RFK Jr., From Environmental Lawyer To All In On MAGA

As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spoke about the spiritual connection he feels toward the natural world and humankind’s duty to protect 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 told 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 movement’s focus on planet-warming carbon emissions.

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

Kennedy, who worked for decades as an environmental attorney, fancies himself as an “old-school environmentalist” — apparently one who thinks that humans can somehow safeguard the environment while ignoring carbon pollution, the 13,000-pound elephant in the room that is wreaking havoc on all the nature that Kennedy purports to care about so deeply.

Numerous former colleagues in the environmental movement have come forward to condemn Kennedy, arguing he lost his way long ago and forfeited any claim to the title of environmentalist. After suspending his own presidential campaign last month, Kennedy became a surrogate for Republican nominee Donald Trump, who has repeatedly dismissed climate change as a “hoax” and as president dismantled dozens of environmental rules and regulations to the benefit of corporate polluters.

Dan Reicher, a senior researcher at Stanford University’s Woods Institute for Environment, worked with Kennedy at the Natural Resources Defense Council in the late-1980s and early 1990s. The man he knew then, whom he called a “strong advocate who spoke his mind on environmental protection” and with whom he bonded over a shared passion for kayaking, is not the same man today.

Kennedy got his start in the environmental movement as a volunteer at NRDC, which fulfilled a community service requirement of his probation stemming from a heroin possession charge in 1983, as a recent New Yorker profile detailed. Later he was hired as an attorney at Riverkeeper, where he helped lead the organization’s fight against companies polluting the Hudson River in New York. Over his long career in environmental law and advocacy, Kennedy battled against oil and mining giants, the military, factory farms and pesticide manufacturers, and Canadian and Chilean dam projects.

“That Bobby is gone,” Reicher said, and his environmental advocacy has been replaced 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 said. “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 other former NRDC colleagues in signing onto an open letter in April calling for Kennedy to drop his independent presidential bid. The letter, titled “Earth to RFK, Jr” and which the NRDC’s political action arm ran as ads in several swing state newspapers, condemned Kennedy’s record 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 biggest environmental crisis 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 said.

Kennedy’s press team did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.

Five siblings called his endorsement of Trump “a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear.”

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

“When we destroy nature, we diminish our capacity to sense the divine,” he said. “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 mention or grapple with is the fact that climate change is devastating communities the world over, with economic damages forecast to reach $38 trillion annually by the middle of this century. For many, confronting the threat is both a spiritual and cultural endeavor.

Kennedy went on to attack the modern environmental movement with several falsehoods.

He declared that “offshore wind is exterminating the whales,” parroting the evidence-free talking point of some of the nation’s most hard-line organizations denying climate change.

He said the environmental movement “no longer talks about toxics anymore, they don’t care about it, they don’t care that we’re mass-poisoning our children.” Every major environmental organization has a toxics program.

John Walke, the director of NRDC’s clean air program, said in a post to X (formerly Twitter) that Kennedy has “absolutely no idea what he is talking about,” noting that the environmental nonprofit has multiple staff working exclusively on toxic chemicals.

“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 national climate policy should be “restoring soils,” not curbing carbon emissions — which, ironically, are contributing to the degradation of soils around the globe. In other words, a fix-it-after-it’s-a-problem approach.

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

Kennedy’s entrance into the Make America Great Again movement has given rise to a similar slogan meant to boil down what Kennedy brings to the table: Make America Healthy Again. But in backing Trump, Kennedy is teaming up with someone with a well-documented and abysmal environmental and public health record. The Trump administration worked to weaken safeguards for nearly 35 million acres, a number that the left-leaning Center for American Progress said earned Trump the title of the most “anti-nature” president in U.S. history. In January 2021, The New York Times compiled a list of more than 100 environmental rollbacks under Trump, including rules meant to safeguard air, water and wildlife habitat, as well as prevent exposure to toxic chemicals.

In a meeting with oil and gas executives earlier this year, Trump vowed to fulfill the fossil fuel industry’s wish list and undo President Joe Biden’s climate and green energy policies if they donated $1 billion to his reelection campaign. It is the very sort of corporate capture of government that Kennedy decries at every turn.

Kennedy expects to be able to influence a future Trump administration on environmental issues.

“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 post to X late last 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 said Kennedy is grasping at “dangerous” straws and expects his embrace of Trump will end in failure.

“Any possibility that Kennedy will green up Trump is about as likely as the former president taking down the border wall,” he said. “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 movement to the early 2000s, when he began to embrace conspiracies about vaccines and autism — a torch he continues to carry — and became a prominent figure in the fight against a proposed offshore wind farm near Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

But Brett Hartl, government affairs director of the Center for Biological Diversity’s political arm, points to a fiasco Kennedy set in motion at Riverkeeper in 2000. That year, Kennedy, then Riverkeeper’s lead attorney, hired William Wegner, a convicted smuggler of wild bird eggs, to help the organization monitor New York City’s compliance with environmental rules. Eight of Riverkeeper’s board members resigned in protest.

Ever since that incident, Hartl, who grew up along the Hudson River, has viewed Kennedy as a foe and told 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 said in an email. “In my view, RFK Jr is an environmental criminal and an environmental villain.”

In a letter to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration last month, Hartl called on federal officials to investigate an incident in the 1990s when Kennedy, according to his daughter, cut the head of a dead, beached whale off using a chainsaw, strapped the head to the hood of his minivan and drove it home 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, told Town & Country magazine in 2012.

The disturbing and graphic whale story resurfaced just a few weeks after Kennedy made national headlines for admitting to dumping the carcass of a bear cub in New York’s Central Park in 2014 and just one day before he told Carlson about how whales and other wildlife were the foundation 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 told the right-wing host and Trump ally.

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