To: \u00a0The Entire Twin Cities News Media
\nFrom: \u00a0Mitch Berg, ornery peasant
\nRe: \u00a0The Reverend Nancy Nord Bence<\/p>\n
Back during my brief and unlamented reporting career, I had not a few editors and producers warn me off using certain sources – the ones that had a habit of feeding them bum information.<\/p>\n
I’m going to do the same for you today. \u00a0To wit:<\/p>\n
On the subject of guns, the Reverend Nancy Nord Bence – the director of “Protect” Minnesota – has never made\u00a0a single, substantial, original, true statement.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Not One.<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Every word in there is a key qualifier. \u00a0I don’t doubt that she makes true, substantial, original statements about other things – Lutheran theology (I’ll let you Missouri Synod people mix it up on that), her family, sports trivia, whatever. \u00a0 Those are not\u00a0at issue.<\/p>\n But on the issue of guns, gun laws, gun owners, violence statistics, then the Reverend Nord Bence and her organization have never – not once – made a single statement that is simultaneously substantial, original, and true<\/em>.<\/p>\n She\/they may have made statements that are substantial and true – like, repeating broad statistics from the Department of Justice website (before they embroider them, anyway) – but the statements aren’t original.<\/p>\n They may have said things that are substantial and original – like “Stand your Ground is a threat to minorities and immigrants” – but it’s not true. \u00a0 It’s devoid of fact.<\/p>\n The Reverend may have said things that true and original – like “Ron Latz supports our agenda” – but they were not substantial contributions to the debate; they were, as lawyers say,\u00a0de minimis. \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n And of course, as we’ve shown in several long series of threads on the Reverend, her predecessor in the office, and their “organization”, they have a long history of saying things that are substantial but unoriginal and false; of things that are original but insubstantial and false, and of course things that are true but insubstantial and unoriginal. \u00a0That goes without saying.<\/p>\n But\u00a0the overriding realization is that the Reverend<\/a>, and her precessessor Heather Martens<\/a>, and their entire organization have yet to say a single thing\u00a0on Second Amendment issues hat is simultaneously all three things<\/a> – original, substantial and true.<\/p>\n And I’ll welcome the chance to prove it to any or all of you, point by point, with or without the Reverend there to speak on her behalf. The challenge is rhetorical – she openly tells her group never to engage with dissenters, and all too many of you in the media indulge her inability to defend her largely fraudulent agenda.<\/p>\n But this isn’t about her. \u00a0This is about you. \u00a0You need to stop treating the Reverend and her group as a legitimate source on Second Amendment issues.<\/p>\n She is not. \u00a0 She feeds you false information, and you – God bless you all, journos tend not to know much about the subject – run it without any serious fact-checking.<\/p>\n More tomorrow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" To: \u00a0The Entire Twin Cities News Media From: \u00a0Mitch Berg, ornery peasant Re: \u00a0The Reverend Nancy Nord Bence Back during my brief and unlamented reporting career, I had not a few editors and producers warn me off using certain sources – the ones that had a habit of feeding them bum information. I’m going to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[325,340,22],"tags":[249,359],"class_list":["post-62562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-gun-control","category-lie-first","category-victim-disarmament","tag-open-letters","tag-rev-nancy-nord-bence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=62562"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62562\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62576,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62562\/revisions\/62576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=62562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=62562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=62562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}