“God talks to human beings through many vectors. But nowhere with such detail, and grace and joy, as through creation. When we destroy nature, we diminish our capacity to sense the divine.”
With this April 2023 tweet, RFK Jr inaugurated his presidential campaign, which has now folded into a daily ritual of Trump bootlicking.
Now, Bobby is telling Tucker Carlson and the world that climate change cannot be solved through commitment to the “carbon orthodoxy.”
“It’s not about quantifying stuff,” he says. “That's what the devil does. But the reason we're preserving these things is because we love our children.”
What does this mean?
Matthew tracks the sources and implications of Kennedy’s broken climate discourse—rooted in St. Francis of Assisi, appealing to gentleman farmers and homeschoolers, allergic to the scientific abstractions that give us a truly global picture, and always committed to the free market.
Show Notes
RFK Jr: Teaming up With Trump, Pavel Durov’s Arrest, CIA, and the Fall of the Democrat Party
Birdwatching with Jonathan Franzen: 'Climate change isn't the only danger to birds'
Special Interview: Nostalgia for the Superego (w/Sam Binkley) — Conspirituality
Laudato si' (24 May 2015) | Francis
Brian Swimme: The Cosmos Watching Itself (E35)
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Hello everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
We are on Instagram and Threads at Conspiratuality Pod, and you can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon, or just our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.
This is a brief called RFK Jr.
Says The Devil Measures Carbon, and it tracks the sources and implications of an old argument that Kennedy is honing in climate discourse that I find disturbingly effective in that Naomi Kleinian sense of the feelings being right while the facts are wrong, or mostly wrong, While his answers to the crisis skitter sideways into romantic idealism at best and narcissism at worst.
Now, I'll be playing excerpts from the man himself, being interviewed by Tucker Carlson, but his argument boils down to this in summary form.
The majority of climate change discussion revolves around carbon.
Emissions, mitigations, drawdowns.
Managerial strategies for carbon mitigation, which involve complex metrics and contentious methods for isolating variables, have two critical drawbacks.
First, they foreground abstract mathematics to describe conditions most people cannot relate to or sense.
And secondly, they are too easily financialized by the same systems that caused the problem in the first place.
So on one hand, people can't really relate to the jargon-laden discussion, and on the other, they are rightfully suspicious of governments and corporations turning carbon into yet another economic game.
So all of this is actually very much on point.
But I want to listen to how he lays it out for Tucker Carlson in his studio in rural Maine, where a deer antler chandelier hangs over the podcast table.
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 know, you're basically, you're putting everything in that kind of box of being able to quantify it and explain its value by, you know, by a 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 There's a, you know, there's a love that we have.
You know, I got into the environment because I wanted, you know, this connection to the fishes and the birds and the wildlife and the whales and the Purple Mountains' majesty.
And that, you know, I understood that the way, you know, God talks to human beings through many vectors, through each other, through organized religion, through the great prophets, 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, understand who God is and what our own potential is and duties are as human beings.
You might be able to sense where this is going.
So he is correct about the perfidy of trading carbon on the open market, even though when pressed, he doesn't offer any climate plan beyond increased competition for renewables companies.
With all of the solipsism of that 1950s Catholic still within him, he insists the free market will solve the problem of the free market.
He's also right that any carbon math requires quantification.
That's just the nature of the beast.
The thickness of ice beds and the erosion of shorelines are predicted in part by the rate at which carbon parts per million rises.
It's part of how we know the planet is heating and will continue to heat, and that in all likelihood the heating will be faster than predicted as the various feedback loops begin to cascade.
So his very first gambit here is to propose a spiritual objection to something as certain as he believes the existence of God to be.
That the measurement of carbon gives us a necessary picture of what we're actually doing and have been doing since the coal-fired steam engine.
He's saying that the math and science and the institutions that produce them will not give you an accurate vision of reality.
Now, does this sound familiar?
Well, maybe it should, because this is exactly what he does with vaccine science.
But here's where he goes on to make quantification, or we could say the scientific process itself, which is always generating answers that we cannot predict through either our priors or through our old beliefs in God, he makes that into an explicit sin.
It's not about quantifying stuff.
That's what the devil does.
He quantifies everything, right?
And that is, you know, what he wants us doing.
Put a number on it.
And the reason we're preserving these things is because we love our children, you know, and it's because we get—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.
