Practical Prep To Navigate Protests And Shutdowns

Cities can change in a heartbeat. One moment you’re cruising home, the next you’re staring at barricades, fake traffic controllers in vests, and a wave of flashing lights. We unpack how to navigate that pivot with calm, practical steps—no panic, no posturing—so you can get home safely and protect your family when protests and police standdowns collide.

We start by demystifying the big three everyone throws around: martial law, Posse Comitatus, and habeas corpus. Understanding who can do what—and who can’t—helps you predict the kind of response you’ll actually see on the street. From rare historical uses of martial law to the legal limits on the National Guard, we translate legal jargon into street-level implications you can act on. Then we move from concept to concrete: building three alternate routes, using offline maps, and adopting a half-tank fuel rule that buys you time and choices when the main roads lock up.

Driving tactics can make or break your exit. We cover scanning several cars ahead, favoring the right lane for shoulder and exits, and leaving a full car-length gap as your emergency out. If traffic freezes, we explain how to secure the vehicle, crack windows to mitigate exhaust buildup, manage fuel, and keep kids calm with simple routines. When it’s smarter to abandon the car, a lean get-home bag—with water, calories, first aid, light, and real walking shoes—turns a risky gamble into a planned micro-evac. Back at home, we focus on low profile and high awareness: garage closed, lights on, cameras live, social feeds filtered, and zero “looky loo” behavior.

Threaded through all of this is mindset. Preparedness isn’t a bunker fantasy; it’s calm communication, small daily habits, and knowing when to wait and when to move. If you want a realistic, street-smart framework for handling civil unrest—whether you’re stuck on the interstate or sheltering two blocks from the noise—this guide gives you the why and the how.

If this helped, subscribe and share it with a friend who drives the same routes you do. Drop a rating and review to help others find the show, and tell us your best alternate-route tip—we might feature it next time.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Storm Warning And Housekeeping
• 1:14 Rankings, Reviews, And Support
• 2:53 Social Media, Censorship, And X
• 5:25 UK Politics, Grok Controversy, And Bans
• 8:16 Protests, No-Go Zones, And Police Standdowns
• 11:14 Martial Law Explained
• 14:19 Posse Comitatus And National Guard Limits
• 16:53 Habeas Corpus And Emergency Powers
• 19:23 Route Planning And Fuel Discipline
• 21:52 Lane Choice, Escape Gaps, And Traffic Safety

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:09

The National Labor Service has issued a severe thunderstorm warning. To the Common Sense Practical Prepper Podcast, where prepping doesn't have to be complicated or expensive. Coming to you from a well-defended off-grid compound high in the mountains. Coming to you from his Florida room in Richmond, Virginia. Neither off-grid nor well-defended, unless you count as chickens and cats, here is your host, Keith.

