Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has found an unlikely but like-minded candidate for the independent presidential race.
Nicole Shanahan, a high-tech lawyer, has no government experience or national name recognition, making her the most unusual choice for a big-name vice presidential candidate in recent memory. She is far less well-known than other names Kennedy considered, including NFL star Aaron Rodgers and actor and former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura.
But what she offers is a worldview similar to Kennedy's, a presumed loyalty to the man who plucked her from relative obscurity, and perhaps most importantly, Kennedy Shanahan. This is a vast amount of wealth that the faction can utilize far beyond the contribution limits that apply to donors. She is not a candidate herself.
Shanahan, 38, also brings the youth and vigor that Kennedy often says he needs in politics. And she has already shown her dedication to Kennedy's cause, revealing in February that she donated $4 million to a pro-Kennedy super PAC for Super Bowl advertising.
Mr. Shanahan, who has primarily supported progressive and center-left Democrats, said he was motivated in part to support Mr. Kennedy by concerns about children's health and the environment, including vaccines. , has also expressed opposition to Kennedy's research funding. We focused on the IVF industry.
She defended President Kennedy's anti-vaccination claims, telling Newsweek magazine this year that it's “very unfair to be called an anti-vaxxer” and that “we need a safe space” to discuss the issue. ” he said.
Living in the tech capital of the world
A technology lawyer and entrepreneur turned philanthropist from Oakland, California, Shanahan has spent his life working with some of Silicon Valley's most important technology and business titans.
Born to financially struggling parents, Shanahan said her family was on food stamps and she started working at age 12 to help make ends meet.
“My father was diagnosed with bipolar schizophrenia when I was 9 years old, and my mother, who was born in China, had only been in the United States for two years when I was born,” she wrote in a 2021 profile in San Francisco Magazine. told. There was no money, little parental guidance, and as you can imagine from a mentally ill father, there was a lot of confusion and fear. ”
She credits the Internet with helping her escape, and after graduating from the University of Puget Sound, returning to the Bay Area, attending Santa Clara University School of Law, and then diving into the intersection of law and law, technology has become a part of her life. will come to dominate. world of technology.
At a time when innovation often outpaces regulation, she founded ClearAccessIP, a company that uses artificial intelligence technology to help patent owners manage their intellectual property, according to its website. The company was acquired by IPwe in 2020.
Shanahan married Google co-founder Sergey Brin in 2018 and divorced in 2022. That same year, the Wall Street Journal reported that she had an affair with her billionaire boyfriend, Elon Musk, but Shanahan and Musk deny the accusations. The Journal has stood by its reporting.
“The Journal's report that my affair with Elon Musk led to the end of my marriage was as accurate as blaming the melting of the Arctic ice sheets on polar bears' body heat,” she said. I wrote this in my first contribution last year. Character essay for characters. “It felt pointless and cruel.”
After divorcing Brin, who is worth an estimated $121 billion, according to Forbes, she transitioned to full-time philanthropy.
Shanahan's philanthropic organization, the Via Echo Foundation, says its mission is to “create synergistic effects” on the issues Shanahan cares about, including “reproductive longevity and equity, criminal justice reform, and a healthy, livable planet.” ”.
She began her work through her ex-husband's foundation, which in 2019 committed $100 million to programs aimed at helping women with late-life pregnancies, in addition to finding solutions to criminal justice reform and climate change. announced.
Infertility issues have been a focus of her foundation and investment firm Planeta Ventures, and a subsequent $6 million donation helped establish the Center for Women's Reproductive Longevity and Equality. Her goal, she said, is to help women have children into their mid-50s.
However, Shanahan insists that he does not support IVF research because he believes it hinders understanding of the root causes of infertility. And she claims the procedure is being “marketed irresponsibly” and has become more of a “commercial endeavour” than a scientific endeavour, adding that its promise “is not consistent with what's being said about women's health today. “It's one of the biggest lies,” he said.
“Many IVF clinics are financially incentivized to offer egg freezing and IVF, but are not incentivized to offer other fertility services,” Shanahan said last year. told the New Yorker.
“I'm often told that IVF is a great technology, but people always ask me why we don't support it more,” she said in an online video series. “I think if we had all the money invested in IVF, all the money invested in marketing IVF, and all the government money invested in subsidies for IVF, what would we do? I imagined it would be a great field, even if only 10% of it went to reproductive lifespan, research, basic research.”
That perspective could be especially important this year as both parties debate abortion rights in the wake of the Supreme Court's 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade. The Alabama Supreme Court ruled this year that frozen embryos created for in vitro fertilization belong to people, temporarily halting the procedure in the state and thrusting the issue into the national political spotlight. It became a target.
Politicians of both parties rushed to express support for IVF, with Democrats arguing that longstanding Republican positions on abortion and “personhood” laws had the effect of restricting IVF.
Her positions on vaccines and other past advocacy efforts
Shanahan's 2023 essay describes how her experience reporting on marriages led her to take a more biased view of the news media, a frequent target of President Kennedy. It is also clear that it was.
“They demonstrated a reckless thirst for popular hits, even if it cost me my life,” she wrote.
She and Bryn had a daughter, Echo, who was diagnosed with autism at an early age. Ms. Shanahan is dedicated to investing her wealth in understanding the causes and treatments for her disorder, she said.
Many vaccine skeptics, including Kennedy, claim that vaccines cause autism, but experts say there is no evidence to support that claim and a key research paper showing the link was later retracted. , even though the lead author said his data was widely discredited after the vaccine was found to have been manipulated.
Kennedy took a leave of absence from his job as leader of Children's Health Defense, the nation's top-funded anti-vaccination group, to run for president, but has since joined many anti-vaccination activists. are participating in the election campaign.
Last summer, Shanahan made a “promise'' to his partner Jacob Strumwasser, an executive at a company developing “next-generation Bitcoin financial software,'' whom he met at Burning Man.
“We were living parallel surfing lives,” she told People magazine last year. “And we met at Burning Man, the driest place on earth.”
Kennedy kicked off his campaign with a speech at a Bitcoin convention in Miami, his first public appearance as a candidate. And he has frequently talked about the future of cryptocurrencies.
Politically, Mr. Shanahan has donated heavily to progressive causes, including the Democratic Party and criminal justice reform ballot measures, according to campaign finance records.
In 2020, he donated $2,800 to Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg and co-hosted a fundraiser for Buttigieg, who is secretary of transportation. She also donated $2,800 to Democratic candidate Marianne Williamson during the last election cycle before donating $25,000 to a fundraiser supporting Joe Biden. She also donated a record $6,600 to the Kennedy campaign last year, and she later announced an even larger donation to a super PAC for a Super Bowl ad.
Shanahan also donated to several Democratic House candidates in battleground states in 2018, and donated up to $5,400 to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign in 2016.
When asked about her politics in 2022, she told Pac: I think of it in terms of people, places, and ideas. ” This stance mirrors Kennedy's own rhetoric, especially since he left the Democratic presidential primary and ran as an independent.
There is no clear precedent for a vice presidential candidate to finance a campaign, but Federal Election Commission rules exempt candidates who finance their own campaigns from contribution limits. , appears to be able to donate or lend as much as they want to Mr. Kennedy's campaign.
The campaign needs money to fund its ballot access efforts, including the arduous and expensive task of collecting hundreds of thousands of signatures from dozens of states.
Major party candidates typically wait until the summer to announce their running mate, but Kennedy made the announcement now in part because of the looming deadline for both candidates to be on the ballot in some states. This is because
This article originally appeared on NBCNews.com
