The news over the last few days, and even one of my columns, has been about whether Trump will attack Iran right after the midterm elections. The Iranians certainly think he will. They have been rattling their asymmetric sabers, threatening U.S. interests around the world with terror attacks, even making noises about an assassination campaign of some kind, which makes complete sense given that we were involved in assassinating their religious leader and most of his family and the top political leadership of the country.

I saw one estimate on a military website that Iran may have as many as 200,000 missiles, a number which clearly came from an Iranian source as a warning of their capability to hit their Gulf neighbors and what is left of U.S. military installations in the region, should Trump order a new attack.

Trump will probably order that attack. Signs certainly seem to point in that direction. He’s got another carrier group out in the Indian Ocean within striking distance of Iran. He’s got another 10,000 ground troops over there awaiting his orders, although what in bloody hell he thinks he can do putting “boots on the ground” anywhere in the Middle East makes no sense at all, especially since he has ordered Americans out of Middle East embassies and any other government buildings or installations where we still have them.

His hand-puppets have been making noises about the big attack in terms of days – I’ve seen two or three days bandied about. Which raises the question of what he expects his bombs and missiles would accomplish in such a short time. I have an answer for that: Nothing of consequence. They’re talking about “taking out” infrastructure this time – power plants and bridges have been mentioned. The thing is, Trump has telegraphed every one of his intentions, so the Iranians are very likely to be ready for all of it. They’ve probably got back up power generation already online, and some sort of way of dealing with blown up bridges with traffic diversions if not temporary bridging waiting in the wings.

So, what is the point of the whole thing? Trump has an itch, or at least that seems to be the closest estimation of his “reasoning” for another attack on Iran, if there is even that much thought behind it. His ego needs a boost is probably another cause, which should be especially necessary after his candidates take a licking in the election on November 3.

Trump proved the last time he bombed Iran that he has no concept at all of what the follow-on effects of his war on Iran mean to the rest of the world, beginning right here in the good old U.S.A. He told his MAGA droolers in Georgia yesterday that he doesn’t give a shit how much they’re paying for gas and even threw in some bragging about how much money his pals in the big oil companies are pocketing.

But his cluelessness knows no bounds. He has destabilized the entire planet by fucking up the oil markets, and his war has inadvertently given Iran the opportunity to do something they’ve been trying to do for decades: remake the Middle East in their image, under their power.

It’s the kind of big fuck-up that gives destabilization a bad name. Political leaders and the companies to which they are beholden around the world like it when things are on an even keel. When things are economically and politically stable, they can busy themselves crapping on their poor people and rewarding their rich friends and making themselves wealthy in the process. When markets go to shit, wars break out over shortages and there is migration that inevitably follows economic problems.

Trump’s number one problem is that he does not understand what a war is. What it’s not is a video game you watch on big flat screens at Mar a Lago while some guy in black trousers and a white shirt and bow tie brings you another Diet Coke. War is also not something you do because you’ve got pumped-up lunatics like Hegseth around you talking about winning the war on trans people, the war on teaching history that doesn’t comport with your view of the world, in which Confederate generals still have “honor” and slavery is a thing that is best tucked away in a dark closet somewhere and not brought up around impressionable children.

Over the last 50 years or so, the right wing has conceptualized too many “wars” they want to win – the war on abortion, the war on the libs, the war on woke, and on and on. Trump is not a product of this strain of “conservatism,” as it used to be called, as much as he is its major beneficiary. In his abject ignorance, he thinks of war the way they do, the Steven Millers and the Steve Bannons and Roger Ailes and the rest of them. He thinks of war in terms of ratings. If he’s got lots of cool boom-booms and images of F-18’s taking off from carriers on TV, his ratings will go up.

The worst thing about fools like Trump is that they think stuff like “regime change” equals winning a war. What they missed by not reading Von Clausewitz or Sun Tzu is the part about bringing entire nations to their knees by killing not thousands of people, but millions, and destroying the entirety of their industrial bases along the way. That’s why we haven’t won a war in the last 80 years. We’re a democracy, and when at least some of our best thinkers and political leaders saw what it took to win the last war we won in Europe and the Pacific, our democracy kind of lost its taste for war. So, what we’ve seen in its place are regional conflicts based on lies that go nowhere, because there’s no real will behind them.

