted. And Facebook says it has cut the overall amount of political content that its 240 million American users see. Monica Bickert is its head of content policy. Most people on Facebook don't want to see political content.

They are following what's happening in the lives of their family and friends and sharing the moments from their lives. And Bickert says Facebook does take steps to downplay the angriest posts. Can you find angry political content online? You can. Can you walk into the average family's Thanksgiving dinner and hear people having an angry political conversation? You can. Tristan Harris says that all the social media platforms are making those conversations even more heated. What I think there's been a failure to recognize

is the direct conflict between an engagement-for-profit business model and what's good for democracy. Another way you could say it is that the business model is to ruin Thanksgiving dinner. We are as divided as I can remember in my lifetime. Yeah. A lot of people will say, well, hold on a second. Partisanship and division, we've had that in many times throughout history. Always. Always. That's true. Also, has partisanship in television and radio pre-existed social media? Yes. Have we ever wired up the most powerful artificial intelligence in the world,

pointed at your brainstem, to show you the most enraging content on a daily basis, and the longer you scroll, the more you get? We have never done that before. Facebook's Monica Bickard insists it's just wrong to blame it for America's anger. Also, if we look at who's becoming more polarized in the United States, the greatest increase is among people over the age of 65. And they are the least likely to be using social media.

Many people watching us will say, well, I don't use social media. Why should I care about this? But we're all downstream from social media affecting television, affecting radio, affecting journalism. More and more of journalism is about covering the outrage exchange of what happened on Twitter. Harris believes the best path to reform would be stricter government regulation of social media platforms, or at least a requirement that they be more transparent. Facebook will tell you that they're all about transparency now. That's not convincing.

They publish reports that they define what the metrics are, and it's like grading your own homework. Harris has launched an online course which aims to give people working in tech the tools to push for reform from within. And what can an individual user do? Jonathan Haidt says simply refuse to be gladiators in the coliseum of social media. You can't win a war on social media. Just don't engage. Don't engage in the public battles because that's just feeding the beast. You don't mean disengage from the political process. You mean just disengage from these platforms?

Yes. When public discourse was moved into the middle of the Roman Colosseum, I'm saying disengage from that. Walk out of the Colosseum and still be politically active. Tristan Harris says real change may have to be forced in court. I think we have to do with social media what happened with Big Tobacco. What stopped Big Tobacco was that the attorneys general in different states actually went after them. The attorneys general in Big Tobacco had an enormous role to play in litigating that there was harms to people and their families. Is that what it's going to take with social media companies?

Yes. And we're seeing attorneys general move already one step in that direction. Attorneys general in at least eight states are coordinating a nationwide investigation of social media platforms. We now know that there's all these harms in social media products designed for engagement. We've done it before. We did it with designed for engagement. We've done it before. We did it with seatbelts. We've done it with big tobacco. We've taken lead out of gasoline.

We have made these changes once we recognize that certain products were toxic for us. We can do it again. Sometimes historic events suck. But what shouldn't suck is learning about history. I do that through storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling podcast chronicling the epic story of America, decade by decade. Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building,

the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck. Available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. For months, buses from the U.S.-Mexico border carrying tens of thousands of men, women, and children from Central and South America have been arriving in New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. They were organized by the Republican governors of Texas and Arizona and the Democratic mayor of El Paso, and paid for mostly by taxpayers. Greg Abbott, Texas' governor, said the buses would give liberal sanctuary cities a taste of what his state has had to deal with for years. Many of those coming to New York were Venezuelans, fleeing poverty, violence, and authoritarian rule and hoping to apply for asylum. But the process can take years, and for much of that time they aren't allowed to work.

