Michael Kosta of The Daily Show explores the bizarre nature of the story about how RFK Jr. acknowledged responsibility for leaving a dead bear cub in New York’s Central Park ten years ago. Kosta breaks down the video of the conversation that RFK Jr. had with Roseanne Barr (that he presumably agreed to have recorded and released) where he told her about what he did. There is only one word to describe the whole episode: Weird.
There is so much that is still unexplained. He said that he had planned to skin and eat the bear but that he ran out of time because he was in a hurry to get to the airport so he decided to drop the bear off in Central Park. But as Kosta says, if you are in a hurry, you do not want to drive into the middle of Manhattan with all that traffic. Also, RFK Jr. says he planted a bike next to the bear to make it look like a bike accident killed it, and he thought that would be funny. Does he carry a disposable bike around him in his vehicle all the time? And why would he think that that makes it funny?
I read the long profile of RFK Jr. by Clare Malone that appeared in the August 12, 2024 issue of The New Yorker. He knew that this article was going to reveal the bear story and so he decided to try and defuse its impact by releasing that video confession ahead of it. But that does not seem to have been a good idea, since video tends to garner more attention than text, and he does not come off well.
The bear story plays just a small part in the article.
One day, in the fall of 2014, Kennedy was driving to a falconry outing in upstate New York when he passed a furry brown mound on the side of the road. He pulled over and discovered that it was the carcass of a black-bear cub. Kennedy was tickled by the find. He loaded the dead bear into the rear hatch of his car and later showed it off to his friends. In a picture from that day, Kennedy is putting his fingers inside the bear’s bloody mouth, a comical grimace across his face. (When I asked Kennedy about the incident, he said, “Maybe that’s where I got my brain worm.”
After the outing, Kennedy, who was then sixty and recently married to Hines, got an idea. He drove to Manhattan and, as darkness fell, entered Central Park with the bear and a bicycle. A person with knowledge of the event said that Kennedy thought it would be funny to make it look as if the animal had been killed by an errant cyclist. The next day, the bear was discovered by two women walking their dogs, setting off an investigation by the N.Y.P.D.
In what most of the article reveals about him, he appears to need a label that is much darker than simply weird. In addition to his conspiracist views on a number of issues as well as his appalling crusade against vaccines, he comes across as an unpleasant, arrogant, entitled person who was hopelessly addicted to drugs and sex, and also abused women but whose name, wealth, and family connections kept him from facing the consequences of his behavior.
He said that he had planned to skin and eat the bear but that he ran out of time because he was in a hurry to catch a plane…
Okay, stop — that’s all I need to hear. This alone is stoopider than a box of rocks. Why would anyone even go bear hunting if they knew they had a plane to catch? Did he see and shoot the bear on airport premises, and think he had enough time to skin it while standing in the porno-scan queue?
The more likely explanation is that he participated in the fun part — killing an animal without fear of consequences — but then when his chums said it was time to skin it, RFKook suddenly made up an excuse to skip out on the real work.
He says that he did not kill the bear. He and his friends had been out falconing (he is apparently very fond of that) and the bear was hit by a van in front of them.
Another question -- who the fuck EATS BEARS? Seriously, what kind of person looks at the carcass of a carnivore and thinks “mmm, tasty”?
Meat eaters, sonofrojblake. That’s who.
Here, for you (heh, I know, you claim to avoid reading my comments, but here they are anyway):
https://www.outdoorlife.com/hunting/bear-meat/
[imagine being proud of blinding oneself to someone’s comments! So weak!]
Notably, this was after the worms ate into his brain (cue Pink Floyd).
Bear meat is notorious as a source of infectious worms, and he was allegedly making plans for the meat after it had spent a significant part of the day decaying in a warm vehicle.
The brain worms weren’t just a freak occurrence. This is a person with reckless disregard for caution and rationality who deliberately places himself in situations with a high risk of permanent injury or disability. He shouldn’t just not be trusted with the office of the President, he shouldn’t be trusted with anything more dangerous than safety scissors!
If a childhood of watching Grizzly Adams and Little House on the Prairie and The Beverly Hillbillies has taught me anything, it’s that a lot of wild game tastes absolutely terrible unless you pre-treat it in a number of different steps before cooking it. Bear is supposed to taste even more terrible than that. Someone would have to be desperately starving to attempt it. And, as invivoMark points out in 6, bear meat is known to be full of infectious worms.
There’s a famous quote about the way a man treats an animal being the same as how he treats women, so I’m not surprised Kennedy also abuses women in his path.
“ In addition to his conspiracist views on a number of issues as well as his appalling crusade against vaccines, he comes across as an unpleasant, arrogant, entitled person who was hopelessly addicted to drugs and sex, and also abused women but whose name, wealth, and family connections kept him from facing the consequences of his behavior.” Are we still talking about RFK, Jr., or have we moved on to SSACFT?
Good point; how could one tell, just from those facts?
For once I gotta stick up for sonofroj. I never heard of eating bears! Wut? That’s a thing?
@ 5
Dude “blinding” oneself to your comments is justified in the same way as averting one’s gaze from a person voiding their bowels. No one can be criticised for this.
Also Morales your link is utterly horrifying. It reads like a parody but is apparently completely serious. :-/
Oh and I remind you sonof says he blocks me in the exact same way. Birds of a feather we are according to sonof. X-D
Can we go back to the weird dude, please?
