The Wall Street Journal Completes Its ‘Woke’ Transition

Trump Derangement Syndrome causes another publication to lose all the marbles it was built upon.

By Joe Schaeffer Feb 23, 2025 @ Liberty Nation News, Tags: | Articles, Media, Opinion

 

Another once-respected American newspaper appears bent on setting its reputation aflame in an attempt to oppose President Donald Trump’s agenda any way it can. Standing out in the case of The Wall Street Journal is the publication’s seamless transition from stuffy numbers-crunching to leftist-style emotional blog blather.

As with its flailing peers, such as The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times, The WSJ routinely sees its impartiality and professionalism questioned when reporting on Trump. The latest egregious example came on Feb. 14. “Exclusive: [Vice President JD] Vance pledged to hit Russia with sanctions and potentially military action if [President Vladimir] Putin won’t agree to a peace deal that guarantees Ukraine’s independence,” the paper exclaimed in social media posts promoting its interview with Trump’s second in command.

Baking the News

It was a neoconservative fantasy determined to deny reality. The WSJ framed the interview around daydreams of the US backing Ukraine’s admittance to NATO – something Trump does not support – and the possibility of American soldiers being deployed to Ukraine. When Vance innocently stated that “everything is on the table” for Trump when he enters a negotiation, the paper seized on that elastic quote to buttress its belligerent pro-Ukraine tone.

This goes beyond bad journalism ethics. Attempting to bully an administration with clearly defined foreign policy beliefs into acquiescing to a newspaper’s agenda is just plain silly.

Earlier in February, a WSJ reporter doxxed Marko Elez, a 25-year-old member of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team, revealing him to be the operator of an anonymous social media account spiked with politically incorrect posts.

The “journalist,” Katherine Long, came to the paper from Business Insider. Before that, she had worked at Vox, a leftist news site more akin to HuffPost‘s emotive blogging than professional reporting. Interestingly, The Wall Street Journal has a striking number of Vox alums in key positions on its news staff.

While at Business Insider, Long apparently practiced the same style of personal “gotcha” journalism that The WSJ now embraces. A populist-right X poster using the moniker Raw Egg Nationalist, who has 274,000 followers, tells a remarkable tale of his experience with Long last summer.

“Long sent an email to one of my local farm shops, asking the owner to give her my personal details,” Raw Egg Nationalist states in a Feb. 7 post. He quoted the email Long sent to the farm. “Do you or any of your staff know of a man who regularly buys large quantities of eggs and milk?” she asked. “If so, I would be very grateful if you could pass along his name. I am happy to keep our conversation confidential, i.e. I would never tell anyone how I had learned his name.”

A few months later, Long was hired by The Wall Street Journal.

Leftist Embeds at The Wall Street Journal

Did you know WSJ has an official “climate finance reporter”? His name is Amrith Ramkumar, and he “covers how investors are paying for the transition to clean energy,” his newspaper bio states.

Your News – How You Like It!

Let’s get to that Vox pipeline.

Alexander Ward “is a national security reporter covering the White House and State Department,” his WSJ bio declares. Before being hired, Ward worked for Swamp-connected Politico and Vox. He’s a member of the globalist Council on Foreign Relations and a former employee of arch-globalist DC think tank the Atlantic Council, and he authored a 2024 book titled The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy After Trump. It focused on key Biden foreign policy officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the man he covered as part of his WSJ beat.

So we have a Council on Foreign Relations member reporting on the foreign policy doings of another CFR member, Blinken, and it’s all being done under The Wall Street Journal banner.

Michelle Hackman is a reporter in the paper’s Washington bureau, “where she covers US immigration policy.” Hackman was hired in June 2016. What made her a must-get?

Perhaps it was an article she co-wrote for Vox three months earlier on how conservative college students were embarrassed by the rise of Trump. “The young conservatives say they already faced an uphill battle in trying to convince a mostly liberal campus that their views are not motivated by racism or homophobia,” the article states. “Trump’s rise has made this problem much more difficult to overcome.”

Hackman is writing these same types of articles for The Wall Street Journal today. “Trump Has Made America More Hostile to Immigrants. He Isn’t Done Yet” is the headline of a Feb. 3 piece.

Then there is Isabella Simonetti, “a reporter covering the business of television and streaming.” In 2020, while interning at Vox, the University of Pennsylvania student scolded whites for taking so long to get on the Black Lives Matter train. “And yet systemic racism has been ingrained in the fabric of America since its founding, police violence against Black Americans dates back to when slavery was legal, and the Black Lives Matter movement has existed since 2013. Why did they choose to get involved now?” she asked.

Dominique Mosbergen is a “medical science reporter” at The WSJ’s Health and Science bureau. She has been active of late, filing one article after another portraying Trump’s Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as a dire health care threat.