Caring for these new arrivals has been a big challenge, and it's drawn attention to a long-standing and bipartisan failure to fix the nation's broken asylum system. When the buses began arriving at New York City's Port Authority terminal from Texas without warning in August, city officials had to scramble. On some days, as many as eight to ten buses rolled in, filled with men and women carrying children but no luggage. Last month, we met an engineer, a taxi driver, some college students, and construction workers. They were welcomed by Spanish-speaking volunteers from local non-profit groups who gave them water and food and donated winter coats. Standing nearby, Letiz Gomez was crying.

She told volunteers she'd been separated from her husband and 18-year-old son by border officials in Texas. Her 7-year-old daughter was with her. To get to the U.S., like many Venezuelans, they'd made their way through 7 Latin American countries and a perilous stretch of jungle. It was very difficult, because in the jungle we ran out of food and we ran out of water. And a child was shot. There were a lot of dead people.

This is my first time emigrating, and I did not know humans were capable of so much evil. How were you treated when you crossed the border in the U.S.? Well, you can interpret my silence. You can interpret my silence. You can interpret my silence. I didn't like being separated from my son. Gomez told us she was thankful for the kindness volunteers at Port Authority had shown her. They'd even given her daughter a doll.

Thank you for treating us well. It's been a while since we were treated well. Within an hour, the volunteers had found her son at a homeless shelter in Manhattan and brought him to Port Authority to reunite with his mother and sister. Lettice Gomez later found her husband, too. Her family now lives in one of 58 hotels the city has turned into emergency shelters at a cost of about $200 a room per night. Unsure how many people would ultimately come and how much it would cost to provide them with food, shelter, medical care and other services, New York's Mayor Eric Adams declared a state of emergency last month.

We are in a crisis situation. This past week, Adams told us more than 22,000 migrants have arrived in the city so far. This is a city of, what, 8 million people. Why would the arrival of 22,000 new people be such an emergency? We're a city of 8 million people that just came through the pandemic. Many of our residents lost their jobs. They lost homes. We already had crises that we were navigating and dealing with. Governor Abbott said that the buses would bring the reality of the crisis of the southern border to liberal cities. And it has done that, hasn't it? No, I disagree with that. He created this humanitarian crisis by his human hands, his actions.

There was nothing that prevented him from communicating with our team of saying, how do we coordinate this so we don't overburden another municipality? His argument would be, well, we don't know when migrants are going to cross the border illegally, so why shouldn't these other cities get a taste of that? Okay, is his fight with the national policy or is this fight with New Yorkers? It is a stark reminder that the system is broken, is it not? Yes. And the system has been broken. We have kicked this can down the road.

Democrats, Republicans in Congress, nobody has clean hands on fixing this at this point. More than 7 million people have fled the political, social, and economic chaos in Venezuela so far. It's the second largest refugee crisis in the world after Ukraine. 187,000 Venezuelans who crossed the border from Mexico into the United States last year have been allowed to stay here while they apply for asylum. But the process now takes years. More than three-quarters of a million people from all over the world are already in line ahead of them, waiting for an asylum hearing or a final decision. Many more are waiting just for an opportunity to apply.

The asylum system has collapsed, yeah. Teresa Cardinal Brown, a former immigration policy advisor in the Bush and Obama administrations, is now a managing director at the Bipartisan Policy Center, which tries to find common ground on major national issues. There are, you know, millions of people arriving to our southern border who are trying to seek protection, trying to avail themselves of our laws. And we just don't have the personnel, the resources, the infrastructure, or the right processes to manage what's happening there well right now. Do you have a sense of how long it is?

Somebody who's arriving just now at the Port Authority bus terminal in New York, how long it's going to be before they actually have an asylum hearing? On average, people who are not detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement might wait three to five years. Three to five years. Are they allowed to work during that time? No. Once you've formally filed your asylum claim in immigration court, 180 days later, then you can apply for work authorization. So it could be, you know, four years, four and a half years before you can ask for work authorization. In the meantime, Brown says, asylum seekers find themselves in limbo. They're here, but they can't legally work.

