Nicole Shanahan is an interesting woman (more on that in a minute). She also was, up until this year, a stalwart Democrat. However, the Democrat party’s decidedly anti-Democrat behavior, both in blocking RFK Jr’s campaign and in placing Kamala at the head of the ticket without her having won a single primary ever, soured her on her one-time party. Now that she’s had a taste of MAGA, she’s also realized that the media and the Democrat establishment have been lying all along. Since she’s got rich and powerful friends, let’s hope her epiphany spreads.

Per Wikipedia, Shanahan’s mother was an immigrant who grew up in communist China before meeting her German-Irish father. Her father, a computer specialist, suffered badly from mental illness (bipolar, schizophrenic, depressive) along with self-medicating, causing substance abuse. The pair settled in Oakland, California, and Shanahan describes her upbringing as poverty-stricken and traumatic. Because she was bright and hardworking, though, she went to college and law school.

Image: Nicole Shanahan (cropped). YouTube screen grab.

After becoming interested in patent law, Shanahan leveraged her patent and legal expertise to create a legal tech company. She eventually sold the company in 2020 for an estimated $20 million in IPwe stock (although IPwe’s bankruptcy this year means that, if she hung onto the stock, it’s worth nothing).

In 2018, Shanahan married Sergey Brin, one of Google’s co-founders, with whom she has a young daughter. That marriage didn’t last long. Although Shanahan had a pre-nup with Brin, she negotiated hundreds of millions in Google shares. Estimates are that she’s worth over $1 billion thanks to that short-lived marriage.

Until recently, Shanahan’s political orientation was Democrat. For 20 years, she’s donated to Democrat candidates and funded Democrat issues. However, she’s also suspicious of big-tech and big-pharm medicine. She distrusts IVF for infertility and thinks that women aren’t getting enough sunlight. (This isn’t as crazy as it sounds. As COVID shows, Americans are sorely lacking in Vitamin D, which is a necessary ingredient in our immune systems.) Also, because her daughter is autistic, she’s interested in non-standard approaches. (As this luminous novel reveals, the scientific community has been awful at autism.)

In March 2024, Shanahan joined Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., as his running mate in his independent presidential campaign. By this time, Shanahan had already witnessed the Democrat party freeze Kennedy out of the primaries, and from March forward, she saw Democrats ensure that Kennedy couldn’t get on most state ballots.

Now that the campaign is over and Kennedy has endorsed Trump, Shanahan has done a few press appearances—with conservatives, everyone from Jesse Watters to Adam Carolla. What’s interesting is that this exposure to actual conservatives, rather than to the leftist caricature of conservatives, is that, as she told Dave Smith, she now understands how the media and the Democrat establishment have consistently lied about conservatives and the MAGA movement:

Listen to RFK’s running mate who is a very well-known liberal tell you that everything she’s ever been told by the mainstream media about the Maga movement is a lie and how they have been so extremely welcoming and thoughtful. pic.twitter.com/ifksvQRWuw

— Insurrection Barbie (@DefiyantlyFree) August 29, 2024

You know, actually, the best part of joining forces with Trump has been seeing MAGA, which I'm learning so much about. I was completely misinformed about what MAGA is.

I don't know if you've taken any deep dives into MAGA-world, but I was just under the impression that they were gun-toting radicals who wanted to come to my doorstep and rip my liberal family out of my house, and, I don't know, do horrible things to liberals. And that's how that's how MAGA has been sold to a huge portion of America by the mainstream media.

And I have to say that what I have learned about MAGA is that they're actually their own party. They're their own grassroots organization that chose Donald Trump. They have so much power in deciding where to point their energy and support.

And they are really, really smart, thoughtful, intellectual people within MAGA. I’ve received beautifully written notes from MAGA supporters, and they were...

You know, our base didn't know how to engage with MAGA. Our base was not, you know, MAGA-oriented in the sense of even knowing who and what MAGA was and what their infrastructure was. In many ways, it's an online, viral movement.

And so the coming together of...

And they gave us the name MAHA—Make America Healthy Again. Have you seen? [“Yes, I’ve seen,” says the interviewer.]

Oh, my gosh, I mean we didn't come up with that. We're getting hats made.

But the coming together of these two groups over the last week—hasn't even been a full week yet—but watching that happen has been really glorious because that was always the vision of this unity movement, this desire to heal the divide.

And even though these are just two pockets within a much larger group of the American demographic, they're two very powerful pockets. And to find common ground has been one of the most motivating, optimistic things I've seen in recent political times.

Welcome to MAGA country, Ms. Shanahan. And now, given your connections, I hope you’re able to spread the word to other Democrat stalwarts the lies that Democrats tell.