Contibuted So Much
East Hampton
April 22, 2026
I recently had the good fortune of being reintroduced to the remarkable story of Goody Garlick, the local East Hampton woman who was accused and brought to trial for practicing witchcraft in 1657.
As a part of the Hamptons Whodunit Festival, Hugh King, East Hampton town crier and historian of both the town and the village, was recruited to present a local mystery component for the festival participants which began with a brief presentation at the Gardiner Mill Cottage on James Lane, proceeded with a fascinating tour of the old cemetery, and ended at the beautiful old Baker House Inn with a short theatrical conclusion to the Goody Garlick trial.
The witchcraft account, which is true, is based on the scholarly research and book by Hugh’s late wife, the dynamic Loretta Orion.
East Hampton is fortunate to have benefited from the efforts of this talented couple who have contributed so much to our understanding of our rich heritage. Hugh King continues to make our history interesting, relevant, lively, and even entertaining! If you get a chance, don’t miss a presentation by Hugh King — you will never forget it!
Sincerely,
JUDITH HOPE
Retro TV
East Hampton
April 27, 2026
Dear Mr. Rattray,
I agree with the rising age demographic, as mentioned in Arthur French’s “No Competition” of April 13. Optimum should show value to its older viewers’ needs with its lineup.
Black-and-white television has reduced blue light, which does not negatively affect the sleep hormone melatonin, as does color TV. Also, retro black-and-white TV has a slower, more soothing pace than louder, high-action content.
Here are some still existing Optimum black-and-white choices: 33 (MeTV), 34 (TVLand), 109 (Cozi TV), 112 (Start TV), 113 (many black-and-white movies), 114 (Antenna TV), 151 (Rewind TV),175 (FETV), 184 (Great American Family), 190 (FX Movie Channel). Some of these may not be 100 percent retro, but try them!
PAMELA MCDONALD
Wild Turkeys
East Hampton
April 22, 2026
To the Editor:
As a homeowner in East Hampton for more than 45 years, I have witnessed many changes. When change represents social progress, this is especially laudable and commendable. When, however, change representing social progress is resisted by a governing town board, and “tradition” is given as the primary justification, this may have numerous negative implications, such as ignorance, vested self-interest, ego, or indifference to the needs, preferences, and wishes of others in the community — and that indeed may represent a board that is out of touch and interested primarily in maintaining a stagnant status quo. Which brings me to the reason for this letter: the Turkey Hunt.
According to statistics, hunting is increasingly viewed through the lens of societal concerns about gun violence, which has negatively affected public sentiment and especially for many concerned parents. One has only to turn on the television, computer, or car radio to learn of another mass shooting, a teenager shot while playing at a neighborhood basketball court; a 7-month-old baby in a carriage, shot and killed by a stray bullet. Also to be noted is that the scourge of hunting and, in particular, trophy hunting, is largely disapproved of, with support nationwide dropping below 30 percent.
So here we are in the 21st century, indulging this so-called sport, while animal behavioral studies have increasingly shown that many of the animals being slaughtered have capabilities, awareness, sentience, and in some cases, even that of sharing, of generosity, and compassion resembling a number of our own traits and characteristics. They are protective of their young, they raise and teach them survival skills, and each creature serves a function and has a reason for its very existence. In truth, I sometimes find it hard to say that about far too many human animals.
So why are we still allowing, even promoting, the killing of these innocent, beautiful wild birds who are entitled to their own lives? Turkeys are highly intelligent, social, and affectionate animals who form close family groups and strong lifelong bonds. They recognize human faces, display complex emotions like empathy and joy, and enjoy being petted, stroked, and cuddled. Turkeys have excellent memories and can remember familiar faces. They are curious and love to explore their surroundings and have over 20 distinct vocalizations to communicate. They engage in playful behaviors, such as playing with objects like footballs, running, and chasing each other and can even be trained to purr or enjoy music. They are also protective and nurturing mothers, with high maternal instincts and will risk their lives to save their young; they communicate with their chicks while they are still in the egg. Turkeys show empathy, comforting distressed or injured flock mates.
