Llewellyn King: My Christmas in poor, beautiful Cuba
These Spanish Colonial era buildings are a common sight across Havana, along with old cars.
— Photo by Bryan Ledgar
There was much business done in Cuba by New England enterprises, especially in sugar but also in tobacco and fruit. Here’s the Soledad plantation of Belmont, Mass.-based sugar mogul Edward F. Atkins. In the late 19th Century, Atkins was a dominant force in the U.S.-Cuban sugar market. His firm, E. Atkins & Co., established sugarcane plantations along the southern coast of Cuba near the cities of Cienfuegos and Trinidad. From the 1840s through the 1920s, the Atkins family operated their sugar business on the island, seeing it through the abolition of slavery, Cuba's fight for independence from Spain, and the changing agricultural and industrial practices of sugar production.
The huge and Boston-based United Fruit Co. owned or leased many properties in Cuba.
I have had a hankering to go back to Cuba. I went there with other journalists on a trip organized by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in the 1980s; and again on a National Press Club trip in 2003.
Over Christmas I went back, just to Havana, that dowager city, and lost myself in the best of Cuba: its architecture, its food, its music and its people.
But around me were plenty of signs of the other Cuba, the Cuba which is in extremis — the Cuba which is driving its citizens to leave in record numbers.
In 2022, by some accounts, about 400,000 Cubans left for work and a new life wherever in the world they could find it. The Customs and Border Protection agency estimates that in a recent two-year period, 425,000 sought entry to the United States.
Many Americans are surprised to hear that you can travel easily to Cuba these days. The confusion arises as the law seems to say “no,” but the regulations posted by the Treasury Department say “yes.”
My wife and I went through a commercial Cuba travel service called Cuba Explorer. We didn’t want to go as journalists; we wanted to take a quiet look at Havana, not through the eyes of officialdom. We signed up and so did two friends, a retired doctor and his wife.
The tour company arranged our Cuban visa and the “Certificate of Legal Cuba Travel,” a U.S. requirement. All we did was buy our tickets on American Airlines, which operates daily service from Miami. Delta, Southwest and JetBlue and also fly to Havana from various cities.
Border formalities are no more difficult than they are going to any country — say, Mexico or the United Kingdom.
Havana — and some of the smaller colonial towns which I visited previously — is a delight. It is among the great “built cities” of the world, like Paris, Vienna and St. Petersburg. However, as Havana is compact, it is easily seen; it is the kind of place you feel you can get your arms around.
The grandeur of its colonial past, its wealth of another time, is everywhere. So is the poverty of today. Some streets are sad, indeed, with all the manifestations of poor countries: people picking over garbage, pedal carts, even bullock carts. There are few overweight people and while Cuban food is complex and sophisticated, I’m told that Cubans survive on rice and beans.
Cubans also queue. Jokingly, one Cuban told me, “When we see a line, we go and stand in it — must be something good and, like all good things here, in short supply.”
Food for those outside the dollar-driven tourist economy is a struggle, as are medicines and simple things, like a favorite shampoo or paper products of all kinds. For travelers, one of the pleasures of Havana is that you always get a cloth napkin, not of choice but of necessity. Our new, comfortable hotel ran out of toilet paper. The American obsession with carrying Kleenex came in handy.
The 1950s cars are as plentiful as ever, but many are reengineered with modern Japanese or Russian engines; some declare they are all original parts and use Cubans abroad to scavenge junk yards and send parts back in relatives’ luggage.
The sanctions, with small modifications, have lasted since 1962, and are the longest-ever in U.S. history — and they haven’t worked. They haven’t brought down the Communist Party, freed the press or made the life of Cubans any better. Instead, they have subtracted hope.
The embargo is a peculiar cross that Cuba alone bears, especially when you think of the many dictatorial regimes we tolerate and befriend.
The Hill reported that Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador told President Biden in a phone call that he could help reduce migration in the region if he could loosen the sanctions on Cuba. It is hard to find a Cuban who wants to leave the island, but wouldn’t if he or she could.
After 20 years, I had hoped to find a more prosperous Cuba, but it hasn’t happened. The small areas of free enterprise allowed by the state have created little oligarchies. Taxi drivers and waiters make much more money than doctors and engineers. These professionals count among Cuba’s exports, its brain drain. On the upside, there are many private restaurants with a thriving food culture for those who can afford it.
The fault is the failed Cuban communist model, but the United States hasn’t helped. Graham Greene, the great British writer, who penned The Power and the Glory, about the Mexican Revolution — from 1910 to 1920 —pointed out that it failed without the aid of an American embargo.
I have felt, now for 40 years, that Cuba would throw off communism if we let it alone, and got rid of the embargo, which is more about U.S. politics than the politics of Cuba.
Meanwhile, do visit Cuba while you can. It is a treat for the eyes, the ears and the palate. You won’t regret it.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Take the Little Circle Route
The westbound I-195 entrance ramp in East Providence was closed due to the Washington Bridge closure.
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
The economic and psychological damage from the ongoing Washington Bridge repair job will, it seems, last for months. I had thought that perhaps the traffic mess would have been smoothed out a lot within a few days. But on Dec. 20, in clear weather and not during commuting hours -- we saw a traffic jam extended for miles on Route 195 West as we headed on the highway’s eastbound side, which we got to via a confusing and circuitous route in always-problematical East Providence. Clearer signage, please! We were bogged down for quite a while on Broadway in that speed-trap-rich city, with its ingeniously confusing signs. Pretty tough to speed there now, not that you should!
