Nathan Larson (politician)
Nathan D. Larson (born September 19, 1980)
[1] is an American
perennial candidate for public office in the U.S. state of
Virginia. He served 14 months in prison for the
felony of
threatening President George W. Bush's life. He has advocated greatly curtailing
women's rights and decriminalizing
child sexual abuse and
incest, and is a
white supremacist.
[2][3][4][5]
Political career
An accountant, Larson has a degree from
George Mason University,
[6] where he was a
cannabis reform activist;
[7] he was then a member of the
Libertarian Party.
[8]
In November 2008, Larson ran for
Congress in
the 1st congressional district of Virginia, as an
anarcho-capitalist.
[2] He received less than 2% of the vote.
[9]
In 2009, he pleaded guilty to sending a letter in December 2008 to the
United States Secret Service threatening to kill the President (the President at the time was
Bush, the President-elect was
Obama), and was sentenced to 16 months' imprisonment and three years' supervised release; he served 14 months.
[2][10][11] In March 2017 he described the letter as "an act of civil disobedience".
[11]
As a convicted felon, Larson was barred from seeking state office in Virginia, until Governor
Terry McAuliffe restored
voting and candidacy rights to thousands of felons in 2016.
[2][11][4] The following year he stood as an independent candidate for the
Virginia House of Delegates in the
31st district,
[11][12][13] again receiving less than 2% of the vote.
[2] His candidacy was discussed in the
2017 campaign for the state governorship, with the Republican nominee,
Ed Gillespie, using it to criticize McAuliffe's action.
[3] Larson was expelled from
the Virginia branch of the Libertarian Party early that year.
[13][14]
In 2018, Larson ran as a "quasi-
neoreactionary libertarian" for election to Congress from
the 10th congressional district of Virginia,
[2][15] before withdrawing in August.
[16]
Electoral history
Virginia's 10th congressional district | | | | | |
---|
Virginia House of Delegates, 31st district | | | | | |
---|
Virginia's 1st congressional district | | | | | |
---|
Date | Election | Candidate | Party | Votes | % |
---|
Nov 4, 2008[9] | General | Robert J. Wittman | Republican | 203,839 | 56.58 |
---|
Bill S. Day, Jr | Democratic | 150,435 | 41.75 | | |
Nathan D. Larson | Libertarian | 5,265 | 1.46 | | |
Write-ins | 756 | 0.21 | | | |
Nov 7, 2017[17] | General | L. Scott Lingamfelter | Republican | 12,658 | 44.19 |
---|
Elizabeth Guzmán | Democratic | 15,466 | 53.99 | | |
Nathan D. Larson | Independent | 481 | 1.68 | | |
Write-ins | 39 | 0.14 | | | |
Nov 6, 2018[18] | General | Barbara Comstock | Republican | | |
---|
Jennifer Wexton | Democratic | | | | |
Nathan D. Larson | Independent | withdrew | | | |
Write-ins | | | | | |
Political views
In his 2008 candidacy for Congress, as an anarcho-capitalist, Larson advocated doing away with government at all levels, saying: "All government functions could be better performed by the private sector".
[19] Endorsed by the Libertarian Party of Virginia, he stated in its newsletter that the primary aim of his candidacy was introducing libertarian ideas; he focused on transportation, proposing that the US highway and rail systems be auctioned off to private owners who would compete to offer toll-based services,
[20] and also that private property rights be extended to
Chesapeake Bay.
[21] In 2017, as a self-described "red pill Libertarian", his platform for election to the Virginia House included legalizing
child pornography[4] and
polygyny, eliminating state funding for girls' and women's education, and repealing the
19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which gave women the vote.
[11]
Larson's 2018 online political manifesto, which has been taken down, advocates "benevolent white supremacy" and names
Adolf Hitler as a "white supremacist hero".
[2] It calls for
free trade, "putting an end to U.S. involvement in foreign wars arising from our country's alliance with Israel",
drug legalization,
[3] "suicide rights",
[5] protection of
gun ownership rights, legalization of child pornography and
incest, and repeal of the 1994
Violence Against Women Act.
[2] Regarding women he states: "We need to switch to a system that classifies women as property, initially of their fathers and later of their husbands";
[2] he has blamed school shootings on feminism, saying: "Guns don't kill people — feminists do."
[3] After withdrawing his candidacy in August 2018, he offered his endorsement to
Democrat Jennifer Wexton, giving as one of his reasons that the
Republican incumbent,
Barbara Comstock, "continually takes the side of career women".
[16] On white supremacy, he says that whites are superior to other races because of "our cultural creativeness, our willingness to invest in the long term rather than living for today, and our conscientious desire to do the right thing even if it requires heroic self-sacrifice for the good of society",
[3] and must resist Jews' attempts to "attain complete supremacy" in the U.S., which would lead to their "destroy[ing] what made this country worth living in".
[13]
Larson began editing Wikipedia under his real name in 2005, contributing to articles, policy debates and to
the software that Wikipedia runs. Identifying as an
inclusionist, he endorsed using Wikipedia in an attempt to make taboo or illegal topics, including child sexual abuse, culturally acceptable. He opposed
Wikipedia's child protection policy, and began using a different Wikipedia account to endorse his worldview, which also aligned with his political beliefs, such as decriminalizing child sexual abuse. He was indefinitely
blocked and banned from the site in 2008. His offline advocacy and activities, and his continual use of
sock accounts (which are also routinely blocked) to edit Wikipedia, eventually led to him being banned from all
Wikimedia platforms.
[22]
Larson has also edited websites based on Wikipedia's technology but that are not officially endorsed by the Wikimedia foundation.
[22] He created
Internet chat rooms for self-identified "
incels" (involuntarily celibate men) and for
pedophiles,
suiped.org and
incelocalypse.today, and wrote posts on the sites endorsing child rape and describing himself as a "
hebephilic rapist".
[2] Both sites were removed by the hosting company in late May 2018 after a complaint by the website
Babe.net.
[2][3][23] He told
The Huffington Post in response to a question about whether he is actually a pedophile or merely writes about it online, "It's a mix of both ... When people go over the top there’s a grain of truth to what they say."
[6][2] He described the term as "vague" and described men being attracted to underage girls as "normal".
[2]
In August 2010, Larson wrote to the federal prosecutor describing the mental health treatment he had received after his conviction as "a complete waste of taxpayer money" since he did not have a mental illness, and announced that he would violate the terms of his release from prison: "If you happen to hear the distinctive sound of gunfire of a
Solothurn S-18/100 20 mm Anti-Tank Cannon emanating from my backyard, as cardboard cutouts of statist federal politicians, federal judges, federal prosecutors, and federal agents become riddled with large, ragged bullet holes, please know, that there is nothing amiss; it is just me engaging in target practice".
[6]
Private life
Larson is from
Charlottesville[3] and lives in
Catlett, Virginia,
[2] as of June 2018 with his parents.
[15] He admitted to raping his ex-spouse,
[6][2] who was
transgender and committed suicide after the birth of their daughter.
[24] In November 2015, a jury in Colorado denied him custody of the girl, and he announced the following month that he would seek legal termination of his parental rights.
[25] He has remarried.
[2]