Wild turkeys can fly up to 55 miles per hour and run up to 18 m.p.h., have a 270-degree field of vision, and excellent hearing, which they use to remain aware of their environment. And turkeys are especially valued in a town like East Hampton for the invaluable role they play by consuming ticks.
They deserve so much more than to be considered as the main course for Thanksgiving or turkey burgers or for a feather in someone’s cap; they deserve to be considered for who they are.
Over time innumerable traditions have bitten the dust, because they are out of step with the time — with knowledge, awareness, and social progress, e.g., floggings, hangings in the town square, children working in coal mines.
On behalf of those in the community who take great pleasure in enjoying the very sight and presence of wildlife and in sharing our space and living in harmony with wildlife, I urge our town board to sweep the senseless killing of all wildlife for personal gratification into the dustbin of history.
ZELDA PENZEL
Feral cat(s) 78
Wind swept, sad sleep,
Too tired for the sun’s leap.
Will freedom come,
With no consequence, undone?
Two-way roads, old dirt roads,
The same path, no turning back?
Will there be a spot for I plus two?
Spring nights behind the saloon,
Begging for scraps you’ll presume.
Searching for life in a weary night,
Longing for a future bright.
Cross on the ferry, back to the old Chevy,
Maybe never see us, forever ready.
In the journey, we find our way,
Through the night and into the day.
Feral cats here to stay!?
EDWARD HANNIBAL JR.
Register Your Views
East Hampton
April 24, 2026
To the Editor:
On May 19, voters in the East Hampton Union Free School District will have a unique opportunity to shape the future of the district for the next 30 years and beyond by voting on the three bond propositions being placed before the community.
The board of education has spent the last year developing three proposals to best address the infrastructure needs and wants for this district.
Proposition One will allow the district to undertake many needed projects, including a complete renovation of the High School auditorium, a complete replacement of the aging windows at the Middle School, and creation of music and special education spaces at the John M. Marshall Elementary School. Proposition One comes at no cost to taxpayers because it replaces older debts that are about to be retired. Proposition One will also allow for the construction of classroom space to teach cosmetology to interested high school students, allow for security upgrades in each of our buildings and fund a number of important upgrades to our outdoor athletic facilities.
Proposition Two will allow for the construction of an indoor eight-lane swimming pool and competition diving board. The pool will be used for swimming safety and instruction during the day and will be open to community members during times when school is not in session. The board of education created Proposition Two to ensure that the students of this district had a guaranteed location to learn the water safety skills they need to live in East Hampton. We will also be creating a vocational education program so that our students can learn pool construction and maintenance.
Proposition Three will allow for the construction of an indoor turf practice field and an indoor basketball court for additional practice spaces for our student athletes. As many people realize, we have limited indoor space for students to use, particularly during the winter months, and Proposition Three will allow more students to engage in athletic activities with their peers. As is the case with the pool, the indoor athletic facility will be available for community use during times when it is not needed by our students.
Proposition Two will increase taxes for an average assessed home by about $200 per year, while Proposition Three will see an increase of $82 for the same average assessed home.
Full details of our three propositions, and our annual operating budget, are available on the district’s website, easthamptonschools.org. Further information will be sent to all mailboxes in the district in May.
Please be sure to vote on May 19 to register your views on our budget and Propositions One, Two, and Three. Polls are open from 1 to 8 p.m. at the District Office, 4 Long Lane, East Hampton.
Yours truly,
ADAM S. FINE
Superintendent of Schools
Goal to Contribute
East Hampton
April 27, 2026
To the Editor,
I am writing again to share my candidacy for East Hampton School Board.
My interest in serving is rooted in a very real and personal investment in this community. As a parent of a student currently in our district, the decisions made by the board of education directly shape my child’s daily experience and future opportunities. At the same time, like many in our community, I have close family members living on fixed incomes, which gives me a strong appreciation for the importance of thoughtful, responsible stewardship of public resources.
Our district has long benefited from dedicated leadership and a strong foundation. My goal would be to contribute to that work in a way that is collaborative, respectful, and focused on what matters most: our students and the community we share.
Vote on May 19 from 1 to 8 p.m. at East Hampton High School. Thank you for your continued support of our schools.
