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PaperclipPerfector  13hr ago (text post)   1666 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 27, 2026

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Hot off the Platner scandal, here comes Max Miller one upping him. Max Miller, a Republican who previously served in Trump's first admin and running for reelection as state representative has been accused by his ex-wife of throwing hot water on her, putting a gun to her head, and (potentially) even choking their 2 year old daughter.

She doesn't know for sure as it would have happened behind closed doors, and Miller obviously denies this but CPS investigations did suggest strangulation as possible.

Neither the child’s father, Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio), nor mother, conservative policy adviser Emily Moreno, admitted to knowing what caused their daughter’s injury or that it occurred while their daughter was under their care. Miller’s primary theory was that the bruising resembled marks from a seat belt. Moreno, who discovered the bruises and took the child to an emergency room, suggested the cause may have been something more sinister. Records of the investigation into potential child abuse show that Moreno told detectives that Miller had previously thrown hot water at her, shoved her, and held a gun to her head; therefore, she couldn’t rule out that Miller caused their daughter’s fracture. Moreover, a child protection specialist reviewing the incident had characterized the bruising near the fracture as resembling a “handprint.”

And the daughter for some reason seems to be scared of her father, so even if he didn't cause this particular injury it's not a great sign.

“Daddy’s house is scary,” Moreno recounted her daughter saying, according to a Bay Village, Ohio, investigative report relating to the February 2026 injury.

There's also apparently been other accusations against him when he was younger.

Responding to written questions from Moreno’s lawyer about whether Miller threw a girl down the stairs in high school, faced expulsion from college for a violent incident involving a female student, and left Moreno within three days of their child’s birth, Miller—over the course of the domestic proceedings—neither confirmed nor denied the events took place.

Especially when I made an interesting discovery, him being an abuser seems to have been already known or at least suspected in politics. George Santos had previously called him a woman beater during a spat with Miller, because Miller was accused of assaulting his previous girlfriend before that.

Miller, a former Trump White House aide, was accused of slapping his then-girlfriend and Trump’s former press secretary Stephanie Grisham in 2020, which she said resulted in her ending the relationship.

and

Politico was more specific in its July 2021 article, recounting—according to three people familiar with the incident—that Miller “pushed [Grisham] against a wall and slapped her in the face in his Washington apartment after she accused him of cheating on her.”

And Miller is (or was) a drug user, showing a history of irresponsible behavior.

Records from Miami University police concluded that Miller’s blood alcohol content was under the legal limit, and he pleaded down to a misdemeanor for failing to control the car. “A blood test conclusively established that Mr. Miller was not impaired,” Miller’s attorney told Politico at the time.

However, Mother Jones has obtained further toxicology reports from the incident stating that Miller had MDMA—also known as ecstasy—and Klonopin in his system at the time of the crash.

And there is hard proof that he poured hot water on Moreno, per a recording.

According to the transcript, Moreno is heard saying, “You poured steaming hot water on me, and you’ve also, you, uh, you have been insanely emotionally abusive.”

Miller first said he “didn’t pour hot water on [her] neck.” He then said, “The water incident…I never thought that that hurt you.”

“It was never done to hurt you with intent. It never was done to hurt you, and you know that,” Miller explained.

Again there's no hard proof of most of these (yet at least) but a history of physical abuse allegations throughout his life + drug usage (and lying about it) + the abuse suggesting bruising patterns on his own child + at least one proven allegation, it certainly seems to be leaning towards his guilt.

These allegations haven't reached the general public much yet, but they do seem to having a small effect on his reelection chances already. Not as much as Platner did but the news is still pretty young. Some comments I've been seeing however suggest that Republican candidates are simply held to lower moral standards nowadays by their respective sides and it won't impact him too much despite the severity. I guess time will tell.

Taking Hanania seriously is a sure sign of Low Human Capital. In the real world, almost every Democrat actively stood behind Plattner while spiking, sabotaging, and downplaying stories about his poor behavior... until the exact week he started polling worse than Collins, at which point they pretended that previously ignorable claims were damning.

Anyway, this dude sounds like an asswipe.

Fairly certain Hannania has admitted he engagement baits and isn’t actually saying his true thoughts. At this point he’s essentially running a business and not a serious intellectual. He might have some very solid thoughts from time to time but if you’re spending your time reading him now….well he’s 90% optimizing for Hannania bank account go up.

he engagement baits

First time? Pretty much every moderately successful influencer is posting 80% engagement bait in some form. Youtube, Tiktok, Reels, Substack, whatever. Engagement is an influencer's bread and butter and they give zero shits for how much they torch the commons as long as they get theirs.