SPEAKER_01: 0:41

Hey everybody, this is Keith, and you're listening to the Common Sense Practical Prepper Podcast, January the 11th, 2026. Couple administrative things right off the top. As some of you may know, I'm a graduate of Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. So hats off to the Indiana Hoosiers for their absolute stomping of the Oregon Ducks in the peach bowl. Moving on to the national championship against Miami on the 19th. Certainly wish them best of luck. It should be an absolutely fantastic game. I know I've spoken before about the rankings and how I appreciate everybody sharing, subscribing, and giving a review of the podcast. It really helps the algorithm. We have broke the top 100 the other day. The podcast was at number 64. It moved up about 20 some slots. So I really do appreciate that. So again, please subscribe, please share. And if you have just a few minutes, go ahead and give me a review. So with everything going on in Iran, Minneapolis, and several other major cities in the United States, I catch myself wanting to comment about what's going on in those cities and why and the money behind the protest. But that's not what this podcast is about. So I will endeavor not to get off on a tangent and talk about those things specifically, but I will tie these situations into prepping and being prepared. And don't forget Prepper Camp 2026 at the Tryon International in North Carolina, August 14th, 15th, and 16th. You can go to preppercamp.com and get your tickets. It's a new venue, whole new setup, and it's going to be absolutely fantastic. I am definitely, definitely going. It is on my calendar. I want to talk briefly about X or Twitter, whatever you want to call it. And I think it's important to mention that if Elon Musk had not purchased Twitter, what, a couple years ago, I guess, I'm not exactly sure when he purchased it. But if he had not purchased Twitter, a lot of the information that we're currently seeing on X would not be available. It's been well documented that Twitter at the time, Facebook, and a few other social media sites were coerced by the previous administration to remove certain posts about certain things and to cancel certain content creators because they insisted on posting information that was contrary to the narrative from the previous administration. Now, over in the UK, and I know I've got a lot of listeners over in the UK, so Stamer, the PM, apparently got his knickers in a twist because Grok, the AI arm of X, you can ask it or tell it to do almost anything. And apparently somebody took a picture of Stamer and asked Grok or told Grok to put Stamer in a bikini. Well, he's not very flattering in a bikini, as you can imagine. So he gets his knickers in a twist. And so now all of a sudden there's this call to not necessarily ban Twitter, but somehow they're going after Grok under the guise of sexual exploitation, child exploitation, child pornography, that type of thing. That is an absolute psyop. That is an absolute ruse to get everybody to jump on board. And who wouldn't jump on board if a particular social media platform was promoting child pornography, child exploitation, sexual exploitation? Who wouldn't want to get on board and try to stop that? Well, that's not the real reason. If law enforcement wants to go after child exploitation and child pornography, there are dozens of ways to do that. Banning a social media platform is not the way to go about it. So that's his take. Well, we need to govern or we need to ban or we need to throttle X because of the grok angle. And so there's certain people within the UK government that are calling for a ban on X. And there's other countries in the EU that are talking about that as well. And I guess that's their choice. They can certainly try to do that. I think it's gonna absolutely blow up in their faces. Stamer's a wank, but that's just my opinion. Some folks like them, some folks love them. But the research that I've done, the stories that I've read, the videos that I've seen, he doesn't really seem to have a good handle on what's going on. I don't know who's pulling his strings. I don't know where he's getting his marching orders from. But in my opinion, it is certainly not from the people, the regular old people in the UK. In my opinion, he does not have their best interests in mind. That's my steamer wank update. So speaking of the protest and everybody all up in arms about Minneapolis, Chicago, LA, let's go ahead and talk about when or if. And a lot of people who live in these major cities in the United States, it's almost a when this happens. Let's talk about what happens if you accidentally get caught up in one of these protests. You're driving somewhere, you get routed into a protest, routed into one of these neighborhoods. In Minneapolis, apparently they've established no-go zones, like the Chaz no go zone they did in Seattle a couple years back. These knuckleheads antifed everybody's out putting up barricades and pallets and traffic cones and wooden barricades that try to keep people out of these neighborhoods. Why? I don't know. I have no idea why one neighborhood in Minneapolis is any more important than the next neighborhood. But Minneapolis police are not in the picture. They're in a complete stand down situation. In fact, the police chief of Minneapolis, was that the guy that was crying the other