Dan Bongino begged Americans to stock their pantries, and plenty of folks still shrug it off.
The Pentagon’s blackout planning made that harder to do.
And an FBI insider just named a danger that won’t need a single missile to reach Americans.
A Bureau Lifer With No Reason to Carry Bongino’s Water
Chris Swecker doesn’t host a podcast, and nobody will catch him hawking survival buckets between segments.
He put in 24 years at the FBI, rose to run the Bureau’s Criminal Investigative Division, and retired as one of its top executives in 2006. Then he went to Charlotte to head corporate security for Bank of America, which means he spent years watching criminals and foreign spies poke at the financial system from the inside.
He has never been anybody’s cheerleader, either. After the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago in August 2022, Swecker went on Fox News and said the Bureau’s own guidelines for that search got “pushed aside.” Years earlier, he branded James Comey a “partisan political mud wrestler.”
So when Swecker told the Daily Mail he stands behind Dan Bongino’s call to stock up, the endorsement arrived with its own built-in disclaimer.
“I think he’s spot on. I don’t always agree with Bongino, but I think he’s spot on here that it would behoove the American people to have a plan, an emergency plan and be prepared,” Swecker said.
Bongino served as FBI Deputy Director under President Trump until January. His podcast plea to keep food, water, and backup power on hand landed right after the Pentagon’s FORTRESS plan went public, the blueprint for keeping major military bases running for 90 days with no civilian power, fuel, or water coming in.
And Swecker listed the reasons in a way that would make anybody check the canned goods.
“We’ve got five, maybe six, countries out there that are fully capable of launching nuclear attacks,” he said. “They’re developing more missile technology and more missiles, and building more missiles every day. So there’s an existential threat there.”
He named North Korea, Russia, and Communist China. He named terrorism, a power grid exposed to hackers, and a banking system he says criminals and hostile intelligence services keep breaking into.
“Their goal is to basically subjugate Western civilization, eliminate Western civilization,” Swecker said.
The Enemy Swecker Says Is Already Inside the Gates
But the missile talk isn’t the part of the interview that should keep readers up at night.
Swecker pointed to the riots and protests tearing through Paris, Rome, Milan, Barcelona, and Albania’s capital of Tirana. In parts of France, he said, mobs overran whole neighborhoods, wrecked shops and homes, smashed infrastructure, and took over buildings.
“There’s a copycat factor, operating right now,” he said. “I think there are attempts, and there have been attempts, to create real civil unrest.”
He admitted rioting doesn’t rank with a nuclear strike or a grid collapse. He just doesn’t think it stays put.
“That’s not on the scale of a nuclear crisis, or even a power grid or a financial system collapse-type crisis, but it is a crisis that can go viral across the country and has to some degree, but I think it can get worse,” Swecker said.
Then he reached for a phrase most retired G-men avoid on the record.
“We have what I would describe as the ‘fifth column’ operating, which is sympathizers of terrorist organizations and sympathizers of a different form of government than we’ve ever endorsed here in the United States,” he said.
Swecker lumped in foreign terrorism, homegrown terrorism, intelligence threats, and efforts to bankroll and encourage unrest. And he doesn’t think Washington has its eye on that ball.
“Given the political situation right now, it’s been made almost impossible to operate in a sort of coordinated fashion to go after that type of threat,” he said.
Somebody Tied the Cops’ Hands Long Before the Next Crisis
Swecker didn’t name the people who made coordination “almost impossible.” He didn’t really have to.
Americans watched the dress rehearsal in the summer of 2020. A mob torched the Minneapolis Police Department’s Third Precinct after city leaders pulled officers out of the building. Rioters spent weeks attacking the federal courthouse in Portland. The industry tracker Property Claim Services put insured losses from that summer somewhere between $1 billion and $2 billion, the costliest civil disorder in American insurance history.