So we decided to return to Providence from our meeting in Dartmouth, Mass., via 195 West and then 24 North to 495 North from which we got on 95 South. The trip took a little over an hour and a half. The detour was well worth it. Drivers should avoid 195 anywhere near Providence, especially those with heart or other serious health issues. You’d find it hard to be rescued in a miles-long traffic jam. And you might run out of gas
Crafts for sale
Installation view of the “Holiday Handmade” shop at the Fuller Craft Museum, in Brockton, Mass., through Jan. 7
The museum says:
The shop showcases goods that “wouldn't look out of place hanging on the walls of the museum itself. This year's shop features textiles, paintings, ceramics and even cosmetics crafted with an eye for artistic flair and good design.’’
Brockton City Hall
— Photo by Timothy Valentine
In Colonial New England, March 25 was New Year’s day
Lunario Novo, Secondo la Nuova Riforma della Correttione del l'Anno Riformato da N.S. Gregorio XIII, printed in Rome by Vincenzo Accolti in 1582, one of the first printed editions of the new, Gregorian calendar.
From the New England Historical Society:
“In colonial New England, the new year did not start on Jan, 1. Not because the Puritans didn’t want people to have too much fun on New Year’s Eve. It was because England refused to go along with the rest of Europe in adopting the Gregorian calendar.
“The English year didn’t change until March 25, or Lady Day, when Christians celebrate the Feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin. So in 1620, John Winthrop’s father Adam wrote in his diary, ‘The new year beginneth,’ on March 25.’’
Ice sculpture on a Boston “First Night’’
PolitiFact says Robert Kennedy is purveyor of 'Lie of the Year'
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
From Kaiser Family Foundation Health News
As pundits and politicos spar over whether Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign will factor into the outcome of the 2024 election, one thing is clear: Kennedy’s political following is built on a movement that seeks to legitimize conspiracy theories.
His claims decrying vaccines have roiled scientists and medical experts and stoked anger over whether his work harms children. He has made suggestions about the cause of covid-19 that he acknowledges sound racist and antisemitic.
Bolstered by his famous name and family’s legacy, his campaign of conspiracy theories has gained an electoral and financial foothold. He is running as an independent — having abandoned his pursuit of the Democratic Party nomination — and raised more than $15 million. A political action committee pledged to spend between $10 million and $15 million to get his name on the ballot in 10 states.
Even though he spent the past two decades as a prominent leader of the anti-vaccine movement, Kennedy rejects a blanket “anti-vax” label that he told Fox News in July makes him “look crazy, like a conspiracy theorist.”
But Kennedy draws bogus conclusions from scientific work. He employs “circumstantial evidence” as if it is proof. In TV, podcast, and political appearances for his campaign in 2023, Kennedy steadfastly maintained:
Vaccines cause autism.
No childhood vaccines “have ever been tested in a safety study pre-licensing.”
There is “tremendous circumstantial evidence” that psychiatric drugs cause mass shootings, and the National Institutes of Health refuses to research the link out of deference to pharmaceutical companies.
Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine were discredited as covid-19 treatments so covid vaccines could be granted emergency use authorization, a win for Big Pharma.
Exposure to the pesticide atrazine contributes to gender dysphoria in children.
Covid-19 is “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
For Kennedy, the conspiracies aren’t limited to public health. He claims “members of the CIA” were involved in the assassination of his uncle, John F. Kennedy. He doesn’t “believe that (Sirhan) Sirhan’s bullets ever hit my father,” former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. He insists the 2004 presidential election was stolen from Democratic candidate John Kerry.
News organizations, including PolitiFact, have documented why those claims, and many others, are false, speculative, or conspiracy-minded.
Kennedy has sat for numerous interviews and dismissed the critics, not with the grievance and bluster of former President Donald Trump, but with a calm demeanor. He amplifies the alleged plot and repeats dubious scientific evidence and historical detail.
Will his approach translate to votes? In polls since November of a three-way matchup between President Joe Biden, Trump, and Kennedy, Kennedy pulled 16% to 22% of respondents.
Kennedy’s movement exemplifies the resonance of conspiratorial views. Misinformers with organized efforts are rewarded with money and loyalty. But that doesn’t make the claims true.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign based on false theories is PolitiFact’s 2023 Lie of the Year.
How an Environmental Fighter Took Up Vaccines
Kennedy, the third of 11 children, was 9 when he was picked up on Nov. 22, 1963, from Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C., because Lee Harvey Oswald had shot and killed Uncle Jack. He was 14 when he learned that his father had been shot by Sirhan Sirhan following a victory speech after the California Democratic presidential primary.
RFK Jr., who turns 70 in January and who lives in New York’s Hudson River Valley and on Cape Cod, wouldn’t begin to publicly doubt the government’s findings about the assassinations until later in his adulthood.
As a teenager, he used drugs. He was expelled from two boarding schools and arrested at 16 for marijuana possession. None of that slowed an elite path through higher education, including Harvard University, for his bachelor’s degree, and the University of Virginia for his law degree.
