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Lily Vakili's avatar

and in other news - posted w/ my sister's permission:

Editorial Board

Wall Street Journal

Dear Sirs;

It is with profound fury and regret that I cancel my over-38-year subscription to the Wall Street Journal. Up until today, June 4th, the anniversary of the 1989 massacre in China’s Tiananmen Square, I held out the belief, steadily eroding to weak hope that, as the news source for business, the Wall Street Journal would always come through with an unflinching respect for truth – especially the wider, most permanent ones.

And many of your reporters and commentators have soldiered valiantly in that effort, against an increasingly emasculated editorial board.

I will sorely miss the fine quality of these journalists’ prose, their tiny one-line rebuttals to the pervasive incompetence, graft, and self-interest of the current administration and the tattered Republican Party which has supported it. I will miss your Business & Finance, your Arts & Culture (oh, Greskovic), even Sports and Cars (thank you, Jason Gay and Dan Neil), and your delightful Journal Weekend.

Over the past two days I have searched your editorial page for some excuse to continue in my self-deception, but, no – you are evidently incapable or unwilling to reveal how completely unclothed is this “king” who ordered (yes, the buck stops with the president) the U. S. military into Washington, D.C.’s, Lafayette Square against peaceful protesters exercising one of our most important constitutional rights, “…the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

But I don’t need to quote this First Amendment to our Constitution to you. You know it, and like the Germans of the 1930s and 1940s, you are turning your head away. Instead, you rant today about the already widely-condemned, including by protestors, looting and violence, and publish dangerous tomfoolery suggesting now is the time to use the U.S. Army to “ensure domestic tranquility,” an Opinion piece which concludes with a sentence which would be laughable if it were not so tragically delusory: “But if violent disorder arises, the president must intervene to uphold the law and protect the republic.” Has there ever been a more lawless American president who has done so much to destroy the republic?

If American soldiers, tanks, and Predator drones on American soil against American citizens at this time are not enough for you, the editorial board of the august Wall Street Journal, to highlight and recoil at such a clear violation of the First Amendment, then this beautiful country is headed for disaster.

I feel that I am sacrificing much by cancelling my subscription, but also that I have few avenues to express my outrage and anguish over the fate of my country, about whom I have so often sung: “O beautiful, for spacious skies… and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea.”

I cancel my subscription effective immediately.

Sincerely,

Z. Vakili

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Jim Johnson's avatar

A nice summary of the situation, but I'd strongly disagree with this statement. "The Times for years has actively refused to acknowledge GOP's dangerous, radical turn, and it started during Barack Obama's presidency." The GOP's radical turn long predates Obama. It did accelerate during Obama's terms, but we cannot forget the efforts to crush dissent under GWB, the explicit efforts to overturn an election under Clinton, and the Reagan years. The truth is that the GOP has been an authoritarian, antidemocratic trash fire for a long time.

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