What Happened to the Wall Street Journal?
I came to know and love the Journal during the Robert Bartley days; he must be spinning in his grave over the Woke Mind Virus infecting a once-great newspaper.
Growing up in New York in the 1980s, I read The Wall Street Journal daily by 15 years old. I eventually became an investment banker and I have spent my career in the global capital markets.
Looking at what has become of the Journal in recent years, I wonder if I had been reading this version of the paper back when I was an impressionable teen if I would now be a braindead climate alarmist working on “the energy transition” absurdist green grift.
Their comment boards are more heavily moderated than Twitter prior to Elon’s purchase. It’s kind of annoying to bother to engage in an online dialogue with other readers and then have all of your comments deleted without any reason given. I opened up my email just now and saw this:
For funzies, let’s see what horrible things I wrote that would justify some cubicle dweeb deleting those things I offered up for consideration.
The last thing they deleted was a link to this essay I wrote on 9 November 2023:
All these people hate Jews; they don't give a single fart in a hurricane about "Palestinians."
What do the following events have in common? Bashar Assad has killed 300,000 Syrian Muslims since 2010. Around 400,000 Yemenis have died since 2014 in the fighting between the recognized government and the Houthi (Shia) rebels backed by Iran. ISIS murdered more than 35,000 Muslims, Christians and Yazidis, enslaved tens of thousands of Muslim women as for…
I commented on articles on Jew Hatred on college campuses, tax policy and some fluff piece about an author Elon Musk likes.
The best part is I cannot even recall the details of the articles I was responding to - some go back to November 2023.
But those fairly anodyne comments were “worth” a Journal staffer’s time to go back six months to remove comments I made and suggestions to readers of other things to look at.
In the spirit of being a good corporate strategy consultant, I have taken the opportunity to write a simplified set of “Community Guidelines” for the Censorship Staff, er, Community Moderators, at the new and unimproved Wall Street Journal.
Anything anyone writes must bow down to an ever-shifting mélange of absurdist beliefs which would be acceptable at the San Francisco City Council whose own statutes claim there are 97 possible genders a San Franciscan can identify as when taking public handout cash so they can loiter around stoned while taxpayers have to deal with public filth and never-ending crime. We consider words to be violence, including horrible trigger phrases like “free market,” “capital,” “personal choice” and - worst of all, so bad the software won’t even let you type it - “personal responsibility.”
There. That should do it. That is the last thing I will give them before I cancel my subscription tomorrow morning.
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Very disturbing. I have noticed it too and it has been quite sudden. In a way they are all we have/had. An authoratative level headed voice. We can write and cancel subsriptions. Most of their articles are goolga-ble after they are published in the WSJ. They show up in a lot of posts. So I am cancelling my online subscription. Thanks.