Kennedy’s freshly selected running mate, Nicole Shanahan, shows the necro-futurism of Big Tech.
Last Tuesday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. revealed that Nicole Shanahan, an ultra-wealthy attorney with deep ties to Silicon Valley, would be his running mate in his independent quote for the presidency. In presenting Shanahan to his audience, Kennedy made an impressive contrast in between her and his well-known grandpa Joseph P. Kennedy. The Kennedy patriarch, who lived from 1888 to 1969 and whose large wealth was the structure for the famous political household, is normally considered as a humiliation. He was infamous for his dubious company practices and gangster connections, his sexual predation, and his ultra-right-wing politics, which, when he was United States ambassador to Great Britain in the late 1930s, made him a leading ally of the British stylish appeasers who wished to negotiate to permit Adolf Hitler to be overlord of Europe in order to protect the British Empire.
Extremely, Robert Kennedy easily acknowledged a few of his grandpa’s defects while comparing the patriarch to Shanahan. According to Kennedy, “In 1932 Franklin Roosevelt selected my grandpa, Joseph Kennedy, to run his brand name brand-new Securities and Exchange Commission. My grandpa had actually been a stock manipulator on Wall Street and FDR desired a chairman who comprehended the stock exchange inside and out as the only individual who might reform it.”
The reasoning here appears to be, “It takes a criminal to capture a criminal.” Advising the world of the crookedness of the paterfamilias makes an unusual sense due to the fact that Robert Kennedy is attempting to square the circle of providing himself as rebel versus industry (consisting of Big Tech) while selecting as his running mate the very avatar of Silicon Valley plutocracy.
In his speech Kennedy declared his project is “a spoiler for the war maker. 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 political leaders and corporations.” Even without the Shanahan alliance, this claim appears suspicious. Far from assaulting the war maker, Kennedy, quite in keeping with his household’s suspicious history, is as huge a pro-Israel hawk as Joe Biden. Kennedy’s opposition to “Big Pharma” has absolutely nothing to do with lowering drug rates and is simply a pet whistle for his advocacy of anti-vaxxing conspiracy theoriesWhen It Comes To Big Tech, Shanahan is not a Joseph Kennedy– design criminal who will check the other scoundrels however a pure symptom of the class interests of Silicon Valley magnates.
Shanahan is an informing vice governmental choice since she shows how Kennedy’s quixotic and strange governmental run is deeply linked with a reactionary faction inside the world of Big Tech that has actually accepted the politics of necro-futurism. These Big Tech right-wingers have actually chosen to co-opt boomer fond memories for the Kennedy household to offer a brand-new variation of “make America terrific once again” that stresses the expected clinical marvels that will emerge from taking apart the regulative state.
Shanahan’s Silicon Valley qualifications are remarkable. From 2018 to 2022, she was wed to Google cofounder Sergey Brin, and part of her wealth originated from their divorce settlement. Politically, her trajectory as a putatively independent-minded Democrat who moved to the right as an outcome of the increase of the activist left follows a familiar course typical amongst the Silicon Valley.
Silicon Valley cash, frequently connected to individuals in the circle of Peter Thiel, has actually sustained Kennedy’s governmental run. As Axios reported last June, “Several of Silicon Valley’s noisiest tech magnates have actually started to support the candidateship of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the singing anti-vax activist who’s challenging President Biden for the Democratic Party election.” These early backers consisted of Elon Musk in addition to investor Chamath Palihapitiya and David Sacks (a longtime service and ideological ally of Peter Thiel, a Pay