The Silicon Valley lawyer, chosen by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as his running mate, made her first solo outing on the stump. She is to appear alongside him at a rally on Monday in Austin, Texas.
- Share full article
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announcing Nicole Shanahan as his running mate in March. She is hitting the campaign trail for the first time.
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 policy, warning that he was putting U.S. troops “at risk of getting into a third world war.”
We are having trouble retrieving the article content.
Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
Source: nytimes.com
