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Who Is RFK Jr.'s VP Pick Nicole Shanahan?

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s pick for vice president, Nicole Shanahan, brings wealth and Silicon Valley connections to a ticket centering its campaign on populism and disinformation.
Marisa Lagos
An Asian American woman with long hair and a purple suit with a white shirt waves from a stage behind a lectern that reads "Kennedy 24."
Independent vice presidential candidate Nicole Shanahan at a campaign rally at the Kaiser Center for the Arts in Oakland on March 26, 2024. (Juliana Yamada/KQED)

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s pick for vice president, wealthy Silicon Valley attorney and entrepreneur Nicole Shanahan, has the type of background that might impress your typical Democratic voter.

She grew up lower-income in Oakland, the daughter of an immigrant mom from China and a father who struggled with substance abuse, before launching a successful career as a lawyer and philanthropist. She’s the founder and CEO of a law firm focused on intellectual property, using artificial intelligence to manage patent portfolios. She created and heads a private foundation, Bia-Echo, that cites its priorities as reproductive rights, criminal justice reform and the environment.

“My roots in Oakland taught me many things I have never forgotten: That the purpose of wealth is to help those in need,” Shanahan said to cheers as she greeted the crowd at Tuesday’s announcement in Oakland.

Shanahan’s exact net worth is unknown. She is the former wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, in addition to her own successful business ventures.

Her deep pockets have already helped Kennedy: She poured $4 million into a Super Bowl ad for the candidate, and her wealth could be useful as he fights to get on state ballots across the country. But it’s not just Shanahan’s wealth and Silicon Valley connections that make her an attractive VP choice for Kennedy: Shanahan appears wide open to some of the conspiracy theories that have made him so controversial.

In Tuesday’s speech, she spoke about one of the things that drew her to Kennedy’s campaign: a focus on what she calls chronic disease, which she blamed on a collusion between the government and corporate interests.

“There are three main causes” of what Shanahan framed as a health crisis in America, she said, citing her own fertility struggles, her daughter’s autism diagnosis, high rates of autism, depression, anxiety and obesity in America.

“One is the toxic substances in our environment, like endocrine-disrupting chemicals in our food, water and soil. Like the pesticide residues, the industrial pollutants, the microplastics, the PFAs, the food additives and the forever chemicals that have contaminated nearly every human cell,” Shanahan said.

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She went on to cite electromagnetic pollution and pharmaceutical medications as the other two reasons and said that she and Kennedy could solve the nation’s most pressing health concerns within “weeks” by ending the “corporate capture of our regulatory agencies” and using technology to examine health record databases that already exist.

“We can figure out what’s making us sick. We just have to ask the right questions, do the right research, and apply the right tools. We have to rid science of the corporate bias that contaminates it today,” she said to more cheers.

Unlike past remarks from Kennedy, Shanahan didn’t repeat falsehoods directly linking vaccines to autism or say that Wi-Fi causes cancer and “leaky brain,” or blame antidepressants for school shootings.

But much of the language she’s using is familiar to people steeped in conspiracy theories — and by playing on people’s doubts about institutions, she is sending a clear signal, said Yotam Ophir, a professor at the University at Buffalo, who studies misinformation in science and politics.

“Conspiracy theorists always use a grain of truth, a kernel of truth to, to kind of support their claims. That’s what makes, you know, those stories so compelling,” he said.

“It’s a very common populist rhetoric that kind of villainizes the established politicians as part of a corrupt system, right? Kennedy and his VP, they’re portraying themselves as outsiders of the systems, the only ones who can cure it from its ills,” he said.

Ophir said conspiracy theorists help sow the doubt they need to convince people of their false claims — and often believe those lies themselves.

“People are afraid of vaccines to a large degree because of people like Kennedy who have been spreading lies and misinformation for decades about the safety of vaccines,” he said.

Republican political consultant Mike Madrid said the popularity of candidates like Kennedy — who’s polling at an average of around 10% in national surveys — is evidence of a shift in the alignment of American politics, first made clear by former President Donald Trump’s rise.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks at his vice presidential announcement rally at Henry J. Kaiser Center for the Arts in Oakland on March 26, 2024, where he introduced Nicole Shanahan to a crowd of a few hundred. (Juliana Yamada/KQED)

“It’s populism is what it is. It’s anti-establishment,” he said, noting that those sorts of messages appeal to both liberals and conservatives. “The right-left spectrum that we have known for the better part of 150 years no longer exists; we have to start talking about establishment versus populism, outsiders versus insiders, people who are looking to just kind of break down institutions and use institutions as sort of a target to say, this is what ails us.”

Ophir agreed, calling populism a “thin ideology.” Its flexibility, he said, allows for it to be attractive to people with few other ideological agreements. It also poses a threat to the political status quo for that reason, he said.

“You can feed it to more liberal audiences or to more conservative audiences,” he said, “which is, I think, why you see that both people on the right and the left are afraid of this third-party ticket because it can eat votes away from the Democrats as well as Republicans.”

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