In a letter Jan. 15 (“President Biden ‘is not for Americans’“), Tom Hart called President Biden a liar and a thief.

What lies? What did he steal? That fits the Trump pattern of calling people names (“low IQ!”) without evidence. Fox News and dark corners of the internet are to blame for such extremist propaganda — unedited and untethered to facts — at a time when the “governed” (as in “consent of the governed”) need reliable information to maintain a vibrant democracy.

An otherwise smart young man told me that vaccines can sterilize males, and added that Dr. Anthony Fauci has the lucrative patent for at least one of the successful vaccines. I asked him and other conspiracy addicts why the government would mislead us about the need to get shots. Without fail, they “don’t know why.”

In other words, their fantasy holds, public health scientists are lying about a pandemic that’s killed well over 800,000 Americans — with no motive to do so. That makes as much sense as Trump bloviating in 2020: “If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases.”

And what about this nonsense that the 2020 election was stolen? To do that, hundreds of election workers from both political parties in four or five states would have agreed to miscount the vote and destroy Trump ballots.

Now, nearly 15 months after the election, substantive findings of such a travesty simply don’t exist. Nor have a slew of federal judges and Trump’s former attorney general found any evidence of a stolen election.

Dave Griffiths, Mechanic Falls

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