RFK Jr.’s Vice-Presidential Pick Drawn in by Debunked Autism Conspiracy Theory

With Robert F. Kennedy Jr. polling more strongly in battleground states than any third-party candidate for president in decades, a more personal drama now plays out in Silicon Valley among the friends of his running mate, attorney Nicole Shanahan. They're wondering what happened to the socially conscious entrepreneur they knew as a reliable advocate for causes such as restorative justice, female empowerment and the tackling of climate change. They worry that the young attorney joining Kennedy’s run for the White House may help erode Joe Biden’s slim margins of support against Donald Trump in one of the most fraught elections in American history.

Introducing Shanahan as his running mate in March, Kennedy dismissed these concerns, praising her as a candidate who will rally support for a “revolution” against what he calls “the Trump/Biden Uniparty,” which he blames for saddling the nation with “ruinous debt, chronic disease, endless wars, lockdowns, mandates, agency capture, and censorship.” To many voters in 2024, with congressional Republicans calling for a “national divorce” between red and blue states, this alleged uniparty has never looked less united. But rather than allaying the anxieties of Democrats desperate to avert four more years of MAGA rule, Kennedy seems eager to play the role of a spoiler, as he accurately predicted that Ralph Nader would do in 2000. He has declared that “Biden can’t win,” insisting that the incumbent Democrat is the real spoiler who should drop out of the race.

It’s easy to see why the controversial heir to the most prestigious liberal name-brand in American politics chose Shanahan, a relative unknown, to be his nominee for vice president. As an ambitious and athletic millennial who surfs and grows her own food with her boyfriend, a cryptocurrency software developer she met at Burning Man, the 38-year-old attorney brings a woman’s presence, and youthful energy, to a race dominated by octogenarian men, not to mention the 70-year-old Kennedy.

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And as the former wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, the seventh richest man in the world, Shanahan brings another factor crucial to the campaign: unfathomably deep pockets. Her backing enables Kennedy to skirt questions about why the notoriously anti-immigration GOP megadonor Timothy Mellon is financing the super PAC supporting Kennedy’s campaign, American Values. Mellon has poured millions into Trump’s Make America Great Again Inc., while donating $53 million in stock to the state of Texas to build the former president’s border wall.

Shanahan is a newcomer to electoral politics and, until recently, had created only a sparse social-media footprint, making it tough to pin down the evolution of her perspective. But her origin story is now widely known. While putting herself through law school, she launched her own patent-valuation startup, ClearAccessIP. After her first marriage failed, Shanahan met Brin at a yoga retreat and fell in love, catapulting her into the most rarified circles of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship. In 2018 the power couple had a daughter named Echo. When Shanahan launched a foundation with Brin’s backing, she named it Bia-Echo, after their daughter and the Greek god of indominable power. The foundation’s website explains that its core areas of investment are “reproductive longevity and equality, criminal justice reform, and a healthy and livable planet,” goals that many social-justice advocates might support.

So how did Shanahan end up on a “spoiler” ticket praised by right-wing ideologues like Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn and Roger Stone, the notorious GOP mischief-maker who called an alliance between Kennedy and Trump his “dream ticket”?

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

The Daily Beast claims that Shanahan “chafed at Brin’s left-brain thinking” about the best practices for raising a child on the spectrum, and the Google co-founder filed divorce papers shortly thereafter, citing “irreconcilable differences.” She initially contested their prenuptial agreement and sought $1 billion of Brin’s fortune but eventually settled out of court. She also responded to Echo’s diagnosis by becoming a “warrior mom” with a virtually unlimited war chest, waging a pitched battle against her daughter’s condition based on her own research, which she estimates takes up to 60 percent of her time.

Shanahan routinely touts her commitment to following the science, particularly when she’s trying to lend legitimacy to a controversial opinion. (She recently defended her support for banning abortion early in pregnancy by saying “the science around [viability] is changing all the time.”) But while she claims that world-class experts keep her apprised of cutting-edge autism research, her ideas about her daughter’s condition seem stuck in the 1990s; during that era, actress Jenny McCarthy was hailed as an autism expert, and Andrew Wakefield triggered a global panic about vaccines with the publication of a paper in The Lancet linking autism to vaccines. That paper was later retracted after multiple investigations found it based on fraudulent data and riddled with conflicts of interest.

Much progress has been made since then, both in the scientific understanding of autism and the advancement of civil rights for people on the spectrum. But you wouldn’t know it from watching Shanahan’s Instagram reel about her daughter, which overlooks hundreds of peer-reviewed studies of the central role of genetics in the condition in favor of earnest hand-waving about cell phones, preservatives in food and an alleged conspiracy by big pharma to cover up a vaguely defined epidemic of “chronic disease.”

