Just the Facts with Gerald Posner

There was an outcry recently over hundreds of changes made to Roald Dahl’s books and Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, all intended to make them “inclusive and accessible” through today’s progressive lens on issues such as gender, race, misogyny, weight, mental health, and violence. Author Salmon Rushdie condemned the publishers then for their “absurd censorship.” In a Substack I wrote last month about the Dahl alterations, “’Ugly’ and ‘Fat’ No Longer,” I concluded, “Words matter. The problem is that the Dahl sensitivity censorship sets a template for other hugely successful author franchises. Readers should know that the words they read are no longer the words the author wrote.”

The template of woke censorship has now been used by Harper Collins, one of the “Big Five” English-language publishers, to make wholesale changes in Agatha Christie’s classic detective novels. The publisher hired “sensitivity readers” to highlight what they considered offensive in the 12 novels and 20 short stories in the Miss Marple series and some of the 33 Hercule Poirot novels. The result is hundreds of alterations, often just changing a few words, but all too frequently the deletion of entire paragraphs.

These are not the first changes to Christie’s works. Use of the N-word was removed years ago from earlier editions. Her hit novel, The Little Indians, which was also a successful play on Broadway with that name, was changed in 1977 to And Then There Were None. “Little Indians” was judged to be a “racist term.”

The new changes, however, are a much broader effort to recast Christie’s writings so they satisfy modern sensitives. That results in characters mostly stripped of any racial or religious identity. A “black servant” is no longer black. A “gypsy type” woman is now just “a young woman.” A judge loses the “Indian” in a scene about his temper, Poirot no longer says that another character is “a Jew, of course.” Natives are replaced everywhere by locals. Most references to Nubians — an ethnic group indigenous to northern Sudan and southern Egypt — are deleted from the 1937 Death on the Nile. “Nubian boatman,” for instance, is now just “the boatman.”

All references to Oriental are gone (Harper Collins is reportedly even considering changing the title of one of Christie’s best-known novels, Murder on the Orient Express, to the one used in 1934 on the U.S. edition, Murder in the Calais Coach).

Sensitivity readers evidently are triggered by inexplicable passages. The publisher does not explain why it made any of the changes. In the 1964 novel, A Caribbean Mystery, a character does not see a black woman in the bushes as he returns to his hotel room. That passage is deleted in the cleansed edition. In the same book, Christie describes a character with “a torso of black marble such as a sculptor would have enjoyed.” That is also removed. At another point in the original, Miss Marple admires a West Indian hotel worker’s “lovely white teeth.” That is gone too. Even other references to “beautiful teeth” are deleted. What could be the preposterous reason to scrub references to “beautiful teeth?”  Does it trigger readers with poor dental hygiene?

Insulting language is no longer allowed. In Death on the Nile, when a group of children annoy and harass a character, she muses, “they come back and stare, and stare, and their eyes are simply disgusting, and so are their noses, and I don’t believe I really like children.”  In the cleansed edition it is simply, “They come back and stare, and stare. And I don’t believe I really like children.”

Harper Collins does not deserve all the blame. As with the previous cases of Roald Dahl’s books and Ian Flemings Bond series, descendants of the authors own the rights. They must sign off on the wholesale changes that supposedly make the books “more inclusive and accessible for modern readers.”

Shame on both the publishers and the family rights holders.

Good literature should not be judged through a modern-day prism that goes out of its way to correct for perceived slights. By reading the uncensored originals, readers can react to books as written. The most talented authors provide an essential lens into the era about which they write. In censoring and changing those books, publishers are invariably diluting the power of great storytelling.  

Christie is only the latest author, but she will certainly not be the last, to have her books scrubbed of all language that might potentially offend today’s readers. 

Dahl. Fleming. Christie. Who’s next?

Personally, I can’t wait for the public ruckus after sensitivity readers comb through the Old Testament.

The World Obesity Federation issued a grim 232-page report earlier this month that predicted more than half the world’s population will be obese by 2035. Childhood obesity will more than double. Scorecards on 187 countries ranked each by their ability to address the epidemic. An independent advisory committee estimated the economic impact to the global economy will be $4.32 trillion in lost productivity and additional health care costs for diabetes, blood pressure, heart disease and other obesity-related byproducts. That is about 3% of global GDP, the same impact as COVID-19 produced through worldwide lockdowns in 2020.

And the $4 trillion figure might be low. Some researchers not involved in preparing the report believe it will be substantially higher since the forecast did not take into account inevitable costs from long term disability caused by obesity.

The London-based World Obesity Federation is no rightwing organization attempting to stigmatize people with high body mass indexes (over 25 is overweight, more than 35 classifies as obese). It is a prestigious nonprofit whose work is supported by the World Health Organization and the United Nations Population Division. The British Medical Journal publishes an extended version of its conclusions.

The World Obesity Federation’s credentials, however, do not impress some progressive public health advocates who believe that such reports only add to “weight stigma and fatphobia in public health.” The woke resistance has been building for years.

A physician writing in Harvard Medical School’s Health Blog warned “weight bias is pervasive in medicine.” Terms such as “obese person” or “morbid” are “stigmatizing.” The U.K’s national health service has urged doctors for a decade to stop using “obese” and “overweight",” and instead try to find “weight-neutral language.” The AMA’s Journal of Ethics blames doctors who “exhibit weight bias” for “helping to perpetuate our nation’s obesity crisis.”

The word obesity should be banned in healthcare, concluded a licensed dietician writing last year for the University of Illinois at Chicago’s School of Public Health.

Buzzfeed’s copyediting desk joined the fray. The word obesity “is best avoided,” it declared. Why? It is based on BMI, a measurement that “simply looks at height and weight and is based on a Belgian scientist’s idea of ‘the average man’ 200 years ago. It’s racist and served as a steppingstone to the creation of eugenics.”

“The focus on body size is rooted in racism,” concurred the University of Chicago’s School of Public Health.

“Around 81 percent of societies historically have favored people in larger bodies. Larger bodies signified wealth and prosperity while thinness signified poverty and weakness. However, this began to change due to racism and eugenics. Charles Darwin and other race scientists created a hierarchy of civilization, placing whitemen on top and people of color, specifically black people, at the bottom, considering them to be ‘less civilized.’ Fatness and differing body characteristics were used to justify lack of civilization:  fatness used as a marker of ‘uncivilized behavior’ while thinness was ‘more evolved.’ This idea was maintained throughout the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries, as a way to justify slavery, racism and classism, and control women through ‘temperance.’ This ideology has perpetuated Desirability Politics - where thinness and whiteness are given more access to social, political and cultural capital.”

