Robert Casimiro’s Dec. 26 rebuttal of Catherine Rampell’s Dec. 16 column reads suspiciously like she hit very close to home.

His use of the words “alleged presidential victory of Joe Biden” is a sign that he is one of the over 40 million people in this country who have fallen for the cynical scam (recycled after a four-year hibernation) perpetuated by a narcissistic demagogue who will do everything to maintain his grip on the power of the office he has abused for his own personal gain for the past four years.

Casimiro claims that Rampell’s arguments were slurs against people and philosophies that he holds so dear, but were never endemic to the party many others and I once belonged to. The once “Grand Old Party” has become a collection of those who think facts are “fake news,” and believe conspiracies dreamed up in the dark recesses of cyberspace are legitimate facts. It would have been nice if he had responded with the same reasoned arguments that he required of Rampell.

The “golem” referred to was not any individual, but the “paranoid style in American politics” that links with extremists. “In Jewish folklore, a golem is an animated, anthropomorphic being that is created entirely from inanimate matter. The word was used to mean an amorphous, unformed material in Psalms and medieval writing” (Wikipedia). The golem Rampell speaks of are the collective paranoid and destructive ramblings by the numerous right wing conspiracy theorists and creators of “alternative facts.”

The definition of a “conservative” is: one who is averse to change and holds traditional values; a person favoring free enterprise, private ownership, and socially traditional ideas. It seems to have grown to include the refusal to denounce or even acknowledge bigotry, misogyny, or total fabrications such as “birtherism”, so-called fraud, and hoax pedophile rings. Those in control of today’s GOP seem content to, at best, humor and, at worst, fan these flames for political gain, with little worry for the health of our citizens or our democracy.

Finally, we see those such as Mr. Casimiro condemning the educated, those who have experienced other cultures, and those who can empathize with the struggles of the not so privileged, as “self-anointed glitterati of the New York and Washington D.C. establishment.” It’s worth noting that nascent totalitarian countries purged the educated classes from their population to remove any resistance to their single-minded goals of stability through oppression. Is it any wonder why so many of our best and brightest youth leave the small communities from which they come to make their homes in larger population centers where they are free to think and to fight for change and a better society?

Claude Bergeron, Lewiston