This is just boo outgroup stuff. We just banned someone in the last thread for doing this.

Three day ban for you as well.

Do you think perhaps you are overindexing on someone just being banned? Like you're expecting mkc to have seen that ban and to adjust their posts accordingly, but there's a good chance they have no idea that this other ban was recorded.

Bad ban.

And there was no one left
To speak out for me

For what it's worth I think you're a bastard but I'll still raise a stink if the mods ban you for silliness like they just did.

First they came for the gypsies, and I said nothing for I was not a gypsy

Then they came for the Somalians and I said "Make sure you get all the Somalis".

We just banned someone in the last thread for doing this.

That ban also seems overzealous to me, although I can kind of squint and see a point. But I don't even really see it in this case, is the idea that /u/magicalkittycat isn't allowed to advance his own point of view?

I get that the rules of the Motte are aiming at something higher than courteous discussion, but sometimes I feel that they're choking out courteous discussion. Aren't we all adults?

The point is that this is not a culture war battleground that needs to be fought over by deploying arguments as soldiers. We fall short of the ideal of a neutral discussion area, but I see no reason not to whack down obvious "battleground" type posts where the whole point of the post could be summed up as "my out group sucks". That's boring and it happens literally everywhere else on the internet.

The point is not to be a courteous battleground. It's to be not a battleground at all.

I dislike about 99% of /u/magicalkittycat 's posts and I found this particular post considerably less obnoxious than most. Now if they had dodged any challenges to the suggestion/assertion at the end of their post, as I've often seen happen, then I'd probably support a temp ban.

Ban is a bit strong, and there could be a discussion about the topic at hand here, but come on, that sentence at the end hiding behind Hanania to claim Republicans are held to lower moral standards is just waging the culture war.

Should we update the Rules As Written to match the Rules As Intended, if we're going to start enforcing them in this way?

At least in the comment you linked there was clearly an overgeneralizing crack at the whole outgroup in the last sentence. Here the framing seems to be "Boo Not-Just-My-Ingroup", with the very first clause reminding us that that Ingroup has some boo-worthy members too..

In RAW it still says "concrete criminal or impeachable offenses are also fair game". The example there is ""Congressman Jones is under suspicion of taking bribes" is fine", a criminal+impeachable offense which is clearly more discussion-worthy by being directly linked to the office, but is that necessary? The initial Platner scandals weren't even criminal; a discussion of how mere "slimy or gross" might not even be disqualifying, during our weeks of Platner discussion, even made the AAQC lists.

the very first clause reminding us that that Ingroup has some boo-worthy members too..

One sentence doesn't undo the entire point of the post. And we don't want some magic set of words to allow someone out of an otherwise rule breaking post.

And the entire point of the post is to point out that someone in the out group is doing something bad.

Someone is always doing something bad and I don't want this place to turn into a battleground where we all just publish the worst things that members of the out group are doing.

Parts of the Platner discussion struck me as much more nuanced than this. In the sense that they weren't about the veracity of the allegations but how others were choosing to respond to those allegations. Some of the Platner discussion was the boring "oh look an out group member turned out to be terrible" and that discussion should have probably been shut down.

Some comments I've been seeing however suggest that Republican candidates are simply held to lower moral standards nowadays by their respective sides and it won't impact him too much despite the severity. I guess time will tell.

That pretty much reads to me as just "Let's not forget that even if my ingroup might sometimes do bad, my outgroup are always worse (or so I've heard some guy whose opinion here is irrelevant say, see? I'm not the one waging the culture war, I'm just reporting on what is being said!)"

It's a weaker and more qualified attack, but yeah, that's also pushing the boundaries in the same direction.

Some comments I've been seeing however suggest that Republican candidates are simply held to lower moral standards nowadays and it won't impact him too much despite the severity. I guess time will tell.

This is a fantasy of the kind some liberals like to tell themselves. Politics is a team sport and it doesn't bother me that sometimes the people "on my team" are "bad people". Sometimes they're real scumbags. But I'm not attached to the idea that my politicians all have to be good people. They might represent me politically, but they don't "represent me".

A lot of liberals seem to live in this moral universe where they do need to think of their politicians as The Good Guys. It's seemingly very important to them. I still hear repetitions of Michelle Obama's line that "when they go low we go high," as though liberals are too noble and pure to stoop to the evil politicking the right so distastefully abuses. It's as if they feel that they actually are "represented" by their politicians, parasocially. It's a personal affront.

