If you are tasked to investigate something, it would seem to behoove you to have even the slightest bit of knowledge of the subject at hand.
Ask me why your car is not running and you will get a blank stare; what you won’t get from me is an hour-long screed against you about the make of your car, how you could possibly have paid for it without resorting to prostitution, how the very idea of cars is evil, and the charge that you always wipe your nose on the headrest.
The latter is how House Judiciary Committee Democrats acted on Wednesday when “questioning(?)” Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger on the Twitter Files. While the subject received independent attention a few days ago -
- I did not go into the issue of “sourcing,” a line of questioning taken by a many of the Democrats.
When newspapers were still a respected thing, proper sourcing was pretty much sacrosanct. If a reporter got something for a court document, the story said “according to court records,” etc.
If a reporter got a tip about something interesting, exactly how that was to be “sourced” - or even it were to be at all – was a topic discussed at the top of the conversation with the source.
For attribution? Name in the paper. On background? Use the information freely but not interested in being in the paper. Off the record? Pretty self-explanatory.
For example, if someone told a reporter off the record about a payment ledger detailing the police department corruption the reporter would then usually wait a few days and try to ask for it and best to ask as a larger request: say, general revenues, how much came in in fines, any related financial documents, etc. The reporter could then go back and feign finding an anomaly in the records and ask for more detail and threaten a freedom of information request and go from there; in theory, this process shielded the person who made the off-the-record tip.
And you would go to jail before you revealed who the original source was because if you didn’t your career would be over because no one – not your boss or the public – could ever trust you again.
Both off-the-record and on-background information can be used in other ways – such as leading to better more precise questions to other people, adding depth to a story, imparting mood, etc.
All of this is separate, by the way, from anonymous sourcing – that involves using information, etc. verbatim while concealing the name from the public. In the past this was used sparingly and was never used to inject a person’s (or the reporter’s) opinion into a piece; now it’s pretty much how the entire DC media core operates.
Wednesday, the Democrat brain trust was clearly trying to bully, beg, bluster, and bullshit their way to get either Taibbi or Shellenberger to state on the record that Elon Musk was their source for the thousands of pages of documents that make up the Twitter Files – so far.
Neither would do so, driving the Democrats to even loopier behavior, including one who stated that because they wouldn’t reveal the source that meant that it had to be Musk.
It was an odd tack to take, made even creepier by the recent Federal Trade Commission request that Twitter provide the names, etc. of every reporter they have talked to in the months since Musk took over the company.
It is clear that Musk allowed the Twitter Files to happen. By his comments since and by the fact he could have directed staff to stiff-arm any reporter, Musk has publicly appeared to be a force beyond the expose.
Though they rhyme, the force is not automatically the source; in fact, he is most certainly not the person hitting click/paste on emails and sending them along, nor the person the reporters have been in contact with directly, etc.
By the way, this is not a distinction without a difference – it matters in the grand scheme of things, especially if the FTC continues its censorious efforts.
So the source is not Musk – why the Democrats harped on the issue is a bit confusing and made them look even worse – if that was possible – than they already did. Everyone – except maybe Rep. Garcia (see “Stupid or Evil” story video clip) – knows reporters don’t reveal sources and the badgering, along with the fact that none of the Democrats actually talked about the damming information itself - that the government is/was actively engaged in suppressing inconvenient speech, opinion, and facts - made them look even more terrifyingly totalitarian, if that is possible.
If you can’t argue the facts, argue the law. If you can’t argue the law, then just argue.
Speaking of argument, there has been for many many years a dispute about Richard Wagner and the Nazis. Despite Wagner dying before Hitler was born, he and his monumental work have been tagged as proto-fascist and anti-Semitic. It is very true that Wagner’s descendants palled around with Hitler and that Wagner himself was unquestionably an anti-semite who really really really thought Germany and Germans were the bees knees. In other words, if Wagner were alive alongside Hitler he probably would not have had too much of a problem with him and that’s why so many people get the creepies when they are Wagner-adjacent.
But conflating the artist with the art is a very slippery slope and it’s pretty hard to argue with this -
.
And it’s impossible to argue with this –
I have searched but could not find a Wagner-specific “trigger warning,” but if Les Miz has one I’m sure they exist – in case you a Broadway-bound snowflake, here are the trigger warnings for what’s showing:
https://stageandcandor.com/series/resource-list-trigger-project/#.ZA4aMx_MK00 .
That all being said, one composer who actually was alive and benefited from being appreciated by the Nazis was Carl Orff of “Carmina Burana” fame. To be clear, Orff never joined the party and – through his postwar “denazification” interviews by the US Army – he does not appear to have been politically much of anything.
But Carmina Burana made its debut in 1937, was popular with the government, and is one of few pieces of music composed in Germany during that time period that has for some reason escaped the tar of Nazism.
Which is kind of interesting considering its tendencies towards the bombastic and its whole giant performance art status (it is almost exclusively presented these days by an orchestra and a choir – it’s original form involved waaayyy more stagey stuff,) the work not only gets a pass but is now a Christmas tradition.
All of that was just an excuse to end with this brilliant clip, a clip you really really should click on:
Thanks for subscribing!