NATHAN LARSON IS A HORRIBLE PERSON. THE FACT THAT HE'S RUNNING FOR CONGRESS ISN'T HORRIBLE.

I obviously understand why this story is drawing some attention, but I don't understand why it's important enough to have been the lead item at the news aggregator Memeorandum all day:

Nathan Larson, a 37-year-old accountant from Charlottesville, Virginia, is running for Congress as an independent candidate in his native state. He is also a pedophile, as he admitted to HuffPost on Thursday, who has bragged in website posts about raping his late ex-wife.

In a phone call, Larson confirmed that he created the now-defunct websites suiped.org and incelocalypse.today ― chat rooms that served as gathering places for pedophiles and violence-minded misogynists like himself....

When asked whether he’s a pedophile or just writes about pedophilia, he said, “It’s a mix of both. When people go over the top there’s a grain of truth to what they say.”

Asked whether there was a “grain of truth” in his essay about father-daughter incest and another about raping his ex-wife repeatedly, he said yes, offering that plenty of women have rape fantasies.

According to Larson’s campaign manifesto, his platform as a “quasi-neoreactionary libertarian” candidate includes protecting gun ownership rights, establishing free trade and protecting “benevolent white supremacy,” as well as legalizing incestuous marriage and child pornography.

In the manifesto, Larson called Nazi leader Adolf Hitler a “white supremacist hero.” He urged Congress to repeal the Violence Against Women Act, adding, “We need to switch to a system that classifies women as property, initially of their fathers and later of their husbands.” He also showed sympathy for men who identify as involuntary celibates, or incels, suggesting it is unfair that they “are forced to pay taxes for schools, welfare, and other support for other men’s children.”

Larson, the author of posts with titles such as “Here’s How to Psyche Yourself Up to Feel Entitled to Rape” and “The Justifiability of an Incel’s Kidnapping a Girl and Keeping Her as His Rape-Slave for Sex and Babymaking,” is an appallingly bad human being who seems to wallow in his own awfulness. It appalls me that he might raped children and not been punished for it. It disgusts me that he might have raped his ex-wife or some other adult woman and gotten away with it. It disgusts me that anyone is willing to be a web host to him (although he's experienced some deplatforming recently).

But what's supposed to upset us is, apparently, the fact that he's running for Congress. Sure, if he's guilty of any crimes for which he hasn't been punished, then it's wrong that he's out free and eligible to run -- but that's a failure of the legal system, not the electoral system.

I know why conservatives care about this: because they want to attack a Democratic politician. Larson is eligible to run for office because he lives in Virginia, where former governor Terry McAuliffe restored voting privileges to released felons, and also restored their eligibility to run for office. (Headline at the Daily Caller: "PEDOPHILE WHO THREATENED TO KILL PRESIDENT NOW RUNNING FOR CONGRESS THANKS TO TERRY MCAULIFFE." The photo accompanying the article is one of McAuliffe, not Larson. The president Larson threatened to kill was, by the way, Barack Obama. Larson's felony conviction was in that case.)

I support what McAuliffe did. Ex-felons are citizens and deserve the rights of citizenship, even if some are as awful as Larson. But the right likes to target McAuliffe, a frequent target of Donald Trump.

What's the harm if Larson runs? He's running as a Libertarian, although the Libertarian Party has disavowed him. How many people are going to vote for him? If democracy can't survive the candidacy of a garbage human like this -- if we can't just simply reject him resoundingly at the polls -- then we need another system of government.

Deplatform his websites. Be sure any crime of violence he can be charged with is unearthed, and throw the book at him once he's convicted. But for now, it's fine if he run and loses.