All we want are the facts, ma'am

Portland, and all of America, should check its bias at the door

Recently I sent a letter to the editor of The Oregonian that the newspaper was kind enough to publish Readers respond: Story diminished risks to police. It addressed a news story about a man who shot two Portland Police Bureau officers. Just days later, Portland officers serving an arrest warrant in a Pearl District high-rise for a violent crime at the local Safeway encountered the suspect emerging from his apartment pointing a gun at them. He was killed by police gunfire.

These two suspects shared a striking commonality: Based on publicly reported facts, both were at least partly motivated by politics. The first launched into a pro-Trump rant during his court appearance and the second had messages written on his ammunition threatening Trump.

This pattern reminded me not only of rising political violence from both sides of our divide, but also of the famous maxim most recently popularized by Daniel Patrick Moynihan: “Everyone is entitled to his opinion, but not to his own facts.”

Increasingly, people—both locally and nationally—seem to prefer their own facts. Thirteen months after an election victory in 2024, some supporters of that victory remain fixated on claims of massive 2020 election fraud despite no credible evidence of outcome-altering irregularities. Others rightly express concern about recent immigration enforcement but resist acknowledging that millions entered the country illegally under policies in effect in prior years. Some advocate for state and local laws that, however well-intentioned, we know for a fact cannot override federal authority under the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause. Still others claimed Iran’s nuclear program was “obliterated” by force last year—yet we now find ourselves in negotiations to dismantle it. And in some accounts, two individuals shot (perhaps unlawfully) by Customs and Border Protection agents were portrayed as innocent, law-abiding immigrants trying to, as The Oregonian put it, find “their version of the American dream.” The facts, however, showed both were engaged in criminal activity for many months, although a number of the more extreme claims by some federal authorities proved to be merely their facts.

What does this mean for our ability to sustain effective local and state governance?

People have always been uncomfortable with facts that clash with their preferred policies. But when our paper of record—while rightly critiquing law enforcement excesses—simultaneously downplays the real dangers officers face and characterizes those involved in extensive criminal activity as just people pursuing “their version of the American dream,” have we crossed a Rubicon? It certainly feels that way to me.

And it seems far harder to govern effectively when those in power and their constituents operate from their own “facts” rather than actual ones.

Could this disconnect explain why our local transit system, once the envy of the nation, has become an expensive, unreliable mess? Could it explain why Old Town was revitalized in the 1970s and 1980s—only to see the magnificent Lan Su Chinese Garden now surrounded by an open sewer of illegal drugs, unchecked crime, destroyed lives and empty storefronts? All of you know I could go on.

We must start acting on the facts—not our preferred versions of them—and we need to vote for leaders willing to do the same not ones that play to preferred facts. If we insist on our own facts then Mencken’s vision of democracy will come true and we’ll “deserve to get it good and hard.”