By wearing a colander on his head, RFK Jr has become a great embarrassment to the dynasty

Robert F. Kennedy Jr, centre, outside the Lincoln Memorial. Picture: Stefani Reynolds / AFP

Sitting in my studio waiting to go on air, I pass the time by opening the hate mail and any mysterious non-ticking parcels. Behold: two such parcels contain conspiracy theories. One, which I’m holding up to show you now, is a book by Robert F. Kennedy Jr titled The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. It’s a long diatribe that would appeal to anti-vaxxers and followers of George Christensen and Clive Palmer. And it comes with cover blurbs by the noxious Fox host Tucker Carlson, “motivational” huckster Tony Robbins and defence lawyer Alan Dershowitz – one of the late Jeffrey Epstein’s besties.

The second parcel, no return address, contains a thick wad of documents proving beyond all reasonable doubt that the Apollo Moon landings were a fraud, while the destruction of the Twin Towers was either an evil plan by Mossad or a false flag operation by George W. Bush. Plus other conspiracy theories too numerous and inane to mention. No surprises here. All standard issue twaddle.

By wearing a colander on his head, RFK Jr has become a great embarrassment to the dynasty (please don’t mention him to Caroline Kennedy, our next US Ambassador and the only surviving child of JFK). Pity, as in the past he has done important environmental work all over the world. My missus Patrice Newell was involved in the Australian branch of the Waterkeeper Alliance, his international organisation committed to protecting that most precious of fluids.

Sad that a Kennedy should now lead the predominantly right-wing nut jobs protesting against any attempt to contain Covid. Even sadder that the son of the assassinated Bobby Kennedy should become a full-time conspiracy theorist when no other family has been the subject of so many, with Oliver Stone last year upping the ante on JFK’s assassination in a second movie, JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass. (Now added to the nut jobs’ lengthening list of suspects: Dr Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to the US president. Not content with jabbing the children of America, the evil Fauci apparently time-travelled to Dallas to aid and abet Lee Harvey Oswald. How’s that for a conspiracy theory? So outlandish, it’s sure to take off.)

Years ago I wrote a column hypothesising about who could have been behind JFK’s 1963 murder, each suspect with a different motive. Lyndon Johnson, of course – a theory much touted at the time. Or maybe it was a hit job organised by a vengeful Jackie, the First Lady looking for a big insurance payout. And a War of the Worlds scenario in which the president had been killed by aliens.

To my astonishment, that last one got traction. I received two thick envelopes stuffed with heavily redacted documents marked “Top Secret”, wherein the FBI and CIA conceded an interplanetary plot. It was, as everyone knows, hushed up by Johnson’s Warren Commission on the assassination. My sources convinced me the US was already ruled by warring factions of shape-shifting aliens – the sort of lizard people now in QAnon’s sights. One minute large reptiles, the next perfectly normal-seeming humans.

Once again, only a few fools failed to see Fauci’s fingerprints on all this – or rather, the pad marks left by his gecko grip. Clearly he’s a lizard person. Isn’t that what Donald Trump has been trying to warn us about? Plus there’s something shape-shifty about that Joe Biden. Grab that lizard by his gizzard!

Which reminds me. Lizard people are everywhere. Kerry Packer was a goanna.