day on the news? Maybe that was the mayor. I can't. There's so many city officials in Minneapolis that have been crying with their fake outrage. I'm not sure who they're trying to impress. But the Minneapolis police have been told not to cooperate with ICE, to stand down, not get involved in the Antifa people and the protesters are out in high-visibility vests, orange and green vests, directing traffic around these no-go zones. So, like that's illegal. I cannot just put on a vest and walk out in the middle of a busy intersection and start waving people around or telling people not to turn into my neighborhood. One, that'll probably get me run over, two, that'll probably get me arrested. But if law enforcement is not in the picture, these folks are free to do whatever they want to. So let's say there's a situation where you have found yourself in the middle of one of these protests. A few months ago, I talked about martial law, posse comitatis, and habeas corpus. Let's go into a little more detail about those, and then we'll talk about what happens if you find yourself caught up in one of these crazy situations. So, martial law, you hear that tossed around all the time. Well, just declare martial law, you know, dust of dawn curfew, shoot on site. So a lot of people think martial law is like Mad Max, and that's not entirely true. So a very simple definition of martial law here in the United States is when the Constitution takes a lunch break. It's only happened once, truly once, and then kind of a limited application a couple other times. The only time that it's really truly been put into effect is December of 1941, right after Pearl Harbor. There were a lot of Japanese, Japanese Americans, Americans of Japanese descent living obviously in Hawaii and in the United States, mostly on the West Coast. So martial law was declared, Admiral Nimitz with the Navy, there was a curfew, they shut down bars, sailors were not allowed to go certain places, and then we had the internment camps. So when there's martial law, there's no courts, there's no lawyers, it's just the government officials calling the shots. Now in New Orleans, in 2005, right after Katrina, the mayor tried to declare martial law. So the National Guard showed up, they had no support, the city was flooded, and it lasted less than 48 hours. So there was no true, true martial law for any extended period of time. No tanks, no armored personnel carriers. You could call the cops, but there were no cops around to respond. I remember this one video from Katrina. Several police officers were actually looting. It was a really bizarre video. And although looting's wrong, looting's bad, but in a lot of ways, you really can't blame them. No food, no water, no electricity. Can't call 911. And so, what is a police officer supposed to do walking around in three feet of water, going down Bourbon Street or some street in New Orleans, and you're outnumbered 500 to one? You got to do what you gotta do. You gotta take care of yourself and take care of your family. Not saying looting's right, but people get put into desperate circumstances. All right, so that's martial law in a nutshell. So Posse Combatatis, it has to do with the military. It was passed in 1878 during Reconstruction, after the Civil War. So basically, the law says the army can be used, but it cannot be used to arrest, search, or seize property or seize people. The National Guard was called out in Chicago last year, strictly legal. There's a couple loopholes, so it gets a little gray. They basically just stood around and were not arresting people. They weren't cuffing people. The National Guard was called into DC about four or five months ago because of the riots and the rampant crime. That was the National Guard, and they've done a fantastic job. Well, they were the two National Guardsmen that were shot. One was killed, and then one is going to make a recovery. But again, they're not arresting people. They were unarmed, and I'm not sure if they're still unarmed or not, because that's one of the sticky points about having armed National Guard or armed military patrolling the streets. It happened in LA, the LA riots in 92. I think that was 92. They protected stores from looters, tried to keep people safe, but again, they weren't doing any policing. So then we come to habeas corpus. It's Latin for you've got the body or the body. It's a legal term. A lot of murder trials, you'll talk about habeas corpus. To have the body, there's been very few, I'm going off on a tangent now, but very few murder convictions without the body, meaning the dead body. So with habeas corpus means you go to jail. You don't go to jail forever, but you can go to jail, you can be detained without even being told why. Lincoln used this in 1861 during the onset of the Civil War, so he could go after Confederate spies. Congress screamed, no, no, we're not gonna do that. But Lincoln said it was a necessity. So it did happen for a limited period of time. World War II, the Japanese internment camps, the courts were like, uh, the courts didn't do a whole lot. They didn't push back on it. So as we know, the internment camps actually became a thing. Congress needs to vote on it. The president doesn't send out a tweet suspending habeas corpus, declaring martial law, or suspending posse comitatis. It doesn't, it's not done with a tweet, it's not