RFK Jr. Made His Mark As An Environmental Lawyer. Now He’s All In On MAGA.

As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spoke concerning the non secular connection he feels towards the pure world and humankind’s responsibility to guard it, Tucker Carlson was left visibly starstruck.

“That is where we sense the divine. God talks to us through the fishes, the birds, the leaves. They’re all words from our creator,” Kennedy instructed Carlson in an Aug. 26 interview. “That is why we preserve nature.”

“Yes!” Carlson agreed, emphatically.

“It’s not because of the quantity of carbon,” Kennedy added, condemning the environmental motion’s deal with planet-warming carbon emissions.

“I feel what you said so deeply I can hardly even express it,” Carlson marveled.

Kennedy, who labored for many years as an environmental legal professional, fancies himself as an “old-school environmentalist” — apparently one who thinks that people can one way or the other safeguard the setting whereas ignoring carbon air pollution, the 13,000-pound elephant within the room that’s wreaking havoc on all the character that Kennedy purports to care about so deeply.

Quite a few former colleagues within the environmental motion have come ahead to sentence Kennedy, arguing he misplaced his approach way back and forfeited any declare to the title of environmentalist. After suspending his personal presidential marketing campaign final month, Kennedy turned a surrogate for Republican nominee Donald Trump, who has repeatedly dismissed local weather change as a “hoax” and as president dismantled dozens of environmental guidelines and rules to the good thing about company polluters.

Dan Reicher, a senior researcher at Stanford College’s Woods Institute for Surroundings, labored with Kennedy on the Pure Assets Protection Council within the late-Eighties and early Nineteen Nineties. The person he knew then, whom he referred to as a “strong advocate who spoke his mind on environmental protection” and with whom he bonded over a shared ardour for kayaking, will not be the identical man at present.

Kennedy bought his begin within the environmental motion as a volunteer at NRDC, which fulfilled a neighborhood service requirement of his probation stemming from a heroin possession cost in 1983, as a current New Yorker profile detailed. Later he was employed as an legal professional at Riverkeeper, the place he helped lead the group’s struggle towards firms polluting the Hudson River in New York. Over his lengthy profession in environmental regulation and advocacy, Kennedy battled towards oil and mining giants, the army, manufacturing facility farms and pesticide producers, and Canadian and Chilean dam tasks.

“That Bobby is gone,” Reicher mentioned, and his environmental advocacy has been changed with “unhinged craziness.”

“Just look at his anti-vaccine crusade, his anti-government rhetoric and his current work with some of the strongest climate denialists we know in this country,” he mentioned. “It’s hard to see how you can square his case that he’s pursuing environmental protection when he’s aligned himself with one of the strongest anti-environment leaders this country has ever seen.”

Reicher joined dozens of different former NRDC colleagues in signing onto an open letter in April calling for Kennedy to drop his unbiased presidential bid. The letter, titled “Earth to RFK, Jr” and which the NRDC’s political motion arm ran as advertisements in a number of swing state newspapers, condemned Kennedy’s file of “spinning anti-vaccination conspiracy theories, denying science, and putting lives at risk.”

Reicher sees Kennedy as having adopted “a narrow, boutique view of environmental protection” that ignores the largest environmental disaster the world faces.

“He’ll wax eloquent about these kind of narrow issues in the broader environmental protection sphere but never get around to even acknowledging, to say nothing of pushing harder to address, the existential threat of climate change,” he mentioned.

Kennedy’s press workforce didn’t reply to HuffPost’s request for remark.

5 siblings referred to as his endorsement of Trump “a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear.”

For a transparent view of Kennedy’s fall from environmental grace, look no additional than his interview with Carlson, when Kennedy condemned environmentalists for adopting what he calls a “carbon orthodoxy,” the concept that all the things is measured by its carbon footprint.

“When we destroy nature, we diminish our capacity to sense the divine,” he mentioned. “It’s not about quantifying stuff. That’s what the devil does; he quantifies everything. That is what he wants us doing — put a number on it. And the reason we’re preserving these things is because we love our children. It’s because nature enriches us, it enriches us economically, spiritually, culturally and historically. It connects us to those ten thousand generations of human beings that were here before there were laptops.”

What Kennedy conveniently failed to say or grapple with is the truth that local weather change is devastating communities the world over, with financial damages forecast to succeed in $38 trillion yearly by the center of this century. For a lot of, confronting the risk is each a non secular and cultural endeavor.

Kennedy went on to assault the fashionable environmental motion with a number of falsehoods.

He declared that “offshore wind is exterminating the whales,” parroting the evidence-free speaking level of a few of the nation’s most hard-line organizations denying local weather change.

He mentioned the environmental motion “no longer talks about toxics anymore, they don’t care about it, they don’t care that we’re mass-poisoning our children.” Each main environmental group has a toxics program.

