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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:
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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?
MAGA was pillaged from 2 sides in 2024 - the technocrats and the neocons; The technocrats, were a mix of recently politically homeless 'elites', with a sense of social liberalism, and economic conservatism (to a point), and mostly anti-woke (some of course, had been instrumental in enabling woke). They cozied up to Trump and Trumpism in a variety of ways, but in reality are a mix of opportunistic and somewhat aligned politically. Basically all were Obama liberals, and would have been quite to the left of Clinton.
Vivek is the worst and most transparently slimy of this crowd, and boy isn't it great to see his grift collapse. Here's a guy who's presidentail campaign was a super strained argument that he was an even bigger Trump ally than Trump himself, and relied on word games like "God is real" as a major campaign plank, to appeal to Christians, while simultaneously asking them to agree with it in a form that was transparently a unitarian platitude. Point being, tortured epistomological games worded in ways meant to trick the dumb voters is neither new, nor successful trick of Vivek's.
His Governorship run is just a leftover plate spinning from when early in Trump II it looked like the technocrats had won. Elon had DOGE, Vance came from Thiel, SV had trump's ear... The neocons had attached themselves to DeSantis (who, was an otherwise viable actually America First, populist conservative successor), and helped sink in by attaching their stink to him, while he went up totally unprepared to skip Trump in line.
But alas, DOGE was a failure, Vance turned out to be more MAGA than SV (yay), and the neocons won the current administartion in the end with Iran; Vivek is a dying gasp of the silicon plot.
At some point I think this is worthy of a larger conversation. I'm of the contrarian opinion (I know it's contrarian) that DOGE succeeded. Massive federal layoffs, ongoing deregulation. The gutting of USAID was significant. The actual DOGE employees all got assimilated into other departments or projects and have mostly all become more powerful. DOGE's successor program Tech Force is quietly achieving a lot of the same goals without attracting almost any attention.
My supposition is that most of the "DOGE failed" narrative is pushed by a liberal media and Republican MAGA critics who want it to have failed, while the actual people involved are fairly satisfied with the work they were able to do and very satisfied to continue doing the same work under other names with almost no scrutiny because "DOGE failed".
I think it was a pointless waste of political capital that probably materially harmed state capacity and drove out a lot of capable employees either immediately with buyouts or layoffs, or long-term (as those who are smart and capable but prefer stability over pay either leave quietly or never choose to work for the government in the first place).
That might be an acceptable tradeoff if it reined in expenditures but retarded levels of government spending (I think the recent number is 2 trillion in deficit spending this year) continue apace.
A lot of those capable employees are not cut out for private sector work or are actively hostile to Republicans.
Trump admin is now working on hiring new top performers through Tech Force.
Maybe DOGE is a failure in some kind of politically-agnostic sense if you view firing them hiring as inefficient. But this is clearly a success in Machiavellian power terms.
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