Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s announcement on Friday that he was dropping out of the presidential race and endorsing former President Donald Trump caused a bit of a splash. (Or furor if you’re one of his party-obsessed siblings, apparently.) To be clear up front, Trump remains the principal here — he’s the candidate; he’s the one who’ll need the votes. RFK Jr. has merely become an ally, one that some believe could make a difference in a close election.
When he made his announcement, Kennedy laid out his three primary agenda items — the ones he feels he can best advance by working with Trump rather than against him: ending the war on free speech; ending the war in Ukraine; ending the war on children (specifically, children’s health).
BREAKING: RFK Jr. Exits Presidential Race…and Endorses Donald Trump
WATCH: Kerry Kennedy’s Trashing of Her Brother, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,
Gets Even More Grotesque
For much of his life, Kennedy was known primarily for his environmental activism. Starting with his work with Riverkeeper, a non-profit organization dedicated to cleaning up the Hudson River and its tributaries, and continuing through several decades of environmental litigation, Kennedy has long fought against pollution and toxins.
Kennedy sat down with Tucker Carlson for an interview released Monday evening. The full video may be viewed below, but the segment excerpted above was quite extraordinary in its fusion of nature and spirituality. It begins with Kennedy explaining his rationale for joining forces with Trump — a modern-day “Team of Rivals” — then pondering the realignment of parties we seem to be witnessing. Then comes a powerful foray into the connection between man and nature and God.
KENNEDY: You’re seeing this…big alignment — and even on environmental issues. It’s so weird to me because the Democrats have become subsumed in this carbon orthodoxy — and you and I have talked about this — that the only issue is carbon. And what that’s done is it’s forced them to do something that you should never do if you’re an environmentalist, which is to commoditize and quantify everything, so everything is measured by its carbon footprint — how many tons of carbon it produces. And…you’re basically, you’re putting everything in that kind of box of being able to quantify it and explain its value…numerically.
And the reason that we protect the environment is just the opposite of that. The reason that we protect the environment is because there’s a spiritual connection. [Watch Tucker’s expression when he says this.] There’s a…love that we have, you know, I got into the environment because I wanted…this connection to the fishes and the birds and the wildlife and the whales…and the purple mountains’ majesty. And…I understood the way — you know God talks to human beings through many vectors, through each other, through organized religion, through the great prophets, through the wise people…the great books of those religions, but nowhere with the kind of detail and texture and grace and joy as through creation. And when we destroy nature, we diminish our capacity to sense the divine — to understand who God is and what our own potential is — and duties are — as human beings.
CARLSON: I hope what you just said, by the way, is chopped up and put all over every social media platform in the world. When we destroy nature, we degrade our own ability to experience the divine.
KENNEDY: Yeah. And that, you know, it’s not about quantifying stuff — that’s what the Devil does. He quantifies everything, right? And 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. And it’s because…nature enriches us — it enriches us economically and spiritually and culturally and historically — it connects us to those 10,000 generations of human beings that were here before there were laptops.
…
All of the organized religions…that we know of today — the central revelation of every one of those religions always occurred in the wilderness. You know, Moses had to go into the wilderness…to hear God’s voice and see the burning bush. He had to go to the wilderness at Mount Sinai to get the Commandments. Muhammad — who was a city boy from Mecca — had to go to the wilderness at Mount Hira on a camping trip with his kids and wrestle the Angel Gabriel in the middle of the night and have the first stanzas — suras — of the Quran squeezed from him. Buddha had to go into the wilderness…and wander for years and then sit under the Bodh Gaya tree to get his first revelation of Nirvana. And Christ had to spend 40 days in the wilderness to discover his divinity for the first time. And his mentor was John the Baptist, who lived in a cave in the Jordan Valley and ate honey of wild bees and locusts…And then all of Christ’s parables come from nature — I am the vine, you are the branch; it is the mustard seed; the little swallows; the scattering the seeds on the fallow ground.
Because 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. And that is why we preserve nature.
It’s clear from Tucker’s reaction that he was truly moved by what Kennedy said here. It resonated with me, too. I think the quality that RFK Jr. brings to the discussion — and the reason I’m glad he’s teamed up with Trump and will, therefore, have a broader platform to advocate for these issues is because they’ve been drowned out for so long in our pre-packaged social media sound bite public discourse. Issues. He’s discussing issues — not personalities, not parties. I think that works to our (Americans’) benefit.