Iran is turning into Trump’s Iraq or his Vietnam – you pick it – complete with people from his administration leaking to the media that the war could go on for another year or more. Trump’s war on Iran is not a quagmire yet. It’s a deeply ignorant man who has gotten himself into a contest with a country that has seen conquerors come and go for more than 4,000 years. Trump is just another one. His mistake is to think that his war on Iran can be ended with a “deal.” Everything to him is real estate. But in real estate, two sides start bargaining, one side way high, the other way low, and after arguing over price, they come to an agreement somewhere in the middle so something can change hands or be built.

Trump the real estate guy forgot that Iran holds the upper hand because they own the real estate he wants, and not only that, they own the sea around it, chiefly the Strait of Hormuz, which is the way in and out of where Trump and the world need to go. Gotcha. They win. He loses.

In the meantime, the number of countries on the Level 4 “do not travel” list from the State Department will only grow, as the world becomes less and less stable and more countries fall into disrepair and violence and wars of their own.

Not to worry, however. Hegseth is checking everyone’s testosterone and making sure guys aren’t playing women’s sports at the service academies, and all the bathrooms at the Pentagon are still marked with an “M” and a “W.” With Trump holding prayer meetings at the White House, we may be running out of bombs and missiles, but we’ve got plenty of Bibles.

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It is rare that one single article can capture so much astonishing boneheaded inhuman technobaloney, but Alexandra Alter has done it with her profile of Marissa Mayer in the New York Times. I can't remember the last time my jaw hit the floor so many times in succession. And before we get into this, I want you to remember all the times you thought, "Surely, they can't expect AI to take over the very human parts of teaching students." Because the answer is these people think outsourcing your humanity is a desirable thing.

Late last year, Marissa Mayer was struggling with what felt like an impossible task.

Her daughter Marielle was turning 10, and Marielle’s teacher wanted three bullet points summarizing what made her special. Mayer — the former chief executive of Yahoo and a pioneer at Google, where she was the first female engineer — likes cracking a hard problem. But she felt overwhelmed by the range and complexity of potential answers.

So Mayer asked her personal A.I. assistant, Dazzle. Within a few seconds, Dazzle delivered an answer.

“It came back and was like, your daughter is empathetic, creative and an animal lover,” Mayer said. She thought it was perfect.

How sad for her daughter. And how sad for a grown woman to be unable to complete a simple parenting task-- and then to be impressed by a bot that pulls off the very low-bar-iest of answers. But it just gets worse and worse.

Mayer has a start-up that is pushing an AI personal assistant, an AI tool "that can handle everyday hassles, like buying a pair of pants you took a photo of, or finding a birthday present for your picky spouse." Because God knows you don't want to be trying to pick out a present for your spouse on your own. The special twist for Dazzle (that's the product's name) is that it will root through your camera rolls to manage tasks that a barely conscious human should already be able to do.

What's the plus? Besides offloading all that pesky humanning? Mayer is excited that something that used to take hours or minutes can now get done in seconds. Perhaps you could use the newly freed-up time to go introduce yourself to your spouse and children.

Mayer thinks this will especially appeal to women, who she imagines are more visual. So the bot will look at all the pictures and then “It essentially understands your personality, your likes, your dislikes, because it knows what you think looks good.”

And maybe what overextended professional women need is an A.I. wife, an emotional labor bot that can plan a birthday party and knows when it’s Crazy Socks Day or Crazy Hat Day at the kids’ school, because it has photos of the fliers that came home crumpled in a backpack.

Yes, parenting is hard. So very hard. Mayer has noticed that AI (like every other aspect of modern tech) is mostly guy stuff, and she's not wrong to call out the ambient baked-in sexism. But is the solution really to draw women in with a chance to offload human behavior? 

This start-up has ten engineers presently, which suggests that, despite Mayer's history as a successful tech overlord, this piece might be a bit premature. 

But Dazzle's mission statement-- “To close the gap between what people want and what people can do with A.I.”-- is this stuff really what people want? Mayer rattles off her uses in what Alter calls her "be-Dazzled life." 

She’s used it to find a family activity during a vacation in Venice (Dazzle proposed a Venetian mask-making workshop that the whole family loved); to plan a play date for one of her twin daughters (Dazzle knows Marielle is into magic, and suggested visiting a magic shop in San Francisco); and to choose a theme for her son Macallister’s 14th birthday party (Dazzle recommended a glow-in-the-dark pool party, and found glowing pool toys and corn hole).

