Michael Shearer

I mean, when he was a young boy before his father died, Once and Future King, which is a story of young King Arthur being trained by Merlin in the woods, was one of his favorite books.

And the first red-tailed hawk he gets from his father, he names after a character in Once and Future King.

So he...

From a very early age, saw himself as a sort of King Arthur-like figure, right?

You know, orphaned future king who has to fight demons and evil forces and fight his way back.

And that force, that fierceness, I think explains why...

I think he's been successful in the ways he's been successful, but also why he has been so willing to divert entirely from the sort of accepted wisdom of the scientific community.

Mm-hmm.

And his mission is to sort of destroy and disrupt corrupt institutions.

And that begins, you know, after his recovery in the early 80s, he becomes an environmentalist.

And he has a number of successful lawsuits against big corporate polluters starting in New York State and the Hudson River.

And so that was the frame of reference that Kennedy had in his adulthood.

Right.

that he really was someone who could take on these evil institutional forces.

Yeah, and he was—he, you know, has always considered himself a liberal.

Right.

And I think still considers himself a liberal.

I mean, he described himself as an FDR Kennedy liberal.

You know, in the early 2000s when George W. Bush was president, he wrote a whole book about the fascism of the Republican Party and how their environmental record—the environmental record of Bush in sort of like handing over environmental policy to corporations—

was similar to what Mussolini did in Italy.