Is Nicole Shanahan Flirting With QAnon and Christian Nationalism?

Nicole Shanahan — the running mate to independent 2024 presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. — is warning about a supposed luciferian influence on the national government. 

Shanahan is a billionaire anti-vaxxer who, like RFK Jr., is no stranger to conspiracy theories. But Shanahan has recently embraced language common to the QAnon crowd, as well as to some Christian nationalists, to describe supernatural forces at play in our politics.

The recent dog-whistling started in late May at the Libertarian Party convention. In a written address to the gathering that Shanahan posted to X, she declared that “Bobby Kennedy can win this next election” because he “understands the deeply troubling, almost demonic forces that have overtaken our agencies, and our culture.”

A lawyer by training, Shanahan is a political neophyte, but she’s no dummy. Rhetoric about demonic possession of government plays to two crowds prone to dark superstition: adherents of the QAnon conspiracy theory and Christian nationalists. The former believe that a luciferian cabal have taken over the highest levels of government, and that this evil group of power players traffic children and harvest their blood to extend their own lives. Many Christian nationalists also believe that their movement is wrestling against demonic forces, and that their political opponents do not simply disagree with them over principle, but are in fact controlled by Satan and must be countered through “spiritual warfare.”

There is considerable overlap between the two crowds. The far-right circus known as Re-Awaken America avidly mixes QAnon adherents and the fundamentalists who encourage followers to believe that God is on their side. Both groups tend to idolize Donald Trump as a divine agent, on a heavenly mission to conquer the deep state — which helps explain why Shanahan may be seeking to substitute RFK Jr. as their savior.

As part of this persuasion effort, Shanahan on June 22 posted a list on X of things that the alleged “uniparty” hates — a list that also doubled, she wrote, as things that “most Americans love.” (The “uniparty” is populist slang to refer to Republican and Democrats who are believed to share an underlying establishment agenda despite surface level partisan disagreements.)

Most of the items on Shanahan’s top-12 list are anodyne, ranging from “democracy” and “humanity” to “real food” and “small businesses.” But one item on the list sticks out like a red flag: 

“7. Questioning if the government might be satanically possessed.”

When Rolling Stone asked Shanahan and the Kennedy campaign to clarify what demonic or satanic forces she has been referring to, the campaign sent a oblique statement from Shanahan: “Corporate capture of the government has resulted in massive harm to human and ecological life,” she said. “I believe that is evil.”

Shanahan is a lawyer by training who became a billionaire by marrying and later divorcing Google cofounder Sergey Brin, whom she reportedly met at a yoga festival. Shanahan is only 38 and a political novice, but she has boosted the Kennedy campaign by donating at least $10 million to the third party effort. Kennedy tapped her as his running mate in March.

Shanahan is a raw milk enthusiast who is increasingly consuming a diet of right-wing media. She follows Tucker Carlson on X, and has in recent days retweeted a video from longtime Alex Jones wingman Owen Shroyer. Shanahan has appeared on podcasts with the chemtrail-curious Naomi Wolf and oft-canceled Dilbert creator Scott Adams. She follows two accounts of the far-right Kentucky congressman Thomas Massie on X, and has praised former congressman and GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul for “carrying [the] voice of our founding fathers.”

Shanahan is far from the only left-wing, natural-living, yoga lover whose new age spirituality and distrust of the medical establishment has led directly to a wormhole journey to the world of right-wing conspiracy theory. Rolling Stone wrote about the phenomenon during the pandemic year of 2021. “Concerns about safety have been absorbed into this other way of viewing the world,” Jack Bratich, a Rutgers professor and author of Conspiracy Panics, explained, alluding to the world of QAnon.

Shanahan, who has second billing on what is expected to be the most successful third-party presidential ticket in decades, doesn’t seem particularly averse to the conspiracy theory — if she isn’t pushing some of its core principles outright.