Why do "prepper" and "prepping" have such a bad rap?

It's because a lot of preppers are sovereign citizen, conspiracy theory, right wing nut bags. The idea of prepping got really popular right before the turn of the century and again in the run up to 2012. Obviously nothing happened and many of those people prepping for the end of the Mayan calendar or the 2000 apocalypse looked like certified lunatics. Definitely where a lot of the ridicule and stereotypes come from.

In reality, prepping takes many forms and covers a broad spectrum of ideologies. Lately, prepping has been rebranded, especially in leftist circles, as sustainable living or homesteading. In the general public, you'll probably still get a lot of assumptions that a prepper is a Nazi with a bomb shelter and a million guns. And there are quite a few of those people, to be fair.

In practice, prepping should be more like community resilience, sharing resources, and making as much use as possible of any amount of space you have. Loading up your basement with ten years of MREs and cans of bullets is basically useless. A real prepper stores enough to get through the worst of an emergency but has a plan for continued life in the event the economy completely collapses or something like that.

For example, my wife and I are members of a local farm co-op and have hydroponic gardens in half the corners in almost every room of our house. We have chickens, and our entire front plot of yard is loaded right now with squash, peppers, tomatoes, and more. We give away or trade what we can't consume ourselves. And believe it or not we live just outside of the center of a small town and have neighbors all alongside and behind. I also own guns, and keep a store of a few months worth of shelf stable goods and have a solid selection of tools. It's not set up right now, but I have solar power if I need it and the ability to get rain water collection going.

I don't refer to myself as a prepper because that's not the primary goal of what we are doing, it just so happens to be a bonus of the marriage between community engagement and self-reliance.

If you're preparing to save yourself, you're preparing to abandon your community.

Up here in the PNW, there are a lot of Christian nationalist/neo-Nazis in the prepping scene. Back in the day the Aryan Nations used to get a decent amount of new recruits by doing lots of prepping workshops.

I'd be a bit more into it if it wasn't for that. It's always good to be prepared for a disaster.

Because preppers tend to be Christian Nationalists and anyone that unhinged who is stockpiling weapons is not someone you would want to be around.

I've two anecdotes.

• I had a friend who was raised by preppers and basically abused by them as a child in the guise of teaching them to be self-reliant. Abused as in--left outside in the cold without food as a pre-teen child and expected to use survival skills to live through the night. There's no few "prepper" communities who become prepper because their ideology was too radical for regular people, which means many preppers are weird politically or religiously, and those who get out of those cults obviously have many justifiably harsh things to say about prepping that filter on to the mainstream.
• I've another friend, ex-mormon, who is watching their parents piss away their retirement into prepper stuff for an apocalypse that's never going to come. The prepping is not carried out with thoughtful, measured decisions. It's peer-pressure from a religious community all hyping each other up. And its preying on seniors, like so many scams do. For obvious reasons, seeing this happen to family and loved ones leaves a bad taste in people's mouths. So they're going to talk about what they see is consuming their parents, and that too will filter to people in the mainstream and give prepping a bad rap.

Over time, I've more inclined towards a prepping lifestyle--but it's because I have trauma that makes it hard for me to hold down a 9-5. So when my life already has a habit of ping-ponging between feast and famine, and I can't seem to kill the reason I ping-pong due to trauma, my work-around is to prep when I have income, and survive on it later when I don't. I approach it with measured reasons.

In my unique situation, "prepping" is basically a work-around bandaid to my PTSD, and I'm well aware my circumstances are NOT the same as other people's, and I have no intention of converting others or drawing them into it.

It's probably a connection to the "survivalist" mentality, which is commonly seen as "buy countless guns, live in the woods, kill anything that gets too close." Survivalists got a bad rap back in the 90s, and it has stuck around. Of course, there have been a number of groups since then that haven't helped the image. Think Ammon Bundy and the Montana Freeman who were actually just a bunch of Sov Cits.

Over the top TV shows have not helped either.

I think you're running into an issue where the media absolutely loves extremes and this hobby/lifestyle tends to breed them. There are plenty of preppers who absolutely fit the stereotype that most people have of prepping, and any exposure the community gets isn't going to be given to the nice folks who just have a few jugs of water and a shelf full of canned garden veg in their basement, it's gonna go to the raging white nationalist who has a minigun and is sure that Jewish people are actually aliens sent here to harvest our thoughts. This creates a feedback loop where prepping means "crazy white nationalists with several guns for each hand", so crazy white nationalists who like guns pour into the community until they eventually take it over.

I think that you'll notice the same ideals without the implication of violent right-wing psychopaths if you start investigating homesteading, self-sufficiency, community organization movements, first aid and things like that. We exist, but the word "prepper" is lost to us at the moment.