Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. The 2024 race has begun.
Voters are not happy about having to choose between Trump and Biden. Trump allies tried to boost RFK Jr. in an effort to split the anti-Trump vote. The tactic might be backfiring. RFK seemed to be pulling votes from both sides, but after this bizarre story about the bear, it is hard to see how he can keep voters who would otherwise go to Harris. If you're an RFK voter who thinks it is okay to prank the NYPD with a dead bear, your second choice is probably Trump.
Clare Malone at The New Yorker:
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. “This is a highly unusual situation,” a spokeswoman for the Central Park Conservancy told the Times. “It’s awful.” In a follow-up piece for the Times, which was coincidentally written by Tatiana Schlossberg, one of J.F.K.’s granddaughters, a retired Bronx homicide commander commented, “People are crazy.”
RFK Jr, in an attempt to get ahead of a forthcoming New Yorker story, says in a new video that he dumped a dead bear cub in Central Park and made it seem like a bicyclist did it.
— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) August 4, 2024
The video is filmed with Roseanne Barr. pic.twitter.com/ajzbGzkuvg
