Eliyahu Gasson | Opinions Editor
The political space seems to attract objectively strange people. One recent example is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a member of the prolific Kennedy political dynasty.
Kennedy launched his 2024 presidential campaign on April 9, 2023 as a Democrat.
Upon realizing that his chances of winning the Democratic Party nomination were slim to none, he announced that rather than challenge Joe Biden’s candidacy, he would run as an independent candidate.
RFK Jr.’s campaign recently ended in a semi-predictable way when on August 23 when he took the stage at a Trump rally and threw his weight behind Donald Trump, a move so controversial that he drew backlash from members of his own family.
“Our brother Bobby’s decision to endorse Trump today is a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear,” his sister Kerry Kennedy said in a post on X (formerly Twitter).
However, if you take a step back and analyze the way that RFK Jr. has handled himself in recent years, this change in allegiances doesn’t seem so out of place.
Since Kennedy launched his campaign, strange tale after strange tale about his personal life have come to the public’s attention.
The first bit of bizarre information about Kennedy came from The New York Times, which uncovered and reviewed a 2012 deposition in which he said, “A worm … got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died.”
Obviously, having worms in your brain is no laughing matter. Regardless, the uncovered comments served as a source for mockery, mostly from internet users who had, up until that point, used the phrase “worms for brains” to describe a ridiculous and weird person.
Kennedy’s strange stories don’t end with brain worms.
In 2014, a bear was found dead in New York City’s Central Park – a place not known for its bear population – by two women walking dogs.
The mystery of the dead bear went unsolved until Aug. 4, when Kennedy uploaded a video to X in which he admitted to transporting and depositing the bear carcass in Central Park to comedian Roseanne Barr.
In the video, Kennedy explains that he was taking a group falconing in the Hudson Valley. On the drive up he saw the driver in front of him hit a bear with her car, killing it.
“I picked up the bear and put him in the back of my van because I was going to skin the bear,” he said in the video. He also explained that he intended on butchering the bear and storing its meat in his freezer.
However, he was unable to return to his home in Westchester, N.Y., in time due to a prior engagement at Peter Luger Steak House in New York City, after which he would have to go directly to the airport.
Not knowing what else to do, Kennedy dropped the bear carcass in Central Park.
“At that time there had been a series of bicycle accidents in New York,” he said. “I had an old bike in my car that somebody asked me to get rid of and I said ‘let’s go put the bear in Central Park and make it look like he got hit by a bike.’”
Shortly after The New Yorker released a profile of Kennedy, a 2012 interview of his daughter for Town & Country Magazine resurfaced in which she recalls the time he dragged them out to a dead whale.
“When she was six, word got out that a dead whale had washed up on Squaw Island in Hyannis Port,” the article said. “Bobby – who likes to study animal skulls and skeletons – ran down the beach with a chainsaw, cut off the whale’s head, and then bungee-corded it to the roof of the family minivan for the five-hour haul back to Mount Kisco, New York.”
Kennedy’s daughter also stated that as the car accelerated down the highway “whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet.”
The article continues “we all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us.”
There are plenty more strange and disturbing stories from Kennedy’s past including a tale involving what could have been a dog, a goat or a lamb.
A popular line from Democrats this election cycle is that their opposition is ‘weird,’ and it’s a strategy that seems to be working well for them.
National polling averages continue to favor Democratic candidate Kamala Harris according to polling aggregate 270toWin, more and more as time goes on. So it begs the question: Who is really surprised about this endorsement, and, more curiously, why did Trump think it was a good idea to accept it?