And it, you know, and it connects us to the most important spiritual asset.
The audio is garbled there at the end, I believe because of his vocal disability, but according to the transcript, he's saying spiritual asset.
And I think that's the most important phrase there because it sums up this perfect contradiction that only a capitalist messiah of the environment could come up with.
The devil measures carbon, but truly spiritual people measure the riches of nature, including the economic riches.
In this world, carbon and the means of counting it doesn't come from God, you see.
Only the good things about nature come from God, and you cannot measure them, although they are assets.
Also, I want you to notice that with Bobby, you're always going to be told that if you're doing consensus-based public policy, public health, vaccine campaigns, and now carbon measurement, you must have perverse priorities.
And you can't really be loving your children.
Because only he knows how to love children.
But his broadest point is that it's the devil who quantifies things.
And this is pretty rich, coming from the famous bulldog environmental lawyer who made his career on literally commodifying and monetizing natural resources on behalf of his clients, so that a price tag could be put on the damages of an oil spill or acid rainfall.
It's the devil who quantifies things, not the environmental lawyer who has to calculate the costs of cleanup, or losses to fishing runs, or drinking water rights, or patches of wild rice in the marshes on the edge of the Hudson River.
RFK Jr.
wants to say that the very thing he built his career on, this nebulous work of measuring value in the natural world in order to defend it, is something one must never do.
Why?
Because if we do it, we're not talking about the natural world anymore.
If we're talking about money, we're not talking about the glory of God.
Now part of his pitch is that we need a climate discussion that we can feel and touch.
And that's why every other fundraiser with him is two hours on a fishing boat.
It's why Charles Eisenstein met him at a falconry event fundraiser.
He goes on to tell Tucker that if you want to divide people, talk about carbon.
But if you want to join them, talk about wildlife.
So on one hand, measuring carbon is a devilish abstraction.
But then on the other, abstracting nature as a pathway to God is a noble act.
Now back on this past Thursday's episode, I covered the writing originality or non-originality of Charles Eisenstein, showing that his main idea of the new story is actually articulated almost verbatim from a 1978 book by Father Thomas Berry.
Now, we've often noted on this podcast that echoing, retreading, reframing without citation, and also outright plagiarism is one of the hallmarks of the charismatic influencer.
And so it should come as no surprise that Bobby's carbon argument here is the outermost shell of a stack of Petrushka dolls.
Tracking it back to its most obvious precursor, you run into a 2017 book by his Director of Messaging, Charles Eisenstein.
It's called Climate, A New Story.
Now here he is laying out some of his view in 2019.
I talked before about the sadness that I felt and especially my wife Stella felt upon looking at the The narrow river estuary and the places where there used to be so much life and it's not there anymore.
And our sadness was not because we made some kind of mental calculation that that location no longer sequesters as much carbon and that therefore our future is going to be a little bit more in peril because of the lost carbon contribution.
Just as the sadness that you feel when you see your childhood woods bulldozed, or when you hear of a species going extinct, or when you look at the pits and quarries and the tailing ponds of a strip mine, or of a mountaintop removal operation, or the devastation caused by tar sands excavation, or those birds covered in oil struggling up onto the shore from an oil spill,
That hurts, and it's not because you make a calculation that, oh boy, this is gonna add more carbon, and according to the models, in 30 years or in 50 years, that's gonna mean this, this, and this.
There's a more visceral impact of these things.
We are sad and in pain from the damage because we love these beings.
And I think that this is a much more potent invitation to environmental action, to action to protect and restore the places of this earth, than appealing to a theoretical projection of what's going to happen in 10 or 20 or 30 or 100 years.
That's not as motivating for a lot of people, and it requires them to buy into a politically charged, politically loaded position.
So you can hear the roots of Bobby's bit here.
And I think of particular note is the false dichotomy for which Bobby is famous.
And that's this.
The truly attuned person really feels environmental devastation much more deeply than any nerd doing calculations in a lab.
They don't get it at all.
And then you can also see where Eisenstein leads Bobby here.
Because he's saying that if you follow your natural love for the fishes and the wetlands to its natural conclusion, you won't even have to do politics.
The answers will be so self-evident that everyone altogether will make the right choice, magically.
And you can see how powerful this idea is in the pudding of Charles Eisenstein winding up five years later soft-endorsing Trump out of a belief that personal love for the mountaintops will somehow be contagious and convince even the most narcissistic consumer in the world that it's time for a radical, earthy change.
