From grinding up baby animals to freezers full of roadkill: What RFK Jr’s weirdest habits tell us about him

Marking Holocaust Memorial Day on Monday, the Auschwitz Memorial X account posted that “Auschwitz was at the end of a long process. It did not start from gas chambers. This hatred was gradually developed by humans … Auschwitz took time.”

I am thinking about this even more after reading Kirsten Miller’s satirical novel Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books. People don’t just suddenly become “evil” overnight. It needs to be encouraged, nurtured, allowed – communal.

One character in Miller’s book that particularly struck me is a Hollywood actor who has found success playing stereotypical Southern roles (the “evil” sheriff, the “evil” prison guard, etc) and who finds further fame by saying out loud what certain right-wing people find exhilarating on social media. He wants power – and this is how he will get it. But even he eventually baulks after encountering the real-world acolytes of the words he doesn’t believe. Such consequences are a fairytale ending. We are seeing in real time the effects of people leaning into stories they don’t believe to achieve power and hold on to it and the seeming powerlessness of others to change these stories with the truth.

Caroline Kennedy, daughter of JFK and the former US ambassador to Japan and Australia, has taken the unprecedented upper-class step of airing dirty family laundry in public and sending a letter to the Senate laying out the total unsuitability of her cousin, Robert F Kennedy Jr for office, let alone the health secretary position that he has angled for since dropping out of the presidential race where he ran as an independent, and handing his 6 per cent vote share to Trump.

People have called RFK Jr’s habits “weird” – a little too generously, one feels. Caroline Kennedy recalls that her cousin would show off blending up baby chicks and mice to feed his birds of prey (one assumes that the prey was dead – a pet shop providing live food is a new level of “weird”). This is both a power play to those forced to watch and the sign of a terrible bird handler: who feeds a hawk puréed food?

Similarly “weird”: his freezer of roadkill (the man lives in LA, for heaven’s sake); discussing how a worm ate part of his brain; and his picking up a dead bear cub while hiking in New York state and later dumping it in Central Park – a 10-year mystery until the New Yorker published the story in a profile on Kennedy Jr.

Treating animals as things is one step from treating humans as things. And this is the truly sickening nature of much of modern politics.

In her letter, Caroline Kennedy describes Kennedy Jr as being “addicted to attention and power” and that he “preys on the desperation of parents of sick children – vaccinating his own children while building a following by hypocritically discouraging other parents from vaccinating theirs”.

Indeed, over the course of a decade, Kennedy Jr has gone from publicly declaring that he had vaccinated all six of his children to saying that no vaccine is safe and effective. He has repeatedly shared false information about Covid-19 and shared conspiracy theories with such inspired ardour that their accompanying charts look credible to the casual eye.

This hypocrisy from public figures, let alone politicians, is lethal. It is a slow and malevolent creep from the days of Hollywood stars crediting a line-free face on drinking lots of water. Unregulated social media, coupled with news reporting, has allowed objectively mad and unacceptable fringe views – and behaviour – to go unchallenged to the point that they become mainstream. Look at the new defence secretary.

RFK Jr may no longer be a drug taker but his behaviour shows that he is far from sober. Caroline Kennedy credits her cousin for “pulling himself out of illness and disease” but notes that this wasn’t the case for “siblings and cousins who Bobby encouraged down the path of substance abuse [and who] suffered addiction, illness, and death while Bobby has gone on to misrepresent, lie, and cheat his way through life”.

This has serious ramifications for the future. The powerful won’t suffer for the lies they tell – Trump and Musk were quite casually stretching the truth on X about the mission to bring back the Nasa astronauts, which was planned by the Biden administration and well underway when they claimed the team had been abandoned. Whether in sacrificing healthcare or fearing the wider world, it will be the people who suffer; the people who are trampled on in the quest for control.

As the old saying goes, a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth has had time to get its boots on. Lies are sexy. That doesn’t stop the truth from being important – and the need to remember the past, and how we got there, is just as crucial.