Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy’s campaign is best known for fringe conspiracy theories tied to vaccines and other medical interventions, such as the belief that antidepressants cause school shootings. But his running mate, Silicon Valley lawyer and entrepreneur Nicole Shanahan, now appears to be dabbling in a wider and, well, more fantastical range of paranoid thinking about the world. Among other things, she has proposed that she and Kennedy are not just fighting against bad policies, but against “demonic” forces — a disconcerting phenomenon, for sure. But there is a potential silver lining: The claims are also more likely to be bought by voters who might otherwise vote for former President Donald Trump.
A new report in Rolling Stone lays out how Shanahan’s rhetoric about the two party-system has taken a dark turn. In her pitch to the Libertarian Party in May, she argued that Kennedy could win because he “understands the deeply troubling, almost demonic forces that have overtaken our agencies, and our culture.” The hedge with “almost” does nothing to alleviate my concern that Shanahan seems to think Washington may need a literal exorcism. And in a post on X last week, she published a list of 12 things she believes that the “uniparty hates” and “most Americans love.” (“Uniparty” is a shorthand for the idea that the Democrats and Republicans are merely two faces of the same establishment party.) The list included “democracy,” “parents raising their kids,” “humanity,” and, at No. 7, “questioning if the government might be satanically possessed.” OK!
We live in a very politically polarized nation, but it’s still highly unusual to hear political leaders refer to their opponents as literally diabolical.
Third parties often try to run on policy ideas that neither of the two major parties have an interest in. The Green Party historically contends that neither Democrats nor Republicans do enough to take care of the environment or attend to consumer safety. Libertarians argue that neither Democrats nor Republicans are willing to adquately shrink the size of government or make tax policies fairer. Shanahan apparently thinks that neither party is willing to reckon with an evil spirit’s possession of Uncle Sam.
Shanahan’s belief that the two-party system hates “humanity” also speaks to the belief that she and Kennedy are locked in a Manichean struggle between light and darkness. Yes, we live in a very politically polarized nation, but it’s still highly unusual to hear political leaders refer to their opponents as literally diabolical.
Talk of the government as devilish does not just imply a certain kind of religiosity or paranoia — it has specific political valences in contemporary American life. Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson writes:
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.”
It would be naive to think that Shanahan is stumbling into this rhetoric by accident. Like Kennedy, she has swiftly embedded herself in the far-right media ecosystem. At a recent event Shanahan said that she and former Fox News host and conspiracy theorist extraordinaire Tucker Carlson are “on the same page in every single way.” On social media she boosted an InfoWars host who was sentenced to prison for his role in sparking the Jan. 6 insurrection. Regardless of where Shanahan's privately held beliefs lie, there is no reason to assume she doesn’t know exactly what she’s tapping into with this speech.
Considering that Kennedy is consistently garnering around 10% in national polls, it’s unpleasant to contemplate how his campaign is potentially further mainstreaming QAnon conspiracy theories and corroding our social fabric. It is not good for influential political leaders to encourage people to believe that the mainstream political class can’t be trusted because it is hostage to satanic forces. It limits the possibility for dialogue across political boundaries; it’s one thing to be cynical about the ability of the government to get things done; it’s another thing to think that it compromised by the devil. This strain of mistrust can also intensify the likelihood of extremist violence, such as when a man fired a gun in Comet Pizza in Washington, D.C., in 2016 based on disinformation that it served as the base for a satanic child sex abuse ring.
But if this kind of rhetoric continues and intensifies, it could be good news for Biden. Believers in theories of a demonic cabal in the government skew to the right, and it’s possible that voters who otherwise might be part of Trump’s base defect to Kennedy. In a narrow race, that could make a difference for Biden in some key states.
