News from the Nonreligious Right

[rug]

Austin Petersen, the Conservative's Libertarian Presidential Candidate?

Underdog Libertarian candidate thinks he's the guy who can take best advantage of #nevertrump Republicans

Brian Doherty | May. 11, 2016 9:45 pm

ustin Petersen is a 35-year-old founder of the libertarian movement news and commentary site Libertarian Republic and a former staffer on Judge Andrew Napolitano's old Fox Business Network show Freedom Watch. Petersen is also one of the three people seeking the L.P.'s presidential nomination, which will be decided over Memorial Day weekend at the Party's national convention in Orlando, who was featured in a candidate debate aired on the John Stossel show on Fox Business last month.

When I interviewed Petersen for a forthcoming feature on the L.P. presidential race in Reason's July issue (subscribe now!), one of his selling points, he told me, was an ability as a Missouri farm boy with pro-life bonafides and a tendency to shoutout (loudly!) to the Founding Fathers, to appeal more to Republicans running from Donald Trump, and thus capture a new constituency for the Libertarians.

- snip -

Petersen is also proud that his "outreach video to Ted Cruz [one easily accessible public posting of that vid here] supporters posted May 3 reached 461K people, and was viewed completely 160k times, and in the past 7 days, my Facebook page grew by 13,912 likes."

Petersen, an open atheist though still anti-abortion, says he's proud of how many explicitly Christian anti-abortion voters say that they are willing to support an open atheist for the first time over that issue.

http://reason.com/blog/2016/05/11/austin-petersen-the-conservatives-libert

[stone space]

1. "Our Founding Fathers, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy names."

and a tendency to shoutout (loudly!) to the Founding Fathers

I see that sort of thing a lot.

[struggle4progress]

2. Ooooh! A battle for the Libertarian nomination!

Maybe this year they'll even get 1% of the vote