John Walke, the director of NRDC’s clear air program, mentioned in a publish to X (previously Twitter) that Kennedy has “absolutely no idea what he is talking about,” noting that the environmental nonprofit has a number of workers working completely on poisonous chemical substances.

“I’ve worked on reducing toxic air pollution for 24 years. Hell I testified NEXT TO Bobby in Congress about toxics,” Walke wrote. “His bid to advance himself & rehabilite [sic] Trump — ignoring, forgetting all the correct & harsh criticisms he directed at Trump’s anti-environmentalism — now means demonizing environmentalists with lies, trafficking in conspiracies.”

Kennedy argues America’s nationwide local weather coverage ought to be “restoring soils,” not curbing carbon emissions — which, paradoxically, are contributing to the degradation of soils across the globe. In different phrases, a fix-it-after-it’s-a-problem strategy.

“If you want to make Americans fight each other, talk about carbon,” Kennedy instructed Carlson. “If you want to bring Americans together, talk about habitat protection.”

Kennedy’s entrance into the Make America Nice Once more motion has given rise to the same slogan meant to boil down what Kennedy brings to the desk: Make America Wholesome Once more. However in backing Trump, Kennedy is teaming up with somebody with a well-documented and abysmal environmental and public well being file. The Trump administration labored to weaken safeguards for almost 35 million acres, a quantity that the left-leaning Heart for American Progress mentioned earned Trump the title of essentially the most “anti-nature” president in U.S. historical past. In January 2021, The New York Instances compiled a listing of greater than 100 environmental rollbacks below Trump, together with guidelines meant to safeguard air, water and wildlife habitat, in addition to forestall publicity to poisonous chemical substances.

In a gathering with oil and gasoline executives earlier this 12 months, Trump vowed to meet the fossil gas trade’s want listing and undo President Joe Biden’s local weather and inexperienced power insurance policies in the event that they donated $1 billion to his reelection marketing campaign. It’s the very form of company seize of presidency that Kennedy decries at each flip.

Kennedy expects to have the ability to affect a future Trump administration on environmental points.

“I have found to my surprise that many people on the Trump team, including President Trump himself, care about the same environmental issues I do,” Kennedy wrote in a publish to X late final month. “Furthermore, these issues can help to unify our nation ― because almost everyone wants clean air, water, food, and soil. Almost everyone values thriving ecosystems and wildlife. Environment was a unifying issue in the 1960s, supported by Democrats and Republicans alike. I am committed to reviving that consensus in the next Trump administration.”

Reicher mentioned Kennedy is greedy at “dangerous” straws and expects his embrace of Trump will finish in failure.

“Any possibility that Kennedy will green up Trump is about as likely as the former president taking down the border wall,” he mentioned. “I just don’t see how it all adds up for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — if he has a shred of environmental protection left in his brain. And it may well be that he doesn’t.”

“You just think, ‘Why has he been welcomed by Trump?’” Reicher added. “It’s not because of Bobby’s early, strong environmental credentials but his now much later craziness on things environmental.”

Reicher and others date Kennedy’s departure from the environmental motion to the early 2000s, when he started to embrace conspiracies about vaccines and autism — a torch he continues to hold — and have become a outstanding determine within the struggle towards a proposed offshore wind farm close to Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

However Brett Hartl, authorities affairs director of the Heart for Organic Range’s political arm, factors to a fiasco Kennedy set in movement at Riverkeeper in 2000. That 12 months, Kennedy, then Riverkeeper’s lead legal professional, employed William Wegner, a convicted smuggler of untamed chicken eggs, to assist the group monitor New York Metropolis’s compliance with environmental guidelines. Eight of Riverkeeper’s board members resigned in protest.

Ever since that incident, Hartl, who grew up alongside the Hudson River, has considered Kennedy as a foe and instructed HuffPost he’s “been baffled by the comments of other environmental advocates that can’t believe what has happened to him.”

“RFK has been twisted for decades, nothing is new, people just tolerated his untethered and bizarre beliefs because his last name was Kennedy,” Hartl mentioned in an electronic mail. “In my view, RFK Jr is an environmental criminal and an environmental villain.”

In a letter to the Nationwide Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration final month, Hartl referred to as on federal officers to analyze an incident within the Nineteen Nineties when Kennedy, based on his daughter, reduce the pinnacle of a useless, beached whale off utilizing a chainsaw, strapped the pinnacle to the hood of his minivan and drove it dwelling to Mount Kisco, New York. “Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet,” his daughter, Kick Kennedy, instructed City & Nation journal in 2012.

The disturbing and graphic whale story resurfaced just some weeks after Kennedy made nationwide headlines for admitting to dumping the carcass of a bear cub in New York’s Central Park in 2014 and simply in the future earlier than he instructed Carlson about how whales and different wildlife had been the inspiration of his environmental work.

“I got into the environment because I wanted this connection to the fishes and the birds and the wildlife and the whales,” he instructed the right-wing host and Trump ally.

“Most of us got into this because of the whales.”