Nicole Shanahan Ventures Onto the Stump for Kennedy

She quoted Carl Jung as she opened her meandering speech, cited what she called the “ruthless” American psyche, alluded to her friendship with the director of the “Black Panther” movies and talked about how Americans needed to remember their ancestors.

Nicole Shanahan, the Silicon Valley millionaire chosen by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as his running mate, had previously said that she would spend little time on the campaign trail, leaving stump speeches mainly to Mr. Kennedy.

But in her first outing on the hustings, in Houston on Saturday about a month and a half after she joined Mr. Kennedy on his independent presidential ticket, Ms. Shanahan signaled that she was a fitting match for him, speaking about the electorate as if it were the victim of a vast Covid-related conspiracy and defying easy categorization along partisan lines.

“I often said Covid was the truth serum,” she said of the pandemic. “Because it showed us things that people have been trying to hide from us for a really long time.” She added, with an expletive at the end for emphasis: “We can’t unfeel it — that raging sense of being controlled and captured and manipulated and herded. We’re not going to stand that anymore.”

Pausing frequently and checking a printed copy of her remarks that she held in one hand, Ms. Shanahan spoke of restorative justice and of her backing of a progressive district attorney in California, but also warned of the specter of communism in the American education system and assailed President Biden’s support for Ukraine in defending itself against Russia.

When a National Guardsman asked how she would help restore faith, as he put it, between the military and the government, Ms. Shanahan said that she was appalled by Mr. Biden’s foreign