The World Obesity Federation report, however, demonstrates that obesity is a mostly equal opportunity disease for all races. Where there are statistically significant variations, it is usually in favor of people of color. For instance, the increased rates for obesity predicted by 2035 for Sub-Saharan African men and women are expected to be about half that of men and women in Central, South and North America.

A lot of Substack readers know that facts alone are not always the most important elements as to whether something gets widely covered today in the MSM. A lot rides on whether the news checks the right boxes for progressive causes. Imagine if a UN and WHO-backed group issued a report that predicted a rapid rise in worldwide temperatures by 2035, and a $4 trillion impact on global economies. It would likely be front page news in most major papers and news sites.

What about the World Obesity Federation report? Google it. It was covered by medical journals such as STAT, Healthline, and the Medical Press. A Reuters story was picked up by CNN Online and CBS online. WebMD carried it, as did FOX News online. The only newspapers that put the story into their print editions were the New York Post and The Alaska Dispatch News. Big names in legacy media, including The New York Times, Washington Post, and NBC, totally ignored the alarming report. Covering it meant using repeatedly the much disfavored word obesity.

I wrote last month in Substack about “The Assault on Freedom of Speech.” It is not always, however, about direct censorship, cancellations, and the refusal to debate ideas in the public square. As the ghosting of the World Obesity Federation warnings illustrate, news is sometimes filtered and stories that do not fit certain political narratives are omitted. Only the Word Police can be satisfied that their assault on some language means the public is less informed on important issues.

Most of us have been deluged by prognosticators warning that the first widely available artificial-intelligence tool, ChatGPT, is either “a major threat to society’s well-being” or the start of an unchartered era in which machine intelligence will be “used for everything from customer service and sales to education and entertainment…. [and] will be able to hold more complex and nuanced conversations, and may even be able to understand and respond to more subtle emotional cues.”

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Elon Musk, one of the founders of OpenAI before he left, tweeted “ChatGPT is scary good. We are not far from dangerously strong AI.”

Pretty impressive for a product launched less than ninety days ago.

The truth between “end of times” and “the next enlightened era” is probably somewhere in between.

ChatGPT is the first generation of AI for the masses. Whatever it can do now will seem rudimentary in a few years. It is like the first generation of the iPhone. We know what it looks like but have trouble imagining how fast it will progress and change.

A lot of worry is that AI is too smart. It made its debut in scientific literature by producing four published papers. It passed three medical school admission tests “without any specialized training or reinforcement.” More than 200 books on Amazon are now listed with ChatGPT as a co-author. There is certain to be a lot more handwringing about AI’s implications. Dozens of competitive AI chatbots are in development, from tech giants such as Google to small, never-heard-of-before startups with a handful of coders.

Good writing will survive, however. And I am not personally worried until they invent an AI model that can reliably persuade whistleblowers to provide secrets about public or corporate malfeasance and somehow be capable of reviewing non-digitized archives stashed away in government and private vaults worldwide.

My goal this weekend was small in scope; a few questions about the JFK assassination seems to be a modest request for the AI chatbot that seems to have taken the world by storm.

I asked ChatGPT seven questions, in this order. Who killed JFK? Why did Jack Ruby murder Lee Harvey Oswald? What is the connection between Lee Harvey Oswald and General Edwin Walker? How many shots were fired at JFK and how many hit the president? Did Oswald work for the CIA? Is Oliver Stone’s film “JFK” good history or disinformation? and “What will be learned when the JFK files are finally made public?”

The answers below to each question are ChatGPT’s first responses. I did not request it to regenerate any answer. I did not correct any factual errors and it had some. For instance, it has Oswald coming to the attention of authorities after he tried to kill the retired Army general, Edwin Walker. In fact, no one knew that Oswald was the Walker shooter until Oswald’s wife, Marina, told the FBI after the president was killed.

At another point, it credits the Warren Commission with a shooting sequence in which the assassin’s first shot missed, the second hit the president and Governor Connally, and the third was the fatal head shot. One of the Warren Commission’s biggest errors was its belief that the first shot hit the president and the second shot missed. That compressed the time for the assassin to get off the three shots to about 5.5 seconds. It was in my 1993 book, Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK, that the evidence was presented for the first shot missing, nearly doubling the time the assassin had to fire three .

Also, when it came to why Jack Ruby killed Oswald, it mentions several possible motivations but omits entirely any of Ruby’s anger over his unfounded belief that the assassination was part of an antisemitic plot to unfairly blame Jews for the president’s death.

Still, overall, I’m mildly impressed with ChatGPT when it comes to some broad JFK assassination queries. That is especially true given that so much of its database includes millions and millions of pages of conspiracy speculation as compared to a much smaller subset of data concluding Oswald alone killed JFK.

Below are the verbatim questions and answers. I have put the questions in bold, so they are easier to see, and emphasized some portions of the answers. I’ve also attached a PDF of screenshots of my Q&As. That is to satisfy the eternally suspicious who won’t trust it unless they see it.

who killed JFK?

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas, remains a subject of controversy and speculation. The official investigation by the Warren Commission concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in shooting President Kennedy from a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository building, using a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. However, various conspiracy theories have emerged over the years, suggesting that other individuals or groups were involved in the assassination.

Despite numerous investigations and inquiries over the years, no definitive evidence has emerged to support any of the conspiracy theories. The assassination remains a subject of intense interest and debate, but it is generally accepted that Lee Harvey Oswald was the person who fired the shots that killed President Kennedy.

Why did Jack Ruby murder Lee Harvey Oswald?

Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner, shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who had been charged with assassinating President John F. Kennedy, on November 24, 1963, two days after the assassination. Ruby's motive for killing Oswald is a matter of much speculation and debate.

Ruby himself gave various explanations for his actions. He claimed that he killed Oswald to spare Jacqueline Kennedy the pain of a trial, to avenge Kennedy's death, or to show that Dallas was not a city of hate. However, none of these explanations were consistent with the evidence, and it is likely that Ruby's true motive was more personal.

Some theories suggest that Ruby was part of a larger conspiracy to silence Oswald and prevent him from revealing any other conspirators in the assassination of Kennedy. However, no definitive evidence has emerged to support this theory.

The official explanation for Ruby's actions is that he acted alone, and that his motive was simply to become famous. Ruby had a history of erratic behavior and had expressed a desire to be a hero. He may have believed that killing Oswald would earn him the admiration of the public and a place in history.

In any case, Ruby was found guilty of murdering Oswald and sentenced to death, but the conviction was later overturned on the grounds that Ruby had not received a fair trial. Ruby died of cancer in prison in 1967 before a new trial could be held.