Sincerely,
KIMBERLY SARRIS ROYAL
Carry Those Values
East Hampton
April 27, 2026
Dear Mr. Rattray,
As a lifelong member of the East Hampton community and as Kimberly Sarris Royal’s father, I’ve had the privilege of watching my daughter grow into the educator and person she is today. I understand that a parent’s perspective may be seen as biased, but I believe that a lifetime of witnessing someone’s character offers a perspective worth sharing.
During my 40 years as a public servant in this community, I learned what it takes to serve others with fairness, integrity, and commitment. These are the values I worked to instill in my daughter, raising her to be calm, levelheaded, fair, and just. Over time, I have watched her carry those values into her work in public education in a steady and meaningful way.
Her commitment is unmatched. I have seen her remain dedicated to her students and her school community even when the work was challenging, always acting in the best interest of students while balancing the needs of the broader school community. That kind of steady, principled commitment is not situational; it defines who she is.
As a graduate of East Hampton High School and now a parent with a child in the district, she understands both the roots of this community and its future. I am confident she will bring that same fairness, thoughtfulness, and dedication to the East Hampton community as a member of the board of education.
I respectfully encourage the community to support Kimberly Sarris Royal on May 19.
Respectfully,
TODD SARRIS
Ruining Montauk
Montauk
April 26, 2026
Dear Mr. Rattray,
I don’t always agree with the editorials in The Star, but your assessment of the situation in Montauk, especially with the approval of 666 Montauk Highway is spot-on.
Town Hall allows this kind of garbage to continue ruining the beauty and the atmosphere of Montauk — to what end? Montauk will become the party place for the one percenters that can afford $10,000 chicken fingers at the Surf Lodge. There is little consideration for local Montaukers or property owners who escape to Montauk for some relaxation and enjoy Montauk without the glitz.
Town Hall allows this desecration to continue on a large scale, but heaven forbid you want to put a small addition on your house or property. You have to go through the tortures of the damned to get an approval.
East Hampton Town, with its approval of this development, will be the death nail in the coffin of Montauk. Thank you, East Hampton Town and the planning board, for your consideration of Montauk and its inhabitants.
Respectfully,
JOE COSTABILE
A Big Deal
Montauk
April 27, 2026
Dear David,
I want to thank Joe Gaviola for his letter to The Star last week in which he reminded us of the many positive actions the town has recently taken to benefit Montauk. When we think of town government, most often the focus is on problems that need to be fixed. This is understandable. Still, while often overlooked, government does manage to get some things done.
I am a veteran of the many land preservation fights of the 1980s and 1990s when citizens working with multiple branches of government and various local administrations succeeded in protecting vast stretches of open space: Montauk County Park, Hither Woods, Camp Hero, Shadmoor, and others. But as Joe pointed out, our current administration continues to work for the people of Montauk.
After 60 years of promises by the federal government, we have a downtown beach in Montauk. New building codes have been adopted that rein in the megamansion epidemic. The dunes at Ditch have been restored. The inlet dredged deeper than ever before. The Pathfinder Camp property preserved. And let’s not forget, somehow the town managed to keep our roads clear throughout this past horrific winter.
In the June 23 Democratic primary, Kathee Burke-Gonzalez and her administration will face a supervisor candidate and a slate of pro-development committee persons, many of whom only changed their party affiliation in the last six months.
Everyone needs to pay attention: June 23 is a big deal.
BILL AKIN
Inspired
Montauk
April 22, 2026
Dear David,
I am inspired to write this letter after watching numerous clips on Instagram showing senior citizens having a wonderful time gyrating and dancing in the afternoon and evenings in The Villages, a senior retirement community in Florida. Everyone seems to be having a good time, and I never saw anyone passing out due to heat exhaustion or drinking more than two alcoholic beverages or Shirley Temples.
I was just wondering if our famous Surf Lodge would ever consider having a G.N. (Geriatric Night) on a slow evening (perhaps a Monday?) over the summer and fall. A nice feature would be an offer of 90 percent-discount drinks, reserved tables for $50 to accommodate 10, numerous chaises longues for folks to take a quick nap after a strenuous dance, and great local bands who can play music from the 1950s ’60s, and ’70s. (Dare I say that I love the Bee Gees?)