“He was like, ‘Mom, I don’t want to hit the theme that hard,’” she said. “I just can’t help myself.”

Well, yes. It appears that she literally cannot help herself and must instead get a bot to help her do exceptionally ordinary parent things. She has also asked it for advice on what to wear and Halloween costume ideas. It suggested dressing up like a cake, because it "knows" she loves baking and art. 

Mayer considers outsourcing mental load to machines an okay thing, though I'm wondering how she feels about outsourcing emotional and interact-with-human loads. Alter reports that Mayer at one point "mused enthusiastically about the potential efficiency gains of having her A.I. assistant talk directly to her husband’s A.I. assistant." Yes, by all means. It would be most efficient to have your bot talk to everyone else's bot and while the bots are simulating human life, the humans could go lie down in the basement and start decomposing early. Efficiency!!

And Alter, God bless her, asks the right question and captures the telling answer:

When I asked Mayer if it’s somewhat depressing to imagine a frictionless future when birthday celebrations, holiday gifts and family vacations are planned by A.I., she seemed caught off guard.

“I haven’t really thought that through,” she said.

Clearly she has not.

Well, Mayer is rich and has had plenty of success. She is also relatively sanguine about sexism in the industry, even though she took a lot of unearned grief for taking only a two week maternity leave. She agrees that women are underrepresented, but doesn't agree that gender is a barrier to success in techworld.

Her hopes for Dazzle lean in part on developing an app that doesn't require technical skill to use. And she cites promising early feedback, noting that some power users are "interacting more with Dazzle than their spouse." Good God, if that's success, then may we all be happy failures. I will note that Alter sits in on a meeting of Dazzle staff and developers, who do in fact meet in person and not by having their bots exchange data with each other.

So remember-- the next time you're arguing that surely nobody thinks that bots could be used to replace live human beings in the classroom, there are people out there who think it's possible-- and desirable-- to have a bot manage your relationships with every human you come in contact with. There is nothing remotely appealing about this vision, and I wish our rich tech overlords would knock it off right now.

We really are watching the MAGA fascist fucks go through the Kübler-Ross Five Stages of Grief. All year long, they’ve been in denial so deep, they refused to invest money in races when it could have helped. Choosing instead to double down on Hail Mary strategies and continue policies that were tantamount to electoral suicide.

Then they got angry. Violence exploded at Trump rallies because when you’re a piece of shit fascist loser, punching women in the face makes you feel like a real man. MAGA wouldn’t know what real masculinity was if it came up and raised their kids for them, but hey, they get to punch people, so there’s that.

Now we’re at the bargaining phase. Vote for me, and I’ll give you money! Vote for my husband, and I’ll give you a gas card! Vote for me, or I’ll withhold disaster relief! If I pour half a billion into the midterms at the last minute, I can buy Congress!

You can smell the desperation, the panic, the terror. So many mediocre racist white people suddenly see the looming blue wave. Worse, they’re starting to glimpse what lies beyond it: A landscape riddled with consequences and accountability. A world where all of their crimes will be exposed to the public, and they will have to explain all of the evil they’ve done for the last two years. As I never get tired of pointing out, there is nothing mediocre racist white people fear more than the consequences of their actions.

Couldn’t you just cry over their pain and suffering? Boo hoo.

Hey there! Weekend Rewind is not the most complicated of pieces to put together. Some summaries, some reading to do, a couple of GIFs, and a little recap of something that happened this week. Still, it represents the end of a week of work, and if you appreciate what I do, please consider becoming a supporting subscriber! For only $5/month or $50/year $25/year during October’s Spoooooky 50% off sale, you can keep this newsletter going until the fascists wave the white flag. And they will because fascism always loses.

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Monday: Voters said they wanted fighters, and they got it. Republicans are Very Sad about this…

Tuesday: There were Birthday Shenanigans today for Mrs. Ogre, so no article.

Wednesday: Recording!

Thursday: Podcast!

Friday: Got caught up doing daddy stuff, so today’s article got put on hold.

Saturday? SATURDAY!: I love the smell of fascist fear in the morning. Smells like…victory.

