“I want to talk about soil.” With that line, Nicole Shanahan opened her first stump speech as Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s running mate, in an event hall in Austin, Texas, in May. Reported by NBC News, the crowd was a few hundred people, most of whom had not known her name before Kennedy, a long-shot independent presidential candidate, announced her two months earlier.
Shanahan, 38, is a Silicon Valley philanthropist. She wore lilac, a colour she uses as a nod to centrism, and spoke for 16 minutes. She told the audience she would skip guns and inflation and speak instead about chronic illness, poverty and political division. The answers, she said, lay in Kennedy and the “realm of the alternative.” “I have seen the power of these alternative ways of thinking in my own life,” she said.
From Oakland to Silicon Valley
Shanahan describes her life as the “American dream.” She grew up poor in Oakland, California. Her mother, an immigrant from Guangzhou, China, worked low-wage jobs, and her father struggled with manic depression and addiction. She went to college in Tacoma, Washington, and while in law school at Santa Clara University in 2013 she founded ClearAccessIP, a patent management company. The Times of India notes that it was acquired in 2020.
She met Google co-founder Sergey Brin at a yoga festival in Lake Tahoe in 2014. They later divorced, in 2023. A diagnosis of polycystic ovary syndrome ended their early efforts to freeze embryos, and after “three failed attempts at embryo-making and three dozen visits to in vitro fertilization clinics” she conceived naturally. Her daughter is Echo. Shanahan took the outcome as proof that the medical advice she had received was wrong, and she began putting millions into research on female reproduction through the Bia-Echo Foundation.
The autism turn
In April 2020, as Covid spread, Shanahan had Echo assessed over Zoom and learned she was autistic. She has said the diagnosis, and the pandemic, changed her politics. A former Democratic donor, she began to question the medical consensus. In 2022 she found Dr. Jack Kruse, a neurosurgeon turned paleo-diet advocate, whose ideas include the claim that sunlight heals nearly all chronic disease.
NBC reports that Kruse told it he advised her to fund projects. She has since put millions into a University of Texas at Austin trial of an infrared headband for autistic children, a blue-light-free computer company and a startup that says it can detect autism at birth from a strand of hair. The professor behind the headband study, Francisco Gonzalez-Lima, praised her dedication.
Research shows genetics and other factors contribute to autism. NBC states that over a decade of studies have debunked the claim that vaccines cause it. Noor Pervez of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network said: “Autism is a developmental disability, and disability is a natural part of human diversity.”
The campaign
Shanahan supports bans on abortion set by states, wants Covid vaccines recalled and attacks “Big Pharma,” “Big Tech” and “Big Ag.” Critics have been blunt. Democratic strategist Lis Smith called her “woefully unserious,” and Donald Trump called her a gold digger.
She has given Kennedy’s campaign $10 million since March, plus $4 million to a PAC for the Super Bowl ad, according to NBC, which counts Kennedy on the ballot in six states. The campaign says it has signatures to qualify in 11 more. Communications director Del Bigtree called her “spectacular.” The campaign declined NBC’s repeated interview requests.
Sources
- The influences that drove Nicole Shanahan, RFK Jr.’s VP pick, to embrace conspiracy theories
- US elections: Silicon Valley philanthropist Nicole Shanahan joins Kennedy's independent presidential bid – Times of India
