Inside the fringe worldview of RFK Jr.’s VP pick

AUSTIN, Texas — On a balmy night in May, Nicole Shanahan took the stage at an event hall here for her first stump speech, beginning with an uncommon subject for a political rally: “I want to talk about soil.”

Dressed in a sparkly lilac tank (she wears purple as a nod to centrism), Shanahan, 38, a Silicon Valley philanthropist, addressed an audience of a few hundred people who largely didn’t know her name before long-shot independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced her as his running mate two months ago.

The crowd in Austin last week — a mix of moneyed supporters, longtime anti-vaccine activists, libertarians, hippies, and health and wellness devotees — clapped and hooted as Shanahan said she didn’t want to talk about guns or inflation, but rather about what really ails America: chronic illness, poverty and political division. In a 16-minute speech punctuated by sighs and laughter, Shanahan said the answers to those problems weren’t to be found in ideas from the conventional left or right, but in Kennedy, and the “realm of the alternative.”

“I have seen the power of these alternative ways of thinking in my own life,” Shanahan said.