“What is wrong with this man? I mean, there is something really wrong with him.”
That’s what MS NOW host Mika Brzezinski had to say after learning that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr once pulled to the side of the road while his kids were in the car to cut off a dead raccoon’s genitalia.
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An entire Morning Joe panel erupted in hysterics while discussing this revelation.
“You thought that the dumping of the body of a bear in Central Park would be the most bizarre story linking Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and a dead mammal,” joked co-host Jonathan Lemire, referring to a time when Kennedy did just that. “Let’s also remember, of course, he has a worm in his brain.”
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Lemire then read the lede of the New York Post story aloud. It states: “Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an avid animal genitalia researcher in his spare time, once pulled the family sedan to the side of the road after spying a dead raccoon and swiftly cut off its sex organs so he could ‘study them later.’”
As he read, co-host Joe Scarborough burst out laughing, and Brzezinski could not hide her disgust. “How did he cut it off?” she asked. “Like, with what?”
The segment then zoomed out to reveal the six panel members/co-hosts. No one could hold in their laughter as they continued reading the Post story (except for Brzezinski, who was too horrified) which concluded, “So far, the results of Kennedy’s rigorous whale head and raccoon penis studies have not been publicly disclosed.” (Once, on a family vacation, Kennedy also decapitated a dead beached whale with a chainsaw).
“There is a serious side to this,” Brzezinski said as the others giggled. “The family storyline, really deeply troubling. This is a deeply troubled person.”
The raccoon incident is part of a new book by New York Post writer Isabel Vincent. RFK Jr.: The Fall and Rise, reportedly found the story in one of Kennedy’s private journals.
The Post also talked about a letter to lawmakers last year from his cousin, Caroline Kennedy, which claimed he fed his hawks with chicks and mice he put in a blender while he was a college student.
It also brought up his daughter, Kick Kennedy, and her 2012 interview with Town & Country, where she spoke about being in the car while her father strapped the head of a whale to the roof.
“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,” she said at the time. “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.”
“We’re going to move on,” Brzezinski said at the end of the segment. “And there is no good segue.”
Kennedy has long espoused wacky, anti-science conspiracy theories, which many say make his position as the head of the Department of Health and Human Services extremely dangerous for public health.
Kennedy – who has no background in medical science – has been a prominent voice in the anti-vaccine movement, which is based on pseudoscience and uses misinformation to spread the belief that vaccines don’t prevent disease. He formerly chaired the Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine organization that claims that vaccines cause autism, ADHD, food allergies, cancer, and autoimmune diseases.
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