This would be a great opportunity for the Surf Lodge to showcase its love of community and its support of senior physical conditioning by encouraging such dances as the Twist (good for arms, backbones, and necks), Mashed Potato (feet), the Jerk (elbows and wrists), and Loving Hugs (to remind and rekindle older loves that still exist).
Happy spring,
BRIAN POPE
Likes Control
Montauk
April 27, 2026
To the Editor,
How well do you know Jerry Larsen? I think Democrats who will be voting in the June 23 primary for town supervisor don’t know him well enough to make an informed decision. There’s so much color (mostly dark) needed to paint his portrait that it will take many brush strokes on the canvas to capture his true likeness. It’s not a pretty picture. Let this be the first splash of paint.
Those who do know Mr. Larsen well, describe him as one who likes to control things. He shuns deliberation and collaboration. He prefers quid pro quo with a select, moneyed constituency, rather than considering the community’s varied views at public hearings and regularly snubs opinions contrary to his.
Those traits were predominant and causal in his taking a sledgehammer to the East Hampton Village Ambulance Association, a 50-year institution when he first became mayor of East Hampton Village. Prior to Jerry deciding that he needed to arrogate it under his sovereignty, it had been quietly serving its community for nearly a half-century. It was an all-volunteer corps of neighbors who gave their time, and sometimes their nights and weekends, to answer emergency calls.
Then without any warning and behind the scenes and without any input from the members of the association or the citizenry, Mr. Larsen orchestrated a transfer of the ambulance service certificate, basically its state license to operate, from the association to the village government. No notification. No agreement. No usual administrative protocols. No public hearings. Nothing. The mayor willed it. The act was done.
What followed was a legal battle between David and Goliath, and this time Goliath won. I won’t go into the legal arguments and the ethical issues. They’re too long for this recounting. Suffice it to say that the remnants of the association were only able to raise a paltry sum with which to hire a lawyer who was no match against a municipal government with hired legal guns and the full weight of the institutional authority behind it. The volunteer association of almost 50 years in existence, built by neighbors who asked nothing in return, was gone.
It was a stunning end for an organization that had provided uninterrupted ambulance service to the village and surrounding areas throughout its tenure. In its place stood a municipal department stocked with paid employees, village lifeguards pressed into service as emergency medical technicians, and a chief who had been a village employee from the start.
Obscuring Mr. Larsen’s self-centered desire to exercise command authority over an independent volunteer corps, his publicly stated reason for converting a free amenity into a payment-based service was ostensibly this: The village takes control, bills insurance companies for rides, use that revenue to offset municipal costs, reduce property taxes. Although, the arithmetic may not support the supposed justification because the revenue from billing would have to be very substantial to offset those new costs and reduce taxes, on paper, taxpaying homeowners come out ahead. This is where the quid pro quo with a select wealthy constituency comes into play.
The uninsured and underinsured would bear the real cost. East Hampton Village is not exclusively wealthy. If you were a wealthy property-owning village resident with good health insurance, Mr. Larsen’s restructuring may well benefit you: lower taxes, and any ambulance bill would go to your insurer. If you were a year-round, working-class resident without robust coverage, you would trade something genuinely valuable: free, unconditional emergency care for a tax cut that largely flowed to someone else. The policy isn’t uniformly bad, but it would redistribute the burden in a way that benefits Mr. Larsen’s wealthy donors and financially harms the village’s most vulnerable residents.
Autocratic control and quid pro quo with elite patrons, as exemplified in the Department of Governmental Efficiency-like elimination of the volunteer ambulance corps, are the initial tones and dark shadows that will ultimately coalesce into Jerry Larsen’s complete portrait. Stay tuned as his full rendering is revealed.
LOU CORTESE
For-Profit Housing
East Hampton
April 25, 2026
David,
Every week I look forward to reading the “Guestwords” column. They usually offer a unique insight into a local issue in a way that perhaps I had not thought about. It has always been a lovely piece of impartial local news.
