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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   17951 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 19, 2026

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If we're doing electoral politics culture war, how about the news out of Ohio?

For those not paying too much attention there's a fairly competitive race going on for Ohio governor between Democrat Amy Acton and Republican Vivek Ramaswamy. On Twitter yesterday Walter Curt, whose biography describes him as the State Director of the Conservative Caucus of Ohio, posted this video. The video features one Donna Arthur, Amy Acton's mother, who says the following:

My name is Donna Arthur and I'm Amy Acton's mother. I worked at the children and Family Service Association building one of the first two sexual abuse programs in America. I love my daughter but when I saw her lying about her opponent, it's not easy for a mother to say this, but Amy has a serious problem. She is a liar. She lies about her past. She says she grew up living in a tent. None of that is true. She's lied her entire life. My daughter needs help and she can't help you if she needs help herself. People can change but first they have to tell the truth and my daughter still isn't doing that. Don't vote for people who lie. Don't let her become your governor. If you think she'll make your life better you're fooling yourself. It will only get worse.

That's a pretty powerful ad! Getting a candidate's mother to come out against them like that. Acton's campaign had their own response prepared, of course.

Today, Dr. Amy Acton's brother, Philip Stearns, released the following statement condemning Vivek Ramaswamy's attempt to platform their estranged and abusive mother:

"It's not surprising that Vivek Ramaswamy has stooped to such a despicable low as to attempt to turn the sexual abuse Amy endured at twelve years old from our birth mother's husband into a political talking point," said Philip Stearns, Dr. Acton's brother. "After he was arrested and Amy and I were removed from their custody, our birth mother stayed married to Amy's rapist until he died. This desperate, disgusting attack reveals exactly who Vivek Ramaswamy is at his core - a pathetic excuse for a man who is willing to hurt anyone as long as it gets him what he wants."

Those are some pretty explosive allegations! Perhaps Acton's mother's opinions are not very reliable if Acton was removed from her custody at age 12 and Donna chose her rapist husband over her daughter. As best I can tell, the allegations are true. National Review alleges to have reviewed documents showing one Cledith Arthur was charged with having sexual contact with Acton while married to Donna. Donna has her own criminal history as well, with a conviction for theft by deception and accusations of animal abuse. Interestingly the Huffington Post dug up another 2020 interview with Donna from Operation Rescue. According to that interview:

Finally, when Amy was 12, she accused Donna’s husband, Bud of raping her. Apparently, Bud had a daughter from a previous marriage that had earlier made similar unfounded claims. It is possible that this and suggestions made by her father gave Amy the idea for making that particular accusation.

There was a grand jury investigation and Amy was called to testify. Donna had gone to court that day to support her husband. She was never personally accused or charged with any crime.

...

Donna borrowed $10,000 from her father and hired an attorney who recommended that she and Bud move away for awhile until things could calm down and charges could be dropped.

It seems to be Donna's own testimony that her husband was arrested for sexual abuse of Action and Donna and her husband skipped town while on bond to avoid any kind of trial.

Journalists naturally reached out to Ramaswamy's campaign for comment, and they said:

We don’t know what happened between Amy and her mother, who first spoke out about Amy in 2020, but we know that Amy Acton is a serial fabulist who has some serious problems with the truth that the public needs to be aware of before deciding who to entrust as governor.”

On the one hand, it's hard for me to see how one goes forward with the ad above knowing the full story. If the question is to be one of credibility I am not sure I trust Acton's mother, whom she has not spoken with for almost 50 years and who chose her rapist husband over Acton, above Acton herself. Especially if she has her own criminal convictions for specifically fraud-adjacent behavior.

On the other hand, how did you not know this information? As best I can tell it took the National Review and Huffington Post less than a day to get their hands on the primary legal documents detailing the dispute. The campaign's own statement references the 2020 interview, in which Donna admits the sexual abuse allegations and discusses their leaving town ahead of a trial. I guess the hope is voters see the ad but don't dig any further into the situation or context?

Oh boy, Vance is throwing his weight behind this. Guess he's trying to get a head start on losing 2028.

We know this forum is spiritually leftist because if constantly fails the moral circles heatmap meme.

J.D. Vance is actually one of us. And yet, when he runs in 2028 against a retarded communist, I expect most people on this board to support the retarded communist.

Only @magicalkittykat is a true rightist (albeit pretending to be a leftist).

The rest of us are leftists, pretending to be rightists, parroting blackpill propaganda that we read on Twitter from some guy with a Roman statue as his avatar who is almost certainly a jobless virgin.

In all seriousness, if you're on the right, and J.D. Vance isn't your guy, I don't know what to tell you. You will never be happy. Good luck finding a supermodel to marry. Life is going to go badly for you and you probably deserve it.

  • -17

He married and Indian and wrote a book shitting on working class white people. He also was a never Trumper. Why am I supposed to like this guy again?

Yeah, I admit that he's going to have a hard time winning the online under 30 white nationalist vote. Fortunately, these comprise like 0.1% of the population and are furthermore extremely low propensity voters.

So, fortunately, people who are mad that JD Vance married a beautiful Indian woman and had four beautiful children with her don't matter electorally. Speaking of which, for at least the second election cycle in a row, Nick Fuentes is supporting Democrats.

I'll be voting for J.D. Vance, who is the smartest politician we've seen in our lifetimes, who knows what time it is, and who actually wants to win instead of mining internet outrage for likes.

I'll be voting for J.D. Vance, who is the smartest politician we've seen in our lifetimes, who knows what time it is,

What time is it? India's time? What's JD Vance going to conserve, the high rate of Indians migrating into the US? The H1B visa pipeline?

JD Vance is not a conservative (neither is Trump, for that matter); that's exactly why I'd select him over the candidates the Ds will be fielding, which are.

This is kind of what the statement "leftists pretending to be rightists" is getting at, of course (whereas Blue/Ds are rightists pretending to be leftists; feminism and the destruction of growth potential for aesthetic reasons are inherently conservative positions).

I'm tired of people like myself, who are better than most, not actually doing the things that people who are better are required to do; that makes me a reformer and by the classical definition that means my "true place" is on the left.

What's JD Vance going to conserve, the high rate of Indians migrating into the US? The H1B visa pipeline?

That's kind of what I'd be hoping he reforms. The thing that complicates analysis is that liberal-tarians just want cheaper labor and don't give a shit about preserving the soul of the country, while conservatives want it because they believe returning the land to the Indians is good to cleanse the soul of the nation of Racism (and like Columbus, cannot distinguish between the dot Indians and the feather Indians- the soul-cleansing is the root motivation, so it doesn't really matter).

If you consider the country and its economic opportunity as an inheritance, I see a father selling it for a get-rich-quick scheme and a mother selling it to a spiritual guru. That's what the "center" exists to push back on.

This is definitely not .1% of the population. And it’s developing as the activists class behind MAGA.

While JD has demonstrated that he wants to win and is willing to debase himself in pursuit of this goal, he has yet to demonstrate that he is capable of such winning.

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