The New Yorker:

As Kennedy’s 2024 election campaign collapses, he has embraced a new role as the former President’s latest ally.

By Clare Malone

In early August, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., then an Independent candidate for President, posted a video of himself, on X, telling a story to Roseanne Barr about the time he picked up a dead bear on the road about ten years ago. Planning on skinning it and putting it in the refrigerator, he said, he placed it in the trunk of his car and kept it there during a dinner at Peter Luger Steak House, in Brooklyn. Afterward, he had to go to the airport, so he decided to take a detour to Manhattan’s Central Park to deposit the carcass alongside an old bicycle. The video only made sense as an attempt by Kennedy to get ahead of my Profile of him, which was scheduled to run the following day, and which included an admittedly less detailed version of Kennedy’s ursine antics.

At the time, Vice-President Kamala Harris had officially secured the Democratic Presidential nomination, and polls were beginning to show that support for Kennedy, which, earlier in the summer, had hovered around ten per cent, was slipping into the single digits. Kennedy had originally positioned himself as an alternative to two historically disliked candidates, Joe Biden and Donald Trump, and he spoke of breaking through the issues that polarized Americans—immigration, abortion, trans rights—to focus on the “existential” threats such as the country’s chronic-disease crisis. But what had drawn him into electoral politics in the first place was his role as a prominent vaccine skeptic. For more than a decade, he has promoted the belief that common childhood vaccines can cause autism and other developmental disabilities. More recently, he had directed his ire toward various media outlets and social-media platforms, alleging that they were “censoring” him after one of his accounts and the accounts of his anti-vaccine organization were deactivated for spreading misinformation. (His Instagram account was reinstated after he announced his candidacy.)

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