Glenn Beck is often accused of being a fearmonger, and rightly so.</p><p>Lately he&rsquo;s paranoid about the flu vaccine. And always he&rsquo;s talking about government stealing our liberties.</p><p>But to 49-year-old Big John Lipscomb of Toronto, Kan., Beck is something else. He&rsquo;s a cynical opportunist who only recently glommed onto the long-running theme that Lipscomb and his comrades in the patriot movement have embraced for decades.</p><p>Which is that America is on the verge of economic and societal collapse, and we&rsquo;d best prepare for the worst.</p><p>&ldquo;We are within the next couple of years going into a serious economic depression,&rdquo; Lipscomb predicted over the phone Thursday from his survivalist &ldquo;homestead&rdquo; a couple of hours south of Kansas City.</p><p>And the result, Lipscomb says, will be &ldquo;a food collapse.&rdquo; Soon, groceries will be more valuable than gold.</p><p>But lucky for you, me and especially Big John Lipscomb, there&rsquo;s a way to beat a collapsing economic system.</p><p>It&rsquo;s on his Web site, survivalistseeds .com. For a mere $119.95, plus shipping, Lipscomb will send you a 4-pound package of heirloom seeds to start a survivalist garden of your very own. &ldquo;This solution is for people that don&rsquo;t trust government to feed them!&rdquo; is his slogan.</p><p>Remember last year? A new president was elected on the promise of &ldquo;hope&rdquo; and &ldquo;change.&rdquo;</p><p>But with the growth of government and a rising unemployment rate, fear of change is the hot commodity.</p><p>Gold is being hawked as &ldquo;the only safe investment.&rdquo; Beck personally pushes &ldquo;Food Insurance,&rdquo; a two-week emergency supply of freeze-dried vittles to snack on in your fortified bunker.</p><p>Occasionally you&rsquo;ll hear a frantic commercial for one of Lipscomb&rsquo;s competitors in the survival seed industry. Still, Big John brags that he was first on the scene in April 2008.</p><p>&ldquo;We&rsquo;ve had a couple of million in sales,&rdquo; he claimed.</p><p>Lipscomb isn&rsquo;t in it to become rich, he said. But what of it if he makes a profit while helping &ldquo;feed the patriots during the coming difficult times&rdquo;?</p><p>He&rsquo;s prepared for whatever comes. Although his 550-square-foot cabin is hooked to utilities and the Internet, he lived for eight years in a straw house in Montana without electricity or running water.</p><p>But are the rest of us willing to become survivalists for when the recession-damaged economy collapses entirely, as he predicts, just as he claims to have predicted the burst of the housing bubble and the earlier dot-com bust?</p><p> &ldquo;I&rsquo;m almost always right,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;yet I&rsquo;m the kook?&rdquo;</p><p>Good question. Given all that&rsquo;s happened, can any of us with certainty tell the kooks from the prophets anymore?</p><p>Besides, anyone who can figure a way to make some serious jack in a market like this one is a shrewd operator in my book.</p><p>Even a kook like Glenn Beck.