In reality I don't see any evidence that Democratic politicians are more moral than Republican politicians. Why would it be the case?

(I know some will say that conservatives have the same problem and that it's unfair of me to describe this as a liberal issue. I will add that I think the conservative equivalent of this is tendency to relish in perceived "cruelty" -- conservatives having already accepted that their ideas are considered immoral by polite liberal society, so they choose to double-down.)

In reality I don't see any evidence that Democratic politicians are more moral than Republican politicians. Why would it be the case?

One obvious reason it might be the case that one party's politicians are more moral than the other's is if one party's platform is itself genuinely morally superior to the other. If any decent person feels in their heart that e.g. abortion is a human right, then by definition only evil or, at best, amoral people will become conservative candidates. (A conservative could, of course, make the symmetrical argument: only a morally-degenerate person would support cancellation campaigns or gay rights, therefore no righteous person is ever going to touch the DNC with a ten-foot pole.)

A lot of liberals seem to live in this moral universe where they do need to think of their politicians as The Good Guys. It's seemingly very important to them. I still hear repetitions of Michelle Obama's line that "when they go low we go high," as though liberals are too noble and pure to stoop to the evil politicking the right so distastefully abuses. It's as if they feel that they actually are "represented" by their politicians, parasocially. It's a personal affront.

I don't believe this is specific to liberalism. It was a universally held truth across the political spectrum not many years ago, that when electing a representative you should pick someone who holds values you hold or aspire to. Only recently did people's realisation that 'oh, they're not actually good guys, many are bastards' metastasize into 'let's deliberately pick bastards'.

Only recently did people's realisation that 'oh, they're not actually good guys, many are bastards' metastasize into 'let's deliberately pick bastards'.

The environment that was created was one that resulted in the bastards being the only ones willing to say what many felt needed to be said. The purpose wasn't solely to pick the bastard. The purpose was finding someone, anyone who would say what so many people wanted to say, but couldn't for fear of ostracism or worse.

You could not be pro-social and be anti-gay marriage. You could not be pro-social and speak ill of mass immigration. You could not be pro-social and be critical of trans ideology. You could not be pro-social and call out the widespread racialization of everything. This still happens everyday on Reddit, but for a decent period it happened in nearly every public space we shared in society.

It's so obvious to me why the Andrew Tates, the Nick Fuentes, the Donald Trumps, etc. have been elevated to what they are (or were). Yet, to the average liberal or progressive it's still a complete mystery.

I don’t mind voting for the bastards now. I feel like a generation ago we had certain norms where most people believed “X thing that is true but bad” and would instead say “Y thing that is nice” but still enforce mitigation against “X uncomfortable truth”. Then post 2010 people started to believe that “Y nice to say” was actually true and we lost a lot of the things we did to mitigate bad things.

Now half the population believes “Y nice things to say” are true. So then you kind of need to have actual bastards elected.

Republicans did used to pretend to care about this in a way democrats never did- Bush as the wholesome born again Christian was part of the campaign in a way it wasn’t for Clinton or Kerry. Trump being Trump thats no longer the thing, obviously.

(Morbid humor: doing a great job representing his constituents.)

He's running for a +5R-+8R district, and his opponent (despite being literally named Poindexter) has some actual union bonafides, so there's a decent chance this sinks Miller, especially if the child abuse gets substantiated. Unfortunately, he didn't have a primary challenger. He could drop out until August 5th, but it's going to be a pretty hard battle to do it and I don't think he has the stones for it.

((Though there's very much a 'throw everything at the wall and see what sticks' here: Ohio's general voting population just doesn't care that much about an under-limit crash where no one was hurt but a lamppole, or about MDMA use. That might genuinely not have even have counted as driving under the influence under state law at the time of the crash.))

Hot off the Platner scandal, here comes Max Miller one upping him.

That is a fascinating choice of words where one party was credibly accused of multiple counts of rape, and it's not the "one up".

And the daughter for some reason seems to be scared of her father, so even if he didn't cause this particular injury it's not a great sign.

I'll caveat that they're in a very messy divorce and custody proceeding, and there's serious questions that one has (alleged misdiagnosed) BPD (and, tbf, I'd only be surprised for Miller in the sense that he doesn't seem likely to get diagnosed by consent). And the guy's a genuine putz and has been known to be one for a long time, ranging from fighting a glass window at a hookah bar to allegedly slapping Grisham. Which remains a good argument about him not getting reelected, but it makes the factual claims specific to each case a lot less strong than they look at first glance.