What is the connection between Lee Harvey Oswald and General Edwin Walker?

Lee Harvey Oswald and General Edwin Walker had a connection in the sense that Oswald attempted to assassinate Walker before he later assassinated President John F. Kennedy.

In April 1963, Oswald attempted to shoot General Edwin Walker, who was a right-wing activist and a former Army officer known for his opposition to the Civil Rights Movement. Walker had been relieved of his command by President Kennedy after disobeying orders during the integration of the University of Mississippi in 1962. Oswald, who had recently become politically radicalized and was sympathetic to Marxist ideology, saw Walker as a symbol of right-wing oppression and decided to kill him.

Oswald fired a shot at Walker's home from a distance, but missed and only shattered a window. However, the incident brought Oswald to the attention of the authorities, who investigated him but ultimately failed to connect him to the attempted assassination.

Later that same year, on November 22, 1963, Oswald assassinated President Kennedy while the president was traveling in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas. Oswald was arrested and charged with the murder, but was himself assassinated two days later by Jack Ruby. The connection between Oswald and General Walker has been the subject of much speculation and debate, with some suggesting that the two incidents were related or that Walker was somehow involved in the assassination of Kennedy, but there is no conclusive evidence to support these theories.

How many shots were fired at JFK and how many hit the president?

According to the official investigation by the Warren Commission, three shots were fired at President John F. Kennedy during the assassination on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas. The first shot missed, the second shot struck Kennedy in the upper back and exited through his throat, and the third shot hit Kennedy in the head, causing a fatal wound.

The Warren Commission concluded that all three shots were fired by Lee Harvey Oswald from a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository building using a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. However, the number of shots and their trajectory have been the subject of much controversy and debate over the years, with various conspiracy theories suggesting that there may have been additional shooters or that the shots may have come from a different direction.

Nevertheless, based on the official investigation, it is generally accepted that three shots were fired, with two hitting President Kennedy, and that Lee Harvey Oswald was the person who fired those shots.

Did Oswald work for the CIA?

There is no conclusive evidence to suggest that Lee Harvey Oswald worked for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or was directly involved in any CIA operations.

However, there have been various conspiracy theories and allegations over the years that have suggested that Oswald had connections to the CIA or was involved in CIA operations. Some theorists have pointed to Oswald's brief defection to the Soviet Union in 1959 and his subsequent return to the United States as evidence of a possible CIA affiliation. Others have suggested that Oswald's military background and his language skills made him an attractive candidate for intelligence work.

Despite these theories and allegations, there is no hard evidence to support the claim that Oswald was an agent of the CIA or that the CIA was involved in the assassination of President Kennedy. Several official investigations, including the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee on Assassinations, found no evidence of a CIA conspiracy, and no direct link between Oswald and the CIA has been definitively established.

Is Oliver Stone's film "JFK" good history or disinformation?

Oliver Stone's film "JFK" is a dramatized version of events surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the subsequent investigations. While the film is highly regarded for its artistic qualities, it has been criticized by many historians and experts as presenting a distorted and misleading account of the assassination and the investigations.

The film includes many conspiracy theories and allegations that have been widely discredited by official investigations and other studies. For example, the film suggests that there was a large-scale cover-up involving government officials and intelligence agencies, that there were multiple shooters involved in the assassination, and that there were connections between Oswald and various other individuals and organizations.

While these claims have been popularized by various conspiracy theorists, there is no conclusive evidence to support them, and most mainstream historians and experts reject them. Moreover, the film takes significant liberties with the historical record and conflates various events and characters for dramatic effect.

In summary, while "JFK" is a powerful and entertaining film, it should not be taken as an accurate or reliable account of the assassination and the investigations. Students of history should consult more credible and trustworthy sources to learn about this important event in American history.

What will be learned when the JFK files are finally made public?

In 1992, the U.S. Congress passed the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, which required that all assassination-related records held by federal agencies be publicly disclosed no later than 25 years after the passage of the law, which would have been 2017. However, due to concerns about national security and the potential impact on U.S. foreign relations, some of the records have been withheld or redacted, and the full release of the records has been postponed.

In 2018, President Trump ordered that the remaining classified files related to the assassination be released by October 26 of that year. However, some documents were held back at the request of the FBI and CIA, and the full release has not yet occurred.

It is difficult to predict exactly what will be learned when the JFK files are finally made public, as the content of the files has not been fully disclosed. However, it is possible that the files could shed new light on the circumstances surrounding the assassination and the subsequent investigations, and possibly answer some of the lingering questions and controversies.

For example, the files may provide further information about the activities of Lee Harvey Oswald and his possible connections to other individuals or organizations, including the CIA or organized crime. The files may also provide new information about the investigations conducted by the FBI and other agencies, and shed light on the motives of the various parties involved.

It is also possible that the files may not provide any significant new information or may even raise more questions and controversies, depending on their contents and the interpretations of those who study them.

The bottom line?

If you are waiting for AI to solve the Kennedy assassination, you are out of luck.

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Sweden passed a milestone this month, but the dubious achievement was mostly lost under a deluge of news and commentary about Chinese spy balloons and the war in Ukraine. Crime statistics from last year revealed that the nation that once had one of Europe’s lowest rates of gun violence was closing in fast on Croatia for the continent’s highest per capita rate of fatal shootings.

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The news was celebrated in a Stockholm suburb when a hooded gunman fired 15 rounds from an AK47 into the home of a mother and her infant child. Police arrested 13 and 14-year-old suspects after the getaway car crashed during a high-speed chase.

Such a brazen assault would have been front pages news in Sweden a few years ago. Today, however, it is another in a long litany of gangland violence that plagues the country. There were 388 shootings last year, with 61 fatalities. That was more than double the 2021 number, which itself had set a record and moved Sweden ahead of Italy and eastern European countries. In fact, since 2000, Sweden is the only one of 22 European nations that has recorded “a significant rise in gun deaths.” While the number of shootings and fatalities might seem modest to Americans inured to mass shootings, it is alarming to Europeans who are accustomed to a fraction of the U.S.’s violent gun culture.

Rapes and sexual assaults are also at record levels. Every year during the past decade, the country averaged between 62 and 78 rapes per 100,000, about three times the number reported in 35 other European nations. The government claims that is because in 2013 it instituted a more liberal definition of rape by eliminating a requirement for the use of violence, threats or coercion and including cases where the victim did not physically resist. Sweden’s is not unique, however, since many of its EU neighbors have similarly broadened the definition of rape but have not seen a jump in the number of reported assaults.