5 Things I Found Interesting This Week

The (very) Long Read (and really important this week)

With a little over a week before the midterms, we are being inundated with warnings. No, not reasonable warnings that the regime will lie and cheat and tamper with the ballot by any means necessary to retain power.1 What we’re seeing is a deluge of articles telling us that, “What if, oh my god!, WHAT IF THE POLLING IS ALL WRONG?”

It’s become quite the cottage industry, selling panic in the form of “just asking questions.” We’ll circle back to the why later, as well as a more detailed look at why these people are full of shit. For now, it’s important to understand that there is a tried-and-true indicator that tells us Republicans are about to get absolutely fucking curbstomped. You can set your goddamn watch by it. It’s as obvious as it is simple: How much the GOP’s base, that mindless horde of “fuck your feelings” rage junkies, suddenly rediscovers and craves the idea of bipartisanship:

A new POLITICO poll shows that 66% of Republican voters this midterm want a Democratic House to find common ground with President Donald Trump to pass legislation next year, assuming the party flips that chamber in November.

Allow me to carefully construct a well-thought-out response to MAGAland’s newfound desire to work together: BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH FUUUUUUCCCCKKKKK YOOOOOOUUUUU!

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Now, that’s not to say I want Democrats to burn it all down. I do not want to breach the debt ceiling. I do not want a six-month-long government shutdown. Even though it would be tough for my family personally, we would survive it. It would, however, financially destroy hundreds of thousands of others, if not more. So, no, please don’t do that. That would be Very Bad.

But everything else the regime wants to do? Project 2025 and everyone merrily implementing it can eat shit and die.

If Trump and his party of pedophiles and Nazis suddenly want to pass real legislation to lower the price of groceries? OK. To lower the price of healthcare? Sure. To bring back the billions of dollars to school lunches and Medicaid and special needs services they stole? Great!

But they’re not going to do any of that. They just are not. Republicans, in the minority, will demand Democrats give them everything they want and offer nothing in return. They’ll demand tax cuts for the rich and offer nothing. They’ll demand an increase in military spending and offer nothing. They’ll demand more money for fossil fuels and Silicon Valley and cuts to Social Security and Medicare and offer nothing. That’s what they do. That’s what they ALWAYS do. So they can fuck off into the sun as Democrats block every illegal executive order, grind Washington to a standstill, and investigate the GOP for their legion of crimes. Unity? Unite your ass with my foot, you fascist scumbags.

Back to the matter at hand, though, Republican voters know their party is doomed. They know there isn’t going to be an “October Surprise” to hand them a last-minute win. One or two candidates may pull a rabbit out of their hat,2 but Republicans are looking at a blue wave large enough to blot out the sun, and everything, literally every single thing Trump does, makes it worse.

I know people used to pretend Trump had uncanny, almost mystical, political instincts. In reality, Trump was really good at feeding hate to his base, and a complicit media sanewashed the rest. That was it. That was the “magic” of Trump. Without the protection of a fawning press, he would have self-destructed in 2016, and that would have been the end of him.

A decade later, his dementia is so far advanced, his own base is bored of his ranting and screaming and confused outbursts. They don’t give a flying fuck about his ballroom or about how he’s the Greatest Victim Who Ever Lived. They really REALLY do not care to hear about how much he wants to fuck all the men around him. His crowds are gone, and now they’re worried that all the hate and rage and cruelty they wallowed in for ten years is going to come back and haunt them. Thus, they want bipartisanship. Pretty please?

Remember, the thing mediocre racist white people fear more than ANYTHING else in the world is consequences. While in power, they can be lawless. They can trample the Constitution. Install an emperor who can rule without limits. But when that power shifts to Democrats? Well, the rules have to change! Right fucking now! The minority has to have a voice! It didn’t yesterday, but today it does because…reasons!

And do we really have to waste time on all of these congressional investigations?! Can’t we just, ahem, “look forward for the good of the nation?!”

That one, more than the rest, will be especially galling. These are the people still braying for the blood of Dr. Anthony Fauci. Who are still demanding the arrest of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and Hunter Biden.3 But arresting anyone in Trump’s circle? That’s tyranny! That’s not the America they grew up in! Sob sob whine whine.

My heart bleeds for the poor lambs. In the meantime, I’m sharpening my knife. Trump’s DOJ, of course, won’t arrest a single member of the regime no matter WHAT Democrats expose. Oh? They were running a literal child trafficking ring out of the West Wing, and there’s video evidence? Sorry, that’s protected by executive immunity, and it’s fake news anyway. Oh? Jared Kushner has been taking billions of dollars from the UAE and acting as a foreign agent while manipulating America’s foreign policy? Yeah, sorry, he’s protected by the power of being the Emperor’s Son-in-Law.