He was hired as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan in 1982 but failed the bar exam and resigned the next year. Two months later, he was arrested for heroin possession after falling ill on a flight. His guilty plea involved a drug-treatment program, a year of probation, and volunteer work with a local anglers’ association that patrolled the Hudson River for evidence of pollution that could lead to lawsuits.
Kennedy’s involvement with Hudson Riverkeeper and the Natural Resources Defense Council ushered in a long chapter of environmental litigation and advocacy.
An outdoorsman and falconer, Kennedy sued companies and government agencies over pollution in the Hudson River and its watershed. (He joined the New York bar in 1985.) He earned a master’s degree in environmental law at Pace University, where he started a law clinic to primarily assist Riverkeeper’s legal work. He helped negotiate a 1997 agreement that protected upstate New York reservoirs supplying New York City’s drinking water.
In 1999, Kennedy founded the Waterkeeper Alliance, an international group of local river and bay-keeper organizations that act as their “community’s coast guard,” he told Vanity Fair in 2016. He stayed with the group until 2020, when he left “to devote himself, full-time, to other issues.”
On Joe Rogan’s podcast in June, Kennedy said that virtually all of his litigation involved “some scientific controversy. And so, I’m comfortable with reading science and I know how to read it critically.”
PolitiFact did not receive a response from Kennedy’s campaign for this story.
He became concerned about mercury pollution from coal-burning power plants; methylmercury can build up in fish, posing a risk to humans and wildlife. As he traveled around the country, he said, women started appearing in the front rows of his mercury lectures.
“They would say to me in kind of a respectful but vaguely scolding way, ‘If you’re really interested in mercury contamination exposure to children, you need to look at the vaccines,’” Kennedy told Rogan, whose show averages 11 million listeners an episode.
Kennedy said the women sounded “rational” as they explained a link between their children’s autism and vaccines. “They weren’t excitable,” he said. “And they had done their research, and I was like, ‘I should be listening to these people, even if they’re wrong.’”
He did more than listen. In June 2005, Rolling Stone and Salon co-published Kennedy’s article “Deadly Immunity.” Kennedy told an alarming story about a study that revealed a mercury-based additive once used in vaccines, thimerosal, “may have caused autism in thousands of kids.” Kennedy alleged that preeminent health agencies — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the World Health Organization — had colluded with vaccine manufacturers “to conceal the data.”
Kennedy’s premise was decried as inaccurate and missing context. He left out the ultimate conclusion of the 2003 study, by Thomas Verstraeten, which said “no consistent significant associations were found between [thimerosal-containing vaccines] and neurodevelopmental outcomes.”
Kennedy didn’t clearly state that, as a precaution, thimerosal was not being used in childhood vaccines when his article was published. He also misrepresented the comments of health agency leaders at a June 2000 meeting, pulling certain portions of a 286-page transcript that appeared to support Kennedy’s collusion narrative.
Scientists who have studied thimerosal have found no evidence that the additive, used to prevent germ growth, causes harm, according to a CDC FAQ about thimerosal. Unlike the mercury in some fish, the CDC says, thimerosal “doesn’t stay in the body, and is unlikely to make us sick.” Continued research has not established a link between thimerosal and autism.
By the end of July 2005, Kennedy’s Salon article had been appended with five correction notes. In 2011, Salon retracted the article. It disappeared from Rolling Stone.
Salon’s retraction was part of a broader conspiracy of caving “under pressure from the pharmaceutical industry,” Kennedy told Rogan. The then-Salon editor rejected this, saying they “caved to pressure from the incontrovertible truth and our journalistic consciences.”
Kennedy has not wavered in his belief: “Well, I do believe that autism does come from vaccines,” he told Fox News’ Jesse Watters in July.
David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, interviewed Kennedy for a July story. Noting that Kennedy was focusing more on vaccine testing rather than outright opposition, Remnick asked him whether he was having second thoughts.
“I’ve read the science on autism and I can tell you, if you want to know,” Kennedy said. “David, you’ve got to answer this question: If it didn’t come from the vaccines, then where is it coming from?”
How Covid-19 Helped RFK Jr.’s Vaccine-Skeptical Crusade
In 2016, Kennedy launched the World Mercury Project to address mercury in fish, medicines, and vaccines. In 2018, he created Children’s Health Defense, a legal advocacy group that works “aggressively to eliminate harmful exposures,” its website says.
Since at least 2019, Children’s Health Defense has supported and filed lawsuits challenging vaccination requirements, mask mandates, and social media companies’ misinformation policies (including a related lawsuit against Facebook and The Poynter Institute, which owns PolitiFact).
From the beginning, the group has solicited stories about children “injured” by environmental toxins or vaccines. This year, it launched a national bus tour to collect testimonials. The organization also produces documentary-style films and books, including Kennedy’s “The Wuhan Cover-Up and the Terrifying Bioweapons Arms Race” and “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.”
In 2020, Children’s Health Defense and the anti-vaccine movement turned attention to the emerging public health crisis.
Kolina Koltai, a senior researcher at Bellingcat, an investigative journalism group, had seen anti-vaccine groups try to seize on Zika and Ebola outbreaks, with little success. But the covid-19 pandemic provided “the exact scenario” needed to create mass dissent: widespread fear and an information vacuum.
