Bobby's brain worms story is just more evidence he’s a terrible, terrible person
We know nothing about his medical situation and everything about his mendacity.
We all falter. But Robert Kennedy Jr. is horrible in a way that suggests he’s less a Measles-loving nepo baby and more a biblical plague sent to punish America for our fixation on political dynasties.
First, let’s get the obvious out of the way. Bobby is running to help elect Donald Trump. I don’t care if Bobby consciously knows that or not. It’s self-evident.
He’s not running to win because it’s literally impossible, something not even Bobby Kennedy Jr. could pretend to believe. Not even a former president running as a third-party candidate could even come close to winning. He can only spoil this race and it’s obvious who he’s trying to spoil it for.
That’s why his biggest donor is a Trump donor. That’s why Steven Bannon lured him into running. That’s even why Republicans are now amplifying the ruse that somehow Bobby could hurt Trump more than Biden.
Republicans know two things for sure:
- Donald Trump hasn’t broken 47% of the vote and never will.
His 2016 “win” was enabled in large part by a fragmenting of the electorate caused by the filth tsunami of his campaign resulting in both candidates being despised and third-party candidates being elevated. He needs to keep Joe Biden from getting 51% of the vote again, and that’s his entire electoral strategy. How this breaks down state-by-state, especially in key state like Michigan, is unknowable. All MAGA knows is that politics is like golf, Trump needs an unfair handicap to compete. - If we’re talking about Bobby it helps Trump. Yes, I could be helping Trump here.
Bobby’s entire value to the right is as a brand, one of the greatest brands in the history of the Democratic party. He’s human catnip for the 200,000 or so voters in the six states who will decide this election, a walking deepfake that titillates nostalgia and offers an escape from the purposeful mess of this election. The whole thing is a ratfuck. When Republicans are attacking him for being “too liberal,” they’re not worried about him hurting Trump. They’re running ads to let low-info voters know that he’s a left-leaning alternative to Biden.
So now we get to the brain worms, another story that reminds us that subtext died the moment this century was born.
It makes perfect sense that Bobby has brian worms because that would explain the genuinely terrible things he believes. His “reputation” is built entirely on an anti-scientific attack on the vaccines that are responsible for reducing massive human suffering, including the all-too-common deaths of children.
He cannot be debunked because, like Donald Trump, Bobby is an unrepentant liar, an aggressive, bullying liar. And he has been for decades, at least.
This leads us to the big problem with the brain worms story. It comes from Bobby Kennedy Jr. That means it’s either a lie, a misrepresentation, or a wild fabulation.
Here’s a detail in the story that I’ve only seen Dan Murphy point out:
The doctor believed that the abnormality seen on his scans “was caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died,” Mr. Kennedy said in the deposition.
Why did Bobby volunteer this information? To suggest he is impaired:
“I have cognitive problems, clearly,” he said in the 2012 deposition. “I have short-term memory loss, and I have longer-term memory loss that affects me.”
Why would a narcissist voluntarily suggest a diagnosis that should be deadly for any of his political ambitions that only he and his medical advisors would know is true or not? And why is he trying to blur the whole thing over now?
Some of Mr. Kennedy’s health issues were revealed in the 2012 deposition, which he gave during divorce proceedings from his second wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy. At the time, Mr. Kennedy was arguing that his earning power had been diminished by his cognitive struggles.
Ah…Bobby’s treatment of his late wife Mary Richardson can be found in the Hall of Fame of Misogyny right next to the exhibit on the current Donald Trump criminal trial in New York City.
During the course of their 18-year relationship, Bobby allegedly demanded to have a ménage à trois with Mary, exposed his genitals in front of her and a friend, and had what a confidant of Mary called an “astronomical number” of affairs, Oppenheimer writes.
Bobby kept track of some of the alleged affairs in a secret diary that was leaked to the New York Post in 2013, reportedly writing that his greatest flaw was his “lust demons.”
In the spring of 2010, Bobby began divorce proceedings with Mary and went public with his relationship with actress Cheryl Hines.
In the months before she took her own life, Mary allegedly told a longtime friend that she “feared for her life” and claimed that Bobby “repeatedly told her that she would be ‘better off dead,’ and that it would be ‘so much easier’ if she killed herself,” Oppenheimer writes.
What everyone seems to be missing is that Bobby appears to have volunteered that he had brain worms for sole the purpose of avoiding paying a fair amount of alimony to his suicidal ex-wife, whom he cheated on with dozens if not hundreds of women. He was engaged in financial warfare against a woman he emotionally tortured — and this is a man whose name is a veritable ticket to free millions for nothing but existing and who was also about to marry a successful Hollywood actress.
The level of yuck involved in this sinks deep into my DNA. I wish I didn’t know any of this. I wish I didn’t have to write any of this.
But I do think it provides a valuable data point that illuminates how terrible of a person you have to be to torch your entire family – and that family’s entire legacy – simply for the narcissistic joy of being the man that helped turn America over to a wannabe dictator.
There are two possible reasons why Bobby is trying to elect Donald Trump.
Perhaps he has some impairment that has driven him to this. In that case, the people closest to him are to blame for not at least warning the public about his medical situation. He has suffered tremendous trauma in his life and dealt with a pernicious addiction. And he deserves help in that case, not whatever the hell they're doing around him now.
Or he’s a terrible, terrible, terrible person.
The evidence suggests this is not even a distinction worth pondering.