We don't come here to be a burden to this country. I come to work and push ahead. Edward and Maria, who met in college in Venezuela, asked us not to use their last names out of concern for their relatives back home. It took them six weeks this summer to get to the United States with their nine-year-old son and one-year-old daughter. They're now living in a hotel in the Bronx that was turned into an emergency shelter. But without work permits, they're struggling. I found a job at a supermarket. I worked for three days, and he didn't give me, he didn't pay me nothing. I lost my time.

You got taken advantage of. My fear is, if I go to complain, he calls the police on me. And I thought, no, they'll deport me. And that was my fear. So I left it like that. Like many migrants we spoke with, Edward and Maria no longer have their Venezuelan passports, ID cards, or birth certificates. They say they were told to hand them over to U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents in Texas and never got them back. Well, they put it in a folder. They said,

whenever you go to court, you can ask for them there. That's interesting. Teresa Cardinal Brown says U.S. Customs and Border Protection regulations are clear. All documents must be returned unless they're fraudulent. We interviewed 16 migrants who arrived in New York by bus from Texas. All but four said they had important documents taken and not returned. And volunteers, caseworkers, and lawyers who work with the migrants also told us the problem is widespread. In a statement, U.S. Customs and Border Protection said it was reviewing its policies and practices to ensure that documents are returned to the migrant absent a security or law enforcement reason.

So 90 divided by 9? One bright spot for many migrant families has been the New York City public school system, which in a period of three months enrolled about 7,000 new students, most of whom don't speak English. Ten-year-old Cesar Ramborgis now goes to PS 145 in Manhattan. His family made the long journey from Venezuela to Mexico and then crossed the treacherous Rio Grande River into Texas. Do you remember what it was like coming here?

Was it scary? Yes, he says. What was scary? When my mom almost drowned in a river. And you saw that happen? Yes. What are some of the things that go into different bins? The principal at PS 145, Natalia Russo, says she's been doing her best to help Cesar and the other new students adjust. She does some students' laundry at her home and has made sure they have school uniforms, supplies, and help getting into after-school programs. So what do you say to other families who see what's being done for these new kids?

My answer to that is that this is a humanitarian crisis. These folks don't speak the language. They're not part of this culture yet. We just want the children to feel safe, not only physically but emotionally. We'll do whatever it takes. I am the judge of the asylum class of the United States of America. Cesar and other children of asylum seekers will likely be fluent in English by the time their parents have their asylum cases ruled on by a judge. And if they fail to make their case,

they and their kids could face deportation. How tough is it to make a case that you should get asylum? It's very tough. It's very tough. The legal requirement is that you have to have been persecuted or have a well-founded fear of persecution. So if somebody says, look, I'm coming here because I want a better life for my children... That doesn't qualify for asylum.

So most of the people who are showing up at the Port Authority bus terminal saying that they want to seek asylum when they can get in front of a judge, most of them will not actually be granted asylum. I can't say that for sure. What I can say is that overall asylum rates are about 30 percent. Venezuelans tend to have a much higher asylum rate because of what's happening in Venezuela. In the past few weeks, the number of buses from the border arriving in New York has decreased significantly. That's because the Biden administration announced it was creating a legal

pathway for 24,000 Venezuelan asylum seekers to enter the U.S. if they had sponsors. But it also began expelling Venezuelans to Mexico if they'd crossed the border illegally. They basically went back to a policy that was in place, put in place by the Trump administration, which allows for Venezuelans to be sent back to Mexico and not apply for asylum here in the United States? I think that the national politics is well over my head on determining what we're doing nationally.

Do you think people who come to this country and want to seek asylum should be able to work while they're here waiting? Yes, I do. Doesn't that encourage more and more people just to come? No, I don't. I don't think it creates a problem. What we should be asking is why is it taking so long? We should let people know right away, based on a preliminary review, you cannot get an asylum here in the country.

