These Men & Their Dead Animals

Reckoning with the fact Robert F Kennedy Jr is now the Secretary of Health.

Hi,

When I started writing Webworm in 2020, I wrote a lot about the conspiracy theories that were suddenly invading our Twitter timelines and Facebook feeds. Four years ago a reader, John, left this feedback under one of my essays:

It’s a never ending labyrinth of lunacy which, as you have pointed out, is impossible to argue with. Like drunk infants. It can be quite exhausting, and I was fearing that I was becoming a little mad myself, like I was on some kind of unfashionable inquisition to insist on the truth.

Things seemed disorientating back then, as I observed how conspiracy movements like QAnon were slowly making their way from the United States to New Zealand.

I wrote on how the language of “just asking questions” effortlessly slipped into New Zealand’s parliament, and documented the descent of fringe musician-turned-political-wannabe Billy Te Kahika Jnr into conspiracy theory hell.

I comforted myself by noting that all of this was temporary. Covid was sweeping the planet and people were scared. Things would return to normal.

Except — they didn’t.

I look back at my thinking then, and realise how mind-numbingly naive I was.

Today one of America’s most well known conspiracy theorists, Robert F Kennedy Jr, became the United States’ health secretary.

The man who once claimed “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people — the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese” and “There’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective” is now in charge of America’s $2,000,000,000,000 healthcare system. The vaccine scaremongering is particularly frustrating, considering another pandemic or two will hit us soon enough.

In all of this, I keep thinking of that fucking dead bear.

A photo RFK had taken back in 2014.

Back in 2014 RFK Jr picked a dead bear cub off the side of the road and threw it in the back of his truck, next to an old bike. After a full day of work and meetings it was time for the airport.

On the way he took a slight detour, pulling up beside Manhattan’s Central Park. He parked, grabbed the dead body from the trunk, and chuckling at his own sense of humor, threw the cub next to a newly installed bike lane. To top it all off, he threw the bike on top of the cub’s dead body, as if the cyclist had hit the cub. That same year he married Cheryl Hines, AKA Larry David’s wife from Curb Your Enthusiasm.

The dead cub in Central Park made headlines, but he only admitted to doing it a decade later.

Professor Joseph Uscinski — who studies conspiracy theories for a living — told Webworm that conspiratorial thinking has always existed at this level, an endless permutation of the same original stupid ideas: “Make up something fucking new, so that I can actually give a shit,” he ranted at me four years ago.

While I have no doubt a fairly steady part of the population has always held idiotic ideas (due to a myriad of things from bad education to bad parenting to bad religion to bad brains) something has changed.

We used to laugh conspiracy theorists out of the room, or a healthy dose of shame would keep their conversations to a minimum. Characters like Billy Te Kahika Jnr held some influence for a time, but were largely ignored come election day.

What’s changed is that today the conspiracy theorists are in charge. One of the biggest holds the highest level of power in the United States, and he’s put one of his whacky minions in charge of America’s health as talk of bird flu starts to flutter again.

I’m not quite sure how we got here, but I think the way we reacted to Covid has a lot to do with it. I think that time of attempting to slow the world a little in order to save lives did something strange to the truly selfish.

Elon Musk emerged from that time demented, raging against his trans child and against the world. At some point, I do think he probably wanted to save humanity by getting us to Mars. Today he’s just one of the world’s greediest men who thinks nothing of killing monkeys (and 1500 other animals with chips in their heads).

These men and their fucking dead animals.

It’s clear that the system — the country — has to burn to the ground for any real change. I want it to. I feel it in my bones.

I also realise that perspective comes so easily because I know I have an escape hatch — New Zealand. It’s all fine and well wanting something to burn if you know you’re not in the fire. Not that the embers aren’t circling Aotearoa already.

And so — we keep talking about it. We keep writing about it. Just because we’re not in charge doesn’t mean we have to let our brains rot like a bear carcass in Central Park, or that monkey that suddenly drops to the cold floor of a Neuralink lab.

David.