ICYMI: The New York Times: R.F.K. Jr.’s Environmental Colleagues Urge Him to Drop Presidential Bid Arrow

Key Point: "Nearly 50 leaders and activists who worked with Mr. Kennedy at an environmental nonprofit group will run ads calling on him to 'Honor our planet, drop out.'"

The New York Times: R.F.K. Jr.'s Environmental Colleagues Urge Him to Drop Presidential Bid

By: Lisa Friedman

• Dozens of Mr. Kennedy's former colleagues at the Natural Resources Defense Council are calling on him to withdraw from the race, in full-page advertisements sponsored by the group's political arm that are expected to appear in newspapers in six swing states on Sunday.

• Separately, a dozen other national environmental organizations have issued an open letter calling Mr. Kennedy " a "dangerous conspiracy theorist and a science denier" who promotes "toxic beliefs" on vaccines and on climate change.

• "A vote for RFK Jr. is a vote to destroy that progress and put Trump back in the White House," says the newspaper ad that will run in Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

• "The Bobby I knew is gone," said Dan Reicher, a senior energy researcher at Stanford University's Woods Institute for Environment. Mr. Reicher worked with Mr. Kennedy at N.R.D.C. and said he had a decades-long personal friendship with Mr. Kennedy, including paddling rivers together in the United States and Chile.

• Gina McCarthy was the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Barack Obama and then became president of N.R.D.C. during the Trump administration, only to return to national service as Mr. Biden's climate adviser until last year. "If folks remember him as an environmentalist, he is no more," she said about Mr. Kennedy. "He's against science, he's against vaccines, he talks jibber jabber on climate. I don't know what he stands for."

• John Hamilton Adams, who co-founded the Natural Resources Defense Council and hired Mr. Kennedy in the 1980s […] "I mentored Bobby as a young environmentalist. I do not recognize the person he has become. His actions are a betrayal to our environment."

• The rebuke from Mr. Kennedy's professional colleagues comes after his brothers and sisters and other members of the Kennedy family endorsed President Biden at a campaign rally in Philadelphia on Thursday.