done with an executive order. You don't send an email and suspend or invoke any of those. Congress has to vote on it. So it's not just a simple, I'm suspending habeas corpus, I'm now declaring martial law, or posse comitatis has now been suspended. So if you tie them all together, posse comitatis keeps soldiers just walking the streets and not policing, no arrests. Martial law basically takes the breaks off the Constitution temporarily in habeas corpus. We're just snatching people, detaining them, throwing them in jail, and we'll get to you when we get to you. So it takes a lot to happen for these three things to be implemented. So now what happens if you are trying to get home, going on vacation, going to the grocery store, you're not up on current events, or the current events you are listening to and getting caught up on maybe aren't the most current because something else has kicked off near your neighborhood or near the store you're driving to. What do you do if you catch yourself driving into one of these situations? Rule one, and I've preached this before, always have alternate routes to get wherever you're going. If you're driving to work tomorrow morning or tomorrow night, you should have at least three routes that you take. You have the normal one that's probably the quickest, probably has the least amount of traffic, and then you have others in the event there's an accident, flooding. Regardless of the situation, you need other routes to take. So know those routes. And if you haven't committed to memory, fantastic. If not, have a map. Your phones will work if the cell service is down, no GBS, you can still look at a lot of the map apps offline. Number two, the fuel tank in your vehicle. As a general rule, my father always told me never let your gas tank get below one quarter of a tank. Especially in the winter. He explained to me it has to do with condensation in the gas tank and water mixing with your gas. So if it's really, really cold out, you're driving around, you pull into your garage, that's a lot warmer, you're inviting condensation into the gas tank. So let's go one better. If at all possible, let's go with not less than half of a tank. I understand that's easier said than done because a lot of times we're not really paying attention to our gas gauge. And if we gas up, we get a full tank on a Sunday night because we're working Monday through Friday. We know that if everything goes okay, come Friday morning, we're at a quarter of a tank, a half of a tank, and then we're gonna go ahead and fill up on the weekend before we run errands or before we take a little trip. So if you have at least a half a tank and you have to employ one of these alternate routes to get around all these other shenanigans, you have the gas to do it. Depending on where you are, and depending on how you need to get to your destination, you may still be driving on the fringe of all this social unrest. It may not be as simple as a quick U-turn and all of a sudden I'm free and clear. For all we know, you might be driving into a secondary situation. So if at all possible, have half a tank of gas. Obviously, easier said than done. And here I am, I went to the grocery store this morning and the low fuel light came on. Went to the grocery store, got gas as soon as I got my groceries. So, dummy me, I'm not even taking my own advice in this situation. Three, the drive home rule. If you're going down the interstate or going down the highway or going down just a regular road, and again, I'm not a driving instructor, but I've been driving quite some time. You're always looking ahead. You're looking through the windshield of the car in front of you. You're looking several cars ahead of you, start hitting the brakes. You need to be ready to start on your brakes. You don't want to start braking when the car directly in front of you hits the brakes because you may not be leaving a large enough gap and you're leaving yourself open for a potential accident. So you see the brake lights stacking up. Make sure you start to back off. And while you're rolling to a stop or what's going to be probably a stop in traffic, if you're on a two-lane road, so you have two lanes, there's a median, then there's two lanes in the opposite direction. Try to make sure you're in the right lane as much as possible. And make sure you leave at least a one-car gap between you and the car in front of you when you're slowing down or when you're stopped. If there's a situation that's just several cars in front of you and somebody gets out, there's fights, there's shooting, there's some crazy stuff going on, you don't have yourself blocked in. If you're in the left-hand lane and you have a gap, that's good, but you've restricted yourself to just the shoulder because more than likely you'll have a guardrail next to you and you won't be able to jump the median, won't be able to do an efficient U-turn if need be. But if you're in the right lane, always have the shoulder. And if you're on a highway or freeway, you're always going to have an exit. It might be further down the road than you'd like, but you always have an exit. So maintain that one car gap in front of you in the event you need to take evasive maneuvers, if you will, I guess, to try to get out of that particular situation. If it's a three-lane road and you're in the middle, even if you have that one-car