Now of particular note in this content is that in his book, Eisenstein uses the phrase, deal with the devil, when talking about the scientific community's concentration on carbon accounting.
And if I had to bet, I'd say that RFK Jr.
is lifting this directly.
I don't think his hold on his followers derives from originality, but through his capacity to stitch together a pastiche of illusions and nostalgias and catchphrases.
Going back to the Carlson interview, Bobby takes another step that I think will help Trump expand his populism into the religious realm under the guise of universalism, while also barely concealing Bobby's vision of himself as a solitary spiritual adept.
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 listen, to hear God's voice and see the burning bush.
He had to go to the wilderness of Mount Sinai to get the commandments.
Muhammad, who was a city boy from Mecca, had to go to the wilderness of Mount Hera on a camping trip with his kids and wrestle the angel Gabriel in the middle of the night to have the first stances of the surahs of the Quran squeezed from him.
Buddha had to go into the wilderness to sit under the, you know, and wander for years, and then sit under the Bodhgaya 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, you know, and then all of Christ's parables come from nature.
I'm the vine, you are the branches, the mustard seed, the little swallows, the scattering the seeds on the fellow ground.
Because that is where we sense the divine.
God talks to us through the fishes, the birds, the leaves.
They're all, you know, words from our Creator.
And that is why we preserve nature.
Yes.
It's not because of the, you know, it's not because the, you know, the quantity of carbon.
And by the way... I feel what you said so deeply I can hardly even express it, and thank you for saying that.
So you can hear how affective that is for Tucker.
It's very true, very moving, it's very Joseph Campbell, and also very American and frontier-pilled.
I'm glad he pinged Muhammad in this litany, but I don't think it will balance out his callous disregard for those bearing the brunt of his Middle East positions.
But here's my main point about the religiosity.
This interview with Carlson came right on the heels of the DNC in Chicago, which, as I mentioned a few episodes back, really foregrounded that old Baptist and civil rights religiosity through figures like Senator Warnock.
And that hit some really deep social gospel notes.
The poor shall inherit the earth, the golden rule, doing unto the least of these, and so on.
But there's a difficulty here with these basics.
At this time, in this country, these appeals really depend on empathy and service and valuing the commons.
And we have to ask, does this messaging inevitably get occluded by the culture wars because it requires giving a shit about other people?
Now is Bobby aware of this and does this explain why he mitigates his Malibu jet set image with redneck signifiers?
He works out in jeans.
He drives old trucks with dog-chewed seatbelts.
Kennedy's religion is not the justice is love in action torch now carried by Warnock, by William Barber, and many others.
It's much more related to the transcendent mysticism of his middle namesake, Francis of Assisi, who, we must note, was not really a social gospel guy in the mold of Martin Luther King Jr.
Now Francis of Assisi, if you don't know him, was the eccentric and sometimes feral son of a wealthy family who, in the 12th century, threw caution to the wind and forswore all familial business responsibility.
So, does this sound familiar?
At first, Francis wasn't most famously focused on the sorrows of human society, but he was consumed by an at times escapist fixation on the non-human world and his own internal ecstasies.
Sound familiar?
These were so intense that as he was battling a trachoma eye infection at the end of his very short life, he believed he received the stigmata, or the five wounds of Christ.
Now, Bobby calls St.
Francis the patron saint of our family and protector of God's creation.
Quote, St.
Francis of Assisi is my hero, unquote.
Back in April of last year, on the day he announced his primary challenge to Joe Biden, he immortalized his Franciscan take on Twitter.
Quote, God talks to human beings through many vectors, but nowhere with such detail and grace and joy as through creation.
When we destroy nature, we diminish our capacity to sense the divine.
So this Franciscan eco-theology is a lifelong keynote for Bobby.
And I have to say that as Franciscan theology developed and matured through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, the communities of brothers and then the sisters known as the Poor Clares They did become known for their mutual aid, their communal living, and their charitable service.
And this is how I think we can understand the pro-social bearings of the current Pope, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who took the name of Francis on his election.
For the nerds out there, he is a Jesuit, not a Franciscan, but I think him taking that name is very significant.
Now, this is a Pope whose most popular encyclical, Laudato Si, is a powerful prayer for environmental action.
Here is the opening.
Laudato Si, mi Signore.