Sweden’s socially liberal and tolerant Nordic neighbors, Denmark, Finland and Norway, match or exceed Sweden’s progressive laws about rapes and sexual assaults. Yet, they have 60% to 80% fewer rapes per capita. Sweden has six times as many shootings per capita than their combined figure.

While the crime stats are bad, many Swedes suspect the numbers are underreported. That belief was so widespread that the government was forced to issue a report denying it was “covering up crime statistics,” claiming it had “nothing to gain” from underreporting the numbers.

What is behind the Swedish surge in crime?

A recent report put most of the blame on 52 criminal gangs concentrated in huge immigrant suburbs of Stockholm, Malmo, and Gothenburg.

They are in a cut-throat competition to control a booming and lucrative narcotics trade. The violence has skyrocketed because the gangs are heavily armed despite Sweden long boasting some of the strictest gun laws on the planet. All guns are licensed by the government, buyers have to take training courses that can last a year, and firearms are seldom stored at homes but usually in a lock box at a registered gun club. What the Swedes did not envision was the birth of sophisticated criminal enterprises with cross-border reach. Swedish police and border agents have failed to stop the gangs from arming themselves with millions of dollars in surplus weapons smuggled from the Balkans. The gangs also have developed a penchant for using explosives, either bought on the black market or stolen from local construction sites. Some gangs produce their own IEDS or use ex-Yugoslavian M75 hand grenades. It is no longer shocking to hear about a gang blowing up a restaurant or shop that refuses to pay protection money. Swedish police created a new crime category in 2017 to monitor the number of explosives and grenade attacks. (The only other country that tracks grenade attacks is Mexico; the two nations have a similar rate per capita).

The intelligence chief of the National Police, Sweden’s FBI, admitted to a reporter, “It’s not normal to see these kinds of explosions in a country without a war.”

The turf wars for control of drug distribution that play out across the country are depressingly similar, but the names change depending on the city. In Gothenburg it is likely to include the Ali Kahn and Backa gangs; in Stockholm it is usually a Turkish and Iraqi gang, Asir, battling with the Gambian-led Chosen Ones; Malmo is split between a Bosnian gang, M-Falangen and its Albanian rivals, K-Falangen. While the police describe the gangs as extended mafia-like families, immigrants call them ‘clans,’ and often resort to them to resolve problems that they do not want to report to the government authorities.

Anyone who has followed Sweden’s spiraling descent into violence will not be surprised that in recent years almost half the suspects arrested for gun crimes are younger than 18. The gang lords exploit what they see as a loophole in the Swedish justice system. Sweden sets 15 as the age of criminal responsibility; anyone younger is considered incapable of committing a crime. In the U.S., where it is set by states, it is often 10. In Sweden, those under 15 are never prosecuted but if the crime is terrible enough, they can get counseling. The worst punishment for anyone between 15 and 18 is to undergo a rehabilitation program at homes that more closely resemble an American boarding school than a juvenile detention center. The rooms are comfortable and there is television, video games, sports, and internet access.

The problem of gangs using adolescent assailants was highlighted last month in a murder that attracted nationwide attention. A fifteen-year-old Afghan boy, who had escaped the Taliban in 2019, was shot execution style at a sushi restaurant outside Stockholm. Hundreds attended his memorial. Police later arrested a 15-year-old as the shooter; his two accomplices were 16 and 17.

“Many of them that we talk to don’t expect to be old, they don’t expect to reach 30,” says Johan Olsson, chief of the police’s national operation division in Stockholm. “The life of these young men is short, nasty and brutish. It’s a very, very grim environment.”

Sweden’s crime epidemic is not simply the result of a too-lenient criminal justice system. It has been fueled also by a surge in immigrants during the past decade, most from war-ravaged Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Two million immigrants live in Sweden, about 20% of the population (25% of the country if those who have at least one immigrant parent are included). The largest group are Syrian refuges.

Sweden has long prided itself as having one of the world’s most generous and protective immigration policies. It passed groundbreaking legislation in 1989, the Aliens Act, and the 1994 Reception of Asylum Seekers. Those laws established the framework to welcome anyone fleeing persecution, war, or other forms of violence. All seeking safety from conflict zones or escaping oppression were allowed to enter the country without background checks or any questioning that the government thought might add to the stress and anxiety of the incoming refugees. Sweden also provided for state support of the new arrivals, with welfare subsides for housing, medical needs, and education. Eligibility for citizenship was automatic after four years, and that sometimes was expedited. Before Covid slowed migration to the EU, Sweden ranked first per capita in its number of asylum seekers and refugees.

When the country had a record influx in 2015, Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven, said at the time, “My Europe takes in refugees. My Europe doesn’t build walls.” 

The problem was that Sweden had significantly underestimated the immense difficulties of integrating such huge numbers into society. Tens of thousands were put into so-called Million Programme estates, enormous 1960s era housing projects. Newcomers faced many hurdles in assimilating into Swedish culture, adopting its values, and learning its language, exacerbating the problems in what had become immigrant ghettos. Children in large families slept on the floor as the inventory of apartments ran low. Nearby schools were woefully substandard. The unemployment rate for young immigrants was double that of native Swedes. And, while the country is proud of its generous welfare system, many new arrivals were quickly mired in a cycle of poverty.

The perfect storm created a rare opportunity for the criminal gangs inside the housing estates. There seemed to be an inverse relationship between the growth in power and influence of the gangs and the reduced level of police patrols and enforcement. Opposition politicians criticized the Million Programme estates as a Nordic version of Paris’s banlieues, places like Seine-Saint-Denis and Clichy-sous-Bois that had become so-called “no-go zones” in which criminal gangs exerted such control that the police no longer patrolled them. (The government admits that hundreds of thousands of immigrants, most from Muslim countries, live in 61 sprawling neighborhoods it defines as “vulnerable.” Those neighborhoods, according to an official report, “are characterized by a low socioeconomic status, in which criminals exert influence on the local community…. working [as police] in these vulnerable areas is challenging.”)

As the police pulled back and the government struggled to assimilate the large number of the new arrivals, the gangs — Kurdish, Turkish, Bosnian, Syrian and Somali — moved in. They offered many vulnerable, young people a promise of fast money and a quick way out of the ghettos. And the problem was not limited to the latest arrivals. David Jones, a journalist who has written about crime and immigration in Scandinavia, says, the children of those migrants who arrived in the 1990s “have morphed dangerously into a lost generation who are effectively stateless. Though they were born here, many don’t feel remotely Swedish, yet have no allegiance to their parents’ homelands, either. Their alienation and discontentment smoldered for several years.”

