To the editor:

With the rise of the far-right and radical right, we not only have been experiencing the growth of “survival of the fittest” social Darwinist ideology in today’s national Republican Party, featuring their desire not only to cut and reduce spending on all of the federal government social programs that help the middle and lower classes (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, college student loans), but we also get their growing cold-hearted desire to abolish all of them, which they try to keep secret from the American people, as authors Jane Mayer and Nancy MacLean have well documented by pointing out that they often use “stealth tactics,” which are a part of what Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman characterizes as their “bad faith.”

And along with this, we get what Alfred Hitchcock referred to as “brutality with a smile.”

An example of this was when presidential candidate Donald Trump literally mocked, made fun of, insulted, disrespected and humiliated candidate Carly Fiorina by shouting, “Look at that face!”

I still find it hard to believe that any human being could have been so cruel, sadistic and abusive as to humiliate another human being like that, especially a very accomplished woman who has had to bury a child as a result of drug addiction and who has had to experience having a double mastectomy. Ms. Fiorina has suffered greatly in life and did not deserve to be abused and publically humiliated like that. No one does.

But as someone who believes in God and who converted to Christianity in 1980, I believe that ultimately we are all held accountable and will be held accountable for how we have treated others in life, and that includes a right-wing, serial spouse-cheater and dirtbag like Donald Trump.

Sincerely,

Stewart B. Epstein

Rochester