ATLANTA — The Libertarian Party candidate for president, Dr. Jo Jorgensen, will be in Atlanta tonight to address supporters at an engagement and make the case that she should be included in the debates alongside President Trump and Joe Biden.
The speaking event is being held at the Georgia Beer Garden from 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. The engagement will be held outside at the beer garden's back patio area and will have a limited capacity of 190 people.
The event will be livestreamed as well at Cake, a Social Bar as a nearby overflow venue.
There will be temperature checks at both venues and masks are required when not eating or drinking. Organizers said six-feet social distancing will be maintained at both venues, as well.
Jorgensen, a Clemson University senior lecturer in psychology, told 11Alive one of her current priorities is to be included in the presidential debates.
She said her campaign is using the hashtag #FakeDebates and contends the leadership of the Commission on Presidential Debates, which arranges the debates, is dominated by people invested in the two-party system.
"If we limit it to Trump and Biden, what were getting are two people who both want to make decisions for everybody in the country," she said. "Neither one will do anything about crushing healthcare costs, neither one has plans to bring the troops home. We really have not much difference between two of them, and the only reason that they're limiting it to these two people is not to help the Americans who would love another choice, but to help the Democratic and Republican parties."
The Libertarian Party generally advocates for a highly limited form of federal government. The party platform says it advocates for a "world in which all individuals are sovereign over their own lives and are not forced to sacrifice their values for the benefit of others" and asserts "all political parties other than our own grant to government the right to regulate the lives of individuals and seize the fruits of their labor without their consent."
Coming to Atlanta, which has been one of the centers of the Black Lives Matter movement, Jorgensen said she agreed with many priorities expressed by activists - "yes we need to get rid of no-knock raids, yes we need to get rid of qualified immunity, yes get rid of the racist war on drugs" - but did not believe government policies and interventions would achieve those goals.
Libertarianism is generally more aligned to the right in U.S. politics, and typically faces critiques from the left that the party's market-oriented vision of limited government would allow inequities such as those faced by Black Americans to fester in the absence of forceful government action.
Jorgensen argued instead that government power inflicts these inequities, either willfully or inadvertently through poorly implemented policy.
She said government "is too big, too bossy, too nosy, too intrusive - but the worst part is they often end up hurting the very people they're trying to help."
The hands-off approach would extend to health policy in some respects, as well. Jorgensen said a Libertarian government would not issue mask mandates to combat the coronavirus pandemic, for instance, arguing that "there is a mistaken belief that if the government doesn't do it then it will not be done."
She's hoping she can amplify her message on the debate stage though, first, she'll be spreading it in Atlanta tonight.
"I think they'll see that we have the best solution," she said. "And that if we have a Trump-Biden debate we're just going to hear the same stuff."
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