Independent presidential candidate and notable anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has tapped Nicole Shanahan, a wealthy Silicon Valley lawyer, as his running mate. Shanahan previously contributed $4 million to Kennedy’s super PAC, helping to bankroll a 30-second campaign ad during this year’s Super Bowl.
Shanahan, who was formerly married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin, has donated heavily to Democratic candidates in the past. In the campaign announcement speech, Kennedy called his running mate “exactly the right person,” as someone who “shared my passion for wholesome healthy foods, chemical-free for regenerative agriculture, for good soils.” He called her a “technologist at the forefront of AI” who uses “neural nets” to “identify abuses in our government.” He also praised her use of “cutting-edge technologies, including AI, to calculate the catastrophic health consequences of toxins in our soil, our air, our water, and our food.”
In her own follow-up speech, Shanahan called Kennedy “the only anti-war candidate today.”
Kennedy, who is married to Curb Your Enthusiasm actor Cheryl Hines, has previously promoted vaccine misinformation, and the Center for Countering Digital Hate has cited him as one of the top spreaders of covid misinformation. In 2021, he was banned from Instagram for repeatedly sharing misinformation. The ban was lifted in 2023.
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