Children’s Health Defense published articles in March and April 2020 claiming the “viral terror” was an attempt to enact the “global immunization agenda” and a “dream come true” for dictators. The group echoed these points in ads and social media posts and grew its audience, including in Europe.
On X, then known as Twitter, Children’s Health Defense outperformed news outlets that met NewsGuard’s criteria for trustworthiness from the third quarter of 2020 to the fourth quarter of 2021, according to a report by the German Marshall Fund think tank, even as Children’s Health Defense published debunked information about covid-19 and vaccines.
In 2019, Children’s Health Defense reported it had $2.94 million in revenue, and paid Kennedy a $255,000 salary. Its revenue grew 440% through 2021, according to IRS filings, hitting $15.99 million. Kennedy’s salary increased to $497,013. (Its 2022 form 990 for tax disclosure is not yet public. Kennedy has been on leave from the organization since he entered the presidential race in April.)
On social media, the message had limits. Meta removed Kennedy’s personal Instagram account in February 2021 for spreading false claims about covid-19 and vaccines, the company said, but left his Facebook account active. A year and a half later, Meta banned Children’s Health Defense’s main Facebook and Instagram accounts for “repeatedly” violating its medical misinformation policies. Several state chapters still have accounts.
As the group’s face, Kennedy became a leader of a movement opposed to masks and stay-at-home orders, said David H. Gorski, managing editor of Science-Based Medicine and a professor of surgery and oncology at the Wayne State University School of Medicine.
“The pandemic produced a new generation of anti-vaxxers who had either not been prominent before or who were not really anti-vax before,” Gorski said. “But none of them had the same cultural cachet that comes with being a Kennedy that RFK Jr. has.”
Demonstrators listen as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is shown on screen speaking at an anti-vaccine mandate rally on Jan. 23, 2022, in Washington.(ERIC LEE/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES)
Rallying a crowd before the Lincoln Memorial on Jan. 23, 2022, Kennedy protested covid-19 countermeasures alongside commentator Lara Logan and anti-vaccine activist Robert Malone. The crowd held signs reading “Nuremberg Trials 2.0” and “free choice, no masks, no tests, no vax.” When Kennedy took the stage, mention of his role with Children’s Health Defense prompted an exuberant cheer.
In his speech, Kennedy invoked the Holocaust to denounce the “turnkey totalitarianism” of a society that requires vaccinations to travel, uses digital currency and 5G, and is monitored by Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates’ satellites: “Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.”
Days later, facing criticism from his wife, the actor Cheryl Hines, Jewish advocacy groups, and Holocaust memorial organizations, Kennedy issued a rare apology for his comments.
Asked about his wife’s comment on Dec. 15 on CNN, he said his remarks were taken out of context but that he had to apologize because of his family.
Recycle. Repeat. Repeat.
When he’s asked about his views, Kennedy calmly searches his rhetorical laboratory for recycled talking points, selective research findings, the impression of voluminous valid studies, speculation, and inarguable authority from his experience. He refers to institutions, researchers, and reports, by name, in quick succession, shifting points before interviewers can note what was misleading or cherry-picked.
There is power in repetition. Take his persistent claim that vaccines are not safety-tested.
In July, he told “Fox & Friends,” “Vaccines are the only medical product that is not safety-tested prior to licensure.”
On Nov. 7 on PBS NewsHour, Kennedy said vaccines are “the only medical product or medical device that is allowed to get a license without engaging in safety tests.”
On Dec. 15, he told CNN’s Kasie Hunt that no childhood vaccines have “ever been tested in a safety study pre-licensing.”
This is false. Vaccines, including the covid-19 vaccines, are tested for safety and effectiveness before they are licensed. Researchers gather initial safety data and information about side effects during phase 1 clinical trials on groups of 20 to 100 people. If no safety concerns are identified, subsequent phases rely on studies of larger numbers of volunteers to evaluate a vaccine’s effectiveness and monitor side effects.
Kennedy sometimes says that some vaccines weren’t tested against inactive injections or placebos. That has an element of truth: If using a placebo would disadvantage or potentially endanger a patient, researchers might test new vaccines against older versions with known side effects.
But vaccines are among “the most tested and vetted” pharmaceutical products given to children, said Patricia Stinchfield, a pediatric nurse practitioner and the president of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases.
Kennedy encourages parents to research questions on their own, saying doctors and other experts are invariably compromised.
“They are taking as gospel what the CDC tells them,” Kennedy said on Bari Weiss’ “Honestly” podcast in June.
Public health agencies have been “serving the mercantile interests of the pharmaceutical companies, and you cannot believe anything that they say,” Kennedy said.
Experts fret that the Kennedy name carries weight.
“When he steps forward and he says the government’s lying to you, the FDA is lying to you, the CDC is lying to you, he has credence, because he’s seen as someone who is a product of the government,” said Paul Offit, a pediatrics professor in the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s infectious diseases division and the director of the hospital’s Vaccine Education Center. “He’s like a whistleblower in that sense. He’s been behind the scenes, so he knows what it looks like, and he’s telling you that you’re being lied to.”
Kennedy name-drops studies that don’t support his commentary. When speaking with Rogan, Kennedy encouraged the podcaster’s staff to show a particular 2010 study that found that exposure to the herbicide atrazine caused some male frogs to develop female sex organs and become infertile.