And while eating roadkill is ecologically better than shooting everything that moves, as mentioned above it requires skills in how to prepare it.
BTW I am told Walz did a DUI decades ago. That is not good, but it is not particularly weird either.
I’m wondering if the real point is that killing cubs is generally illegal, creating a need to come up with a cover story and to ditch the carcass in a way that looked like an accident.
Ramming a bear with a truck for fun and only later realizing that it might have been a crime certainly seems on par for Mr. Brain-worm.
LykeX,
Although I am not a fan of RFK Jr, in the interests of accuracy, he says that another person who was driving ahead of him hit the bear and killed it. He says that in the state of NY, you can get a permit to keep a bear that Is roadkill.
Check out the video in the OP to get his side of the story. Not that that it makes him look better, the way he seems to think it does.
i assume RFK jr actually hit the bear. he said he and the others in the vehicle were drinking.
picking up a dead bear and dropping it in central park sounds like something a drunk asshole would do.
#11 Sbob
Also, the fact that he keeps mentioning unbidden it is proof enough that it bothers him.
As to eating bears, if you live off the land, fat can be a scarce and valuable commodity. A bear in the fall is a giant pile of fat.
“if you live off the land, fat can be a scarce and valuable commodity”
Whereas if you’re a millionaire politician so famous people just refer to you by your initials, like your uncle who LITERALLY CAUSED HUMANS TO HAVE LANDED ON THE MOON…
I get that if you’re Robinson Crusoe you’ll eat what you can get, but he dropped off the carcass in *Central f**king Park*. Its comedically, proverbially the opposite of remote.
I believe the entire story is bullshit, though it is quite revealing as to the colossal sense of entitlement that comes along with being a nepo-baby.
In any case, bears are omnivores. Bear meat is very soft, bland, and greasy. It does not taste like chicken.
Cooking wild game is a skill. It tends to be very low in fat, and requires fast cooking at high heat to be tender and tasty, rather than dry and leathery.
“Walz did a DUI decades ago.”
If it really is just one, that is as bad as it could be…. For his enemies. It’s relatable, old, and you can reasonably say he didn’t do it again, so he learned his lesson.
My dad and his friends used to have a game dinner in Ohio every year. Lots of deer and rabbit and squirrel. Some possum and racoon. Not too many birds as I recall. They brined a lot of them. One year they had black bear. It was real greasy and smelled nasty, kind of like asphalt. I think it was the only thing I never tried.
Heh. You do amuse, Holms.
“Also, the fact that he keeps mentioning unbidden it [sic] is proof enough that it bothers him.”
Says the guy that keeps talking about me but not to me.
<waves playfully>
Also, the fact that the BubblingFetor keeps mentioning me unbidden is proof enough that it bothers him.
(See, when you piss like that, don’t do it into the wind, lest you get the splashback)
Ah but you’re forgetting a large difference: you have previously indicated that you believe commenting on a thing indicates that thing is a big deal to you. No one else has revealed any such embarrassing psychology.
So, your constant posts about sonof blocking you = sonof blocking you is a big deal to you.
Heh heh heh.
You are funny, Holms, when you harp.
Bonus: https://misspursuit.com/bear-fat-the-complete-guide-2/
The state of American politics is that this isn’t even the worst story involving animals this year.
Isaac Asimov mentions once having ordered bear steak in his autobiography. (He never says what it tasted like, though.)
@Mano:
Sure, that’s what he’s saying: “The anonymous mystery driver hit the bear. Not me. I totally didn’t kill a bear cub and then drunkenly tried to cover it up in the most perplexing fashion possible.”
You’ll excuse me for suspecting that he’s not being 100% truthful.
[Ah well, since I’m a tad bored]
Holms: I reckon ‘sonof’ refers to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blake%27s_7
Or it did, before it became a ‘nym.
Come on. What other Roj Blakes are there?
He’s decided to compete for the weird vote. Which is good news. But it’s a grizzly story, and bearly credible!
KG,
… and the Pope shits in the woods.
Oh, right. Too allusive, so far. But it ain’t obscure.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JD_Vance#Personal_life)
There’s a whole trajectory from his failing 2021 campaigning to his Tucker Carlson breakthrough to his Thiel funding. And so, he became a Catholic.
I can see that. I’ve eaten ostrich, horse, dahu and crocodile, among other things. If you’re in a restaurant and they’ve something exotic on the menu, sure, why not? After all, given that the place is in the business of selling people food, it’s safe to assume the chef (a) sourced it responsibly, (b) made sure it was fit to eat and (c) knows how to cook it.
But that’s a world and more away from scraping an animal carcass up off the road with the intent of then having to butcher it yourself. This isn’t Game of fucking Thrones.
Actually, I just had a funny thought: did RFK Jr. see the Game of Thrones episode “You Win Or You Die” in May 2011? That’s the episode that saw the first appearance of Charles Dance as Tywin Lannister, and throughout the scene he’s butchering a stag. The timeline fits -- it was out before he
hit the bearsaw someone hit the bear and decided to skin it. Was he having fantasies of being Tywin? Or more darkly, was he having fantasies of being Jamie, imagining himself having a similar lecture from his own long-gone father? I need a drink…My cousin’s husband was a police officer for a small village east of Cleveland. There were a lot of deer killed on the rural roads that he harvested, mostly in the winter when the cold weather preserved the carcasses. He once had three of them he’d field dressed hanging from trees in the backyard waiting to be butchered. It was good food and didn’t cost any money.