Last Tuesday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that Nicole Shanahan, an ultra-wealthy lawyer with deep ties to Silicon Valley, would be his running mate in his independent bid for the presidency. In introducing Shanahan to his audience, Kennedy made a remarkable comparison between her and his notorious grandfather Joseph P. Kennedy. The Kennedy patriarch, who lived from 1888 to 1969 and whose vast wealth was the foundation for the legendary political family, is usually regarded as an embarrassment. He was notorious for his shady business practices and gangster connections, his sexual predation, and his ultra-right-wing politics, which, when he was US ambassador to Great Britain in the late 1930s, made him a leading ally of the British aristocratic appeasers who wanted to make a deal to allow Adolf Hitler to be overlord of Europe in order to preserve the British Empire.

Remarkably, Robert Kennedy freely acknowledged some of his grandfather’s flaws while comparing the patriarch to Shanahan. According to Kennedy, “In 1932 Franklin Roosevelt appointed my grandfather, Joseph Kennedy, to run his brand new Securities and Exchange Commission. My grandfather had been a stock manipulator on Wall Street and FDR wanted a chairman who understood the stock market inside and out as the only person who could reform it.”

The logic here seems to be, “It takes a crook to catch a crook.” Reminding the world of the crookedness of the paterfamilias makes a strange sense because Robert Kennedy is trying to square the circle of presenting himself as rebel against big business (including Big Tech) while choosing as his running mate the very avatar of Silicon Valley plutocracy.

In his speech Kennedy claimed his campaign is “a spoiler for the war machine. It’s a spoiler for Wall Street and Big Ag and Big Tech and Big Telecom and Big Pharma and the corporate-owned media and all the corrupt politicians and corporations.” Even without the Shanahan alliance, this claim seems dubious. Far from attacking the war machine, Kennedy, very much in keeping with his family’s dubious history, is as big a pro-Israel hawk as Joe Biden. Kennedy’s opposition to “Big Pharma” has nothing to do with bringing down drug prices and is just a dog whistle for his advocacy of anti-vaxxing conspiracy theories. As for Big Tech, Shanahan is not a Joseph Kennedy–style crook who will rein in the other crooks but a pure manifestation of the class interests of Silicon Valley tycoons.

Shanahan is a telling vice presidential pick because she illustrates how Kennedy’s quixotic and bizarre presidential run is deeply intertwined with a reactionary faction inside the world of Big Tech that has embraced the politics of necro-futurism. These Big Tech right-wingers have decided to co-opt boomer nostalgia for the Kennedy family to sell a new version of “make America great again” that emphasizes the supposed scientific wonders that will emerge from dismantling the regulatory state.

Shanahan’s Silicon Valley credentials are impeccable. From 2018 to 2022, she was married to Google cofounder Sergey Brin, and part of her wealth came from their divorce settlement. Politically, her trajectory as a putatively independent-minded Democrat who shifted to the right as a result of the rise of the activist left follows a familiar path common among the Silicon Valley right.

Silicon Valley money, often tied to people in the circle of Peter Thiel, has fueled Kennedy’s presidential run. As Axios reported last June, “Several of Silicon Valley’s noisiest tech moguls have begun to support the candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the vocal anti-vax activist who’s challenging President Biden for the Democratic Party nomination.” These early backers included Elon Musk as well as venture capitalists Chamath Palihapitiya and David Sacks (a longtime business and ideological ally of Peter Thiel, a Paypal and Facebook tycoon who backed Donald Trump in 2016).

Writing about this cohort in The New Republic in 2022, Jacob Silverman noted that a pivotal movement that helped coalesce the group was the successful campaign to recall Chesa Boudin as San Francisco district attorney because of his support for criminal justice reform. Both Shanahan and Sacks contributed heavily to the Boudin recall campaign, which demonstrated that Silicon Valley money could roll back left-wing social movements.

Prior to 2022, Shanahan was a typical wealthy Democratic Party donor, giving to figures such as Pete Buttigieg and Joe Biden. But in 2022 she joined the anti-Boudin campaign, which connected her with a wider cohort of reactionary tech figures. As Shanahan explained, she didn’t think that criminal justice reform was necessary and “Chesa came into a situation that needed to be maintained, in my opinion, not necessarily reformed.”

There’s a pipeline that runs from anti-Boudin sentiment to supporting Robert Kennedy, but law-and-order politics is just one component of Shanahan’s journey. Another key factor was openness to alternative medicine and quack science, defended with the familiar contrarian defense that we need to ask questions. Shanahan is opposed to in vitro fertilization as “one of the biggest lies that’s being told about women’s health today.” As AP reports, “Shanahan’s speech accompanying the announcement of her joining the Kennedy campaign “referenced discredited theories about vaccines as Kennedy and his allies have been accused of doing.”