Kennedy has repeatedly invoked that frog study to support his position that “we should all be looking at” atrazine and its impact on human beings. The researcher behind the study told PolitiFact in June that Kennedy’s atrazine claims were “speculation” given the vast differences between humans and amphibians. No scientific studies in humans link atrazine exposure to gender dysphoria.
In July, Kennedy floated the idea that covid-19 could have been “ethnically targeted” to “attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” The claim was ridiculously wrong, but Kennedy insisted that it was backed by a July 2020 study by Chinese researchers. That study didn’t find that Chinese people were less affected by the virus. It said one of the virus’s receptors seemed to be absent in the Amish and in Ashkenazi Jews and theorized that genetic factors might increase covid-19 severity.
Five months later, Kennedy invoked the study and insisted he was right: “I can understand why people were disturbed by those remarks. They certainly weren’t antisemitic. … I was talking about a true study, an NIH-funded study.”
“I wish I hadn’t said them, but, you know, what I said was true.”
Kennedy answered using scientific terms (“furin cleave,” “ACE2 receptor”), but he ignored explanations found in the study. He didn’t account for how the original virus has evolved since 2020, or how the study emphasized these potential mutations were rare and would have little to no public health impact.
Public health experts say that racial disparities in covid-19 infection and mortality — in the U.S., Black and Hispanic people often faced more severe covid-19 outcomes — resulted from social and economic inequities, not genetics.
Kennedy says “circumstantial evidence” is enough.
Antidepressants are linked to school shootings, he told listeners on a livestream hosted by Elon Musk. The government should have begun studying the issue years ago, he said, because “there’s tremendous circumstantial evidence that those, like SSRIs and benzos and other drugs, are doing this.”
Experts in psychiatry have told PolitiFact and other fact-checkers that there is no causal relationship between antidepressants and shootings. With 13% of the adult population using antidepressants, experts say that if the link were true they would expect higher rates of violence. Also, the available data on U.S. school shootings shows most shooters were not using psychiatric medicines, which have an anti-violence effect.
Conspiracy Theories, Consequences, and a Presidential Campaign
The anti-censorship candidate frames his first bid for public office as a response to “18 years” of being shunned for his views — partly by the government, but also by private companies.
“You’re protected so much from censorship if you’re running for president,” Kennedy told conservative Canadian podcaster and psychologist Jordan Peterson in June.
In June, Kennedy’s Instagram account was reinstated — with a verified badge noting he is a public figure. Meta’s rules on misinformation do not apply to active political candidates. (PolitiFact is a partner of Meta’s Third Party Fact-Checking Program, which seeks to reduce false content on the platform.)
In July, he was invited to testify before the Republican-led House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. He repeated that he had “never been anti-vax,” and railed against the Biden White House for asking Twitter to remove his January 2021 tweet that said Baseball Hall of Famer Hank Aaron’s death was “part of a wave of suspicious deaths among elderly,” weeks after Aaron, 86, received a covid-19 vaccine. The medical examiner’s office said Aaron died from unrelated natural causes.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. arrives to testify during a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on what Republicans say is politicization of the FBI and Justice Department on July 20 in Washington.(JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST VIA GETTY IMAGES)
Throughout 2023, alternative media has embraced Kennedy. He has regularly appeared on podcasts such as Peterson’s, and has also participated in profiles by mainstream TV, online, and print sources.
“You’re like, ‘But you’re talking right now. I’m listening to you. I hear your words. You’re not being censored,’” said Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon who researches how news media covers conspiracy theories and their proponents. “But a person can believe they’re being censored because they’ve internalized that they’re going to be,” or they know making the claim will land with their audience.
Time will tell whether his message resonates with voters.
Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, said Kennedy may be a “placeholder” for voters who are dissatisfied with Trump and Biden and will take a third option when offered by pollsters.
The only 2024 candidate whose favorability ratings are more positive than negative? It’s Kennedy, according to FiveThirtyEight. However, a much higher percentage of voters are unfamiliar with him than they are with Trump or Biden — about a quarter — and Kennedy’s favorability edge has decreased as his campaign has gone on.
Nevertheless, third-party candidates historically finish with a fraction of their polling, Kondik said, and voters will likely have more names and parties on their fall ballots, including philosopher Cornel West, physician Jill Stein, and a potential slate from the No Labels movement.
Kennedy was popular with conservative commentators before he became an independent, and he has avoided pointedly criticizing Trump, except on covid-19 lockdowns. When NBC News asked Kennedy in August what he thought of Trump’s 2020 election lies, Kennedy said he believed Trump lost, but that, in general, people who believe elections were stolen “should be listened to.” Kennedy is one of them. He still says that the 2004 presidential election was “stolen” from Kerry in favor of Republican George W. Bush, though it wasn’t.
American Values 2024 will spend up to $15 million to get Kennedy’s name on the ballot in 10 states including Arizona, California, Indiana, New York, and Texas. Those are five of the toughest states for ballot access, said Richard Winger, co-editor of Ballot Access News.
Four of Kennedy’s siblings called Kennedy’s decision to run as an independent “dangerous” and “perilous” to the nation. “Bobby might share the same name as our father, but he does not share the same values, vision or judgment,” the group wrote in a joint statement.
Kennedy brushes it off when asked, saying he has a large family and some members support him.
