Left, Right, March to War

Two major newspapers decided last week to return to real journalism by discontinuing their decades-long practice of choosing a presidential candidate to endorse. The Left went apoplectic over the idea that they’d have to choose their candidate without the help of an always Left-leaning newspaper endorsement as if anyone would ever question which path the editors would recommend if they had been allowed to.

You would have thought the L.A. Times publisher’s choice to have the paper, instead, print a rundown of each candidate’s achievements during their one term in office, both pro and con, was the death knell for democracy. Both publishers even had the audacity to say they thought their readers could actually make their own choices if just given information about the candidates.

All of this was retaliated against via mass subscription cancellations as if those publishers had made the final draw of their cutting-edge journalistic blades across the throat of democracy. How possibly could democracy survive if deprived of editorial endorsements of presidential candidates, given those endorsements always lean predictably the same way? How would the liberal bastions of America know how to vote? (After all, not too many on the Right read those papers, which is why Bezos says he’s trying to center his paper a little more with some conservative commentary.)

Interestingly, I lost more readers, myself, over writing about the lunacy of the Left last week than I have from my diatribes against Ronald McDonald TheRump. (Well, OK, only one or two more.) Since I think I have a lot more readers who lean hard Right, could it be that the Left is even more nuclear reactive than they claim the MAGA Right is? In which case, imagine the civil war if Donald Trump wins! (My prediction has been we have a strong chance of violent civil unrest either way for a chaotic end to the year.)

Uncivil war

I started reading recent articles on the subject of civil war, expecting them to be all about rage on the Right, should Trump lose, as if all threats against a democratic election come from there. They are articles like “The Civil War Has Already Started” “It Feels like a Tinderbox” and “The Election Is Looming — and These Washingtonians Are Running Scared.” They may have somewhat emphasized the civil war as coming from the Right since two-thirds of Republican voters already say they will not accept the election results if Trump loses, but they all talk about the possibilities from the Left, too. (In other words, evidence be damned; we’ve already rendered our verdict about the legitimacy of the election before it even happens, and we know we’re right.)

It was interesting to me that the articles did not just focus on the likelihood of civil war coming out of the Right field. They also talk about the BLM and Antifa crowds if Harris loses and about how intense Trump hatred could spawn violent rebellion from that quarter. One article even highlights some acts of violence already being brought against Republicans in Arizona. Kari Lake’s campaign office, for example, was forced to evacuate over “suspicious substances.” In another article, one of the many people making an exodus from Washington, D.C., ahead of the election to avoid a possible war around her, said, “Do I think there’s going to be another January 6? Honestly, I’m also a bit worried about if the other side wins. People really hate Trump. I just don’t know.”

For liberals, fears of a Jan. 6 rerun are baked in, based on very real history. But conservatives also worry about antifa-style outrage.

I found one element of surprise in recent news. One researcher who has written a book about America’s impending civil war that points to a lot of groups on the Right says that the focus on civil war began with the 2008 Financial Crisis and the unequal distribution of wealth the Fed created with its lopsided recovery programs that bailed out the rich and the mighty and juiced financial markets that only the top 10% can even afford to play in. So, that was interesting—to see the next civil war laid at the feet of the Fed.

Another article even offers some faint hope by claiming fears that post-election violence may be overinflated. National security experts do not see near the level of chatter and build-up that they saw ahead of January 6. Of course, the election hasn’t happened yet and the chatter and build-up for January 6 didn’t begin until after the election during the run-up to the final congressional count. Then it intensified quickly. That said, Homeland Security has designated January 6, 2025, when the next certification of a presidential election takes place, a National Special Security Event.

Taking reader rebellion in stride

As voters are now also fleeing newspapers in droves that don’t proselytize for their side, I can say that fortunately, those who left The Daily Doom over my own editorial about the lunacy on the Left regarding the Lefties’ loss of voting instructions were free subscribers. They will be sorely missed because of all they contribute to my life in exchange for all that I provide for them.

I just don’t know how we’ll survive as a nation without newspapers instructing us on how to vote. How did democracy survive in the old days before The Times and The Post started telling people who to vote for? As the publishers have duly noted, the papers are both really just going back to their journalistic roots.

Maybe some on the Left were shocked to find that publishers actually do sometimes steer the paths their publications will take. What a sad day, I guess, for a dying democracy this realization was for some on the Left. They apparently don’t remember William Randolph Hurst. For those of us who don’t read only rewritten history, this was just newspaper business as usual. For socialists accustomed to news media that can be relied on to lean Left, this was a tear along a major fault line of their “fifth column.”

Laying Gold BRICS

Following up on an unrelated matter that I’ve been writing about, the BRIC nations not only did nothing to start talks of a BRICS currency, as I said would be the case, but the lengthy document they came up with at the close of their summit made very clear efforts to avoid sounding anti-West in any sense:

Judging from the text of the declaration, the intention is to maximize both [East-oriented and West-oriented] opportunities: it calls for fundamental institutional changes in ‘old’ multilateral structures such as the IMF or the IBRD, while at the same time stating the BRICS’ intention to further promote non-Western institutional alternatives to these predominantly Western structures, such as the New Development Bank (NDB) and the BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA). On the one hand, the document strongly supports the World Trade Organization (WTO) as a universal mechanism for the development of international economic relations, but does not limit its support to the WTO alone, and also calls for further trade liberalization within the BRICS grouping itself….

As I laid out in my last Deeper Dive, the BRICS can do all of those things without launching a new BRICS currency. They can do exchanges the old-fashioned way—in gold bricks and gold ledger entries and then loan in their own currencies to their own businesses.

Overall, the declaration suggests that the enlarged BRICS group is ready to open a new chapter in its history. It is clear that BRICS is not an anti-Western alliance, and the group is not seeking to deliberately undermine or destroy Western institutions. The authors of the Declaration chose their wording very carefully, avoiding any turns of phrase that might lead the reader to believe that a sharp confrontation between the collective West and the rest of the world is inevitable.

BRICS does not even aim to ‘balance’ the West in any way. The BRICS will never be able to become a kind of G7, given the diversity of its members and the absence of a clear hegemonic leader in the group. Nevertheless, the group is capable of claiming, and is already openly doing so, a new, more prominent role in global governance and in defining the parameters of the new world order. Moreover, it intends to become one of the most influential actors in the entire global South, which has been severely underrepresented in most multilateral international institutions.