Mosbergen isn’t another Vox hire. She came straight from HuffPost, where she worked for “a decade,” her WSJ bio states. While there, she regularly wrote about climate change in the hysterical tones one would expect from that outlet. “Climate Change Is Melting ‘The Roof Of The World,’” the headline of her Dec. 2016 article pronounces. “We Need A President Who Will Continue Obama’s Climate Legacy – Not Destroy It,” her Oct. 2016 piece is titled.

This is how one becomes a medical science reporter for The Wall Street Journal. And this is how fake news operates.

~

Liberty Nation does not endorse candidates, campaigns, or legislation, and this presentation is no endorsement.

Read More From Joe Schaeffer Political Columnist

How One Newspaper Called the Hong Kong Story Right From the Start

Wall Street Journal Figured It Out a Generation in Advance 

By IRA STOLL, Special to the Sun | July 5, 2021

Journalists celebrate themselves annually with Pulitzer Prizes for the best work published in the previous year. Often, though, a single year is too short a time span in which to judge journalism. A different and more distinguished prize might eventually be established and awarded for journalism published a decade, or perhaps even a quarter-century earlier. It can sometimes take that long to judge whether the reporters and editors got a story right.

In that spirit, I’ve lately been looking back at the American press coverage from 1984. That was the year that China and Great Britain issued their “Joint Declaration on the Question of Hong Kong.”..............The course of events in Hong Kong was not just entirely predictable; it was predicted, entirely, in advance, by the Journal editors with remarkable clarity: “It is in the nature of totalitarian regimes to control.”.........

The Journal, of course, proved to be right. The Joint Declaration of 1984 proved to be a stain on the legacies of both Thatcher and Reagan, about whom there is otherwise so much to admire. Let it be a reminder to President Biden, as he weighs future negotiations with Communist China, Iran, the Taliban, or even Syria or the Hamas leadership in Gaza, that any deal with such a regime is only as good as a free country’s determination and ability to enforce its terms.............To Read More.....

My Take - The Wall Street Journal may have been the only newspaper to have read the tea leaves correctly, but there were a great many who weren't in the information delivery business who did also.  I was one of them, this really was totally predictable.  As for writer's comment about Thatcher and Reagan; the question was then and still is this:  What exactly were they supposed to do?  The 100 year agreement was running out, and there was no way they could impose an independent Hong Kong on China, so what were their alternatives?   

There are times when leaders aren't left deciding between right and wrong.  They're left with deciding which wrong is the most right. While it's true that decision will eventually that comes back to haunt them, but that's the world as I see it, and a world that has to be dealt with.

Add The Wall Street Journal To The People Who Can't Do Basic Arithmetic

May 17, 2021/ Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian

Let’s face it, lots of people aren’t very good at math, even rather basic math. On the other hand, some people are quite good at it. If you aren’t very good at math, there are plenty of other things for you to do in life. My own field of law practice mostly does not require much skill at math, and there a plenty of math-challenged people who are nevertheless very good lawyers.

But some big societal decisions require a certain level of math competence. Some of these decisions can involve multi-hundreds of billions of dollars, or even multi-trillions of dollars. For example, consider the question of whether proposed electricity generation system X has the capability to deliver the amount of electricity a state or region needs, and at the times it is needed. Answering this question is just a matter of applied basic arithmetic. Given the dollars involved, you would think that when a question like this is being addressed, it would be time to call in some people who could do the arithmetic, or who at least would be willing to try.

Yet when the issue is replacing generation of electricity by fossil fuels with generation by “renewables,” it seems that the need to believe that the renewables will work and be cost effective is so powerful that all efforts to do the arithmetic get banished. I last considered this issue in a post last week titled “California’s Zero Carbon Plans: Can Anybody Here Do Basic Arithmetic?” The answer for the California government electricity planners was a resounding “NO.” Today, the Wall Street Journal joins the math-challenged club with a front page story headlined “Batteries Challenge Natural Gas As America’s No. 1 Power Source.” (probably behind pay wall)

The theme of the story is that “renewable” energy sources, such as solar, paired with batteries to balance periods of low production, are rapidly becoming so cheap that they are likely to “disrupt” natural gas plants that have only recently been constructed:

[T]he combination of batteries and renewable energy is threatening to upend billions of dollars in natural-gas investments, raising concerns about whether power plants built in the past 10 years—financed with the expectation that they would run for decades—will become “stranded assets,” facilities that retire before they pay for themselves. . . . But renewables have become increasingly cost-competitive without subsidies in recent years, spurring more companies to voluntarily cut carbon emissions by investing in wind and solar power at the expense of that generated from fossil fuels.

