RFK Jr. Running Mate Brags That She’s on “Same Page” as Tucker Carlson
In the conspiracy world, white supremacist conspiracy theorist Tucker Carlson is evidently a triumph of independent anti-establishment thought. At least if you ask Robert F. Kennedy Jr. running mate (and billionaire) Nicole Shanahan.
“I’m sitting across from Tucker, and he and I are so on the same page in every single way,” Shanahan boasted during a campaign stop last week in Maine, provoking cheers from the small audience. “We are on the same page because we have left ‘establishment thinking’ once and for all.”
While touting his campaign as a defiant underdog battling against the forces of establishment control, former so-called Democrat Kennedy has long been a conspiracy theorist who routinely finds himself apologizing for pushing antisemitic rhetoric and appalling conspiracies—like nonsensically claiming Covid-19 was created to spare Jews and that vaccine requirements are worse than the Holocaust.
The anti-vax nonprofit Kennedy chairs, Children’s Health Defense, was a major propagator of anti-vaccine disinformation in 2021 and often found itself rubbing shoulders with QAnon-addled Trumpsters and election denialist insurrectionists. According to The Washington Post, Children’s Health Defense has peddled the “Great Reset” conspiracy, which claims “global elites” (billionaires, like Shanahan?) planned to use the coronavirus pandemic to “push forward a globalist or Marxist plot to destroy American sovereignty and prosperity and control the population.”
Tucker Carlson was ousted at Fox News after repeatedly pushing the deeply racist ‘Great Replacement’ theory, a racist conspiracy which falsely claims non-white immigrants are relocating to the U.S. for the explicit intention of eliminating “white culture.” Great Replacement is a staple conspiracy among the extreme far-right, and has been frequently touted by racist mass shooters.
Shanahan’s embrace of Carlson, both ultra-rich and espousing conspiracies either covertly or overtly rooted in racism, is just another example of how the “anti-establishment” label is often just a scam to get people buying into authoritarian, extremist ideologies.