On Friday, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. deserted his presidential marketing campaign and endorsed Donald Trump as commander-in-chief.
Kennedy has signaled that he is gunning for a task within the Trump administration. Trump, in the meantime, just lately told CNN that he was contemplating giving Kennedy a task in his administration, and in an interview that aired on Monday, Kennedy told the conservative pundit Tucker Carlson that he and Trump are “engaged on coverage points collectively.”
As for which place Kennedy is particularly trying to nab? Nothing’s been confirmed, however final week, previous to the marketing campaign’s suspension, Kennedy’s operating mate Nicole Shanahan — the ex-wife of Google cofounder Sergey Brin — supplied a touch: per NBC, whereas speaking to a podcaster Shanahan floated the suggestion that Kennedy would make an “unbelievable” secretary of well being and human providers.
That Kennedy would need this place within the administration — or another well being or environment-related position — is not stunning. A former environmental lawyer, Kennedy has gained notoriety in recent times for his open-armed embrace of a slew of health-related conspiracy theories, most famously the debunked notion that vaccines cause autism. His marketing campaign has largely been based on his rejection of the COVID-19 vaccine and pandemic protocols normally, and he even made the ludicrous claim that the COVID-19 virus had been genetically modified to keep away from “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese language.”
In different phrases, based mostly on his conspiratorial and unscientific strategy to human well being alone, placing Kennedy wherever close to a place like well being secretary could be harmful — and that is earlier than you even get to the animal tales.
The Kennedy scion has lengthy been referred to as an animal aficionado with a penchant for taxidermy; per the NYT, his taxidermy assortment contains the stuffed physique of a pet turtle and a Sumatran tiger as soon as gifted to his father, the late Robert “Bobby” Kennedy, Sr. However his presidential marketing campaign has revealed a string of more and more weird tales about numerous regarding interactions with deceased animals, the most recent of which can warrant an official inquiry.
It began again in Could, when The New York Times reported that throughout divorce proceedings in 2012, Kennedy disclosed {that a} parasitic worm “bought into [his] mind and ate a portion of it after which died.” (Per the NYT, Kennedy invoked the alleged mind worm to clarify self-described “cognitive issues” he was experiencing.)
Shortly after that, in July, a Vanity Fair article — which additionally included resurfaced sexual assault allegations introduced in opposition to Kennedy by a former babysitter for his kids — included a photograph of Kennedy, taken in Korea in 2010, posing with the carcass of what strongly seems to be a lifeless, barbecued canine. It was later that yr that docs would allegedly uncover the worm in his mind.
And barely a month after that, Kennedy himself launched a deeply strange video by which he informed the one-time comic Roseanne Barr that he had dumped a lifeless bear cub in New York’s Central Park and staged it to appear to be a motorbike accident. Mainly, as he tells it, in 2014 he was on his option to go falconing — once more with the animals — when a lady driving forward of him hit the younger bear, killing it. At first, Kennedy informed Barr, he’d supposed to pores and skin the bear and retailer its meat in his fridge, because it was in “good situation.” However he left the bear within the automobile for too lengthy — as one does? — inflicting it to spoil, and so, as a result of there had apparently been a string of motorbike accidents in Central Park, he determined to drop the bear there. As a result of there are not any bears in Central Park, nevertheless, the lifeless cub turned massive information. (Kennedy launched the video to get forward of a forthcoming New Yorker article that exposed the incident.)
And also you’d suppose that might be the tip of it, proper? Alas, not but. Simply this week, a bizarre Town & Country interview with Kennedy’s daughter, Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy, resurfaced — and it’d simply comprise probably the most deranged Kennedy story of all of them.
Within the interview, which was initially printed again in 2012, Kick recalled that her father had wielded a chainsaw to noticed off the top of a lifeless, beached whale at Hyannis Port, Massachusetts — after which, with the household in tow, strapped it to the roof of their automobile for the drive again to the household’s house in Mount Kisco, New York. The drive was 5 hours lengthy, and per Kick’s retelling, it sounds hellish.
“Each time we accelerated on the freeway, whale juice would pour into the home windows of the automobile, and it was the rankest factor on the planet,” Kick informed City & Nation. “All of us had plastic baggage over our heads with mouth holes minimize out, and other people on the freeway have been giving us the finger.”
“However that was simply regular day-to-day stuff for us,” she added.
It is one factor to be all in favour of oddities, like taxidermied critters and even outdated bones. However lopping off the allegedly still-juicy head of a beached whale is extraordinarily bizarre conduct that goes means past merely being a hobbiest, even by Kennedy’s more and more bizarre requirements. On Monday, according to The New York Times, the “political arm” of the Heart for Organic Variety known as for an investigation into Kennedy’s alleged whale-sawing, citing federal legal guidelines prohibiting people from accumulating smooth tissues from protected marine mammals and, individually, carrying these collected elements throughout state traces.
Although no particular position for Kennedy within the Trump administration has but been confirmed, Kennedy is on Trump’s transition team, which means that he’d at minimal play a task in staffing, reviewing, and organizing a Trump-led authorities. And on the finish of the day, Individuals should have actual specialists helming authorities companies, together with those answerable for human, animal, and environmental well being — and never a weirdo conspiracy theorist who can not seem to cease desecrating animal corpses.
Extra on RFK: RFK Junior Threatens to Eat “Five More Brain Worms”
