Anecdotal evidence, being the favorite way of many people to make their point is totally understood because anecdotal evidence is how most of us look at the world, i.e. if that is what I see in my everyday life, then that is the way it must be.

Last week’s letter writers (“What could go wrong with open borders,” and “Sanctuary laws led to an officer’s death,” published Jan. 16) use analogy and anecdotal evidence to support their opinions, never mind that they use very poor analogies: opening up our borders to everyone is the same as opening up our homes to everyone, which of course is not an apt analogy at all, and picking a criminal’s wrongdoing and him being an illegal in a sanctuary city means that there shouldn’t be any sanctuary cities, even though extensive research supports the fact that illegals in this country are involved in far less crime then natural born citizens.

This, to me, is how we so easily fall into the trap of supporting a person like Trump, who tells us exactly what we want to hear, even though what he tells us is totally bogus. If you take the time to look at the facts, almost nothing that he tells us on a daily basis has anything to do with the truth, but it is what we want to hear because it is what we want to believe. As long as we are too lazy to take the time to seek out the facts, a charlatan like Trump can easily lead us down the path to authoritarianism and we won’t even know how we got there.

Larry Benson

Enumclaw