Has the government’s failed integration of migrants led to surging gang and gun violence? News accounts and websites sometimes report that immigrants are the perpetrators in a majority of serious, violent crimes. Those are often anecdotal. The real number is impossible to determine. That is because Swedish law enforcement agencies are forbidden to register an individual's ethnicity or nationality, and that information is omitted from official crime statistics. Websites that have reported court information revealing that a criminal was foreign-born have sometimes been censored by the government. An internal investigation was opened on one police officer, after he told a journalist that “ethnic Swedes [are] engaged in group violence, but not in the same numbers as foreign-born offenders.” 

The strict policy of secrecy around the nationality or ethnicity of those arrested and convicted of violent crimes is an exceptional standout in a nation that otherwise prides itself on transparency and a progressive and open access records policy. Sweden is one of three Nordic countries that makes even personal tax returns public.

Information leaked by prison officials reveal that over half of those serving long prison sentences for violent crimes are foreign-born. It is closer to 70% if Swedish born, second-generation immigrants, are included. Crime reporters calculate that immigrants are suspects in 90% of public shootings.

There is some evidence that Swedish leaders are finally running out of patience.  The national police commissioner admitted that unchecked criminal gangs threatened the very democracy that Sweden so greatly valued. The Gothenburg police chief told a reporter in 2020 that, “We need more police to deal with this situation urgently. Otherwise we will turn into a gangsters' paradise.”

Last April, Magdalena Andersson, then Prime Minister, said, “Segregation has been allowed to go so far that we have parallel societies in Sweden. We live in the same country but in completely different realities.” It was a rather remarkable admission considering that her party, the Social Democrats, had been in power for 28 of the last 40 years.

Public opinion polls before last September’s national election consistently showed that gang crime topped the list of concerns for the average Swede.  The new Prime Minister, the Moderate Party’s Ulf Kristersson, managed to get a parliamentary majority by promising to tackle crime and winning the backing of the far-right Sweden Democrats.  

Kristersson committed to a “paradigm shift” in criminal justice and said he would work for longer prison sentences to go after gang members and deter recruits. “These people who shoot each other on the street aren’t going to stop because we tell them to; they need to be locked up.”

His far-right partners want him to go further. One proposal is to permit the police to set up temporary zones in neighborhoods where they can search for guns, explosives, and drugs, even if they do not suspect wrongdoing. Another idea is to use anonymous witnesses at criminal trials, something now forbidden.

The new government is talking up its anti-crime program, dubbing it “the biggest offensive in Swedish history against organized crime.”

Given the failure of previous governments to acknowledge or concentrate on the problem, the “biggest offensive” might be a low bar.  Criminals know that no matter what the politicians promise, the police are still hobbled by a nation that often puts privacy protection above police powers. Detectives are frequently denied access to the CCTV network, traffic cameras or automatic license-plate recognition technology. Only recently have they been able to tap telephones. 

The only way to measure progress will be a steady drop in the sky-high crime rates. That will not be easy. It has taken years of neglect for Sweden to reach such a low point, it might take a long time to return any semblance of safety. As one Swedish cop assigned to the gang beat told a reporter in 2021, “There’s no quick fix, this will take at least one generation.” 

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Note: This is the first in an occasional series of short essays about the perils of what I call one think, a pernicious type of censorship in which voices and opinions that veer outside the guard rails of what is deemed “acceptable speech” are themselves banned, canceled, humiliated in the public square, and often branded as some form of bigotry.

I made my first trip to London in 1981 to visit the family of my soon-to-be wife, author Patricia Posner. One day, while walking in Hyde Park, near Marble Arch and Oxford Street, I came across a few dozen people listening to a speaker ranting that the “illuminati are the masterminds” of a recently failed assassination on the Pope.

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“I wonder what’s going on?” I asked Trisha.

“Oh, that is Speakers’ Corner. People are free to turn up and talk about whatever they want.”

She gave me the capsule history. For 600 years the British had hanged criminals there before huge crowds, some of whom bought tickets for the best seats. The more than 50,000 who were executed got a couple of minutes to say their final words. A century after the executions had moved from London, Parliament passed an act setting aside Speakers’ Corner. It was a safe haven used by suffragettes in their campaign for the right to vote, as well as by political firebrands such as Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin and black-nationalist, Marcus Garvey. 1984 author, George Orwell, himself an occasional speaker, called it “one of the minor wonders of the world….Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

For me, as an American, raised in liberal San Francisco on principles of free speech and vigorous debate, I thought Speakers’ Corner simply unnecessary.

“I guess the whole of America,” I told Trisha, “is the equivalent of Speakers’ Corner.”

I returned there many times in subsequent London visits. There was always something interesting going on. A Muslim preacher adamant that Jesus was a fiction. A Christian cleric scolding young Muslims that Islam was a faith of demons. An atheist calling out Catholics to demand they implore the Pope to stop “counting his money and smoking his dope.” An apoplectic man screaming that feminism was a fraud and that women were more violent than men.

Some could be dismissed as religious fanatics or slightly unhinged. Others, however, pressed a rational and persuasive case for Western intervention to stop the Serbian slaughter of Bosnian Muslims or against a British military role in the war in Iraq. Those gatherings, some of them huge, provoked vigorous and often heated arguments. Although few people left with their minds changed, they had at least engaged in the debate.

In all my visits I never saw any effort to silence the speakers, who at times relished expressing views that others found shocking and disturbing.

No one called the often offensive speeches a smokescreen for hate.

There was no movement to close Speakers’ Corner over charges it subjected marginalized groups to harmful prejudice.

I never once heard anyone say that speech, by itself, could sometimes be violence.

Speakers’ Corner showed me why the English were proud they did not need a “first amendment” to enjoy freedom of speech.  A British high court judge summed it up when he overturned in 2009 the conviction of a bible-thumping, evangelical minister who had become a near public nuisance: “Freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worth having. Free speech includes not only the inoffensive but the irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome and the provocative, provided it does not tend to provoke violence.”

Fast forward to 2023 America.

Imagine a Speakers’ Corner, an unrestricted bastion of “say whatever you like, no matter how many people you offend,” in New York’s Central Park or San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. A free-flowing discussion about today’s hot button issues, such as abortion, bail reform, climate activism, puberty blockers for adolescents, and race reparations, would quickly devolve into shouting and possibly violence.  

Too many people have become accustomed to having their opinions amplified in an echo chamber of social media and cable news. Most follow those who reinforce what they already believe. Few like having their opinions challenged. Fewer yet have an open mind to changing what they think if presented with alternative evidence and arguments.

For those who do have independent opinions, fear of the consequences of speaking out has created a tsunami of self-censorship. Little wonder that people stop themselves from saying or writing something that they believe will produce some blowback.

