The Bluestocking 330: Bigfoot and dead bears
he is a walking, talking conspiracy theory
Happy Friday!
You’ll be delighted to know that I’m growing as a person; instead of taking to Twitter to argue about the Olympic sex and gender controversy, I sat down, thought about it, and wrote an article for The Atlantic.
Today’s Bluestocking is largely about conspiracy theories, and who believes them, which feels appropriate right now.
Helen
At The Florida Bigfoot Conference (Paris Review)
The next morning I drove to Rainbow Springs to take a dip in the seventy-two-degree water and mull over my own question. While driving, I’d passed the Villages, a retirement community with the power to influence presidential elections. I drove past swaths of clear-cut forest. I drove past roadside attractions like the Don Garlits Museum of Drag Racing, the Zipline Adventure Park, and Gatorland. Florida’s retirement communities and roadside attractions invite transplants to escape the malaise of a perceived American decline; they also often function as hotbeds of eccentricity, conspiracy theories, and right-wing politics. In 2021, at the first annual Great Florida Bigfoot Conference I’d attended, peak pandemic, it was paranoia which held my nose captive. Mask mandates were flouted in the merch aisles. Vendors sold SQUATCH LIVES MATTER stickers. One media company called the Soul Trap played a loop of a video about the Mark of the Beast.
In his recently published book The Secret History of Bigfoot, John O’Connor asked the scientist and writer Robert Michael Pyle if he thought Bigfooting and Trumpism were related. “Yes,” Pyle replied. “There’s a lot in common. As with the January 6th people, Bigfooters are all white guys. And they love their gear and their big trucks and their big guns and all of their infrared things. It’s not exactly the same crowd as January 6th, but it’s some of the same people.”
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Hot DAMN I am sad that I didn’t get commissioned to go to the Florida Bigfoot Conference. Then again, unlike the author of this piece, I do not believe in the literal existence of Bigfoot.
What Does Robert F. Kennedy Actually Want? (New Yorker)
On the campaign trail, Kennedy tells crowds that he wants to redefine which issues should actually matter to them. Abortion, guns, border security, and transgender rights, he says, are distractions that career politicians use to divide voters. He calls chronic disease an “existential” threat facing the U.S. “The cost of diabetes now in this country is higher than the defense budget,” Kennedy told the conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro. In an interview with the podcaster Todd Ault, he said, “Our kids are all on Adderall. They’re all on S.S.R.I.s. Why? Doctors didn’t just start prescribing these for no reason. We have damaged this entire generation. We have poisoned them.”
Notably, there isn’t much talk of vaccines at Kennedy’s campaign events. “I think what Kennedy learned along the way is that it’s not in his interest to go after Tony Fauci and to say, ‘Lock him up,’ ” Zogby, who has conducted polling for the campaign, told me. Kennedy now typically deploys euphemisms such as “medical freedom” and “informed consent” when referring to the issue.
The candidate has sought to widen his appeal in other ways, too. Recently, his campaign released a slick thirty-minute video with a voice-over by Woody Harrelson. In the opening, Kennedy reads a selection of headlines and excerpts from articles criticizing him. “He is a walking, talking conspiracy theory,” Kennedy intones, quoting the Times. “He is a crank who cranks out whoppers the way Taylor Swift disgorges perfect pop songs.” Then he says matter-of-factly, “I wouldn’t vote for that guy, either.” A title card flashes onscreen: “Who is Bobby Kennedy? What if he’s not crazy?”
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RFK Jr’s life story continues to fascinate me. The big news line that came out of this profile was that a decade ago, he planted a dead bear cub, which he had found by the side of the road, in Central Park as if it had been killed by a cyclist. But there is so much more here—including lines like this one about his eldest son: “Conor, who is now thirty, formerly dated Taylor Swift and, in 2022, briefly volunteered with Ukraine’s International Legion.” (Same tbh.) “That summer, Kennedy and the actress Jessica Biel spearheaded a high-profile campaign against mandatory vaccination in California schools.” Never mind that RFK was introduced to his third wife by Larry David. The man’s story intersects with American celebrity in such bizarre ways.
