For today's bizarre RFK Jr. story, we're hopping into our time machine and traveling back to 1994. That is the year that former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy felt the need to drive five hours to saw the head off the rotting carcass of a whale.
The story was first related to Town & Country magazine by RFK's daughter, Kick Kennedy, in 2012. It seems that when Kick was six, her father the amateur anatomist got wind of a washed-up dead whale on the beach near the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis Port, Mass.
"Kick's taste for the extreme was fed by her dad's eccentric environmentalism," Town & Country charitably phrases the former candidate's predilection for dead animals:
When she was six, word got out that a dead whale had washed up on Squaw Island in Hyannis Port. Bobby — who likes to study animal skulls and skeletons — ran down to 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. "Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet," Kick recalls. "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."
It's fascinating that you can't look up anything about RFK Jr. without tumbling into one of the internet's deepest, weirdest rabbit holes. The man's "eccentric environmentalism" has led him to tinker with the corpses of more critters than a Texas butcher before the annual Bar-B-Que Cook-Off & Festival.
Speaking of BBQ, we've all heard RFK's dead bear cub in Central Park story, but how about his barbecued dog stunt?
Just under two months ago, when Kenedy was still a candidate, regime media magazine Vanity Fair dutifully published a hit piece on the man, designed to hit tender liberal sensitivities and shake loose any votes that might instead go to the Democrat candidate. In the piece, the outlet peddled a borderline-slanderous story:
Last year Robert Kennedy Jr. texted a photograph to a friend. In the photo RFK Jr. was posing, alongside an unidentified woman, with the barbecued remains of what he suggested to the friend was a dog. Kennedy told the person, who was traveling to Asia, that he might enjoy a restaurant in Korea that served dog on the menu, suggesting Kennedy had sampled dog. The photo was taken in 2010, according to the digital file’s metadata—the same year he was diagnosed with a dead tapeworm in his brain.
The picture’s intent seems to have been comedic—Kennedy and his companion are pantomiming—but for the recipient it was disturbing evidence of Kennedy’s poor judgment and thoughtlessness, simultaneously mocking Korean culture, reveling in animal cruelty, and needlessly risking his reputation and that of his family.
Here is Robert F. Kennedy eating a barbecued dog.
— Joey Mannarino (@JoeyMannarinoUS) July 2, 2024
He has no place in polite society with this behavior.
Utterly reprehensible stuff here.
This even beats out Kristi Noem. pic.twitter.com/vnMW288KbP
Recommended: 'America's Dad'? There's Nothing Pro-American or Paternal About Tim Walz.
Kennedy later publicly stated that the tasty animal in the image was in fact a goat, not a dog. But that didn't stop Vanity Fair from sniveling:
The friend says that Kennedy “sent me the picture with a recommendation to visit the best dog restaurant in Seoul, so he was certainly representing that this was a dog and not a goat. In any case, it’s grotesque.”
I've eaten grilled goat, and it's utterly delicious. But we live in an era when a man can't play with his food without triggering hyperventilations from the sensitive crowd. Poor Bobby Kennedy is a man apart from his time as well as his ancestral political party.
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