And then those who are eligible and reach a minimum criteria, we can put it on a faster track. The bipartisan Border Solutions Act, introduced in Congress, would make that possible by adding more immigration judges and asylum officers and building four new processing centers along the southern border, where the government could determine whether migrants have a credible fear of persecution before they're allowed to stay in the U.S. Teresa Cardinal Brown, the former policy advisor in two administrations, says she'd like to believe Congress will finally do something to fix the problem, but she's skeptical.

For 30 years, they haven't passed really any substantive change to any of our immigration laws. Is this a Democratic failure, a Republican administration failure? It's both. At some point, they've got to decide that fixing it is better and necessary, more so than using it to try to win the next election. When does fast grocery delivery through Instacart matter most?

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If you hear the term survivalist and it conjures images of militants and conspiracy theorists residing on the fringes and on compounds armed to the teeth, well, it's time to reset your doomsday clock. A worldwide community of preppers, those who stockpile goods and skill up for extreme catastrophes, is girding less for the end of days than for a disaster that calls for taking cover. A climate emergency, civil unrest, the possibility of a dirty bomb. To say nothing of a global pandemic that suddenly shuts down the world. It was COVID that turned abstract, apocalyptic scenarios into a reality. Modern preppers come at it from all angles and for all kinds of reasons. We went high

and low talking to a few of the millions of Americans who have joined the movement. We're literally going over the edge of the mountain right now. Bradley Garrett led our crew down a narrow trail near his home in Big Bear Lake, California. When I moved here, one of my first off-road adventures was to figure out how to get off this mountain without using the highway, and that's what we're doing right now. Where are we going? Ten miles an hour? Nine. A former university professor, Garrett wrote a book two years ago about prepping, then became a convert himself. Our country doesn't have the infrastructure anymore to be able to deal with emergencies in a meaningful way. Behind the wheel of his hybrid 4x4, he off-roads, not for kicks,

but to practice what preppers call bugging out, getting out of Dodge in the event of disaster, steering clear of the masses. We'll take these roads and make sure that, you know, they're not washed out and we can still use them. Just give it a dry run. Give it a dry run. Test running an escape route to the Mojave Desert sounds like overkill. Until it doesn't. Consider this. Days before our interview with Garrett,

a wildfire forced him to put his bug-out plan into action. And it climbed the ridge. I mean, literally right behind us. Literally to right here. My neighbor came and knocked on my door, and he said, I think it's time to evacuate. There were helicopters pulling water from the lake and dumping it on the fire, and we decided to go.

So we packed up the dogs and the guinea pigs, and we were out the door. How long did it take you to pack? 30 minutes. That fire is a couple miles from our cabin. The wildfire burned more than 1,000 acres, but didn't reach Garrett's cabin. We're packing up to leave. Still, he used the close call to assess his readiness. How do you think you did?

Pretty well. We fell down on documents, birth certificates, credit cards. They were all over the house. And I had stuff in filing cabinets. It was a mess. I went to get it down to 15. 15 minutes? 15 minutes out the door. Getting the dogs out is no problem.

The guinea pigs are a little harder to wrangle. The act of gathering up animals in a natural disaster recalls the original prepper. Noah, of course, loaded them into an ark. But in 2022 AD, preppers still confront catastrophes of biblical proportions, as varied as they are frequent. In the last few months alone, Hurricane Ian showed us the wrath of nature, while Vladimir Putin showed us the wrath of man, issuing a warning he might use nuclear weapons. If and when disaster strikes, FEMA, the overburdened federal agency charged with leading the responses, has warned Americans they should be ready to go it alone for several days.

