RFK Jr. names attorney Nicole Shanahan as his VP pick

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26 Mar 2024, 4:58 pm

The attorney and entrepreneur, like Kennedy himself, has never run for elected office.

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Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced Tuesday that Nicole Shanahan, a wealthy attorney and entrepreneur in the San Francisco Bay Area, will be joining his campaign as his vice presidential selection

Shanahan, who like Kennedy has never run for elected office, has contributed to his campaign and his super PAC.

Kennedy made the announcement at an event in Shanahan's hometown of Oakland.

In explaining his decision, Kennedy said he wanted to choose a young athlete from a diverse background as his running mate and touted Shanahan's experience in tech and advocacy.

“I am confident that there’s no American more qualified to play this role than Nicole Shanahan.”

In her address, Shanahan railed against the Democratic Party, saying the institution “has lost its way” and that she was formally leaving it behind.

She also focused on concerns over the U.S. food supply — a top concern of Kennedy’s — and expressed skepticism of medicine and vaccines — also a top Kennedy cause — claiming no safety study “can assess the cumulative impact of one prescription after another after another, one shot after another and another, throughout the course of childhood.” At one point, she raised concerns about “electromagnetic pollution,” elevating a conspiracy theory about the health effects of 5G and Wi-Fi signals.

This independent movement comes at a time of extreme division in America that threatens to tear this country apart," Shanahan said. "It is time for a re-alignment. It is time, as Bobby Kennedy says, to focus on our unifying values rather than our divisions."

"Take a close look at his vision for America," she continued. "It is a vision that I share too as I back his campaign, and focus the next seven months of my life getting him on each and every ballot in this country!"

In Arizona, Bloomberg/Morning Consult and Fox News surveys from this month show him garnering double-digit support. In Michigan, a Quinnipiac University survey from earlier this month also shows him attracting double-digit support while in Pennsylvania. And in North Carolina, a Marist College poll showed 11% of registered voters backing Kennedy.

"Our campaign is a spoiler. I agree with that," Kennedy said. "It’s a spoiler for President Biden and for President Trump. It’s a spoiler for the war machine. It’s a spoiler for Wall St. and Big Ag and Big Telecom and Big Pharma and corporate-owned media ..."

Both Trump and Biden supporters took aim at Kennedy following the announcement. Alex Pfeiffer, a spokesman for the pro-Trump super PAC MAGA Inc., railed against Kennedy as "a far-left radical" and said it was "no surprise he would pick a Biden donor leftist as his running mate."

On a Democratic National Committee press call, Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow said Kennedy picked Shanahan purely for her ability to help fund his effort.

"There is absolutely no path for Kennedy to become president and he knows that," she said. "That is why he picked a VP who can fund — who can buy his way onto the ballot in the number of states."

But ultimately, Kennedy homed in on Shanahan, who previously was involved in the production of an attention-grabbing Super Bowl ad supporting Kennedy in February.

Shanahan told The New York Times that she helped make the ad and gave $4 million to the super PAC American Values 2024 last month to air it. Federal campaign finance records show a $4 million contribution to the super PAC on Jan. 31 from Planeta Management LLC, which bears a similar name to her venture fund, Planeta Ventures.

Joining Kennedy's ticket appears to open a pathway for Shanahan to inject her own wealth directly into the campaign instead of into an outside group, which would allow Kennedy to use the funds for key projects like gathering petition signatures for ballot access.

Federal Election Commission rules suggest that vice presidential hopefuls are free to contribute their own money to their campaign with no limitations — just like a presidential candidate, as long as the ticket is not seeking public funding.

A tech lawyer and entrepreneur turned philanthropist, Shanahan’s life in California has been intertwined with some of tech’s biggest players.

She founded ClearAccessIP, a company that, according to its website uses AI technology to help patent holders manage their intellectual property. The company was acquired by IPwe in 2020.

She married Google co-founder Sergey Brin in 2018 and divorced him in 2022. The Wall Street Journal reported that she had an affair with billionaire Elon Musk, but both Shanahan and Musk have denied the accusation. The Journal has stood by its reporting.

"The WSJ’s narrative that an affair with Elon Musk led to the end of my marriage was about as accurate as claiming that the body heat of polar bears is responsible for the melting of the Arctic ice caps," Shanahan wrote in a 2023 essay for People magazine. "It felt senseless and cruel."

Shanahan's foundation, the Bia-Echo Foundation, says its mission is to “create a multiplying effect” on issues Shanahan cares about, including “reproductive longevity & equality, criminal justice reform and a healthy & livable planet.”

Shanahan has an autistic daughter and has recently funded research into the disorder’s causes, and she told the New York Times in February that she had been motivated to support Kennedy in part because of concerns about children’s health and the environment, including vaccines.

The latter item has been one of Kennedy's professional causes as the head of the country’s best-funded anti-vaccine organization, Children’s Health Defense. He took a leave from the organization to run for president, but has filled his campaign with anti-vaccine activists.

