From the beginning of Kurt Andersen’s (Wikipedia & KurtAndersen.com) lecture:
Back thirty years before he was President in United States, twenty years before there was a United States, John Adams as you may know served as the defense lawyer for the British soldiers who had killed some of his fellow Patriots in the Boston Massacre and at that trial John Adams made his first statement that became famous. He said: “Facts are stubborn things and our wishes and our inclinations and the dictates of our passions do not alter the state of facts and evidence”.
Two and half centuries later this nation that Adams co-founded has almost become a refutation of that line as a another great American leader of our lifetime Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to say: You’re entitled to your own opinions but you are not entitled to your own facts.”