This past week I was horrified to see that this usually excellent column had been offered up to Chris Kelley as a soapbox to preach his and Kirby Marcantonio’s for-profit condo development plan under the guise of affordable housing.
As a refresher for those who may have not followed the near-catastrophe at 152 Three Mile Harbor Road, the model offered is that businesses can buy these condos for their employees.
The 47 condos that would be three bedrooms (that would be an additional 141 bedrooms, assuming single-room occupancy) could potentially be bought by 47 different businesses that would be able to move employees in and out as they pleased. There would be no oversight as to how often employees moved in and out, effectively creating a potential for revolving-door motel-style housing. This would be transient housing at its absolute worst dead center in the middle of East Hampton and Amagansett at 350 Pantigo.
I appreciate the altruistic tone of the column, but it begs the questions: How much do the developers of this for-profit project stand to make on the back of affordable housing? Who are the investors? Who will be accountable for complaints that will inevitably arise out of this type of employee housing (think noise, landlord tenant, etc.)? And finally, why is the town so very eager to get into bed with a for-profit developer who will make all of the profit yet take on none of the risk or oversight?
Per Chris Kelley’s suggestion, I think that concerned citizens should attend the May 7 meeting at 6 p.m. and get some clarification on how the affordable housing issue is posed to become a for-profit model in East Hampton Town.
MARY WASERSTEIN
The A.I. Tsunami
Springs
April 25, 2026
Dear David:
Reading daily about artificial intelligence in the national media, it is a bit anomalous to see little about A.I. in The East Hampton Star. Knowing The Star, the stories are not there only because the local developments are not occurring. If they were, they would be in The Star.
Likely, the A.I. tsunami has not hit small business and local governments. But be certain it has hit the home of virtually every East Hampton family now coping with the chatbots like ChatGPT, CoPilot, and Claude. That has direct implications for East Hampton High School.
Chatbots are applications of the large language models, or L.L.M.s, a breakthrough of the last decade or so that enables “generative A.I.” to heed a user prompt to produce a fluent, informed, logically organized, stylish essay (say on the American Revolution or “The Scarlet Letter”) in a few seconds. How the chatbots are trained to do this, trained to be the most “intelligent” logic machines ever created, is too technical to address here. An advanced L.L.M. such as CoPilot is trained by ingesting data the equivalent of several text collections of the Library of Congress. NVIDIA reports that an advanced graphics processing unit can perform dozens of petaflops per second. (A petaflop is 1,000 trillion calculations.)
Who can fathom that? But the product, A.I., is in the hands of anyone with a computer. It is free. Its training has a “finishing school” training layer that guides its responses into friendly, encouraging, sometimes flattering rhetoric.
The little public information available as yet suggests that East Hampton High School has introduced A.I. into certain courses and special areas. The impression I get, however, is that not much course work on A.I. is in place. I have no criticism of that.
But the proverbial elephant in the room is documentation that the huge majority of students are acquainted with A.I. and using it for their assignments. The College Board reported that in late 2025 and early 2026, some 85 percent of U.S. high school students were using artificial intelligence for their schoolwork.
The whirlwind first struck our colleges and universities. Traditionally, writing has been a prime tool of thinking. “I can’t think without a pen and legal pad.” And the college essay was the test of thinking (in contrast to memorization), inviting the student to think through a thesis, develop an argument for it, and articulate it.
Suddenly, college students could ask chat for any essay on any topic and in seconds get a fluent, researched, organized, logical, stylish, and referenced essay. The storm in colleges has raged for several years. “The essay is dead.” “Thinking is dead.” Ban any use of A.I. in any assignment. Expulsions. Or, in contrast, a statement from a Wharton School professor, “If you are not teaching students use of A.I. in all assignments, you are preparing them for a world that no longer exists.”
Unquestionably, the conflict — and the threat — have moved to the high-school level. There are no reports that I have found of what is happening in East Hampton schools. But you may be sure that every student is aware of ChatGPT5.2, CoPilot, and Claude, and that an essay sophisticated enough for publication can be produced in seconds.