But all of this will be out in the open, and Trump won’t pardon EVERY single one of his cronies. When Democrats take the White House in 2029, purge the DOJ, and install professionals dedicated to upholding the law instead of perverting it? Whole lot of Republicans are going to prison for a very long time.

Think Republican voters are begging for unity now? Just you fucking wait until October of 2028. They’ll be on their hands and knees, screaming and wailing that America “needs to heal” and that “looking back will only tear us apart.”

Should have thought of that before you elected a treasonous pedophile rapist whose entire campaign was a single promise: “I will be your retribution.” Retribution is a two-way street, motherfuckers, and we’ll be in the driver’s seat very very soon.

Now, let’s have a quick conversation about why people are writing so many “OMG! Maybe we’re actually losing!” articles. There are two reasons to do this. The first is clickbait. Fear sells. Scared and nervous people will read anything that confirms what they’re afraid is going to happen. I’ve written clickbait before back when I was first getting into political writing. I was working for someone who made me do it, and I didn’t know any better. It was repulsive. I lasted a few months and refused to keep debasing myself. People who write clickbait to scare people for a living are the lowest form of life in this arena. If you’re one of them, I hope you die a slow and painful death, alone and abandoned by all who once loved you.

The other reason is worse: Ratfuckers laying the rhetorical groundwork for the regime to challenge the results of dozens of elections across multiple states. After all, look at all of these articles saying the polls might be wrong! That’s proof there was a giant conspiracy to rig the elections and cheat Republicans out of a rightful victory. It doubles to give MAGA voters a fig leaf to hide behind when their Dear Leader simply throws the Constitution in the trash, seizes ballots and voting machines, and declares entire elections null and void. Do presidents have that authority? No, but so what? Didn’t you see how wrong the polling probably was? Clearly the election was rigged! We have to do something!

I hate ratfuckers even more than I hate Nazis, and I openly advocate for violence against Nazis. Interpret that how you will.

But here’s the thing about these articles: They’re all bullshit. Never mind the polling. Never mind the massive turnout in early voting. Never mind the insurmountable enthusiasm gap. Just look at the conditions going into the midterms:

• The president (one Donald J. Trump) is deeply unpopular among every demographic, including the ones that he won with in 2024.

• We are in the middle of a deeply unpopular and very stupid war in the Middle East. A war everyone understands we’ve lost. A war started by Donald J. Trump.

• The price of oil/gas/diesel is sky-high (because of said stupid war).

• Inflation is high and going higher.

• Groceries are painfully expensive, and so is everything else.

• Job growth is nonexistent.

• Wages are growing slower than inflation.

• We are on the brink of a massive AI bubble collapse, which will push us into the worst depression in history. A lot of people are aware of this and are really mad about it.

There are not a lot of hard rules in politics. But one of them is that when the economy is a train wreck, the party in power gets the blame, unfairly or not. When the party in power is directly responsible for the economic pain, though? They don’t just lose elections; they are punished. Severely.

I made this observation the other day, but it’s worth repeating. Here is a comprehensive list of all the midterms in which the party in power won during an economic downturn while waging an unpopular war:

1. Absolutely

2. Fucking

3. Never

4. Even

5. Once

And that’s aside from the normal headwinds of being the party in power during the midterms and ignoring how pissed off people are about the regime’s ridiculous, over-the-top, cartoonish levels of corruption. Put all of those ingredients together, boil in a stew of white-hot resentment coming for literally every part of the political spectrum, and even suggesting that Republicans might have some hidden level of deep support we just aren’t seeing, and maybe, JUST MAYBE, they’ll hold on to power is an insult to my intelligence. Like, motherfucker, no, I will not be buying a bridge in Brooklyn from you. How fucking stupid do you think I am?!

These polling doomer articles are either assholes trying to scare you for clicks, or ratfuckers trying to sell the lie that the midterms are rigged. Ignore them. Elon Musk, alone, is pouring more than half a billion dollars into races he knows Republicans are losing because he’s panicking. As a Senator in Texas, where Musk’s businesses are, James Talarico will be an existential threat to Musk. Does this look like a man who thinks the polling is wrong?