That became abundantly clear when my wife, Patricia, wrote a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed in May 2022, “When Did ‘Woman’ Become a Dirty Word?” She put a spotlight on the trend in medicine to degender language. While trans rights, she wrote, were important to protect, so were women’s rights. Defending the rights of men identifying or transitioning to change their gender should not be at the expense of women. Trisha got almost a thousand direct messages and emails, mostly from women who overwhelmingly thanked her for saying what they felt unable to express in their workplace since they feared it meant they could be tagged as “transphobic.” That risk forced them to stay quiet.

Heated discussions today abruptly end when someone charges racism or some phobic bias (transphobic, homophobic, Islamophobic), or interprets and condemns an opinion as the product of ableism, the patriarchy, or misogyny.

All those biases and prejudices undoubtedly exist and should be condemned when publicly exposed. But in many instances, they have been reduced to empty labels used as cudgels by which to end immediately uncomfortable discussions or unpopular ideas. Evidence to the contrary is never welcome. One think has replaced divergent points of view. Fit in or get canceled.  Afraid of losing your thousands of followers on Twitter or Facebook? Do not post or like anything too controversial.

This is the opposite of what I was taught in school. I was on the debate team at a San Francisco high school and then later at UC Berkeley. That instilled in me the concept that societies that evolve the best are those that do so through a battle of ideas. Let the nastiest opinions be expressed, my first debate coach said, and then destroy them with logic and evidence. I grew up on the idea that a consensus on divisive topics could only be had after a robust public discussion in which different views were constantly criticized and questioned.

For school debates, a single controversial issue was assigned every year. To be a champion debater, one had to at different times persuasively argue both sides. The challenge was to understand so thoroughly what the advocates on each side believed that it was possible to credibly present their case. 

Imagine that today? More likely that both sides would be intent only in making their own points, not in listening to what the other said. Intellectually stimulating debate is a relic of a quickly fading past.

The growing shadow of censorship has also fallen across college campuses, which should be bastions of free speech. There are dozens and dozens of examples in the past few years in which protestors have insisted their schools withdraw an invitation to a speaker they judge as controversial. When that fails there are efforts to block the entrance to lecture halls, shout down the speaker, and even storm the stage.

At my alma mater, UC Berkeley, conservative speakers were shouted down even during the school’s much touted Free Speech Week. That is right, you read it correctly. Berkeley devotes a week a year to “free speech,” seven days when opposing points of view can be expressed. Except, of course, it is a façade. Only points of view that are sanctioned by the one think police are allowed. This is the same school that in 1964 ignited the Free Speech Movement. A 21-year-old student, Mario Savio, led 500 fellow students demanding an end to the numerous restrictions on political speech that were leftovers at public universities of the rabid 1950s Red Scare of McCarthyism.

Most of the canceled speakers are conservatives; however, progressives are also sometimes canceled if they step on some unidentified one think land mine. “Protests against liberal speakers have drawn less media attention and appear to be less frequent,” concluded two constitutional law professors in a review of free speech problems on American campuses. The College of William and Mary sponsored a “Free Speech Event” a few years ago in which the ACLU’s Executive Director for Virginia was invited to talk about “Students and the First Amendment.” BLM protestors interfered, chanting “ACLU, you protect Hitler, too,” until it was canceled. Why? “Liberalism is white supremacy,” said one organizer.

Protestors also blocked a “Stand Against Fascism” speech by the very progressive University of Oregon President, Michael Schill. Demonstrators chanting he was a “white leader,” who ran the university as a “business firm,” forced him to cancel.

At UCLA, a panel discussion, “What Is Civil Discourse? Challenging Hate Speech in a Free Society,” was hosted by the university, the Los Angeles Times, and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Protestors shut it down by shouting that the panel was “normalizing fascism.” One demonstrator said, “This is what the people in Nazi Germany were facing.”

Colleges should be the places where the most repellant views are sometimes presented so that students can learn how to demolish those with logic and evidence as opposed to protesting and screaming the loudest. Administrations are craven, however, buckling often to the shrillest voices.

 Times are changing fast and not for the better. A few years ago, the fabled Oxford Union debating society refused to withdraw the invite it had extended to France’s right-wing politician Marie Le Pen. In the ensuing debate, Oxford published a paper that argued that it would have even been in the best interests of free speech to have invited Hitler to speak there in 1933: “It seems to me that freedom of speech, particularly in the context of politics and democracy, is a fundamental moral principle and shouldn’t be abandoned based on our feelings of whether we like the speaker or not.” 

In sharp contrast to that defense of offensive speech, this month the UK’s University of Derby added trigger warnings to Shakespearean and Greek tragedies because it is “a genre obsessed with violence and suffering, often of a sexual or graphic kind.”

There is not a lot of good news beyond campuses when it comes to the protection of free speech in modern America.

For me as a journalist, one of the most sobering instances that demonstrated how quickly the protections for speech can be lost, transpired at The New York Times in June 2020. One of the paper’s opinion editors invited Republican Senator Tom Cotton to write an Op-Ed about the protests sweeping the nation in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. Although its title, “Send in the Troops,” made it seem as if Cotton were calling for military force against the demonstrators, his piece suggested the military be available as a backup only if the police were overwhelmed and there was no other way to stop the riots.

“The column immediately drew fierce backlash, dozens of Times journalists voicing their opposition, tweeting the headline, caption and a form of the phrase “Running this puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger,” according to Politico.

What did the Times do?

The day after Cotton’s Op-Ed, James Bennet, the paper’s editorial page editor, wrote “Why We Published the Tom Cotton Op-Ed,” an unprecedented defense of his decision. Bennet emphasized that he “strongly oppose[d] the idea of using federal troops.” However, he said, “We published Cotton’s argument in part because we’ve committed to Times readers to provide a debate on important questions like this. It would undermine the integrity and independence of The New York Times if we only published views that editors like me agreed with, and it would betray what I think of as our fundamental purpose — not to tell you what to think, but to help you think for yourself.”

At a long and tense internal meeting the following day, Bennett and other top editors apologized to the paper’s staff. While the Times publisher, A. G. Sulzberger, said the paper’s leadership regretted publishing Cotton’s opinion piece, he nevertheless backed Bennett, who he said had “as tough a job as anyone I can imagine in any newsroom.” 

Two days later, June 7, Bennet resigned, saying he was “proud of the work my colleagues and I have done to focus attention on injustice and threats to freedom…” The paper issued a statement that the Cotton Op-Ed had not met its “editorial standards.”