John Ramey is prepared to go it alone for two years. Ramey started his career in Silicon Valley and was an innovation advisor to the Obama administration. From his home in Colorado, he publishes a roundup of threats and how to prep for them, best practices and bug-out bag checklists. His website, The Prepared, is a leading voice for the measured segment of this growing community. We think about 15 million Americans are actively prepping right now. In terms of percentage of households, we are at or about to cross 10% of all households. And just a few years ago, that was 2% or 3%. What happened to trigger this? More and more people over the last decade

that have accepted the reality of climate change and how that impacts the disasters and things that we go through almost every day now. What's happened with our economy since the global financial crisis? What's happened with political discourse and institutional failures? Broadly speaking, more and more people realizing that they are their own first responder. This is a bug out back. Part of Ramey's work entails reviewing the glut of supplies on the multi-billion dollar prepping market. Got unsafe drinking water? Here's a $25 filter. And it will filter 100,000 gallons of water. Cell service down? No problem for that old faithful ham radio.

You at least have the ability to communicate. Ramey says the uptick in prepping cuts across national divides, politics, economics, region. Is there a typical prepper? Not anymore. There used to be. Across the country, there is a growing darkness, a belief that the end of days is near. This is Doomsday Preppers. In the past, the reality TV shows that would cover preppers, they'd find someone who had the most extreme fantastical concern, like fascist alien zombies arriving on an asteroid. That is so night and day from where we're at now.

In the foothills of Tennessee's Smoky Mountains, we met Heidi Keller in her vegetable garden. A restaurant supply company worker by day, she lives alone and calls herself a homestead prepper, ready to hunker down or bug in in a crisis. You can put raw meat in here. She recently acquired the hottest item for preppers, a freeze dryer. That's a pound of ground beef. This is where I keep all of my canned goods. Inside her pantry, Keller has canned, freeze-dried, and stored enough food to get by for a year without leaving her property.

Chicken, meat, roast beef. And it doubles as protection from surging food prices. After fires spread through nearby Gatlinburg during a 2016 drought, Keller says she wanted a backup. When the fires came, it made me rethink, my gosh, I can't have everything in my house because if something does happen and there is a fire and my house burns, it can't be all in one location. So the long-term storage things I have someplace else. Where is that?

In a secure location. It's not here. Fort Knox? No. How far from here. Fort Knox? No. How far from here? Not far. Within five miles. Give us more hints? Why would I do that? You know, I'm not. Grab one.

As a rule, preppers don't like to reveal too much. You might say they also have trust issues with the country's infrastructure and the ability of its institutions to deliver in a crisis. If there's some kind of catastrophe, to what extent do you trust the government? I'm not going to down the government. I mean, they do the best that they can, but pretty much the government's not going to take care of you, not because they may not want to, but because there's too much going on. That's common sense. You're prepared to go it alone? You have to be to some degree. My biggest concern for two years, it took me to get a wood stove.

I didn't have that, and I'm all electric, so I was not prepared. And finally when I got it, it was like, whew, finally, I feel more comfortable now. I'm okay. If all it takes is a wood stove for Heidi Keller to feel comfortable, when the sun rises on post-apocalyptic America, the moneyed class will find comfort here. We drove to the belly of the country, central Kansas, flat as a countertop, hemmed by soybean and cornfields. Who'd you actually buy this from? Where we met Larry Hall, a former defense contractor turned, shall we say, niche property developer.

In 2008, he paid $300,000 for this decommissioned nuclear missile silo. He and investors put in $22 million to refashion it as a luxury bunker, the Survival Condo. Considerable thickness for a door to a residence. Inside the 16,000-pound doors, an apartment building. We're going to go down to 14. Except this one is jammed 15 stories into the ground. Jail-burning fireplace over here. There's room for 75 people.

All but three of the 14 private units have been sold. This three-bedroom, with TV screens posing as windows, goes for $2.4 million. Cash. Who are your clients? These are all self-made people. We don't have any lottery winners or old money. We have retired doctors, professional people. Do they share a particular ideology?

No, they don't. I know that there's independents, and I know there's Democrats and Republicans. You've got the whole mix here. But what they have in common is they all want to have a safe place for their family. We've got a 75-foot-long saltwater pool. The end of the world as we know it, they'll feel fine sitting poolside.

