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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:
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.
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:
...
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:
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.
Nah. You'd expect a lot more "Guys, we have to join the web of supporters of the fugitive child molester! It definitely won't destroy our electoral chances while sending our souls to hell!" false flags if that was the case. Instead, so far at least, I've only seen the one...
Nah, it's spiritually focused on truth. It was founded by fans of an actual retarded-communist-may-be-the-lesser-of-two-evils leftist, just one who became popular with rightists too for prizing truth above leftism.
I know emotionally our hunter-gatherer hearts really feel like there's Our Tribe versus Their Tribe, and if only we can get all one hundred of us to collectively stick our fingers in our ears and pretend Big Chief and Little Chief have no faults then morale will stay high and Our Tribe will win, but that's just not how it works. With a hundred million people there's going to be someone who won't go along with the ruse. The people you really need to win over are swing voters who are never going to give Little Chief the kind of love that you're wasting on him (instead of sublimating it into Yankees fandom or something, like you're supposed to do to keep your head clearer for politics), and a "who cares about a couple molested kids anyway" attitude does not win over swing voters.
It doesn't even seem to be a winning play among many MAGA voters. Remember when that was all about stuff like avoiding war with Iran and exposing child abusers like Epstein's network? But now here we are. You beat the retarded communist last time, but the victory was narrow and Pyrrhic, and there's a lot of time and even more crazy developments coming up in between now and 2028. So, if you want to pull it off again, then we may need an actual competitive primary that filters out bad candidates, not just a princeling's coronation. You might think it would be impossible to sink so low that normal people will prefer the kind of candidates that the Democrats come up with these days, and it really should be impossible, but it's not. It's really not. It's not even impossible for the modern Republicans to just sink that low by default, in the absence of conscious effort to avoid it, much less in the presence of conscious effort to resist avoiding it.
Demented communist, surely? And the communist whore who replaced the demented communist.
None of the recent Presidential candidates were stupid enough, or pretended to be stupid enough (Hi Dubya) for "retarded" to be funny.
Biden may have been a bit demented (if only in the "sundowning", "good days and bad days" sense), but I was referring to Harris (endorsed in the link) as "retarded". She obviously wasn't literally retarded (or even subnormal, I'd bet) by "average human being" standards, but she kinda was by "average human being who should risk campaigning for President of the US" standards. I get that the competition was a guy who thinks the dementia screener he's been acing is an IQ test, but my advice for Republicans could be flipped around for Democrats and would still be 100% applicable: the goal is not to hang on to a candidate who seems to be a tiny bit better than the competition, the goal is to come up with a good candidate.
(Well, to be fair, the goal is to come up with someone who would be a good candidate and a good President, which is harder - Harris was probably even worse by the second criterion, even if Trump again set us a low bar)
Granted, by 2024 it was too late for the Democrats to come up with a good candidate, perhaps because the task of "convince the declining elderly person of how badly he's declining" leads to a veridical paradox where the better your evidence is the harder it is to use. But in 2020 it probably wasn't too late for Biden's team to ensure they filled the "person who becomes President in an emergency" slot with a person who would definitely be a top choice for more than (literally, not a typo:) 844 of their party's voters. 20% of US presidents have died or stepped down in the middle of a term and left their Vice President in charge. This is not a wild unforeseeable happenstance, and in modern politics the "don't betray Big Chief!" attitude is bipartisan enough that whoever's in charge when the next election rolls around is generally the presumptive nominee, even in "normal" cases where the handoff isn't mid-campaign.
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