The Times leadership may have ultimately had little choice because a fair percentage of its newsroom was in open revolt, mostly on Twitter, after the Cotton Op-Ed. Bennett’s departure, and the reassignment of James Dao, the editor who personally oversaw the Cotton piece, was likely the fastest way to quell the staff uprising. It was also, however, a sign of how one of the country’s most influential papers had itself come up short when it came to protecting speech.

The express purpose of an opinion page is to run a mix of opposing viewpoints on the important issues of the day. I have written nine New York Times Op-Eds (all available here). The most recent three were on the drug industry and vaccines, and two about how the billionaire Sackler family were using the bankruptcy courts to avoid personal liability for the lethal opioid crisis they had ignited and fed with their blockbuster hit drug, OxyContin.

Those who disagreed with me could write an opposing opinion piece. The Washington Post, for instance, published Jillian Sackler’s Op-Ed “Stop blaming my late husband, Arthur Sackler, for the opioid crisis.”

That is how Op-Ed pages should work. Opinions presented on both sides of tough issues and the readers can make up their own minds. There were many good arguments against the case Cotton made, but not wanting it printed was not the right approach.

A month after Bennet left, Times opinion writer and editorBari Weisssubmitted her resignation. While Bennett had left with a statement that talked about how he “was honored to be part of it [the Times],” Weiss left with a stinging resignation letter that she published on her website. Central to her disillusionment was that at the Times “truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.”  Weiss concluded, “And I’ve always comforted myself with the notion that the best ideas win out. But ideas cannot win on their own. They need a voice. They need a hearing. Above all, they must be backed by people willing to live by them.”

Weiss nailed it.

It is great to champion free speech. If, however, the guardians of such speech are frightened every time a tweet in opposition goes viral, there will be little room indeed for an energetic and lively exchange of ideas. Those heated discussions might often be uncomfortable and trigger a lot of sensitive people, but they are also the only way to reach a consensus on key issues in our fragile democracy. The alternative, one think, an inflexible orthodoxy in which only sanctioned opinions and beliefs are championed, is already changing the definition of free speech in America. If we allow it to become an insufferable and permanent form of censorship, we will only have ourselves to blame for not speaking out earlier and forcefully.

For now, I would settle for a Speakers’ Corner in Central Park as a starter.

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Last week’s headlines summed up the gist of a breaking story. The Netherland’s National Archives had put on public display a map that purported to show where German soldiers had in 1944 buried diamonds, gold, and jewelry stolen from a bank branch that had taken a direct bombing hit. The Germans hid their haul in four oversized munitions boxes they buried on the outskirts of the small town of Ommen. They never got a chance to retrieve it before the Allies won the war the following year.

A new story about a long-missing clue that might lead to stolen spoils of the Third Reich does not surprise me. Hidden Nazi treasure is something I have investigated on and off for decades. It is indisputable that hundreds of millions in looted Nazi goods are still missing almost 80 years after the end of the war. The Nazi theft was at an industrial level. Of more than 600,000 works of art stolen from Jews and museums, 10,000 are still missing, including masterpieces by Raphael, Rembrandt, Klimt, Degas, Van Gogh, and Pissarro. The Nazis plundered hundreds of tons of gold from the national reserves of ten countries they occupied. Another five and a half tons of gold came from smelted dental fillings pulled from the mouths of concentration camp corpses.

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Hoping for a day when they might return to retrieve it, the Nazis hid much of what they had stolen. As Nazi leaders prepared to escape Europe, they implemented Aktion Feuerland (“Operation Land of Fire”), a secret plan to ferry art and diamonds in U-boats to Argentina. Moving tons of gold was not so simple, so almost all of it stayed in Europe. In the war’s closing days, American soldiers stumbled upon a motherlode of gold and art stashed in an underground cavern in abandoned salt mines near Frankfurt. The gold recovered there was worth $262,000,000 ($6.5 billion in 2022).

The lure of so much missing gold and art has attracted many treasure hunters convinced it is buried under glaciers or deep inside caves in Alpine mountains. Over many years, dozens of expeditions organized to find the '“Nazi treasure” turned up only a few crates of Reichsbank documents. When word leaked in the 1960s that some currency had washed up on the shores of Austria’s remote Lake Töplitz, it was overrun with amateur divers. The money turned out to be counterfeit, and nothing else was found. Polish divers in 2020 thought they had found the priceless panels the Nazis had stolen from the Amber Room of a Russian royal palace. The crates they retrieved from a sunken Nazi warship contained personal belongings and some military gear, no Amber panels, no Nazi loot. Last year a newly discovered WWII diary of an SS officer grabbed headlines when it purported to show that four tons of gold were buried deep under an 18th-century Polish palace. Experts concluded last week that the SS diary was a fake, made at least 40 years after the end of war.

How much Nazi gold is still missing? A massive postwar investigation concluded in the 1990s that it could not account for a stunning 177 tons.

So where is it?

My reporting pinpoints the last place where most of it was hidden: the Vatican’s underground catacombs and tunnels.

I spent nine years to research and write a book about Vatican finances (God’s Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican). As I report in that book, the U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps (an Army predecessor organization to the CIA) had put one of its best agents, William Gowen, in Rome after the war. Gowen was on the lookout for Nazi fugitives trying to escape from Europe. In 1946, an informant told him that ten truckloads packed with gold stolen from the Croatian State Mint had traveled from Switzerland to Rome before being unloaded at a Croatian seminary only a mile from the Vatican. The convoy had used Vatican license plates, and some of the men were dressed as priests. Gowen discovered that a well-known Croatian priest based in Rome had led the convoy from the seminary to St. Peter’s Square. There, Gowen wrote in a classified report, the Vatican Bank took control of the gold for “safe keeping.” The presence of the Croatian priest, according to Gowen, allowed the Vatican Bank to accept the gold as “a contribution from a religious organization” and “convert[ed] it without creating a record.”

U.S intelligence tried unsuccessfully to get more information on the Vatican gold. There were unconfirmed reports that much of it found its way to South American safe havens. However, another U.S. intelligence agent investigating the missing gold concluded those stories were “a smokescreen to cover the fact that the treasure remains in its original repository [the Vatican].”

What happened to the stolen gold at the Vatican?

There are some clues. The Vatican sold gold reserves as late as the 1980s, and covertly used gold ingots to support the CIA’s war against Communism in Poland (no coincidence there was then a Polish Pope). Around the same time, the church’s Our Lady of Fatima shrine in Portugal paid for an expansion to its sanctuary by selling 110 pounds of wartime gold bars stamped with swastikas. All of that, however, accounts for only a tiny portion of the gold that the 1946 truck convoy brought to the Vatican.

