RFK Jr. Made His Mark As An Environmental Lawyer. Now He’s 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.