And Democrats spent that summer making excuses. Kamala Harris urged her followers to chip in to a Minnesota bail fund. A majority of the Minneapolis City Council stood on a stage and pledged to dismantle their own police department. CNN ran the now-famous “fiery but mostly peaceful” caption under a burning Kenosha.
Fast forward to sanctuary cities that refuse to hold criminal illegal aliens for ICE, state officials who sue the federal government over every enforcement surge, and local prosecutors who treat looting like a parking ticket. Picture the FBI, a governor, a mayor, and a county sheriff trying to run one coordinated operation against a riot network while half of them won’t return the other half’s phone calls.
The violence hasn’t stayed hypothetical, either. Left-wing political violence has already produced two attempts on President Trump’s life in 2024, an armed man arrested near Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home in 2022, and the assassination of Charlie Kirk on September 10, 2025.
It’s tempting to draw a straight line from Swecker’s “different form of government” to the socialist groups openly chanting to abolish ICE. But Swecker didn’t make that connection, and a political faction with a lousy platform isn’t the same thing as a terrorist cell. The point stands on its own without it. A country that can’t agree on whether to enforce its own laws can’t coordinate much of anything when the windows start breaking.
FEMA Was Never Going to Beat the Gridlock
Swecker said he couldn’t believe the Pentagon waited this long to put a plan like FORTRESS in front of the public.
“I applaud the military in recognizing the threat, and they’re going to be the people that are going to come to the rescue, so they need to take care of themselves and make sure they’re self-sufficient,” he said.
That logic cuts straight back to the kitchen table. If the troops coming to the rescue need 90 days of supplies, the families waiting for the rescue need something, too.
Air Force veteran Sean Gold, who founded the preparedness site TruePrepper, told the Daily Mail that Americans shouldn’t count on FEMA to save them, and he didn’t pin the problem on any recent budget trim.
“Even at previous levels, we saw inept management and poor response times from FEMA,” Gold said.
Anybody in western North Carolina already knows that. After Hurricane Helene in 2024, FEMA fired a supervisor who told relief workers to skip homes flying Trump signs. Folks in those mountains learned which neighbors would show up with a chainsaw and which government agency would show up with a political screening test.
Gold says a family might have as little as 10 minutes to get out the door in a real emergency. He wants every member of the household to keep a packed evacuation bag with important documents, critical medication, a few tools, some protective gear, and the basics of water, food, and shelter.
He also says not to wait if staying home gets too dangerous, especially in big cities. Head for relatives or friends outside urban areas, because evacuations jam the highways fast, and a car stuck in gridlock offers about as much shelter as a lawn chair.
“If the very entities you expect to lean on in a crisis [governments] are actively telling you to gather preparedness supplies, prepping is about as rational as you can get,” Gold said.
Some threats mean sheltering in place, a basement for a chemical spill or a nuclear blast. Others mean leaving before the crowd figures out it should. Neither one works without a plan made ahead of time.
Swecker was born in Ferrol, Spain, the country that gave the world the term he used. In 1936, as four Nationalist columns closed in on Madrid, General Emilio Mola boasted of a fifth column already waiting inside the city, ready to rise when the moment came.
Sources: Daily Mail, “FBI agent reveals ‘existential threat’ that could unleash chaos across US without warning as Pentagon prepares for blackouts” (October 29, 2026); FBI press release on the retirement of Assistant Director Chris Swecker (May 2, 2006); Wikipedia, “Chris Swecker”; SecurityInfoWatch, Bank of America hires Chris Swecker; Fox News, “Guidelines for FBI’s raid of Trump home were entirely ‘pushed aside’”; Fox News, “Comey has become a ‘political mud wrestler’”; Mediaite, “‘Panic Kills’: Dan Bongino Warns Americans to Take Stock Up Warnings Seriously”; Unilad, Bongino FORTRESS coverage; Property Claim Services estimates of 2020 riot insured losses; Associated Press reporting on FEMA’s Hurricane Helene response (November 2024).