The Weekly Screed (#996)

 Flaming Bikini Rabbis from Planet Sodom!

by David Benjamin

“Then oddly there are all these people who have said they saw what looked like lasers or blue beams of light causing the fires, and pictures and videos…”

— Marjorie Taylor Greene

MADISON, Wis. — Whenever I catch up on the antics of QAnon Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, The Sound of Music comes to mind and I wish Julie Andrews were still around to portray Greene in the biopic of her life. The song that sets the tone for our heroine’s saga would be, of course, “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Our Margie?” A Mitch McConnell mimic would render the solo, backed by a baritone chorus of jowly gray Republicans, while Margie dances crossfit circles around the Capitol rotunda. 

Among Margie’s artifacts is her (deleted but searchable) 2018 Facebook post, in which she imputes a wave of California wildfires to an evil cabal that includes Pacific Gas & Electric, “Rothschild, Inc.” (actually Rothschild & Co.), Solaren Corp., the California Public Utilities Commission, ex-California Gov. Jerry Brown, Diane Feinstein’s husband and a cast of thousands. Margie deftly squeezes her sprawling but damning indictment into a mere 535 words. 

The other day, when I stumbled into Margie’s exposé, I realized that she had created a sort of CliffNotes exegesis of a communication style native to the conspiracist underground press. I use the term “press” because the spokesfolks of QAnon-world take pride in knowing secrets unrevealed to the mass of benighted “normies.” Sleuths like Marge do the homework the rest of us are too myopic and brainwashed to heed. For example, Marge is barely fifty words into her revelations when she invokes the word “research.”  

She knows stuff, ‘cause she’s been digging.

I’m tempted to critique Marge’s effort as faulty journalism in many respects. But I have to grant some indulgence because her polemic tends to fall under headings like “op-ed” and “analysis,” which permit a modicum of subjectivity.

However, even a personal commentary can be judged by reportorial standards that measure the author’s credibility. In this respect, from her very first sentence, Margie repeatedly screws the journalistic pooch.  Most unfortunately, she commits the cardinal sin of AP Style by “burying the lead” (often spelled “lede’). 

The lead is a who-what-where-when capsule that captures the vital elements of the story in a single opening sentence. Alas, in her exposé, there’s nary a whiff of the lead ’til almost halfway, when Margie springs the stunning claim that blue lasers from Outer Space, seemingly linked to the Rothschild banking empire, ignited the California wildfires as a clandestine public service, to clear the path for Gov. Brown’s high-speed rail “pet project.” Holy smokes!

In newsroom lingo, this is the sort of kickass scoop that should go “up top.” Indeed, the deadline task of extracting the perfect prologue from a blizzard of facts, assertions and insinuations can challenge even the keenest of grizzled newshounds. But locating this particular bombshell, even for an amateur like Marge, should be a layup. I mean, really: Multiple sources who’ve witnessed the horrific handiwork of pyromaniac Parisian bankers lurking in the Van Allen Belt and pointing flamethrowers at wine country? Any enterprising cub reporter who buried a lead this hot would spend the rest of his abortive career as a copyboy and coffee gopher. 

Margie’s botched lead isn’t her only misstep, unfortunately. She describes her numerous sources as “all these people.” I know most of you out there aren’t journalists, but I suspect you might see the problem: “All these people”?

When you’re bird-dogging the news, it’s nice to cite a bunch of eyewitnesses to an outrage as ghastly as an extraterrestrial conspiracy of rabbinical arsonists. But it’s even nicer to tell your readers who these witnesses are (attribution), what their credentials might be (citation of authority), where and when they all saw these laser shafts of sizzling blue light and whether their accounts and descriptions are consistent with one another (corroboration). 

One of the distressing trends (to me, at least) in the news in recent decades is a loosening of the rules of attribution, resulting in a plague of “Deep Throat” stories based on the testimony of unnamed sources. This tolerance of secrecy compels the reporter to hunt down additional witnesses — ideally with names — who can independently verify the testimony of the anonymous snitch. 

Citing “all these people,” or “everyone knows” (the favored formulation of a former president) falls pathetically short of minimum transparency, especially when you’re talking about an allegation as far-fetched as Jews and Jerry Brown scorching Smoky the Bear with death rays from Mars.

Margie sows deeper doubts about her investigative rigor as she rattles off an all-star squad of purported malefactors, from Roger Kimmel — a sort of board-of-directors gadabout (he belongs to five of them) — to Gov. Brown, Richard Blum (Sen. Feinstein’s husband), a guy named Michael Peevey and, indirectly the New York Stock Exchange. By her own cheery admission, Marge connects all her bad guys, bad companies, bad banks and bad Jewish astronauts through “speculation,” “coincidence,” suspicion and guilt by association. 

Some of Margie’s defendants and their organizations are probably guilty of something, but an actual journalist doesn’t burrow to the bottom of their alleged shenanigans simply by dropping names. When you mention, say, Michael Peevey, you’re required by your editor and your ethics to explain who he is (former member and president of the California Public Utilities Commission, 2002-15, board member, Solaren Corp.), what he did and how he contributed to all those forest fires. This is the sort of background scutwork that requires even more “digging,” takes up a lot more space on the page and tends to dampen the veracity of a nice juicy accusation. It also leads, for example, toward the website of Solaren, the outfit Margie has linked to the Rothschild firebugs. There, one disappointing sentence renders moot the whole diabolical conspiracy. Issued on 29 January 2021, 26 months after Margie chronicled the Jewish blue streaks piercing the redwood groves of California, the (readily verifiable) Solaren statement reads: “Solaren has not yet launched any Solar Power Satellites into space.”

I looked up this tidbit of buzzkill. It took thirty seconds, too easy to call it “research.” Much harder to dig up, for example, is the term “Dundreary whiskers,” which I encountered this week in a ghost story by Algernon Blackwood. Thanks to Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, I ferreted out the reference and reveled in the richness of its heritage, including the death of Abraham Lincoln. I could write a whole feature story on the subject. 

But not here. Because journalism is a discipline that eschews digression (another of Margie’s expository sins). 

Journalism, of course, is hardly a prestigious calling. It lacks glamour. It lacks the technical rigor of neurosurgery, rocket science and teaching geometry to tenth-graders. It is, more accurately, a craft — like joining wood or blowing glass — that can, in the right hands with proper seasoning, elevate to a sort of art. It serves its purposes according to rules both written and implicit, with tools of the trade that take years of practice and frequent humiliation, and through faithfulness to a sticky moral code. It’s a subjective profession that aspires to objectivity and bends, hopefully and haltingly, toward the truth.

When rank poseurs like Marjorie Taylor Greene horn in and sound off, but bring no chops and observe no ethics, well… Is that Julie Andrews I hear twirling and warbling in a fictional meadow?

“The hills are alive with the sound of bullshit…”