RFK Jr. is incredibly bizarre

Even though I’m on staycation and, as I mentioned in one of the comments, and before that had been dealing with a personal family situation (which I’m still dealing with), hence the paucity of posts the last couple of weeks. While I expect that I should be getting back to something resembling normal next week, sometimes news appears that is just so odd and compelling that I feel the need to comment on it anyway. Also, I know that you, my readers, are dying for a chance to comment on it. So here it is, a story in The New Yorker published earlier this week entitled What Does Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., actually want? It might as well have been entitled RFK Jr. and the Dead Bear Cub Dumped in Central Park a Decade Ago, because that’s all anyone seems to be talking about since the story was published.

So let’s cut to the quick, and then I’ll discuss the rest of the story, because the story is about much more than this one really bizarre incident:

One day, in the fall of 2014, Kennedy was driving to a falconry outing in upstate New York when he passed a furry brown mound on the side of the road. He pulled over and discovered that it was the carcass of a black-bear cub. Kennedy was tickled by the find. He loaded the dead bear into the rear hatch of his car and later showed it off to his friends. In a picture from that day, Kennedy is putting his fingers inside the bear’s bloody mouth, a comical grimace across his face. (When I asked Kennedy about the incident, he said, “Maybe that’s where I got my brain worm.”)

After the outing, Kennedy, who was then sixty and recently married to Hines, got an idea. He drove to Manhattan and, as darkness fell, entered Central Park with the bear and a bicycle. A person with knowledge of the event said that Kennedy thought it would be funny to make it look as if the animal had been killed by an errant cyclist. The next day, the bear was discovered by two women walking their dogs, setting off an investigation by the N.Y.P.D. “This is a highly unusual situation,” a spokeswoman for the Central Park Conservancy told the Times. “It’s awful.” In a follow-up piece for the Times, which was coincidentally written by Tatiana Schlossberg, one of J.F.K.’s granddaughters, a retired Bronx homicide commander commented, “People are crazy.”

This is a real photo included with the story. I kid you not:

That’s some seriously warped and messed up behavior there. I mean, look at that poor bear cub. It has a big open wound on its side, and this photo is not the least bit funny; that is, unless you’re a truly awful individual. I do, however, respect some of the memes resulting from this story:

I’ve been writing about RFK Jr.‘s antivax conspiracy mongering dating back nearly two decades now, and even I hadn’t suspected that RFK Jr. is this disturbingly vile. Perhaps I should have, given his longstanding behavior.

Throughout the rest of the article, there are good tidbits about RFK Jr.’s history, such as the founding of the World Mercury Project, which later morphed into its current incarnation, Children’s Health Defense, noting that 2014 was also the year that he moved to L.A. with Cheryl Hines:

That year, Kennedy moved with Hines to Los Angeles, where he soon became acquainted with Eric Gladen, a vaccine skeptic who, in 2007, founded a group called World Mercury Project. According to an Associated Press investigation, the group—which was later renamed Children’s Health Defense—reported $13,114 in revenue on its 2014 tax filings. But, in 2015, after Kennedy joined the group’s board, revenue shot up to $467,443. At an event in Sacramento to promote a film by Gladen, “Trace Amounts,” Kennedy told a crowd that, when children receive vaccines, “that night they have a fever of a hundred and three, they go to sleep, and three months later their brain is gone. This is a holocaust, what this is doing to our country.”

Yes, I’ve been writing about RFK Jr.’s propensity to refer to vaccines and autism as a “holocaust” dating back to at least 2013. Since then, RFK Jr. has been trying to persuade Samoan officials that the MMR vaccine was dangerous (in the middle of a deadly measles outbreak!), claiming that today’s generation of children is the “sickest generation” (due to vaccines, of course!), or toadying up to President-Elect Donald Trump during the transition period to be chair of a “vaccine safety commission.” Indeed, a few years ago his own family even called him out for his antivaccine activism, while, predictably, RFK Jr. has, as so many antivaxxers have done, gone all-in on COVID-19 pseudoscience and conspiracy theories and become anti-mask, “anti-lockdown,” and pro-quack treatments for COVID-19.

As I said, I’m on vacation and dealing with a family health issue; so I’m not going to go over the whole article. Rather, I’m going to recommend it as a good primer on RFK Jr.’s history as an antivaxxer (and before), as well as on just how deranged and dangerous RFK Jr. is. The article really doesn’t cover anything new on RFK Jr.’s antivax activism that I haven’t written about (likely many times) over the years, but it does make a couple of interesting observations:

Kennedy has long been drawn to questionable science. But some of his former close friends have grown alarmed at the changes they’ve seen in him more recently. Last summer, Kennedy posted a video of himself shirtless, doing pushups, a sunburn blooming across his well-defined back and torso. The implication was that his then rivals, Trump, at seventy-seven, and Biden, at eighty, were comparatively old and enfeebled. On a podcast last year, Kennedy said that he was taking testosterone-replacement therapy under the guidance of a doctor. One of the side effects of that treatment is increased muscle mass. But the longtime friend told me, “It’s almost like he’s been body-snatched. I look at pictures of him, and he’s unrecognizable. His sense of humor is all but gone. There’s this anger.”

The tragedy of Kennedy, the former friend said, is that there is a lot of good in him. Kennedy is said to have a natural affinity with children, taking them fishing or falconing, enthusiastically explaining nature and animals. “That guy was kind of magical,” the former friend said. “And that guy appears to be gone.” The longtime Kennedy friend said that he has tried talking to Kennedy about the environmental havoc that, he believes, Trump will unleash. In response, he said, Kennedy just “goes on a rant about the D.N.C.” Nearly everyone who knows him is perplexed by his belief that he can win the Presidency. “Sure, he was anti-corporate when we worked together,” Barratt-Brown said. “But he is now anti-government in such a dark way.”

This is an all-too-frequent fate of conspiracy theorists. Once you start down the dark path of conspiracy mongering, forever will it dominate your destiny. (Apologies to Yoda.) That’s exactly what’s happened with RFK Jr. over the last twenty years, although the article notes that his work had been problematic even before the infamous 2005 article, Deadly Immunity, co-published by Salon.com and Rolling Stone, to their eternal shame as journalism, positing a conspiracy theory about mercury in vaccines being the cause of the “autism epidemic”:

Kennedy’s previous work for the magazine was sometimes problematic. “He would turn in these manuscripts, and it’s barely exaggerating to say, like, eighty to ninety per cent of the facts would be incorrect, even the simple ones,” Dana said. “It’s because he’s not a journalist. He’s a lawyer. He’s more about making arguments than about trying to communicate the truth.” The former friend remembered attending a dinner party with Kennedy and finding his case against vaccines persuasive and nimble, even though the former friend knew that the facts were wrong. “People think he’s an idiot—he’s not an idiot,” the person said. But the vaccine story for Rolling Stonewas riddled with errors. Eric Bates, an editor at the magazine, tried to slow-roll the piece, but Wenner pushed it through. (Wenner said that, if he had known that the piece was “flawed that deeply,” he wouldn’t have published it.)

So Jann Wenner pushed the article through over objections of one of his editors? Color me shocked…not. Also, color me shocked…not…that RFK Jr. had a history of lying and making up facts predating his antivax activism. In retrospect, it appears that RFK Jr.’s transformation into the all-purpose Alex Jones-like conspiracy theorist that he’s become was inevitable.