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PaperclipPerfector  13d ago (text post)   25132 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?

Shitbag move by Vivek. Wish he would just retire away quietly somewhere.

My maybe controversial take is that being a victim of child sexual assault (CSA) makes me not want you as a high level politician.

It's not their fault, it's not that I think they did anything wrong or I want to punish them further. But look, I feel bad for blind people too, but I don't think they should be driving a motor vehicle on the same roads as me.

High level politician is a mentally stressful job. You'll be dealing with shitbags like Vivek, and even plenty of people worse that are either:

  1. Less in the limelight (imagine any of the state's worst criminals asking for a pardon)
  2. Better at not looking like a total shitbag (imagine a rival politician had instead just quietly bribed her mom to come up and be in her life)

So there won't be a national consensus every time that someone has done you dirty. They'll just do it and you'll just have to deal with them partly getting away with it.

There will be many other situations where mental stability and health is important for the position, and even fully healthy people are likely to be worn down by it.

Alternatively maybe it's a good thing because every high level politician is likely mentally ill in some way (how else do you explain why they want the job?), and this is a case of 'better the devil you know than the devil you don't'.

I think it’s good for politicians to be diverse (in the general sense). A politician CSA survivor has unique experience they may provide to draft better CSA preventions, without the majority needed to propose overzealous ones.

Plus, I doubt every CSA survivor is less mentally stable (or able to deal with shitbags) than average, or let’s say, top 10%. And constantly mentally stable people are unlikely to understand mental health issues, so in their legislation, unlikely to account for their effects. Again, I think the ideal is enough politicians with mental health issues to have them accounted while the majority ensure the general environment remains stable.

A better analogy may be blind passenger in a motor vehicle. Maybe their enhanced hearing can detect something.

A politician CSA survivor has unique experience they may provide to draft better CSA preventions, without the majority needed to propose overzealous ones.

As far as I can see, the problem is more than sufficiently dealt with now, and new preventions practically always involve eroding rights, especially but not limited to privacy.

Plus, I doubt every CSA survivor is less mentally stable (or able to deal with shitbags) than average, or let’s say, top 10%.

I think she's. a pretty typical case and it's clear she inherited some extremely bad traits. Like mother like daughter, the heritability of cluster B disorders is moderate to high. It's not surprising that both Amy Acton, and her mother, would be pathological liars. Elect « survivors » if you want to be ruled over by mentally ill sociopaths.

Maybe their enhanced hearing can detect something.

They don't have enhanced hearing. Fallacy of equal talents or something like that (that is, you want to believe the world is mostly fair, so when you see someone is blatantly bad at something, you assume they have excess skill points somewhere else, when the reality is they just have way less skill points than other people. This is common in intelligence discourse where people assume low IQ is made up for with people skills and stuff like that. It's not, being stupid is just bad.)

Being a pathological liar is hardly a disqualification for politicians. It may even be a prerequisite.

Politicians are among the first to recognize as a rule that most people don’t want the truth. That conclusion has come home to me numerous times throughout my life. No lie I’d ever told when I was young had even remotely got me into more trouble than telling the truth ever has.

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