Kennedy Jr.'s running mate is drawn to the debunking of autism conspiracy theories

As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wins more votes in battleground states than any third-party presidential candidate in decades, a more personal drama is unfolding in Silicon Valley among friends of his running mate, lawyer Nicole Shanahan. The friends are wondering what happened to the socially conscious entrepreneur they knew as a reliable advocate for causes like restorative justice, women's empowerment and tackling climate change. They worry that the addition of a young lawyer to Kennedy's fight for the White House could chip away at Joe Biden's slim lead against Donald Trump in one of the tightest elections in American history.

Kennedy, who introduced Shanahan as his running mate in March, dismissed those concerns and praised him as the candidate who would rally support for a “revolution” against the “Trump/Biden one-party system.” Kennedy blames the system for imposing “catastrophic debt, chronic disease, endless wars, lockdowns, mandates, government takeovers, and censorship” on the country. To many 2024 voters, this so-called one-party system seems less united than ever as Republicans call for a “national divorce” between red and blue states. But far from easing the fears of Democrats who want to avoid four more years of MAGA rule, Kennedy seems keen to play the role of obstructionist, just as Ralph Nader accurately predicted he would do in 2000. “Biden can’t win,” Kennedy proclaims.,He argued that incumbent Democrats are the real disruptors who should drop out of the race.

It's easy to see why the controversial heir to one of American politics' most established liberal families would choose the relatively unknown Shanahan as his running mate: Ambitious and athletic, a millennial who surfs and grows her own crops with her cryptocurrency software developer boyfriend, whom she met at Burning Man, Shanahan brings a feminine presence and youthful energy to a race dominated by men in their 80s, not to mention the 70-year-old Kennedy.

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And as the ex-wife of Sergey Brin, the Google co-founder and seventh-richest man in the world, Shanahan brings another key element to the race: immense financial resources. Her backing helps Kennedy avoid questions about why notorious anti-immigration Republican mega-donor Timothy Mellon is bankrolling American Values, the super PAC that's backing Kennedy's campaign. Mellon has pumped millions into Trump's Make America Great Again, while also donating $53 million in stock to Texas to support the former president's border wall.

Shanahan is new to electoral politics and, until recently, had little social media activity, making it hard to gauge the evolution of her thinking. Her origin story is now widely known. She launched patent valuation startup ClearAccessIP while attending law school. After his first marriage failed, Shanahan met and fell in love with Brynn at a yoga retreat, catapulting him into Silicon Valley's rarified circle of entrepreneurs. In 2018, the power couple had a daughter named Echo. When Shanahan started her foundation with Brynn's help, she named it Via Echo, after her daughter and the Greek god of indomitable strength. The foundation's website explains that its core areas of investment are “reproductive longevity and equality, criminal justice reform, and a healthy, livable planet,” goals supported by many social justice advocates.

So how did Shanahan end up on a “spoiler” ticket that was praised by right-wing ideologues like Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, and Roger Stone, the notorious Republican thug who called the Kennedy-Trump alliance the “dream ticket”??

The turning point in her life came in 2020 when Echo was diagnosed with autism, she said in an Instagram video.

of The Daily Beast Shanahan claims she was “chastised by Brin's left-brain thinking” about best practices for parenting a child with autism spectrum disorder, and that the Google co-founder filed for divorce shortly thereafter, citing “irreconcilable differences.” She initially challenged the prenuptial agreement and sought $1 billion in Brin's assets, but ultimately settled out of court. She also responded to Echo's diagnosis by becoming a “warrior mom” with virtually unlimited funds, waging an intense battle against her daughter's symptoms based on her own research, which she estimates takes up 60% of her time.

Shanahan has always touted her commitment to following the science, especially when she is trying to give legitimacy to controversial opinions. (She recently explained her support for banning early abortions by saying, ” [viability] But while she claims to keep her informed of cutting-edge autism research by world-class experts, her thinking about her daughter's condition seems stuck in the 1990s, an era when actress Jenny McCarthy was hailed as an expert on autism and Andrew Wakefield caused global panic with his paper on vaccines. Lancet Linking autism to vaccines. The paper was later retracted after multiple investigations found it to be based on fraudulent data and riddled with conflicts of interest.

Great strides have been made since then, both in the scientific understanding of autism and in promoting civil rights for people on the autism spectrum, but you wouldn't know it from watching Shanahan's Instagram reel about his daughter, which ignores hundreds of peer-reviewed studies about the central role of genetics in the disease and glosses over an alleged conspiracy by cell phones, food preservatives, and Big Pharma to cover up the epidemic of a vaguely defined “chronic disease.”