Unless they'd prefer to go rock climbing. No one was living here full-time when we visited, but Hall says the place was hopping at the onset of the pandemic. The owners, for the first time ever, all came here at the same time. All of them. So 19 kids were here. Paul's sales pitch reduces to three words, peace of mind. This is just the common area. And with dozens of strangers holed up together in a crisis, he hired a psychologist to consult on design, to avoid a subterranean version of Lord of the Flies.

I did notice what looked like a jail cell. We do have a jail cell. That's because we also have a bar and a lounge. And if you have a bad day or you drink too much, you might get an adult timeout. Five different power sources keep it all humming. There's a five-year supply of stored food and hydroponics to grow more. The survival condo also employs doormen, that is, armed guards at the gate. To what extent are you worried this place could be overrun during an actual crisis? This

place was engineered to withstand a 20 kiloton nuclear warhead detonated within a half mile. You know, you can rant and rave and throw smoke bombs and Molotov cocktails and you're going to scratch my paint. Hall is converting another silo half an hour away. Most bunkers worldwide are not fortified luxuries. We get a vivid demonstration of their practicality as Ukrainians take cover. In Australia, this man made news

when he emerged unscathed from his backyard bunker after a deadly bushfire. Here in the U.S., one personal bunker manufacturer told us he takes a new order every other day. What do you make of the spike in bunker sales? The vast majority of people should never get to the point of having a bunker. And in fact, I really dislike the bunker narratives because it takes away from the conversation that we should be having, which is how do we make our existing homes and our existing communities more resilient,

rather than, I'm going to quit society and go live in a decommissioned missile silo. You say you would never build a bunker. Why not? You can only stockpile so much in your bunker. I can only withstand so much time in it. I would be desperate to peek out and see what's happening outside. Bradley Garrett won't bunker down, but he has double down on bugging out. He keeps a second truck, this 1972 GMC, in his yard in case the lights go out for good, taking out electronics and turning his hybrid escape vehicle into the equivalent of an expensive brick. The specter of massive power grid failure, the result of a nuclear attack

or solar storm, preoccupies many Preppers. The current estimates from the government is that it would take two years to rebuild the grid. Two years? The Wi-Fi goes down for five minutes and everybody panics. Exactly. And Preppers say that it's 72 hours to animal. Meaning what? Meaning that it takes about three days for people to totally lose it. Preppers call this the SHTF scenario, the proverbial S hitting the fan, a breakdown of social norms. John Ramey says don't panic, just get prepping. If you have two weeks worth of food and water in your home, a radio,

some basic supplies, that alone, that little bit of effort and cost, covers you for the vast majority of scenarios. That's that minimum threshold that everyone should aspire to. As more Americans stock up, bracing for the worst while still intent on surviving it, we may be approaching the day when prepper isn't a loaded word. Until then... Is there a preferred term now? The one that I prefer that's popping up is doomer optimist. Sounds like an oxymoron.

This is someone that recognizes that disaster is inevitable, but they're optimistic that they're going to be able to make their way through them. They'll concede the catastrophe, but they'll be okay. Yeah. You have to live with hope. You know, if you don't have hope about the future, there's no point in preparing for it. Candidates in the midterm elections are approaching the end of the trail, and voters, the end of their ropes. It's been as long, as negative, and as nasty a campaign as anyone can remember.

Opponents are not only wrong, but they love crime, or are too extreme for your state or congressional district. The other guy is plotting to take away your guns, or your personal rights, or your constitutional freedoms, or your personal rights or your constitutional freedoms or your country. Candidates, or the political action committees supporting or fundraising for them, see the need to demonize the other side, to strip the other candidate of humanity itself. In his second inaugural address, Abe Lincoln, who knew a little bit about how deep divisions wound a country, spoke of binding up those wounds with malice toward none with charity for all. Maybe a Lincoln biography should be required reading for any candidate before the next election. I'm John Wertheim. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.