I had never really engaged with how spooky Robert F Kennedy Jr looked until I saw him describe, in a video, the circumstances in which he ended up driving around with a dead baby bear in his boot. It sounds a lot more like an anxiety dream than a thing that happened, but here you go: the independent US presidential candidate had been taking some people falconing in the Hudson valley, in 2014, when he saw a woman hit and kill a bear with her van.
Kennedy decided to skin and eat it, so he picked it up, only remembering later that he didn’t have time to do either of those things, because he was going out for dinner in New York and taking a flight straight after. Can’t take a dead bear cub on a flight. He had bought only hold luggage and this was carrion. Sorry.
He dumped the cub in Central Park, New York, putting a bicycle on top of it, hoping to incriminate a mystery cyclist, because that is exactly what would happen if you cycled into a bear – you would place your bike on top of it, then scarper. Even though Central Park is bear-free, and the police quickly determined the bike was a red herring and established the cause of death as a traffic collision, no further action was taken.
The story remained buried, with the bear, until the New Yorker got wind of it and smoked out Kennedy’s account while fact-checking a story. By posting the video, he shot their fox, if you like, but would never skin and eat that. Who would eat a metaphorical fox?
If anyone would, it would be this guy. Vanity Fair recently published an old picture of Kennedy and an unidentified woman eating what looked a lot like a dog on a spit, verifying with a vet that it matched the canine rib formation. Kennedy denied this, saying that there were three things he would never eat – a person, a monkey or a dog – and that this was goat. Inconveniently, goats also have 13 pairs of ribs.
This question – what you are prepared to kill and eat – feels alien to British political discussion, but has cropped up more than once in the US. Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, was a contender for Trump’s ticket until she wrote a memoir about killing a dog and a goat in a single day in horrific circumstances (she had to shoot the goat twice, with an interval while she went back to the truck to get another bullet).
God knows, it helps nobody to relitigate the justice of the kills – suffice it to say that the dog’s crime was acting like a dog and the goat’s smelling like a goat. She said explicitly about the revelation that it was just the top line in a book full of “more real, honest and politically incorrect stories that’ll have the media gasping”; it was a blunt bit of message delivery, the message being: “I love guns, I’ll stand up to the kind of do-gooders who bleat on about cruelty and I love attention.” What else could a newly radicalised Republican party want in a vice president?
Well, they want the kind of systems change that won’t be delivered by goats, culled ineffectually, one at a time. Get women back in the kitchen, then they will listen.
Kennedy, his emphasis all on the eating, none on the killing, is tapping into a different strain of political self-fashioning: “Real men eat meat, only meat, any meat, as long as it’s big meat.” The Canadian culture warrior Jordan Peterson was its poster boy, although his daughter Mikhaila was the true prophet of the meat, salt and water diet, on YouTube and elsewhere. This reflects the broader trend that while meat-only diets generally end with a bit of primal and hypermasculinist philosophising, the box-office meatfluencers are predominantly women. It can’t be “incel”-adjacent if ladies are also into it. Except, don’t be fooled, it can.
I’m just dreading the next phase, where the British “popular” “Conservatives” start to ape their American counterparts, as they always do, and the Instagram reel arrives of Liz Truss trapping a squirrel. The RSPCA had better be ready.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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