But despite this, there is some of discussion of armed compounds, marauding hordes, and the like, that you would probably not see in a similar article in Europe.  I suspect that those of us who have lived in the U.S. for a long time read articles like this differently, having encountered survivalists like this before. These guys always seem to be reasonable, in precisely this way, but there always seems to be an undercurrent of antisocial lunacy just under the surface.

One possibility, though, is that the movement is indeed rational, like you suggest, with only a few survivalist lunatics, but that the journalist has automatically written the article in a way that fits the standard narrative.