Are our schools addressing this? I mean, little controversy seems to have reached our local media. It is impossible that the issue does not exist. So, what?
Colleges have moved toward a modus vivendi. A.I. is not going away. Students will graduate into a world where writing and A.I. will be synonymous and thereby make integration of A.I. into assignments honest, explicit, and aware. Submit your essay. Submit the prompts you gave to A.I., its response, and your additional prompts. In a word, be explicitly conscious of your use of A.I. as a tool, how you used it, how you refined it, what you contributed, what it added.
Articles in abundance address the dilemma created by generative A.I. One provocative response (Educational Philosophy and Theory, Oct. 2025) suggests that the traditional essay, an exploration of ideas, the essaying upon an adventure in thought, today has come to “more closely resemble research reports or academic articles, genres designed to present findings rather than explore ideas.”
Artificial intelligence is a computer software program that leaped ahead with the theory of connectionism — A.I. mimicking the distributed neuronal/synaptic architecture of the human brain. A.I. is aware of nothing, sees nothing, thinks nothing, wants nothing, feels nothing; it ingests data, processes it according to algorithms, identifies patterns in the oceanic text upon which it is trained, and tests its conclusions billions of times, each time correcting all “weightings” of artificial neurons. It can manipulate its oceanic text with unfathomable computing power, through billions of trials and corrections, until its answers to prompts are fluent, logical, informed, stylish, and agreeable. It is the most astonishing “intelligent” machine ever conceived.
It does not have “agency,” however, does not have volition, initiate, make genuine choices, value, care, or need to be right or perish. Despite endless talk of “agentic” intelligence, the term is either a metaphor or an expansion of the meaning of “agent.”
How will we prepare our children for a world where this new “intelligence” competes with the human mind? A.I. will take over much of what is “mechanistic” in our intelligence. It will enormously increase productivity, living standards, job creation, and the level at which human intelligence is challenged to operate. (The internet, the last new “general technology” to enter our lives, has been the most-rapid job creator in the history of technology, creating two direct jobs and 2.5 indirect jobs for every one lost. By 2023, it was adding up to 17 percent to the U.S. general domestic product.
The challenge to education is to enable human minds to evolve as rapidly as the technology they create.
Yours,
WALTER DONWAY
Sure
East Hampton
April 25, 2026
To the Editor,
Firing squads. Sure, why not? Some great optics and don’t worry about any blowback; nobody handles denial better than the boss.
What’s on the calendar for tomorrow?
TOM MACKEY
Least We Can Do
Amagansett
April 27, 2026
To the Editor:
Okay, the “day in the life” letter:
Friday morning, I was in court defending a 27-year-old hijab-wearing Arab-American woman, a non-party witness in an antisemitism lawsuit against a university. She had been reduced to tears by an attorney asking her theatrical, inappropriate bullying questions in a deposition, “Are you in favor of killing Jewish babies? What about blowing up buses full of Jewish people?”
Under court rules, my role was uselessly reduced to saying “Objection as to form,” which he ignored. There was zero prospect of his being able to introduce any of this as evidence in his case, but that wasn’t the point. He immediately placed the transcript on the public docket, including her name and that of her employer. Friday morning, the judge did the right thing, issuing a protective order.
Then I heard that a friend of mine, an attorney in another state, was being threatened with sanctions for missing a court appearance, in a case similar to the one I just described. He is 76 years old, has a respiratory condition, is doing this work for free (as I am), and overslept. I was helping him plan his defense, but we were interrupted.
A 22-year-old African-American suspended college student returning home from overseas had been pulled into secondary at American customs in Toronto. A schoolyard bully in a Customs and Border Protection uniform demanded he unlock his phone and turn it over. He said no. The C.B.P. agent responded, “You are not flying home from here, or any Canadian airport tonight. Go rent a car.”
Canadian customs, now tasked with admitting him to Canada, was stupefied. They had never seen anything like it before. Fortunately, they let him into their country, so he didn’t have to spend the rest of his life living in the airport, like the guy in the Spielberg movie.
I spent the next few hours helping him find a motel and buy a Greyhound ticket, and comforting him for being assaulted by a stupid, vicious government.