Likewise, it's very strange that his alleged expulsion didn't surface in the first election, and the claims are messy: both Mother Jones and the court filings jump between whether Miller "faced" expulsion or was actually expelled, and despite Mother Jone's attempt to frame the court transcript carefully, Miller did specifically deny (and offer to prove non-existence of) the expulsion to the New York Post. The stairs incident was brought up in 2021, but it's also almost twenty years after it allegedly happened now, released by someone who's name isn't on the record, and echoed by people talking as much about rumors or 'fits his character' than actually seeing whatever happened.

There's credible reasons no one can find proof - the former would only exist in records protected by federal law, the latter was allegedly a high-school party where no one was injured and the core of the allegation is just shoving someone at a wall - but it's still not very persuasive on its own.

The child abuse one and the water incident are the most impactful, but they're also the most dependent on facts not in evidence. The child's injuries were investigated and the allegations found "unsubstantiated", and the prosecutor's office that would have been involved doesn't exactly scream 'MAGA diehard'. The boiling water one fell in similar bounds, and was messy enough That Right-Wing Rag couldn't come out and call it clearly proven. The reddened skin is more than we have for Katie Portner, to be fair!

I'll caveat that they're in a very messy divorce and custody proceeding

Yeah, I absolutely do not believe anything Parent A says about Parent B, or Parent B says about Parent A, alleging the kid(s) are scared of whomever. Get a neutral third party to back this up, without coaching from A or B as to what to tell them, but "My kid told me they don't want to go to Mom's place/Dad's place because they're scared" is nothing more than mud to throw in custody dispute.

That is a fascinating choice of words where one party was credibly accused of multiple counts of rape, and it's not the "one up".

Yes I think physically abusing a child if true is worse than physically abusing an adult if true. I'm not giving out bonus points just cause the abuse of adults was sexual. Hurting children is a one up.

The boiling water one fell in similar bounds, and was messy enough That Right-Wing Rag couldn't come out and call it clearly proven.

It's been proven now, there is a recording of Miller and Moreno talking about it.

According to the transcript, Moreno is heard saying, “You poured steaming hot water on me, and you’ve also, you, uh, you have been insanely emotionally abusive.”

Miller first said he “didn’t pour hot water on [her] neck.” He then said, "The water incident…I never thought that that hurt you.”

Now he contests any intent on hurting her, and he contests it being at her neck, but it's clear he understands what she means by "poured steaming hot water on me" and refers to it as the water incident. Maybe he's telling the truth about intent, but pouring steaming hot water on anyone outside of a complete accident is a bad look IMO because at the very least he's ridiculously careless.

Yes I think physically abusing a child if true is worse than physically abusing an adult if true

From your link: "Cuyahoga County’s DCFS investigation into possible child abuse was “unsubstantiated”—that is, there was not enough evidence to support a finding of neglect or abuse." Now, I'd consider the facts separately from police or administrative findings. But it's a bit odd a look for you.

I'm not giving out bonus points just cause the abuse of adults was sexual.

What an odd thing to say.

Now he contests any intent on hurting her, and he contests it being at her neck, but it's clear he understands what she means by "poured steaming hot water on me" and refers to it as the water incident.

One set of allegations is that he literally poured boiling water on her, from a pot on the stove. Another is that he sprayed her with water from a kitchen sink. One of these is a serious allegation of criminal assault, and any pretense that Miller would not have intended injury would be a cruel joke. The other is inadvisable horseplay. The Snopes link has direct images, as presented by Moreno, of the alleged injuries.

I'm not a doctor; it's a single click and five seconds to evaluate.

I don't think this meaningfully proves what you're trying to prove; it picks up the goalposts and sprints for the horizon.

The Snopes link has direct images, as presented by Moreno, of the alleged injuries.

I'm not a doctor either, but I'd diagnose that neck rash as being the result of exposure to ambient ultraviolet radiation while wearing a V-neck top or similar.

Politicians being scumbags isn't a partisan phenomenon. Voters and ideological supporters will ignore the stories against their candidate and highlight stories against their political opponents. The opposing sides hardly agree on what's moral and what isn't these days. That's the actual story. I'm generally uninterested in the Platner story and I'm generally uninterested in this one. What's left is policy.

The ex-wife is senator Bernie Morenos daughter.

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