I come away from John Balentine’s recent column thinking he believes that the Vietnam war was “our finest hour” and George Wallace was not a racist. His or his uncle’s views on protests on the right are naive at best. To quote from Peter Singer in The Washington Post of Feb. 28: “Over the last decade, individuals and groups fueled by (the extremist right’s) virulent ideology have committed 71 percent of the known politically or religiously inspired killings in our country – that is, 274 of the 387 Americans murdered by extremists.”

Phil Davies
Falmouth