This was only a slightly unusual 24 hours, because it included three such situations, instead of only one or two.
Are you thinking, “That’s a letter from Harry Potter world, and I’m so glad to be a Muggle”? I am guessing not. By the way, that is a fictional world, and ours is real. And we all live in the same one; there is no such protected class as Muggles.
Ninety percent of life is showing up (and showing up and showing up). You don’t need to be a lawyer to do something; hopefully you already are. There are good people all around us who are being bullied and threatened, and the very least we can do to is to stand next to them.
For democracy in America,
JONATHAN WALLACE
Question of Judgment
East Hampton
April 25, 2026
Sir,
Representative Nick LaLota’s closing remarks in your recent article about the absence of a Republican candidate for East Hampton Town supervisor read less like a contribution to civic debate and more as a wink to a partisan audience. “Bless the hearts,” paired with a reflexive warning about “socialism,” is not an argument. It is a dismissal.
The more revealing point is the one your reporting already establishes: The local Republican Party cannot field a candidate at all. That failure is not incidental, nor is it the result of a sudden ideological shift among voters. It reflects a longer erosion that parallels the national party’s turn away from substance toward slogans and loyalty tests. Voters notice. Eventually, they move on.
Against that reality, Representative LaLota’s assertion of having delivered so much for his constituents feels overstated. Securing funding for water quality and first responders is worthwhile, but it is also baseline congressional work. It does not offset, or even begin to address, the larger question of judgment, particularly his continued alignment with Donald Trump, whose relationship with the truth and with democratic norms is, at this point, not a matter of partisan interpretation but of public record.
His use of “socialism” follows the same pattern. Once a term with a defined meaning, it is now deployed as a catch-all epithet, more signal than substance. One might expect greater precision from a member of Congress. Instead, the rhetoric substitutes for explanation.
The result is a tone that underestimates the electorate. East Hampton may be “bright blue,” but its residents are not naive. They expect arguments, not slogans or insults.
Sincerely,
ANDREW VAN PRAAG
About Snakes
East Hampton
April 23, 2026
Dear Mr. Rattray,
In Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” King Claudius cries out, “Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.” With respect to self-proclaimed King Trump, we should all cry out, “Madness in presidents must not unchecked go.” Consider Trump’s recent erratic behavior:
In December at a White House Christmas reception, Trump spoke incoherently for eight minutes about poisonous snakes in Peru, claiming that they cause 28,000 deaths per year in that country. In fact, over a 15-year span, only 10 deaths were reported from poisonous snake bites in Peru. Is Trump reporting “fake news” while babbling?
In January, in his demand that Greenland become part of the United States, Trump erroneously referred four times to the country as Iceland. In any case, he described it as a “big, beautiful piece of ice. It’s hard to call it land. It’s a big piece of ice.” Does Trump think no one lives in Greenland? Or is it Iceland?
In February, the Supreme Court ruled that Trump exceeded his authority when he imposed sweeping tariffs on imports from nearly every U.S. trading partner. In a 45-minute rant, Trump referred to those judges who ruled against the tariffs as “fools and lapdogs for the RINOs and the radical left Democrats.” He also claimed, “It’s my opinion that the court has been swayed by foreign interests.” Has Trump ever considered how foreign interests have swayed his policies?
In March, Trump said, “I think the war is very complete, pretty much. We’ve already won in many ways, but we haven’t won enough.” When asked if the war was beginning or complete, he said: “Well, I think you could say both.” Is Trump fit to be our commander in chief?
This month, Trump posted in obscenity-filled rage threatening Iran with obliteration. He also attacked Pope Leo XIV, who said that the world is being “ravaged by a handful of tyrants” who spend billions on war. This month, The Wall Street Journal cited a senior Pentagon budget official who placed the cost of the war with Iran at between $25 billion and $35 billion so far. Is Trump one of those tyrants to whom Pope Leo was referring?
Last week, Trump told a reporter that J.D. Vance was in the air about to touch down in Pakistan just minutes before Vance’s motorcade arrived at the White House. If Trump doesn’t know where his vice president is, how can he possibly know how to lead our country?
SALVATORE TOCCI