gap, if the people beside you are not employing a one-car gap, you're stuck. You don't know what the situation is ahead of you. So you need to be extra safe. So let's say you're stuck and it's an all-out traffic jam, you don't have an immediate escape route, and the vehicles are literally stopped. If you're gonna be stuck there for a long time, and again, this is a little dependent on the weather, keep the doors locked, crack your window a little bit, even if your car is off. There's other cars that are running around you, and if there's not a breeze, if there's not wind, that CO2 is still getting around your car. And CO2 poisoning could obviously lead to serious impairment, if not death. So keep your windows cracked, turn the car off, take your keys, and just be patient. Communicate with your friends, your loved ones, whoever you need to communicate to, get on the cell phone, cell phone's down, you have your in-reach or your other method of communication, let everybody know what's going on. If it's super, super hot outside and you need to start the car for a few minutes to run the AC, you can certainly do that. But be mindful of the amount of fuel that you have in your car. If you have the kids in the car, reach into your get home bag, grab a deck of cards. They're playing on their little Nintendo switches, keep the kids occupied, sing songs, let them know if they start asking, oh, there's just an accident, or there's some people up in front of us that are having trouble with their car. It's just gonna be a few more minutes. All right, let's say you make it home and the civil unrest is going on very close to your house. If not, let's say it's going around your house, a couple blocks away. People walk up and down the streets, the protesters, the rioters, they're out making noise and they're out looking to cause disruption. Put the car in the garage, garage door down, put on your outside lights. If you have security cameras, make sure they're working, make sure they're set to detect motion, have a radio on, any way to monitor social media to try to find out what the situation is. If you're inside and you happen to be stuck in one of these situations, we're gonna stay inside. We're gonna monitor as best we can. My opinion, do not go outside. Don't be a looky loo and find out, don't be a looky loo and start walking down the street and get yourself hemmed up in a situation that you don't need to be in. A lot of these protesters, especially the ones in Minneapolis, are very irrational and they don't know whose side you're on. Regardless, remove yourself from a situation, don't put yourself in a situation that could go completely sideways and you end up getting hurt. Stay inside, let it play out, keep yourself and your family safe. So we talked about a get home bag, water, protein bars, mylar blanket, phone charger, battery bank, comfortable shoes. Maybe a situation where we have to abandon the car and walk the last mile, two miles, three miles home. If it's a situation where you are truly not moving for an extended period of time, it is a situation where there is social unrest and you have decided that staying in your car is not the best plan of action. You're going to grab your get home bag and you're going to head home. There may be a situation that you're stuck at the office. Maybe a situation where you have decided that it's not safe to go home, given this particular situation, that you're going to spend the night in the office. Go outside, get your get home bag, get your comfy shoes, maybe crash it on the couch, or you may be there for an extended period of time until the situation clears up. So again, these protests normally don't last very long. They don't go on 24-7 per se. A lot of them happen in the late evening, late afternoon. Some do happen in the day, but for the most part, it's when it gets dark on the cover of darkness when these protesters get more emboldened and start breaking things, looting, setting cars and buildings on fire. Those situations you want to be completely separated from. You don't want to be within a hundred miles of a situation like that because that is a very dangerous situation. Again, these people don't know who you are. If you're on their side and you're protesting, that's one thing. But I'm talking to the people that are not part of these protests that just find themselves inadvertently injected into one of these situations. All right, folks, thanks again for stopping by. I really do appreciate it. I appreciate all the likes, all the shares, all the reviews. The podcast is gaining traction exactly how I wanted it to. And I have everybody here, everybody listening to thank for that. So thank you so much for that. Practicalprep podcast at gmail.com if you want to reach out to me. I have a few emails. I promise I will do a mailbag episode here soon. And I'm on the Twitters, prep underscore podcast, Common Sense Practical Prepper. Search it on the Twitters. And again, there'll be a commercial somewhere within this podcast, plugging the Augustin Farms affiliate link. I do appreciate everybody who decides to go to that and order something through that link. Use podcast prep at checkout and get an additional 10% off. All right, folks, as always, take care of one another, be careful out there, and until next time.

SPEAKER_00: 23:02

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