On Saturday, the editors at the New York Times decided to print Alan Feuer’s story of his odyssey into the fringes of society — the “preppers,” those people who are preparing for some type of national collapse, often the insolvency of the U.S. financial system.

Feuer, a reporter for the Times who has determined for himself that the U.S. economic system is set for a major shakeup, including high levels of price inflation, said he became concerned about his financial future somewhere “between the fall of Lehman Brothers [in 2008] and the corresponding rise of quantitative easing when it occurred to me … that the financial system was appallingly unstable and that the realm of the possible now included a disruptive reduction in the value of our money.”

With only occasional barbs thrown at “preppers,” such as derisively commenting about people who believe that “bug out bags” — kits or backpacks filled emergency supplies — were somehow sufficient to see people “through the collapse of civilization,” Feuer reported on a vast network of people and corresponding websites devoted to the idea of “preparing for the worst,” or The End of the World as We Know It, each with differing views of the coming cataclysm.

What he found was vastly different than he expected:

To the unprepared, the very word “prepper” is likely to summon images of armed zealots hunkered down in bunkers awaiting the End of Days, but the reality, at least here in New York, is less dramatic.

Local Preppers are doctors, doormen, charter school executives, subway conductors, advertising writers and happily married couples from the Bronx. They are no doubt people that you know — your acquaintances and neighbors. People, I’ll admit, like myself.

Of course, as is fitting with "The Newspaper of Record," a leftist lean was clearly evident. Feur showed his disdain for people who believe that many of the world's wealthiest people work in a concerted fashion to influence the direction of international politics — even though the wealthy often admit to doing that very thing: “Prepping” to the uninitiated or deliberately misinformed, he said, “continues to be thought of as a marginal and unseemly business, something on par with believing that the Bilderberg Group controls world events.”

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