Kennedy regularly caricatures people on the autism spectrum as “vaccine-scarred” zombies, but you'd never know it from listening to him. “They get a shot… and three months later their brains are gone,” he told an audience in 2015. The candidate, who claims there was no previous generation of autistic people – in fact they were often hidden away in institutions due to the completely discredited theory that autism was caused by poor parenting – told radio and TV host Michael Smerconish last year: “I've never seen a severely autistic man my age in my life. Where are those men? One in 22 men walking around the mall with a helmet on, unpotty trained, non-verbal, stimming, walking on their toes, flapping their hands. I've never seen a man like that.”

For Kennedy and his campaign communications director, Del Bigtree, who also produced the 2016 film, Vaccinated, The COVID-19 pandemic, orchestrated by none other than Andrew Wakefield, provided a new target for misguided anger. On January 6, as rioters converged on the U.S. Capitol to try to halt the counting of the electoral votes that ultimately sealed President-elect Biden's victory, Bigtree, speaking a block away, took the themes of vaccine refusal and Republican refusal to accept the results of the national election to a conspiratorial climax. “I wish I could tell you Tony Fauci cares about your safety,” he told the crowd. “I wish I could trust that the voting machines were working… but none of that's happened.”

While Shanahan's friends may wonder why a self-described champion of female independence would lend her name and fortune to the spoiler campaign of a man who treats someone like her daughter as damaged goods, a largely overlooked aspect of her recent past shows just how far she's willing to go to “cure” Echo, even before she loses her diagnosis.The young entrepreneur's alleged affair with Elon Musk at a Miami art fair in 2021 has attracted plenty of salacious press attention. The Wall Street Journal (A claim denied by both Musk and Shanahan.) But what hasn't received enough attention is what she asked Musk to do: use his experimental Neuralink technology to “cure” her daughter's autism.

Not one to shy away from bold claims, Musk promises that the technology – which uses a surgical robot “that's like a cross between a microscope and a sewing machine” to weave hair-thin electrodes directly into brain tissue – could one day help treat obesity, depression and schizophrenia., Masks have also been shown to be effective against autism, even though the brain mechanisms that cause these conditions remain frustratingly unknown after decades of research. For a warrior mother with endless funds, early access to the technology must have seemed like a rare opportunity.

But Shanahan and her daughter should be thankful that Musk didn't interfere. Though the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Neuralink's first human trials in 2023, the rollout of the technology has been plagued by problems. First, reports emerged that about a dozen of Neuralink's primate subjects had to be euthanized after the animals developed complications, including fungal and bacterial infections, brain hemorrhages, uncontrollable shaking, head-banging and other signs of extreme distress. Then in May, the company acknowledged that its first human trials had stalled. Some of the wires implanted in the brain of a young man who became quadriplegic after a 2016 diving accident “retreated” unexpectedly, likely because Musk's robotic surgeons trapped air inside his skull. Neuralink reportedly knew about the wiring problems for five years.

Musk's grandiose claims evoke a frightening time for people on the autism spectrum, when desperate parents turned to experimental treatments such as lobotomies and cruel electroshock devices to “erase” autistic behavior in their children.

Buried in the Kennedy legacy is a lesson that should serve as a stern warning to Shanahan, who has amplified his running mate's message that people like his daughter are damaged goods. When Kennedy Jr.'s aunt, Rose Marie Kennedy, was born in 1918, a misguided nurse held her head down the birth canal for two hours until an obstetrician arrived. As a result, the little girl, nicknamed Rosemary, suffered from learning disabilities and seizures for the rest of her life. By the time she was in her 20s, her father, a prominent businessman who wanted to keep his daughter's condition a secret, arranged for her to have a lobotomy. The brain surgery was devastating for Rosemary, leaving her incontinent and unable to walk or talk properly.

This tragedy inspired Rosemary's sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, to become a pioneering disability rights advocate by founding Special Olympics in 1968. Rosemary's brother, John, as the 35th President of the United States, signed the Maternal, Child, and Mental Retardation Amendments to the Social Security Act, the precursor to the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act. With bipartisan support from politicians including Senator Bob Dole and Rosemary's brother, Senator Ted Kennedy, the ADA was signed into law in 1990.

Despite basing his electoral prospects entirely on his family name, RFK Jr. seems indifferent to his family's tradition of fighting for disability rights and ignores in his book the struggles of autistic people for dignity and respect. The Real Anthony Fauci Shanahan calls it “a specific epidemic-denying subtype of autism known as 'neurodiversity.'” But if Shanahan's belief in women's empowerment extends to his daughter, he may have a lot to learn from the other Kennedys, who publicly rejected her vice presidential candidate's spoiler campaign. And as Echo comes of age and finds her people, Shanahan may find he has a lot to learn from her, too.

This is an opinion and analysis article and the views of the author are not necessarily those of Scientific American.