Robert F. Kennedy Jr. found it difficult but congenial. running mate for an independent presidential ticket.
There’s Nicole Shanahan, a technical lawyer has no government experience or national profile, and is one of the most unusual choices for a high-profile running mate in recent memory. He is less well-known than some of the other names Kennedy considered, including NFL star Aaron Rodgers and actor and former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura.
But what he does offer is a worldview similar to Kennedy’s, a supposed loyalty to the man who plucked him from relative obscurity and, perhaps most importantly, the vast fortunes the Kennedy-Shanahan campaign could make by exceeding the donor contribution limits. who are not candidates themselves.
Shanahan, 38, also represents the youthfulness and vitality that Kennedy often says is needed in politics. And he has already shown his commitment to Kennedy’s cause, making it public in February he donated $4 million to a pro-Kennedy super PAC to help pay Super Bowl commercial.
Despite supporting mostly progressive and center-left Democrats in the past, Shanahan said he supported Kennedy in part because of his concerns about children’s health and the environment, including vaccines, and he also expressed opposition to research money. pouring into the in vitro fertilization industry.
Defended Kennedy’s defense of vaccines Newsweek this year, “it’s very unfair to be called anti-vaxxer” and “we need a safe place” to discuss the issue.
A life in the technology capital of the world
A tech lawyer and entrepreneur from Oakland, California, Shanahan has lived a life intersecting with some of the most important technology and business titans in Silicon Valley.
Born to financially struggling parents, Shanahan said his family received food stamps and he began working at age 12 to make ends meet.
“My father was diagnosed with bipolar schizophrenia when I was 9, and my Chinese-born mother had only been in the United States for two years when I was born,” she told San Francisco magazine. profile in 2021. “So not only was there no money, there was almost no parental guidance, and as you can imagine with a mentally ill father, there was a lot of chaos and fear.”
It helps him escape the internet and technology will dominate his life After graduating from the University of Puget Sound and returning to the Bay Area, he attended Santa Clara University School of Law and then entered the intersection of the worlds of law and technology.
In a landscape where innovation often outpaces regulation, he founded ClearAccessIP, a company that uses artificial intelligence technology to help patent owners manage their intellectual property. The company was acquired by IPwe in 2020.
Shanahan married Google co-founder Sergey Brin in 2018 and divorced in 2022. “The Wall Street Journal” reported on this of having an affair with billionaire Elon Musk, but both Shanahan and Musk have denied the accusation. The magazine stood by its report.
“The WSJ story that an affair with Elon Musk was the end of my marriage was about as accurate as claiming that the body heat of polar bears is responsible for the melting of Arctic ice caps,” she wrote last year. first person essay For people. “It felt pointless and cruel.”
After divorcing Brin, who is worth an estimated $121 billion, according to to Forbes, he switched to full-time philanthropy.
Shanahan’s charity Bia-Echo Foundationsays its mission is to “create a multiplier effect” on the issues Shanahan cares about, including “reproductive longevity and equity, criminal justice reform, and a healthy and livable planet.”
She started this business through her ex-husband’s foundation $100 million commitment In addition to exploring solutions to criminal justice reform and climate change in 2019, to programs that help women get pregnant later.
Productivity issues have been the focus of his foundation and his investment firm Planeta Ventures, and have since been gifted. 6 million dollars helped establish the Center for Women’s Reproductive Longevity and Equity; he said that his goal is to help women have children In their mid-50s.
However, Shanahan has argued against supporting IVF research because, in his view, it hinders understanding of the root causes of infertility. And he said the procedure “sold irresponsibly” and has become more of a “commercial endeavor” than a scientific one, is calling her promise is “one of the biggest lies told about women’s health today.”
“Many IVF clinics are financially incentivized to offer you egg freezing and IVF and are not incentivized to offer you other fertility services,” Shanahan This was reported by The New Yorker last year.
“I’m often told that IVF is this great technology and I’m always asked why I don’t support IVF more,” she said. online video series. “I tried to imagine that all the money invested in IVF and all the money invested in marketing IVF and all the government money invested in subsidizing IVF, if only 10% of it went to reproductive longevity, research and basic research.
That idea may be especially relevant this year, as both sides hope that the Supreme Court will decide in 2022 Roe v. Discusses abortion rights after decision overturning Wade. The Alabama Supreme Court ruled this year that frozen embryos created for IVF briefly halted the procedure in the state, turning the issue into a national political hot button.
Politicians from both parties have been quick to express their support for IVF, and Democrats have argued that the GOP’s longstanding position on abortion legislation and “personhood” laws would have the effect of restricting IVF.
His position on vaccines and other past propaganda
Shanahan’s 2023 essay also reveals how his experience with reporting on his marriage led him to adopt a more jaundiced view of the news media, a frequent target of Kennedy.
“They showed a reckless thirst for a popular hit piece, no matter how much it cost my life,” he said.
He and Bree had a daughter, Echo, who was diagnosed with autism at a young age. Shanahan said he was determined to invest his fortune in understanding the causes and treatment of the disorder.
Many vaccine skeptics, including Kennedy, have said that vaccines cause autism — although experts say there is no evidence to support the claim and that major research papers establishing the link are later. withdrewwith their lead author widely discredited after it was discovered that manipulated the data.
Kennedy took a leave of absence as head of Children’s Health, the nation’s best-funded anti-vaccine organization, to run for president and has since recruited a number of anti-vaccine activists into his campaign.
Last summer, Shanahan “committed” to his partner Jacob Strumwasser, “the next generation bitcoin financial software,” whom he met at Burning Man.
“We were living parallel surfing lives,” he said he told the people last year, “then we met at Burning Man, the driest place on the planet.”
Kennedy started his campaign It was his first public appearance as a candidate, with an appearance at a Bitcoin convention in Miami. And he often talked about the promise of cryptocurrency.
Politically, there is Shanahan donated a large amount Ballot measures for Democrats and progressive causes, such as criminal justice reform, according to campaign finance records.
In 2020, he gave $2,800 to Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg and hosted a fundraiser for Buttigieg, who is the transportation secretary. He also gave $2,800 to Democratic candidate Marianne Williamson in the last election cycle, who donated $25,000 to fundraising efforts to support Joe Biden. He gave the maximum $6,600 to Kennedy’s campaign last year before announcing a larger gift to a super PAC for Super Bowl ads.
Shanahan also gave money to several Democratic congressional candidates in battleground states in 2018. And he contributed the maximum $5,400 to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
He asked about his politics in 2022 he said Shayba: “I don’t think about it from the party point of view. I think about it in terms of people, places and ideas.” This attitude mirrors Kennedy’s own rhetoric, especially after he left the Democratic presidential campaign to run as an independent candidate.
While there is no clear precedent for vice presidential candidates financing their campaigns, Federal Election Commission rules exempt candidates who finance their own campaigns from contribution limits, so it appears he could contribute or lend as much to Kennedy’s campaign as he wanted.
The campaign needs money to fund its ballot drive, including the painstaking and expensive task of gathering hundreds of thousands of signatures from dozens of states.
While major-party candidates typically wait until the summer to announce their candidacies, one reason Kennedy is doing so now is because of the approaching deadlines in some states that require both names to appear on tickets to appear on the ballot.