Praise be to you, my Lord.
In the words of this beautiful canticle, St.
Francis of Assisi reminds us that our common home is like a sister with whom we share our life and a beautiful mother who opens her arms to embrace us.
Praise be to you, my Lord, through our sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us and who produces various fruit with colored flowers and herbs.
And then the Pope goes on, this sister now cries out to us
because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods
with which God has endowed her.
We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters entitled to plunder her at will.
The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin is also reflected
in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air, and in all forms of life.
This is why the earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor.
She groans in travail, Romans 8.22, We have forgotten that we ourselves are dust of the earth, Genesis 2-7.
Our very bodies are made up of her elements.
We breathe her air and we receive life and refreshment from her waters.
Now I can imagine Bobby reading along here and nodding and sighing with agreement, but unlike Bobby's much smaller view, Francis, who here is channeling an old anti-exploitation theme that has emerged ironically in conjunction with the Church's ongoing co-signing of colonial plunder, Indicts industrialization, consumerism and capitalism itself and insists that developed countries must aid the majority world in mitigating the effects of climate destruction that will impact them more profoundly and is already starting.
Now, by contrast, when I search Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
climate refugees, I can find no statements that he's made on the topic.
The icon of environmental concern for Bobby is the gentleman farmer in Idaho or Kentucky frowning as he looks out over fields of monoculture.
It's not the malnourished family in Bangladesh wading through floodwaters with their possessions in plastic bags.
If you listen to enough Bobby, you'll hear that his focus has always been on this solitary hero.
The mysticism locked into the natural world that only he can really see into.
His vision of Francis, like so many of his other fascinations, is static, abstract, and unintegrated.
He's really stuck in that iconoclastic image of the feral revolutionary, and he shows no interest in how that image develops, it matures out of its adolescence into a sustainable culture.
All of this amounts to a home run in the context of American hyper-individualism.
It's romantic.
It harkens back to Thoreau and Goethe before him.
It's a liberal John Wayne with a falcon instead of a six-shooter.
And it has a venerable legacy behind it.
It is the poetry of William Blake, juxtaposing England's mountains green with the dark satanic mills.
It's the theology of that old Swedish hymn, Americanized in the 1950s and taken on the road by Billy Graham, How Great Thou Art.
Here's George Beverly Shea.
I'll praise the Lord, I'll praise the Lord.
Oh Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder Consider all the worlds Thy hands have made.
Consider all the worlds Thy hands have made I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder
I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder Thy power Oh Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder
Thy power throughout the universe displayed Changing my goal, I say a lot to Thee
How great Thou art, how great Thou art Changing my goal, I say a lot to Thee
How great Thou art, how great Thou art And when I think that God...
So Bobby's gift is to point to something awesome and wonderful.
But the glory and grace he points to depends on this foil, that other technocratic and monetized way of doing things that doesn't come out of any real love of nature.
And so it must be doomed to fail.
Now, when I first heard Bobby be interviewed by Carlson on this topic, it didn't sound original to me.
It sounded like this old tension I remember from when I canvassed door-to-door for Greenpeace in the late 1980s and went to various protests.
Now on one hand we all knew that whales or baby seals really caught that suburbanite attention at the front door while they were trying to get their kids to dinner and the stove was boiling over.
These are people who viewed themselves as progressive and caring but needed something to really focus on for a moment.
We needed issues that people could attach to, identify with, and animals were always better than the metrics of pollution, which I also struggled to memorize.
Like, how many metric tons of effluent were being dumped by that pulp mill into the St.
Lawrence?
I could never remember stuff like that, and if those numbers weren't in my heart, they wouldn't be in my speech.
And beyond that basic communications issue, there was a deeper anxiety that we were selling people one whale, one polar bear at a time through adoption schemes that you could never imagine growing to scale.
It was like talking to the tree planters who came back from out west in the fall after a summer of tramping through northern forests and they would say, I planted 300,000 trees, but you could hear in their voices that they knew it wasn't enough.
So, if you had that right mixture of anxiety, intuition, and data, and if you stayed late at the Greenpeace office after your shift and listened to how despairing the old-timers sounded, you got this feeling that the true enormity of the problem was somehow being ignored or avoided.
Then, almost 20 years later, a novelist I admired at the time, Jonathan Franzen, got into an open war with climate advocates by complaining that focusing on climate and carbon capture would actually distract people from the simpler joys of nature, like watching birds, which he had taken up as a New Yorker in his 40s.