On her podcast, Weiss asked whether Kennedy worried his position on autism and vaccines would cloud his other positions and cost him votes. His answer ignored his history.
“Show me where I got it wrong,” he said, “and I’ll change.”
In a campaign constructed by lies, that might be the biggest one.
PolitiFact researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.
PolitiFact’s source list can be found here.
Map of the world
“Untitled 1” (collaged monoprint on Tyvek embedded into pulp and pulp painting), by Debra Weisberg, in the group show “Somerville Prints!,’’ at Brickbottom Gallery, Somerville, Mass., through Dec. 30.
— Courtesy Brickbottom Gallery.
The gallery says that the show includes “detailed monochromatic prints that create a world in light and dark hang alongside vibrant, abstract and explosive prints with strong messages.’’
‘Inhabitant of the Mind’
“I perceive that I am neither a planter of the backwoods, pioneer, nor settler there, but an inhabitant of the Mind, and given to friendship and ideas. The ancient society, the Old England of New England, Massachusetts for me.”
— Amos Bronson Alcott (1799 -1888) American teacher, writer, philosopher and reformer and long-time resident of the intellectual community of Concord, Mass.,
When Mass. halted big highway projects, making history
Routes that Governor Sargent cancelled are the Southwest Expressway and the Inner Belt.
On Nov. 30, 1972, Massachusetts Gov. Francis Sargent, a Republican, halted plans for major new highways in and around Boston, in an important turning point in American transportation history. He said in the speech:
“You, your families, your neighbors have become caught in a system that has fouled our air, ravaged our cities, choked our economy, and frustrated every single one of us…We have been caught in a vicious cycle. More cars meant more highways, which meant more traffic jams; more traffic jams meant the need for more highways, which meant more traffic jams and the need for superhighways…The side effect: billions of dollars spent and more and more cities torn apart, more and more families uprooted and displaced. Worst of all: failure to solve the problem that started it all.’’
A bumpy commute
“Seashore Sketch, 1854” (oil on panel), by Fitz Henry Lane, at the Cape Ann Museum, Gloucester, Mass.
To her essentials
“Portrait of a Woman” ( oil and acrylic on cotton-duck; triptych), by Ian McKeever, at Heather Gaudio Fine Art, Greenwich, Conn.
Get drunk with a high-protein New England holiday drink
Versions of “flip cocktails “ like this have been popular New England holiday drinks for more than 200 years. They’re made from brandy, egg and syrup and garnished with grated nutmeg. Nutmeg has been a favorite New England spice since colonial days, especially over the Christmas holidays. Consider that Connecticut is called The Nutmeg State.
Refugee from Waspdom
Spalding Gray in about 1980.
“I was raised as an upper-class WASP in New England, and there was this old tradition there that everyone would simply be guided into the right way after Ivy League college and onward and upward. And it rejected me, I rejected it, and I ended up as a kind of refugee, really.’’
Spalding Gray (1941-2004), American actor, novelist, playwright, screenwriter and performance artist. He grew up in Barrington. He died by suicide.
Boston and a haunting Christmas carol
View of Bethlehem on Christmas 1898
Read this lovely story about “O Little Town of Bethlehem’’ by our friend Don Morrison. There’s a big Boston connection.
In Boston, the former Trinity Church, constructed in 1735 and destroyed in the Great Boston Fire of 1872.
The famed current Trinity Church and parish house, on Copley Square, were designed by Henry Hobson Richardson. Its construction took place from 1872 to 1877.
Roman royalty
“Sofia Loren, Rome, 1954” (silver print) by George Daniell (1911-2002), in group show at the Maine Museum of Photographic Arts, in Portland, through Jan. 31. The photographer and painter was a resident of Trenton, Maine, near Bar Harbor, from 1960 to his death.
The features the work of 26 photographers, including Ansel Adams, George Daniel, and Linda Connor and aims, the museum says, to explore "the themes of portraits, still life, interiors, sea scapes, landscapes and collage.’’
The Trenton Lighthouse, in Trenton, Maine, is not a lighthouse but a business building, now containing a restaurant, The Beacon.
— Photo by Billy Hathorn
The four-masted schooner Margaret Todd; Bald Porcupine Island is beyond the pier and the Bar Harbor Inn is to the right.
— Photo by NewTestLeper79
Chris Powell: New Haven welcomes immigration lawbreakers
Before passports: New Haven as it appeared in a 1786 engraving
Illegal immigration might substantially change the ethnic composition of New Haven.
MANCHESTER, Coon.
For 22 years, ever since the Arab terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Americans have been urged by various government agencies: "If you see something, say something." Having done just that may cost New Haven's registrar of vital statistics her job.
The registrar, Patricia Clark, had been alerting federal immigration authorities to dozens of marriage licenses involving immigrants -- licenses that struck her as questionable -- just as guidance from the state Public Health Department recommended she do, independent of the national policy of reporting things that don't seem right. When her superiors discovered this in November, they suspended Clark with pay pending investigation.
Why? Because New Haven has declared itself a "sanctuary city" and its policy long has been to nullify federal immigration law.
Mayor Justin Elicker says, "New Haven is a welcoming and safe city for everyone, regardless of background or document status." That is, immigration lawbreakers are welcome in the city. New Haven has gone so far as to issue city identification cards to illegal immigrants to facilitate their remaining in the country illegally.
