Repetition compulsion of doomsday scenarios is wedded to a performance of apocalyptic manhood. Their rhetoric confirms white masculine victimage, ensures a surge of mass violence.

One overarching lesson of American doomsday culture is that the future is indefinite but that hegemonic white masculinity—aggression, self-reliance, stoicism, competitiveness—remains necessary. In Martin’s grave divinations, the recuperation of traditional manly skill sets will rebuild America after inevitable disaster. Like most doomsday preppers, Martin is enraptured by a regression to the state of nature—a fantasy consummated through repetitive scenario planning and preparation for the apocalypse. Here, the world is made to disappear only to be returned to the viewer with an illusory sense of control and mastery over an uncertain future. Doomsday Preppers powerfully illustrates the culture of politics of melancholia at work in the contemporary crisis of masculinity: there was a primal moment to which we will and must return when our survival hinged on the strength and natural ability of men.

Although American television audiences are accustomed to seeing their world eviscerated on screen, outlived by small bands of maleled survivors, the apocalyptic turn in popular culture gives viewers purportedly unmediated access to the masculinized survival rituals performed by ordinary Americans. National Geographic’s Doomsday Preppers promises to take viewers “into lives of . . . committed preppers who have devised extensive plans, gone to great lengths, and made huge personal sacrifices to guarantee their very survival.” Each episode’s participants are “ordinary Americans from all walks of life” who are “taking whatever measures necessary to prepare and protect themselves from what they perceive as the fast approaching end of the world as we know it.” Unlike spectacular disaster films, Doomsday Preppers portrays the manly art of survival as a sensible ritual already practiced by millions of Americans. Drawing from the educational ethos of the Nat Geo, Doomsday Preppers invites audiences to emulate “real life” performances of manly survival skills against the background of an uncertain future.

This chapter attends to how the mainstreaming of doomsday prepping figures into the contemporary rhetoric of white male victimhood. As a dominant form of new media, reality television has played a prominent role in modeling white masculinity in precarious political and economic times. Reality television purports to offer unmediated access to everyday-life performances through a valence of authority borrowed from anthropology and educational television. It is a form that affords its subjects an aura of authenticity or realness. Yet, reality television is belabored and produced under conditions of heavy mediation, including the crafting of character types, mise-en-scene, continuity editing, cinematography, and dialogue to name a few. Reality television is also a genre with an agency all its own. Like other forms of media, it is formulaic, but its premises, sets, and concepts can be easily and cheaply copied, recycled, and reused across cable television. For example, the success of Doomsday Preppers generated a series of copycat programs on other cable networks, including related programming that features extreme survival trials (Alone, Dual Survival, Man vs. Wild, Naked and Afraid, Survivor Man, The Alaska Experiment, and The Colony). Hence, reality television is, in part, responsible for the sudden cultural visibility of masculine survivalism. What is novel about reality television is that it imbues extreme everyday-life performances with both authenticity and compelling dramatic structure. This chapter explores how the rhetoric of reality television delivers to the culture a manly sense of apocalyptic excitement.

My central argument is that seemingly “authentic” representations of doomsday prepping have helped reclaim white male sovereignty in the name of survival and resuscitated premodern archetypes of primal masculinity as befitting the laws that govern human nature and, consequently, the postapocalyptic future. Doomsday preppers argue that the feminine attributes that characterize modernity are ultimately unsustainable luxuries that will inevitable collapse into barbarism. Simulating the apocalypse, then, is an opportunity for white men to display masculine traits as a set of survival tools—the antidote for a crumbling and emasculated society. Longing to resuscitate a past that never existed, doomsday preppers seek to domesticate the trauma of white masculinity’s displacement by promising a future in which white men are restored to their proper place in both nature and the social order. In short, the apocalypse serves as the ultimately resolution to the so-called crisis of masculinity. Along with a series of other networked platforms, reality television has ushered in the apocalyptic turn in white masculinity.

Once a fringe ritual among survivalists and white supremacists, apocalyptic manhood is now constituted through rhetoric and per-formances that confirm the necessity of masculine skills as modern society meets its demise. This chapter uses the National Geographic Channel’s reality program Doomsday Preppers to show how the figure of the doomsday prepper cultivates a militarized version of white manhood capable of reclaiming the future from women and racial Others. Through repeated displays of manly preparedness rituals in machine shops, gun ranges, and wilderness, Doomsday Preppers offers a rebuttal to the progressive case for gender and racial equality by testifying to the enduring primacy of white male identity. In a broader context, this chapter also explains how apocalyptic paranoia has contributed to a surge in hypermasculine mass violence in American culture where feelings of white male alienation translate into militaristic preparations for an uncertain future.