Their dialog is fascinating, demonstrating how frustrations with standard medication and the will for a transcendent order — for a giant holistic framework that is sensible of the world’s destabilizing chaos — lead away from technocratic liberalism and towards, nicely, the unstable political formation that’s coalescing round Kennedy. Listening to it, you possibly can hear a sensible and delicate girl narrating her personal journey down the rabbit gap, a portal that took her to a spot the place she might assist swing the 2024 election and thus the course of American historical past.
Shanahan got here to Kennedy the best way many determined dad and mom have. Throughout the pandemic, her 18-month-old daughter was identified, over Zoom, with autism, and she or he described how not one of the interventions supplied by consultants helped. One other Silicon Valley mother with an autistic youngster urged her to take heed to Kennedy, who has lengthy asserted a false hyperlink between vaccines and autism. Although Shanahan was resistant at first — she knew about Kennedy’s repute as a conspiracy theorist — she tuned into his podcast.
Across the similar time, she bought deep into the work of Jack Kruse, a neurosurgeon and self-described “biohacker” who emphasizes the significance of daylight for good well being. (Kennedy and Kruse appeared collectively on Rubin’s podcast final yr.) Kruse, mentioned Shanahan, woke up her to the concept that autism might be “associated to the best way that the mind was responding to some type of outdoors affect” — like vaccines — “and heal the mind.”
She began her daughter, Echo, on a routine that included numerous early morning gentle, swimming in a saltwater pool and music frequencies that ship “a sign to mind cells that they will restore.” (“Morning daylight particularly is like rooster soup for metabolic well being,” she advised Rubin.) On the similar time, she labored to scale back Echo’s publicity to “nonnative gentle sources,” and mobile and Wi-Fi indicators. These interventions, she mentioned, have all helped her daughter. “When it really works, possibly we want science to catch up,” she mentioned.
When she met Kennedy final summer time, she was impressed by his report of “wanting on the environmental exposures and the issues that impression human well being which are man-created,” she mentioned. Shanahan lamented what she sees as widespread closed-mindedness within the face of the questions she desires to discover. “My daughter has lifted the veil for me,” she mentioned, in an allusion to Aldous Huxley’s work on psychedelics. “If we’re speaking about my assist for Bobby Kennedy, that’s what has introduced me to this motion.”