At his Tuesday event, warmup speakers included Del Bigtree, Kennedy's communications director and a prominent anti-vaccine activist; Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford professor and outspoken opponent of Covid mitigation measures; and Angela Stanton-King, a one-time GOP congressional candidate who Trump pardoned in 2020 for her role in a stolen car ring. In her congressional run, Stanton-King compared gay and transgender people to pedophiles and said the Black Lives Matter movement was “a major cover up for PEDOPHILIA and HUMAN TRAFFICKING”


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Today, 9:44 am

Why Nicole Shanahan could be bad news for Democrats

Quote:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s new running mate might not help him win an election, but she’s already highlighting a change that unsettles both parties in American politics — and shows how tech-world money might be accelerating it.

Nicole Shanahan, the 38-year-old lawyer and investor who will now be Kennedy’s running mate, provides a helpful injection of cash to the campaign, having donated more than $4.5 million to his bid thus far.

Shanahan is a longtime staple of the Silicon Valley scene as an early AI executive, an ex-wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin and, according to the Wall Street Journal, an alleged one-time paramour of Elon Musk.

But potentially more significant than the money she delivers is the way her politics squares with Kennedy’s existing supporters, and what it means for U.S. party alignment.

Looking at Shanahan’s track record, she at first seems the paragon of a loyal Democrat: She contributed to Hillary Clinton in 2016, Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg in 2020, and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), her local representative.

She was a major donor to Measure J, an anti-incarceration California ballot initiative, and her Bia-Echo Foundation names “the world’s greatest challenges” as “Reproductive Longevity & Equality, Criminal Justice Reform and a Healthy and Livable Planet” — which, whatever it actually does, manages to invoke a lot of progressive-sounding buzzwords.

That might make her selection jarring, considering RFK Jr.’s campaign has thus far appealed to a more right-leaning crowd.

But she’s also a walking manifestation of big tech’s idiosyncratic politics — a blend of “innovation”-minded libertarianism, West Coast institutional skepticism, and an interest in mysticism, alternative lifestyles and medicines.

RFK Jr., so far, has thrived by connecting all those lines in one celebrity-surname package. His highest-profile supporters so far have been the libertarian-minded Silicon Valley techno-utopianists who once flirted with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ doomed campaign.

Kennedy fits very neatly into the culture that produced Shanahan — one comprising tech billionaires comfortable with celebrity and suspicious of legacy institutions and their policy consensus. Kennedy has repeatedly apologized for Russia’s conduct in Ukraine; he invited the vaguely anarcho-libertarian investor Balaji Srinivasan to be his Secretary of the Treasury; he’s repeatedly spread conspiracy theories about the coronavirus vaccine.

The two names on the RFK Jr. ticket now form a sort of Venn diagram, with Kennedy’s paranoid distrust of the establishment and Shanahan’s crunchy California progressivism joining their circles around a fair number of voters put off by what they see as calcified Republican and Democratic politics.

Samuel Hammond, senior economist at the pro-tech nonprofit Foundation for American Innovation, suggested that the ticket reflects America’s “radical center.” The term, coined by Ted Halstead and Michael Lind in a 2001 book of the same name, posited a base of disenchanted voters that includes single-issue, alienated radicals and low-information independents, willing to throw their support to whoever best courts their disaffection.

Both Republicans and Democrats fear that base could throw the election to the opposite side.

Shanahan’s presence on the ticket represents, then, a tentative play for the left side of the “radical center,” and an experiment in how broad a coalition it could become.

Her progressive track record is unlikely to sit well with the right-leaning venture capital crowd which first bear-hugged Kennedy’s campaign, but her yoga-mom, populist wariness of the medical establishment could entice otherwise skeptical left-leaning members of that group to take the plunge and support the ticket.

If — and it’s a big if — that ploy is successful for Kennedy’s campaign, it could chiefly hurt Biden, who is staking his re-election on retaining persuadable voters from 2020 who couldn’t, and still can’t, stomach Trump.

Marshall Kosloff, a media fellow at the Hudson Institute and co-host of the Realignment podcast, argued that the initial surge of interest in Kennedy’s campaign from the tech set obscured a more natural fit for his message and track record with disaffected liberals. “They’re dissatisfied with being Democrats because they’re bored and anti-establishment… RFK’s people are people who you could have seen voting Green Party 20 years ago, but now their party identification is even weaker.”

After a 2020 presidential election that saw a steep drop in the proportion of the vote that went to third-party candidates, Democrats now worry about shedding crucial votes to candidates like Kennedy in swing states they can’t afford to lose.

“If you sat down with these voters and went through their actual views and what they actually care about, they would be a part of Joe Biden’s coalition,” Kosloff said. “But there’s the uncomfortable reality that in an anti-institutional age, there’s a distinct minority of those voters that just don’t like that.”


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Professionally Identified and joined WP August 26, 2013
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“My autism is not a superpower. It also isn’t some kind of god-forsaken, endless fountain of suffering inflicted on my family. It’s just part of who I am as a person”. - Sara Luterman