Shannon Bray is running for the U.S. Senate as a Libertarian. Bray said he hopes to create a stronger voice for libertarians to create a space for voters who don’t fall in line with the two major parties, and he finds the two party system to restrict people’s liberties.
“The nice thing about the last race was I pulled close to 172,000 votes, which is much larger than the Libertarians in the state of North Carolina,” Bray said. “So there's a lot of other people out there who voted for me who don't identify with the Republican and the Democratic Party.”
Shannon Bray said a difficult aspect of competing as a Libertarian has been the lack of funding, which has led to him trying to use cryptocurrency to fund his campaign. Cryptocurrency and cybersecurity are two of his main platforms as he thinks that people, especially politicians, should be more informed. He said when watching earlier in the year founder of Facebook testify to the House of Representatives, representatives were not able to have an intelligent conversation with him.
“It was quite embarrassing to see our House of Representatives not understand social media when Mark Zuckerberg and them were trying to talk to them,” Bray said. “We need technologists in that space. But beyond that, the whole crypto will be a revolution down the road is going to offer us a safe, transparent election process. It's going to redefine how everything's going.”
Bray said regarding cryptocurrency, people aren’t talking about it, but that this is something that people need to pay attention to.
“The nice thing about crypto is it's 24/7 there's always something going on,” Bray said. “We have a digital revolution in front of us that no one's really looking at right now except for the people in crypto as it builds but we need to make sure that we have policies and grow with our initiative and not stifle them.”
In terms of other aspects of his campaign, Bray said he is against the idea of the federal government having too much power, which can be seen with something like having a COVID-19 vaccine mandate, as he doesn’t think the government should be able to force people into doing something they don’t want to do.
“I don't believe in vax mandates, and there were side effects that are happening that are being discovered from some of these vaccines,” Bray said. “Why have mandates when they can cause more harm than good?”