The Vatican will not talk about what happened to the plundered gold.

Forty-one countries gathered in London in 1997 as part of a broad international effort to get answers about the missing Nazi gold. The Vatican refused to attend the conference. It was unmoved although declassified documents revealed that it was one of only four countries that illegally received and stored gold bars emblazoned with swastikas (those bars often included gold from death camp victims).

“Two hundred tons of gold from the pro-Nazi Croatian government found its way to the Vatican,” Elan Steinberg of the World Jewish Congress, told me in 2006. “Here they were, one of the world’s great moral institutions, and they refused to tell us what their view was, much less to lift a finger to help recover any looted assets. It was terribly disappointing.”

A 180-page report the following year from the U.S. government concluded that the Vatican and Switzerland had used their neutral status to hide and make immense profits from Nazi gold stored in their central banks.

That put more pressure on the Vatican. It still did not budge. “We later tried to get information from the Vatican,” Steinberg told me, '“[in comparison] the Swiss were an open door. The Vatican told us to get lost.”

The Vatican also later told me to get lost.

I tried repeatedly to obtain access to the wartime Vatican Bank records, but they are sealed. Only the Pope can order them released. Pope Francis has consistently rebuffed my efforts, even including my public pleas through three high-profile opinion pieces in 2015 and 2016 in The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. As another author had once noted, “Vatican officials would sooner talk about sex than money.”

Absent a breakthrough with Francis or the next Pope, what happened to tons of plundered Nazi gold at the Vatican will remain a mystery.

What about the current hunt in the Netherlands for the cache of looted diamonds and currency? While most of last week’s news coverage had an optimistic slant, I am skeptical. The map had been in the archives for decades and was not a secret to researchers and historians. It only made headlines after it went on public display (along with 1,300 other wartime documents). The Dutch archives admitted in a separate statement that the location highlighted on the map had been searched several times in the war’s immediate aftermath. A Dutch historian, Joost Rosendaal, doubts the Nazi loot is still there because of a heavy British Air Force bombing run in that area in April 1945. Rosendaal thinks the saturation bombing likely destroyed the metal containers containing the loot; whatever was left scattered about and was picked up by locals and Allied soldiers.

The coming weeks will determine whether the Dutch map is just another in a long line of what has become an almost mythical quest for Nazi treasure. One thing, however, about which I am certain, is that whatever the outcome of the Dutch hunt, missing Third Reich plundered art and gold should not be become a footnote only for history books. The trail might be cold on many fronts, but answers must still be had from those countries, organizations, and people who profited from the greatest state theft in modern history.

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Everyone will have their own favorite short list of the stories they think turned into nothing burgers. This is my subjective top five. They are stories I followed closely that fizzled away. Fellow journalists understand all too well that a piece that captures headlines might sometimes fade without any significant follow up. Sometimes there are no more developments and other times journalists are distracted by the latest and shiniest candy on the media radar.

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I have reported widely in both the pre and post digital world. The pressure today is not just to deliver a good story that breaks some news but also to attract clicks. Publishers know precisely how many people clicked on a story, they also know whether readers stopped after a paragraph or two or read to the last word. The digital measurements translate into a new media culture. Once the click traffic slows to a crawl on what is initially big news, editors stop assigning more reporting.

Of course, any of these can become a front-page story again in 2023.

I’m looking into some of them, and I trust other good reporters are doing the same. Below, I also take a guess at the ones I think might get resurrected in the coming year.

* What happened to the leak investigation of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs draft that overturned Roe. v. Wade? Seven months have passed. It is not a large universe of people to examine. Electronic records and phone logs might uncover a direct link to Politico, which broke the story.

2023 outlook? Little reason to think the Robert’s court will suddenly become transparent about the investigation or that anyone will be charged.

* The JFK files. Fifty-nine years after the assassination we are still waiting for the government to release in full the final batch of classified files. Many had high expectations about the National Archives dump of 11,000 documents. Some conspiracy theorists claimed the new files established a link between the CIA and Oswald, ‘proof’ that there was a plot by the Secret State to kill JFK. Alas, the documents were mostly a big nothing. As I told The New York Times, anyone looking for a smoking gun in the new files was on a “fool’s errand.”

2023 outlook? It will unquestionably return since the CIA and other government agencies have until May 15 to make their case to keep files sealed and President Biden could release everything to the public by June 30.

* Are criminal gangs lining up to buy tens of millions in weapons the U.S. and NATO have shipped to Ukraine? That was headline news this past June when Interpol’s chief, Jürgen Stock, warned that, “The criminals are even now, as we speak, focusing on them…even those used by the military and including heavy weapons. We can expect an influx of weapons in Europe and beyond. We should be alarmed.” Interpol asked all countries sending weapons to Ukraine to use a database to help “track and trace” the weapons. Some nations refused.

2023 outlook? It will become front page again after the hot war stops and Ukraine is left with a multi-billion-dollar surplus of weapons. No one knows if that will happen in the next year. I am following it.

* What happened to the Department of Justice criminal probe of the OxyContin Sackler family? In February, a group of senators asked the Justice Department to investigate whether the Sackler family - Purdue Pharma’s billionaire owners who made their fortune on OxyContin - should be criminally charged. Although there were more than $50 billion in civil litigation settlements in the nation’s deadliest ever prescription drug crisis, many activists and families of opioid victims demanded more. Are there DOJ criminal probes of the Sacklers or executives at other drug companies, distributors, and pharmacy chains? Justice will not confirm or deny whether a probe is underway, but many of us who have followed it think they are going to wait out the outrage and pressure to act, eventually doing nothing.

2023 outlook? I do not have much hope for criminal charges to be filed unless new evidence of culpability and intent come to light. I, and other journalists, will continue reporting on it in the hope that a whistleblower might yet come forward.

* What happened to Monkeypox? In the summer it seemed that every news outlet had a Monkeypox scare story, something along the line that it was the viral successor to Covid. “America has the largest monkeypox outbreak in the world,” was the Daily Mail headline in August. All the media hype was over 28 confirmed deaths in more than 72,000 infections. And the initial cases were limited to mostly gay and bisexual men. Still, media warned it was an equal opportunity infection that would be a worldwide scourge. Four months after the first reports, the number of cases had dropped by 85%.

2023 outlook? Zero. The virus turned out to be more difficult to transmit than originally forecast and far less deadly.

I am looking forward in 2023 to reporting on some stories that will be new and interesting to a wide audience. It is a great time to be an investigative journalist. In the meantime, I am sending with this post the best New Year wishes to all my Substack followers. Thanks for making 2022 a great year.

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