So I remember reading the back and forth with this growing sense of nausea that this guy who was able to write such psychologically rich characters was becoming his own narcissistic anti-hero.
Just sounding like the most conceited and privileged asshole out there, literally downplaying carbon and warming in favor of some kind of nostalgia for 19th century gentleman naturalist cosplay.
As it turns out, this is precisely the core tension in the environmental world.
Where best to put our focus, if focus is limited?
And where does our environmentalism come from?
Does it come from the colonial and frontiersman era of feeling the big sky bless your enterprise?
Is it about conserving natural resources for the pleasure of human culture, like with the fox hunts in England?
Or is our version borrowed from the First Nations?
Does it realize the interconnectivity of things, including the abstract science that can see the planet at a large enough scale to know how and why things are changing?
And which approach will prevail?
The local, granular, animals-based love for the earth?
Or the determinations made by geologists drilling ice cores and gazing at trapped CO2 bubbles under microscopes?
Which is more spiritual?
I think we know that it's the wrong question if the answer has to be both.
So here's a final complication.
Charles Eisenstein, despite all shortcomings, has earned some credit with some environmentalists
by being able to cite some credible theory wrapped up in what is known as the Gaia Hypothesis.
So from the living planet view, we understand that the organs of Gaia are essential,
especially those that are still intact, like the Amazon, like to some extent the Congo,
like some other places on earth that are smaller but still intact.
These are reservoirs of health.
These are where Gaia's memory of health even is located.
We need to protect these areas.
The Amazon is a living being in and of itself, and we just have a very superficial understanding of how that interrelates to the Gaian physiology.
So, if you reduce the Amazon to how much carbon that it sequesters, you're going to miss out on all of these other physiological effects.
So, first priority, these places must be held sacred.
If we do not do that, then even if we compensate for the lost carbon from the Amazon, this planet is still going to spin out of control.
So the Gaia hypothesis is not universally accepted by the climate science world as being a workable model for change or theory of change, but it has had legitimate consideration and backing from some climate scientists over time.
It basically says that environmentalism must take an holistic and systems approach because the ecosphere is a single body, infinitely interconnected.
This is an appeal for sensitivity, for humility, for interdisciplinary thinking, which is all great, I think.
Very inspiring.
But I think that the way it shows itself playing out in these politics of magic that Bobby Kennedy and Charles Eisenstein bring to the fore is that in the New Age world, A hypothesis like this can get collapsed into a kind of epistemological solipsism in which care for the individual or single body becomes the template for the salvation of everything.
Hence, personalized supplements are more important than vaccines, and making sure quack doctors are never deplatformed is more important than universal healthcare.
Here's the key, I think.
Every single conspirituality influencer we have covered starts from this idealization of interconnectedness.
and they have good reason to. The unitary experience is at the heart of every religious
aspiration and mystical tradition. And they'll have those experiences in yoga, meditation,
on psychedelics, or walking through the woods. Bobby can't stop talking about his epiphanies.
But what these folks don't have in the post-institutional, fragmentary landscape of neoliberal religion is a lifeline back into a working socioeconomic network.
When mystical traditions mature, they routinize all epiphanies back into the social life that made them possible.
Keeping with our prior themes, for example, the Franciscans and Poor Clares built their monasteries and convents.
They became school teachers and nurses and provided models of mutual aid that went on to influence liberation theology and the Catholic workers' movement.
The Jesuits opened universities and hospitals and produced an odd constellation of theologian-scientists deeply invested in public health and social well-being in a system that was able to inspire Dorothy Day in the 1930s, Thomas Merton in the 40s, Teilhard de Chardin in the 50s, Father Berrigan in the 60s, and the current Pope today.
People still go to the wilderness, they still enter their ecstasies, but they have a larger body to join when they come back.
And so for them, something like the Gaia Hypothesis could naturally be a cooperative, interdisciplinary project.
Something to hash out at the biology conference.
But just as every single conspirituality influencer we have covered starts from the revelatory epiphany that Bobby correctly recites from the Pantheon of Messiahs, not a single one of them moves in their content or business models towards cooperation, charity, or building institutions.
There are experiments in communes that are more but usually less successful, and of course seminaries, monasteries, and convents also harbor abuse.