State government doesn't go quite as far but issues special driver's licenses to illegal immigrants for the same purpose.
The premise of these nullification policies is that the desire of anyone anywhere, whatever his motive, to live in the United States trumps the interest of the United States in remaining a sovereign nation by controlling its borders and judging the admissibility of foreigners and what they intend to do here.
Connecticut and New Haven persist in these policies despite the turmoil lately on display just over the state line in New York City, where, as in other "sanctuary cities," the Biden administration's open-borders policy is bankrupting city government, causing reductions in services to legal residents, driving down the local wage base, driving up housing costs, and worsening the shortage of housing.\
The New Haven registrar is in trouble for being a good citizen and public official in trying to uphold federal law against a city policy that, while dressed up in political correctness and humanitarianism, is essentially treasonous.
Most illegal immigrants mean no harm. But there must be rules to keep immigration orderly and assimilable and ensure that the country remains democratic, secular, and safe from religious and ethnic fanaticism. Letting people enter or remain in the country illegally, unvetted, in the age of international terrorism is crazy.
Some illegal immigrants do mean harm. Some have been deported many times and still sneak back in and commit crimes. The hapless immigration system has many repeat offenders, just like Connecticut's criminal-justice system.
At least six of the 9/11 terrorists violated U.S. immigration law, either by overstaying their visas or falsifying their visa applications. If New Haven and other "sanctuary cities" keep having their way -- indeed, if the Biden administration stays in power -- nothing like that may ever be caught before the damage is done.
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Another contradiction of a premise of Connecticut education policy was broadcast throughout the state the other day but wasn't noticed. The study and advocacy group Education Reform Now CT reported that while Connecticut has racially diversified its public school teaching staff in recent years, the increase in teachers from racial minorities has not matched the increase in students from minority races.
Competition for good minority teachers is intense even as state government can't control the racial composition of its student body. So any increase in minority staff is a credit to school administration. Integration and diversity are important objectives.
But learning is a higher objective than racial integration, and ever since the state Supreme Court's decision in the school-integration case of Sheff v. O'Neill in 1996, Connecticut policy has presumed that minority students learn better in a racially integrated environment. So what's the big deal if teaching staffs are, on average, whiter than their classrooms?
If, as the complaint from Education Reform Now CT suggests, minority kids will learn best in a segregated environment, education in Connecticut has a lot of rethinking to do.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Use it up
“In Maine, there is a deeply ingrained sense that you can always get a little more use out of something.”
– Tim Sample (born 1951), Maine humorist
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“Winter in Maine is a time of alternating rest and frenzied activity.”
– Tom Allen (born 1945), writer and former Maine congressman
Llewellyn King: When will Trump and Biden talk about the looming tsunami of AI?
“Artificial intelligence” got its name and was started as a discipline at a workshop at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, N.H., in the summer of 1956. From left to right, some key participants sitting in front of Dartmouth Hall: Oliver Selfridge, Nathaniel Rochester, Ray Solomonoff, Marvin Minsky, Trenchard More, John McCarthy and Claude Shannon.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
Memo to presidential candidates Joe Biden and Donald Trump:
Assuming that one of you will be elected president of the United States next November, many computer scientists believe that you should be addressing what you think about artificial intelligence and how you plan to deal with the surge in this technology, which will break over the nation in the next president’s term.
Gentlemen, this matter is urgent, yet not much has been heard on the subject from either of you who are seeking the highest office. President Biden did sign a first attempt at guidelines for AI, but he and Trump have been quiet on its transformative impact.
Indeed, the political class has been silent, preoccupied as it is with old and – against what is going to happen — irrelevant issues. Congress has been as silent as Biden and Trump. There are two congressional AI caucuses, but they have been concerned with minor issues, like AI in political advertising.
Two issues stand out as game changers in the next presidential term: climate change and AI.
On climate change, both of you have spoken: Biden has made climate change his own; Trump has dismissed it as a hoax.
The AI tsunami is rolling in and the political class is at play, unaware that it is about to be swamped by a huge new reality: exponential change which can neither be stopped nor legislated into benignity.
Before the next presidential term is far advanced, the experts tell us that the life of the nation will be changed, perhaps upended by the surge in AI, which will reach into every aspect of how we live and work.
I have surveyed the leading experts in universities, government and AI companies and they tell me that any form of employment that uses language will be changed. Just this will be an enormous upset, reaching from journalism (where AI already has had an impact) to the law (where AI is doing routine drafting) to customer service (where AI is going to take over call centers) to fast food (where AI will take the orders).
The more one thinks about AI, the more activities come to mind which will be severely affected by its neural networks.
Canvas the departments and agencies of the government and you will learn the transformational nature of AI. In the departments of Defense, Treasury and Homeland Security, AI is seen as a serious agent of change — even revolution.
The main thing is not to confuse AI with automation. It may resemble it and many may take refuge in the benefits brought about by automation, especially job creation. But AI is different. Rather than job creation, it appears, at least in its early iterations, set to do major job obliteration.
But there is good AI news, too. And those in the political line of work can use good news, whetting the appetite of the nation with the advances that are around the corner with AI.
