Bear With Me: RFK Jr.Tries To Seize Control Of Latest Bizarre Story
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Third-party independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is no stranger to controversy. On Sunday, he posted a video to his X account relaying a story about how he once drove a dead bear cub into New York City and left it in Central Park.
The video shows Kennedy telling comedian Roseanne Barr about how a motorist traveling in front of him hit a bear cub. According to Kennedy, he stopped and packed the cub into his own car with the intention of skinning it and refrigerating the meat. (It is legal in New York state to pick up roadkill, but the police need to be notified and one needs to acquire a special tag.)
“It was in very good condition and I was gonna put the meat in my refrigerator.” Kennedy explains to Barr in the video.
As Kennedy’s strange story goes, he was busy falconing, time got away from him, and before he knew it he was headed to dinner with friends in New York City—with a bear carcass in the trunk of his car. His friends, who were drunk (though RFK Jr. says he was sober), thought it would be funny to stage the dead bear in Central Park and try to make it look like a bike accident, as Kennedy had to catch a flight and couldn’t return the car to his home in Westchester.
The famous anti-vaxxer says that while the incident remained a mystery for 10 years, The New Yorker was about to release a story on the matter, which was why he is giving his version of events.
None of this is surprising in retrospect. It’s just the latest bizarre story from a bizarre candidate who has said and done bizarre things. When Kennedy announced his plans to run as a third-party candidate in October 2023, his Philadelphia press conference included a teleprompter mishap that perfectly encapsulated his strange campaign: everything was upside down.
Kennedy’s entire campaign has been a reckoning of his convoluted conspiracy theories around health care, big business, and the government. While he has long promoted the thoroughly debunked idea that the MMR vaccine causes autism, in the past few years Kennedy has gained traction with the right-wing crowd by encouraging the idea that the COVID-19 pandemic was an engineered event.
Kennedy was caught on camera saying that COVID is “ethnically targeted,” and “spares Jews.” He has blamed school shootings on pharmaceutical drugs while lying about gun ownership rates in the U.S. and Switzerland.
In recent months he has questioned the prosecution of Jan. 6 insurrectionists, and had to retract false, conspiracy-theory-laden statements regarding the peacefulness of the mob that descended on the Capitol building.
All of this is capped off by Kennedy being forced to respond to reports that doctors once found a dead worm in his brain—literally.
Kennedy has consistently held low double-digit numbers in polls up through the beginning of June, but in recent weeks those numbers have plummeted. New York Times/Siena polling from late July has Kennedy at six percent in a three-way battle with Vice President Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. The Wall Street Journal puts his popularity in a national election down around 4-5% (with an error margin of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points).
Maybe it’s time to release another push-up video.
Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.