But for the most part, the Charles Eisensteins of the world are condemned to wander amongst the imagined ruins of the institutions they have no connection to and will not participate in.
Their wisdom will be mediated by the free market, the demand for self-help.
It'll be parceled out in online courses, mastermind groups, and group coaching.
And when they die, where will it go?
What kind of embodied social capital will it leave behind?
I think for the vast majority, it will amount to personal estates and dwindling royalty checks.
I remember presenting at a yoga event at the Omega Institute in upstate New York many years ago.
And in the green room for presenters, there was this line of portraits of the New Age and wellness luminaries who had passed through over the years.
This was an eclectic bunch from Diane Fossey, who probably gave talks on primate intelligence and emotionality.
Rupert Sheldrake was up on the wall, Marianne Williamson.
But then also the psychic surgeon and serial rapist John of God.
What did they all have in common?
Well, they could all draw a crowd through the vague magnetism of alternative spirituality.
They could sell retreat spaces.
It felt really like looking at the portraits of musicians on the back wall of a decades-old music venue.
The lack of coherence is no one's fault.
The entire economy of post-traditional spirituality since the 1970s has been based on an individualistic inward turn.
The thing that sociologist Sam Binkley calls the age of getting loose in relation to the body, work expectations, family relations, and political allegiances.
This happened as the great moral and political questions of the 1960s deflated without resolution.
Even as they enshrined looser social mores around sex and finding meaningful work, the cultural yearning for structural change, now demoralized and fading into nostalgia and irony, found temporary lodging in the project of the self.
facilitated by an accelerated consumerism that expanded the conflation of agency with
consumption and personal growth with social change.
I think Binkley's thesis, I'll link to the interview that I did with him in the show
notes, is interesting to think about when we consider where Bobby came from.
Because that Kennedy promise of the 1960s lies in a marble crypt at Arlington.
And through the 70s and 80s, Bobby roamed until he found himself at rock bottom.
And then turned his life over to the 12 steps.
And since then, as he tells it, he ties every movement and breath to his devotion to God.
And he speaks about this in that totalizing tone that gives the impression that if he attends meetings and takes care of the little things every day, the world will fall back into order.
Now to be fair, Bobby has accumulated more real-world experience than most, and his Children's Health Defense organization will likely survive his death.
But if the conspirituality demographic of influencers has any core skill, it is in the discipline of self-regulation and the story it tells about the healing of the individual life and the hero's journey within.
This is why they all talk about themselves so much, and why so many of their big ideas boil down to the generalization of personal anecdote.
It's also part of the reason why RFK Jr.' 's political campaign, over time, felt more and more like a vanity project.
So three conclusions I'm going to leave you with.
The first one is that this whole deal around carbon accounting comes from the devil just makes no sense.
You can't separate the carbon cycle from nature because it's abstract, but then say that nature is also a pathway to the ultimate abstraction of God.
Second conclusion is more of a concern, which is that this, I think, is effective because it unfairly juxtaposes the nerdy, wonky science of climate prediction against what I believe is Bobby's most compelling persona, this feral child who may never have wanted the burden of his family's name, whose father brought him lizards and a terrarium and then a falcon, the father who died and left his mom to go mad, Before that all happened, Bobby was a boy tramping through the woods who wanted to be a veterinarian.
But, you know, because he was a Kennedy, he couldn't just be himself.
He couldn't be just satisfied with a life in nature.
Last point is that I think what Bobby presents to Carlson represents an amazing sleight of hand that reinvigorates a conservative style hunting and fishing take on the environment as a way of acknowledging climate change but also refocusing it into what really matters locally to them.
away from the institutional mechanisms that are required for rendering the big picture and which so easily invoke the cabal.
I think the messaging is gold for moderate GOPers who need a way to stop denying and alienating themselves from climate, while not giving up on any of their consumption-based freedoms, and while also believing themselves to be God's stewards over their personal domains.
All of this is a lot easier than the theology that Ralph Warnock is pulling on, or the challenges issued by Pope Francis.
But that's Bobby for you.
He wants the legacy of his family, but not its commitments to public health.
He wants the aesthetics of his uncle's campaign, but that really stops at the skinny neckties and doesn't include the aspirational visions.
He wants the universalism of the new age, but not its pacifism.
He wants the blessing of his Catholic forebears, but not their social gospel.
Thanks everyone for listening to another episode of Conspirituality Podcast.