To bolster the theme, we are introduced to industry executives who are shifting their investment strategies away from natural gas to catch the new renewables-plus-batteries wave. For example:

Vistra Corp. owns 36 natural-gas power plants, one of America’s largest fleets. It doesn’t plan to buy or build any more. Instead, Vistra intends to invest more than $1 billion in solar farms and battery storage units in Texas and California as it tries to transform its business to survive in an electricity industry being reshaped by new technology. “I’m hellbent on not becoming the next Blockbuster Video, ” said Vistra Chief Executive Curt Morgan.

But how does one of these solar-plus-battery systems work? Or for that matter, how does a wind-plus-battery system work? Can anybody do the arithmetic here to demonstrate how much battery capacity (in both MW and MWH) it will take to balance out a given set of solar cells at some particular location so that no fossil fuel backup is needed? You will not find that in this article.

Here’s something that ought to be obvious: solar panels at any location in the northern hemisphere will produce less power in the winter than in the summer. The days are shorter, and the sun is lower in the sky and consequently weaker. Therefore, any system consisting solely of solar panels plus batteries, where the batteries are seeking to balance the system over the course of a year, will see the batteries drawn down continuously from September to March, and then recharged from March to September. Do batteries that can deal with such an annual cycle of seasons even exist? From the Journal piece:

And while batteries can provide stored power when other sources are down, most current batteries can deliver power only for several hours before needing to recharge. That makes them nearly useless during extended outages. . . . Most current storage batteries can discharge for four hours at most before needing to recharge.

OK, then, so if solar-plus-battery systems are about to displace natural gas plants, what’s the plan for winter? They won’t say. The fact is, the only possible plans are either fossil fuel backup or trillions upon trillions of dollars worth of batteries. But the author never mentions any of that. How much fossil fuel backup? That’s an arithmetic calculation that is not difficult to make. But the process of making the calculation forces you to actually propose the characteristics of your solar-plus-battery system, which then makes the costs obvious. How much excess capacity of solar panels and batteries do you plan to build to minimize the down periods? Do you need solar panel capacity of four times peak usage, or ten times? Do you need battery capacity of one week’s average usage (in GWH) or two weeks or a full month?

The simple fact is that wind/solar plus battery systems would not need any government subsidies if they were cost effective. The Biden Administration is proposing to hand out many, many tens of billions of dollars to subsidize building these systems. They are clearly not cost-effective, and not even close. But no one in a position to know will make the relatively simple calculations to let us know how much this is going to cost. Even the Wall Street Journal can’t seem to grasp the math involved. And President Biden? It’s embarrassing even to ask the question.

 

Wall Street Journal peddling ‘blue wave’ doom

By Jack Hellner August 10, 2018

The Wall Street Journal continues to head off the cliff with their top editorial on Thursday titled “The ‘Red Wave’ Illusion.”

We have been told since at least 2008, when Obama won, that there is a blue wave. They said, repeating Democrat talking points, that the Republicans must move left and join in with Democrats on their policies or they would never win again. Instead, the Republicans moved right with the tea party advocating for smaller government and fewer regulations (which the public likes) and from 2010 to 2016 the Republicans picked up majorities in the House and the Senate and over 1,000 seats nationwide -- and yet we continue to get the nostrum that Republicans had better move left and give in to illegal aliens or else they will never win again.

We rarely if ever have seen advice to the Democrats that they had better join in with Republicans or they will continue to lose seats. We always get some excuse why they lose. The biggest made up excuse was the fictional Russian collusion which the media and other Democrats continue to lie about. ..........To Read More....

We Were Winning the War Against Malaria

In the early 1970s malaria was all but eliminated by DDT.

Regarding Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan’s “How Long Till the Final World Malaria Day?” (op-ed, April 25): Dr. Narasimhan conveniently omits the fact that in the early 1970s malaria was all but eliminated by one of the most important pesticides ever invented—DDT. While study after study proved DDT to be effective in eliminating the malaria-carrying mosquito, the EPA’s first administrator, William Ruckelshaus, chose to ignore the opinions of his own study group and ruled against the continued use of DDT.

The world followed and the exponential increase of malaria deaths followed around the world. Environmental groups cheered as the disease once again got out of control in the 1980s. Books like Rachel Carson’s flawed “Silent Spring” talked of thinning bird eggshells and increased bird mortality. Audubon bird-count records proved the opposite, and the eggshell studies were in fact of caged birds deprived of calcium in their diets.

Novartis surely will profit from continued efforts to control malaria through methods that will never equal what was already being accomplished by DDT. J. Gordon Edwards, who was the world’s leading expert on malaria and DDT in the 1970s, must be turning over in his grave.

Jay Lehr, Ph.D. The Heartland Institute Arlington Heights, Ill.

This appeared as letter to the Wall Street Journal.  I wish to thank Jay for alerting me.