Many aspects of medicine will, without doubt, rush forward. Omar Hatamleh, chief advisor on artificial intelligence and innovation at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, says the thing to remember is that AI is exponential, but most thinking is linear.
Hatamleh is excited by the tremendous impact AI will have on medical research. He says that a child born today can expect to live to 120 years of age. How is that for a campaign message?
The good news story in AI should be enough to have campaign managers and speech writers ecstatic. What a story to tell; what fabulous news to attach to a candidate. Think of an inaugural address which can claim that AI research is going to begin to end the scourges of cancer, Alzheimer’s, Sickle cell and Parkinson’s.
Think of your campaign. Think of how you can be the president who broke through the disease barrier and extended life. AI researchers believe this is at hand, so what is holding you back?
Many would like to write the inaugural address for a president who can say, “With the technology that I will foster and support in my administration, America will reach heights of greatness never before dreamed of and which are now at hand. A journey into a future of unparalleled greatness begins today.”
So why, oh why, have you said nothing about the convulsion — good or bad — that is about to change the nation? Here is a gift as palpable as the gift of the moonshot was for John F. Kennedy.
Where are you? Either of you?
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
The long-gone downtown department stores at Christmas
Book cover from the 1916 children's novel Christmas Holidays at Merryvale, illustrated by Charles F. Lester
From the The New England Historical Society:
“Generations of New Englanders remember fondly the glorious downtown department stores at Christmas. Those great retail palaces brought magic to the holidays with stunning window displays, conversations on Santa’s lap and walks through enchanted villages.
“The holiday season brought out the best in the great downtown department stores. They were at once arbiters of quality and fashion, makers of dreams, vibrant elements of city life and landmark consumer paradises….
“During the heyday of Downtown Crossing in Boston, carolers serenaded shoppers atop the Filene’s marquee. A giant manger scene loomed above Summer Street at Jordan Marsh and three large gold bells swayed with the Christmas music….”
To read the whole article, hit this link.
Poisoned Ivy?
The Harvard Lampoon Building, also known as the Lampoon Castle, in Cambridge. Prepare to see The Lampoon, Harvard College’s humor magazine, take on Harvard’s problems with Congress.
— Photo by Beyond My Ken
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
In Schenck v. United States (1919), U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously wrote of free speech that “no one has the right to {falsely} shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theater.’’
What about shouting “kill all the ----"?
There was something creepy about the congressional grandstanding (mostly by Republicans, of course) in grilling the presidents of Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania about anti-Semitism, alleged and real, on their elite campuses. Of course those leaders’ robotic and evasive, or at least equivocal, responses, crafted by a law firm, didn’t do them any good in facing those on Capitol Hill set on appealing to their always-angry-and-envious base and funders by sticking it to the trio, portrayed as Ivy-covered swells.
The authoritarian-minded inquisitors were basically telling the private universities’ leaders how to run their institutions. But even small colleges, let alone the big elite ones above, are complex enough to be compared to little countries, with sometimes warring constituencies – students, trustees, faculty, funders (including very rich and sometimes arrogant and bossy donors, more and more of whom are oft-amoral hedge fund and private-equity moguls), and residents of the schools’ host communities. These institutions can’t be run as dictatorships.
Further complicating things is that colleges and universities are, more than most other parts of American society, supposed to be dedicated to freedom of speech and inquiry. That’s bound to lead to angry encounters. Finally, universities are increasingly ethnically and otherwise diverse, thus leading to tensions between, say, people of Jewish and Palestinian backgrounds on campuses.
As for speech codes for students: They may make things more toxic by bottling up anger. But I’d leave decisions on codes to each university and its officials’ sense of the danger of violence on their own campuses. And if students don’t like the codes, they can transfer to a school more suitable for their feelings and opinions.
Of course, the threat to yank federal money always hangs over congressional hearings. But we should bear in mind that colleges and universities get federal money for good reasons -- to educate future leaders and other citizens, to underwrite scientific and other research and otherwise enrich society. In short, for the national self-interest.
Thus while I think the three presidents above generally did a bad job in explaining their universities’ evasive “official” positions on confronting anti-Semitism in the current fraught climate, I have some sympathy for them, even if they are trained, as are many leaders dealing with crises, to prevaricate.
Meanwhile, now that Harvard President Claudine Gay has been raked over the coals in Congress, her career in the distant past is being exhumed, raising allegations she’s a plagiarist, and certainly some of her scholarly work has that aroma. So I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s soon no longer leader of America’s richest university. Once you’re in hot water for one problem, you’re apt to find yourself in it for something else as your enemies continue digging.
An inventor’s etching
“Hairy Hare” (zinc etching, mixed media), by Dan Welden, in his show “Dan Welden: Solo 100,” at Mitchell • Giddings Fine Arts, Brattleboro, Vt., through Jan. 14.
The gallery says the show celebrates “paintings and prints by artist Dan Welden, inventor of the solarplate etching process, with his milestone 100th solo exhibit. Also featured, ‘masterworks,’ hand pulled impressions of current and past masters collaborating with Welden, including Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Kiki Smith, Eric Fischl, Roy Nicholson and others.
The Brattleboro Retreat treats mental-health disorders and drug addiction. It was established as the Vermont Asylum for the Insane in 1834. New England has many private facilities dealing with mental illness and drug addition.
Photo by Beyond My Ken