And you wouldn’t know it from listening to Kennedy, who routinely caricatures people on the spectrum as “vaccine-injured” zombies. “They get the shot ... and three months later, their brain is gone,” Kennedy told an audience in 2015. Insisting that previous generations of autistic people simply never existed—when in truth, they were often hidden away in institutions because of a thoroughly discredited theory that autism is caused by bad parenting—the candidate told radio and TV host Michael Smerconish last year: “I have never in my life seen a man my age with full-blown autism, not once. Where are these men? One out of every 22 men who are walking around the mall with helmets on, who are non-toilet-trained, nonverbal, stimming, toe-walking, hand-flapping. I’ve never seen it.”

For Kennedy and the communications director of the campaign, Del Bigtree, who also produced the 2016 film Vaxxed, directed by none other than Andrew Wakefield, the COVID-19 pandemic provided new targets for misdirected rage. On January 6, as rioters converged on the U.S. Capitol to try to stop the counting of Electoral College votes that eventually confirmed President-elect Biden’s victory, Bigtree, speaking a block away, brought the themes of vaccine refusal and Republican refusal to accept the outcome of a national election to a conspiratorial crescendo: “I wish I could tell you that Tony Fauci cares about your safety,” he told the crowd. “I wish I could believe that voting machines worked … but none of this is happening.”

If Shanahan’s friends are wondering why a self-proclaimed supporter of women’s autonomy is lending her name and fortune to the spoiler campaign of a man who writes off people like her own daughter as damaged goods, a nearly overlooked aspect of her recent past shows just how far she’s willing to go to “fix” Echo to the point where she loses her diagnosis. Much salacious press attention has been expended on an affair that the young entrepreneur allegedly had with Elon Musk at an art fair in Miami in 2021, as reported in the Wall Street Journal (denied by both Musk and Shanahan). But not enough attention has been paid to what she asked Musk to do: use his experimental Neuralink technology to “treat” her daughter’s autism.

Never one to shrink from making extravagant claims, Musk has promised that the technology (which employs a surgical robot described as “a cross between a microscope and a sewing machine” to weave hair-thin electrodes directly into brain tissue) will someday help treat obesity, depression and schizophrenia, as well as autism, despite the fact that the mechanisms in the brain that cause these conditions have proven frustratingly elusive even after decades of research. For a warrior mother with an inexhaustible war chest, early access to Musk’s technology must have seemed like a precious opportunity.

But Shanahan and her daughter should be grateful that Musk’s intervention never happened. The Food and Drug Administration gave its approval for Neuralink’s first human trial in 2023, but the rollout of the technology has been problematic. First, reports surfaced that about a dozen of Neuralink’s primate subjects had to be euthanized after test animals suffered complications that included fungal and bacterial infections, brain bleeding, uncontrollable shaking, head-banging and other signs of extreme distress. Then, in May, the company admitted its first human trial had hit a snag: some of the wires implanted in the brain of a young man who developed quadriplegia after a 2016 diving accident had unexpectedly “retracted,” possibly because Musk’s robot surgeon left air trapped in his skull. Neuralink has reportedly known about problems with the wiring for five years.

Musk’s grandiose claims hearken back to an earlier era of horror for people on the spectrum, when desperate parents sought cures for their children in experimental treatments like lobotomies and brutal electric-shock devices to “extinguish” their autistic behavior.

There’s a cautionary tale buried in the Kennedy family legacy that should serve as a stark warning to Shanahan as she amplifies her running mate’s message that people like her daughter are damaged goods. When RFK Jr.’s aunt, Rose Marie Kennedy, was born in 1918, a misguided nurse held her head in the birth canal for two hours while waiting for the obstetrician to arrive. As a result, the little girl, nicknamed Rosemary, struggled with learning disabilities and seizures for the rest of her life. By the time she was in her 20s, her father Joseph, a prominent businessman who was desperate to keep his daughter’s condition secret, arranged for her to have a lobotomy. The brain operation proved devastating to Rosemary, leaving her incontinent and unable to walk or speak coherently.

This tragedy proved to be the impetus for Rosemary's sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, to found the Special Olympics in 1968 and become a pioneering advocate for the rights of disabled people. As the 35th president of the United States, Rosemary's older brother John signed the Maternal and Child Health and Mental Retardation Planning Amendment to the Social Security Act, a precursor to the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act. Championed by a bipartisan group of politicians including Senator Bob Dole and Rosemary's brother, Senator Ted Kennedy, the ADA was signed into law in 1990.

Although he owes his electoral prospects entirely to his family name, RFK Jr. seems disinterested in his family’s legacy of fighting for disability rights, dismissing the struggle of autistic people for dignity and respect in his book The Real Anthony Fauci as “a particular brand of autism epidemic denial known as ‘Neurodiversity.’” But if Shanahan’s belief in female empowerment extends to her own daughter, she has much to learn from the other Kennedys, who have publicly disowned her running mate’s spoiler campaign. And hopefully, as Echo comes of age and finds her own people, Shanahan will find she has much to learn from her, too.

This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.