RFK Jr.’s story about the beheading of a whale is in no way inferior to the story about the bear murder

If you follow politics, and especially the 2024 presidential campaign, you probably regularly ask yourself, “What the hell is wrong with this guy?” – usually in reference to Donald Trump.* But not infrequently one could also ask the same question about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Like when the story of the brain-eating worm came out. Or when you saw the photo of him happily posing with an animal carcass. Or when he responded to his children’s former babysitter’s accusation of sexual harassment by saying, “I’m not a church boy.” Or when he said The New York Times He lived with an emu that regularly attacked his wife. Or, of course, when he tried to avoid an unfavorable New Yorkers Articles by telling Roseanne Barr, on film, around the time he planned to eat a dead bear cub but had to catch a flight, so he staged an elaborate murder scene in Central Park.

Given all this, you might think that Kennedy would be the only person who could get people to ask, “What the hell?” But surprise: He is Despite it have it!

Thanks to a recently excavated City and country Profile of Kennedy’s eldest daughter, Kennedy steps in, which was published in 2012, we now know the following:

Kick’s penchant for extremes was fueled by her father’s eccentric environmentalism. Exhibit A: When she was six years old, word got around that a dead whale had washed up on Squaw Island in Hyannis Port. Bobby, who enjoys studying animal skulls and skeletons, ran to the beach with a chainsaw, cut off the whale’s head, and then tied it to the roof of the family minivan with a bungee cord. for the five-hour drive back to Mount Kisco, New York. “Every time we accelerated on the highway, Whale juice was running into the windows of the car, and it was the most disgusting thing on the planet,” recalls Kick. “We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and the people on the highway gave us the middle finger, but That was a normal part of everyday life for us.”

The emphasis is ours because, like I said, what the hell is this? Honestly, it’s hard to identify the strangest detail of this deeply strange story. Was it the part about:

• Kennedy beheads a whale with a chainsaw?
• The whale juice that flows into the car?
• His children wear plastic bags over their heads to avoid the whale juice?
• As his daughter herself admitted, this was “just part of our everyday life,” reinforcing the idea that it really wouldn’t be the least bit surprising if another Kennedy revealed that Bobby played football with animal skulls on the beaches of Hyannis Port?

Incidentally, and regardless of her father’s sinister interactions with cadavers, Kick Kennedy beat her in the same City and country In an interview, she said that in her parents’ eyes, the worst thing she could do in her life was “to become a Republican.” Yet 12 years later, her father has endorsed perhaps the worst Republican of all time as a presidential candidate. That’s something to think about!

The Kennedy campaign team did not respond to Vanity FairPlease leave a comment.

*Although sometimes J.D. Vance.