The profile also takes Kennedy seriously, outlining the evolution of his political thought: as with many vaccine sceptics and conspiracy theorists, there are compelling personal experiences that led him to his opinions. I also think the section where he publishes an article on vaccines in Rolling Stone that’s full of factual errors is instructive: “‘Bobby never had a moment of doubt,’ a former staffer told me. ‘He was already convinced in the overarching argument, so the loss of any one piece or all of the pieces of data didn’t put a dent in that.’”
If it’s anything, journalism is the war of facts against narrative. Conspiracists swallow the narrative and ignore the facts.
Like the previous Vanity Fair profile of RFK Jr, this also offers an insight into how much indulgence rich screw-ups get compared with poor ones. Hard to imagine that a working class former meth and heroine addict would end up running for the presidency.
PS. The piece mentions RFK Jr’s testosterone therapy as a reason why his personality might have changed in recent years, which led me to this archive NYT piece from Andrew Sullivan on his own experiences of injecting the “he hormone”.
Quick Links
“The Never Trumper is thereby confronted with an inevitable tension. Not voting for Trump is an easy call, of course. But actually voting for the most left-wing candidate in US history — and one in the vanguard of the new left’s woke cultural revolution — forces us into a new, and awkward place: abandoning almost all our previous principles for the sake of preventing one man’s return to office.” (Andrew Sullivan, Substack)
Some interesting theatre coming up: a version of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go at the Rose in Kingston; Robert Icke’s Macron-inflected Oedipus in the West End; a new production of Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing at the Old Vic. Bill and Ted are doing Waiting For Godot in New York next year . . . but it’s directed by Jamie Lloyd. So I would suggest instead the West End version with Ben Whishaw and Lucian Msamati.
“As time went by, The News Movement increased its investment in lighter topics, such as entertainment, lifestyle and sports. The company began adopting the “HIPPO” method for engaging its audience, short for “hook + intrigue, pace and payoff.” It also tried to make money from paid Instagram subscribers, but that has been slow going, too, with about nine subscribers contributing $36 monthly, according to an internal document.” (NYT, gift link)
Sarah Ditum is very good on the Olympic boxer controversy (Tox Report, Substack).
For work this week, I reread Douglas Murray’s apologia for Tommy Robinson, which gains an unintentionally comic effect from repeatedly describing incidents where Tommy Robinson punches someone, in order to demonstrate how unfairly Tommy Robinson has been misrepresented as a violent rabble-rouser (National Review, 2018).
Since you all enjoyed arguing about aphantasia so much in the comments last time, here is another piece on the phenomenon (Quanta).
“Picking the new colours, though, was no easy business. All six needed to work on both the Tube map and the more extensive Tube & Rail Map, produced in collaboration with the Rail Delivery Group. They also needed to be colours that wouldn’t clash with branding used by other organisations (other bits of TfL, train operating companies) whose material they might appear near.
Most importantly they had to be striking and easily recognisable when reproduced on vitreous enamel, of the sort used on TfL signage (and also, unexpectedly, fabergé eggs).” Jonn Elledge has somehow made the logistical question of renaming and rebranding all the Overground lines deeply fascinating (Substack).
A couple of weeks ago, a reader asked why there was so little pick-up of the Tortoise investigation into Neil Gaiman. I said that “libel risk” mostly covered it—it’s hard to followup an investigation into an allegation that’s hotly denied when you don’t have access to the sources and documents yourself. But I’m more surprised that the many organizations producing adaptations of Gaiman’s work (Good Omens at the BBC, Sandman at Netflix, Anansi Boys at Amazon) have stayed silent. For what it’s worth, I found the podcast series very convincing and thought it did a careful, responsible job of exploring the complexity of the women’s experience, and their own changing attitudes to what happened.
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The Tortoise Neil Gaiman series was fascinating, and it's been sad to see that the response has been mostly either "he's a monster" or "she's Boris Johnson's sister you know".
I want to defend my wives and daughters and Christianity from replacement by Bigfeet. I'm told you need bullets made of silver. Will crypto do instead?