Letters to the editor often provide a platform for imbeciles to spread falsehoods and haters to spew racist calumny. Recent examples:

An Aug. 15 letter claimed the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement guarantees $16.50/hour wages in Mexico, twice our minimum. The actual Mexican minimum is $6.50 (the contention was ludicrous, but don’t laugh, because wherever the writer read, or likelier heard, that lie, she swallowed it like Meatball the Cat eating a toad, and then, like that stupid feline, vomited that toad of BS onto your Op Ed page).

One from Onaway stated that today’s immigrants “rape and plunder,” unlike the Good Old (White) Days. But research shows illegal immigration is actually linked to lower crime rates (newsflash: Onaway is on the way to oblivion, and doesn’t need an airport!)

Another called for us to “come together” to deny the global pandemic, which killed 1,100 Americans yesterday, and 179,000 so far … An Aug. 22 letter applauded that sentiment.

Also on the 22nd, a screed condemned the Portland protests, demanding force to crush protest. It asked of the city’s mayor, “Why don’t she have the bodies of persons killed during that anarchy on display…?” Two reasons: “she” is Ted Frey (a guy), and moreover, nobody died.

Arguments between letter-writers who ignore today’s grim reality, and epidemiologists who warn about the coming carnage, are like the Catholic Church denying Galileo’s proof that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Didn’t we settle the Faith vs. Reason question?

Justin Hinkley’s lucid editorials defend truth at a time when U.S. society has drifted away from the Modern Age moorings of scientifically verifiable fact.

Letters to the editor amplify loud, mask-free contrarians, who prefer to dispute the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin, rather than pay attention to hard data.

ERIC PAUL ROORDA,

Harrisville