Your life is already being impacted by the “Cowboy Apocalypse” even if you’re unaware of it.

A small but not insignificant portion of the population actively look forward to the end of the world. While this might seem like a fringe issue, the implications are far reaching and consequential. You’ve seen preppers, we all have that one friend who’s a little too into The Walking Dead, and there are any number of hit shows and movies saturated with apocalyptic themes. Certain people tend to imagine the end of the world as a sort of open world video game. One where they have free reign and start out with an advantage (the guns and cans of beans they’ve been hoarding since the early 2000’s) over others. Fellow humans in this context are seen as, at best resources and at worst, threats.

The author of this book explores this impulse and dubs this conceptual framework “Cowboy Apocalypse”, two heavily loaded but exceedingly apt terms for this vision both of imminent collapse and phoenix like regeneration for the rugged, heavily armed individual. Central to this idea is the role of firearms, weapons that have had and continue to have profound, deadly consequences for our country.

I found several insightful gems in this book. The term “Cowboy Apocalypse” itself is something of a revelation. But also, for instance, the idea that preppers embody a kind of Calvinist worldview dividing the world into the elect (themselves and their families, the prepared) and everyone else who they view as inherently unworthy and dangerous. The moment I read this it instantly clicked. This kind of thinking explains why in most doomsday narratives preppers tell themselves, everyone outside the immediate family is treated with suspicion or hostility. They’re already predetermined to be a threat even if they aren’t actively doing anything threatening.

Another useful insight I found was the author’s position that apocalyptic ideation serves as a form of escapism for people who feel threatened or vulnerable in the current world. They imagine themselves as heavily armed Mad Max style survivors in a future apocalypse to distract from their sense of powerlessness in real life. That’s not to say such escapism is justified or benign.

The best parts of this book for me were where the author drew connections between the “Cowboy Apocalypse” mental framework and current events. Everything from Doomsday Preppers (the show and the people themselves), the ubiquity of FPS games, resurgent racism, and January 6th.

Where the book struggled, in my opinion was with what I like to call “This Could Have Been and Essay” syndrome. While I did appreciate the broad scope and disparate connections the author made, this sometimes gets carried too far, to the detriment of the book as a whole and the point the writer was trying to make in particular. I think a series of shorter, more focused essays could have accomplished the goal better, personally. That being said, this issue didn’t stop it from being a worthwhile exploration of the “Cowboy Apocalypse” phenomenon.

Overall this was an interesting volume that might have worked better in a slightly different format. I felt that sometimes the author stretched a point almost to absurdity to justify the length of an average book. While this made parts of the middle of the book difficult to get through, it was one I was ultimately glad I read, I'd give it two and a half stars.

Rachel Wagner does a great job in writing this book, it had that history feel that I was looking for and thought the research worked well overall. It was what I wanted based on the description and had a interesting topic.