Nathan Daniel Larson (September 19, 1980 – September 18, 2022) was an American white supremacist and a convicted felon. A self-described "quasi-neoreactionary libertarian" who unsuccessfully ran for public office several times, he was expelled from the Libertarian Party of Virginia in 2017. Larson advocated for curtailing women's rights and decriminalizing child sexual abuse and incest.
Larson served fourteen months in prison for the felony of threatening the president of the United States in 2008. In 2020 he was arrested at Denver International Airport for allegedly kidnapping a 12-year-old girl. According to court records, he intended to take her to his home, sexually assault her, and impregnate her. During a search of his home, detectives found evidence suggesting that he operated a website encouraging pedophilia and child rape. Larson died in custody during legal proceedings.
Early life and education
Larson was from Charlottesville, Virginia, and lived with his parents in Catlett, Fauquier County. An accountant, Larson earned a degree from George Mason University, where he was a cannabis reform activist.
Career
After graduating from college, Larson became a member of the Libertarian Party. He ran for Congress in Virginia's 1st congressional district during the 2008 election, running on an anarcho-capitalist platform. He received less than 2% of the vote.
As a convicted felon, Larson was barred from seeking state office in Virginia from 2009 until Governor Terry McAuliffe restored voting and candidacy rights to thousands of felons in 2016. The following year he stood as an independent candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates in the 31st district, again receiving less than 2% of the vote. His candidacy was discussed in the 2017 gubernatorial campaign, with the Republican nominee, Ed Gillespie, using it to criticize McAuliffe's action. Larson was expelled from the Libertarian Party of Virginia early that year.
In 2018, Larson ran as a "quasi-neoreactionary libertarian" for election to Congress from Virginia's 10th congressional district, before withdrawing in August.
Electoral history
Political views and online advocacy
In his 2008 candidacy for Congress, Larson advocated doing away with government at all levels, saying, "All government functions could be better performed by the private sector". 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 U.S. highway and rail systems be auctioned off to private owners who would compete to offer toll-based services, and also that private property rights be extended to Chesapeake Bay. In 2017, as a self-described "red pill Libertarian", his platform included legalizing child pornography 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 right to vote.
Larson's online manifesto in 2018, which has since been taken down, advocates "benevolent white supremacy" and names Adolf Hitler as a "white supremacist hero". 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, "suicide rights", protection of gun ownership rights, legalization of child pornography and incest, and repeal of the 1994 Violence Against Women Act. 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"; he has blamed school shootings on feminism, saying: "Guns don't kill people feminists do." 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". On white supremacy, he said that whites are supposedly 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", 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".