Meanwhile, MAGAland suddenly wants to hold hands when just five seconds ago, they were promising to murder us in the streets. The rats in the White House are scurrying about, hiring lawyers and pre-emptively blaming each other for the coming bloodbath.

If this is what Republican winning looks like, can you imagine what kind of chaos losing would unleash? The fascists are fucked. You know. I know it. They absolutely know it. Anyone telling you otherwise has an agenda. Tell them to fuck off and go vote.

These are dark times, but I will continue to tell the stories you need to hear in a clear (and usually profane) voice. If I entertain/anger/inform you, preferably all three, please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50/year $25/year during the 50% Off Spectacular Spooky Season Sale!

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Today’s Politics Have No Moral Bottom.

The chatter over Ohio’s controversial campaign ad featuring an opponent’s mother denouncing her own daughter as a liar while dragging out the story of the candidate’s sexual abuse as a child may show that politics has no moral bottom.

The reactions also mirror a voter disgust with the character of their candidates.

The ad by Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy presents the mother of his opponent, Dr. Amy Acton, who is leading in the race, as a serial liar is backfiring.

The bigger reaction is to the morality of Ramaswamy in choosing to spend $4 million to continue airing the ad when the backstory that has emerged is that Action was abused by her stepdad and abandoned by the mother at age 12. The stepdad went to prison, and the mother sided with the stepdad and has remained estranged from her children for 50 years.

When Political Ambition Overrides Human Decency

On a bipartisan basis, the political world has decided Ramaswamy is “desperate” to ignore basic human decency in the attempt to re-take advantage. Outgoing Republica Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine called on Ramaswamy to withdraw the ads as “deeply troubling”; Donal Trump, who still does not acknowledge his 1,000 mentions in the Epstein Files, strongly defended Ramaswamy, called critics “weak” and said the ads should stay on the air.

Despite massive backlash about just over how reprehensible, awful, disgusting the political move,  Ramaswamy is doubling down. Obviously, a public verdict will be rendered in two weeks on the strategy as much as on whether either candidate has an appropriate answer to questions about high prices and health care.

One might wonder whether Acton surviving a family sexual abuse makes a candidate stronger, not “a liar,” But the average voter has got to wonder about Ramaswamy as the candidate who thinks that seeking to shame a sexual abuse victim will make him a better governor. Ramaswamy, like all candidates, has choice here; the 12-year-old Acton did not. How exactly does Ramaswamy expect us to respond? 

Character Questions Follow Candidates Across the 2026 Elections

Politics always presents voters with flawed candidates, of course, but this year, we are seeing more than the average number of cases in which basic morality seems tangential to Winning.

Democrat Graham Platner had to withdraw not because of his political positions, but because of sexual abuse claims he could not escape. Sen. Roger Marshall’s, R-Kan., surprisingly tight race is as much the result of disclosures that as a physician he aggressively pursued patients who had trouble paying him – even having 18 arrested – as because of his strict backing for Donald Trump and national Republican positions.

In the Texas senatorial campaign, each day brings new real disclosures about excesses in Attorney General Ken Paxton’s personal life, and made-up inventions about Democratic opponent James Talerico’s that stretch the moral imagination. In Georgia, they are arguing about whether it is moral for Republican Senate candidate Mike Collins to surround himself with Nazi sympathizers.

Opponents of Michigan’s Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, unsatisfied with what only the anti-Israel bias he himself offers, have resorted to talking about the political statements of the woman who walked away as his mother as a child. Trump’s Justice Department can’t stay away from investigating immigration paperwork Minnesota Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar’s dead father filled out more than 25 years ago two weeks before the election.

The central anger in our November elections has been a nationalized through-line about tariffs and the effects of an unwanted war with Iran, about a power-crazed Trump who ignores democracy and about excesses in Trump’s mass deportations campaign. Yet, the localized versions are crashing more on the moral efficacy of the candidates from the region.

Has Winning Become More Important Than Political Integrity?

We have allowed “morality” to be defined by politics about abortion or support for tuition to church schools, for example, rather than by the code by which the candidates themselves live. When Vice President JD Vance can look into the camera and insist that Trump and his family have not benefited personally from corruptive practices in the White House despite case after case in which business deals are substituting for defense of American democracy, or billionaires are reportedly offering millions towards consideration of presidential pardons, something basic has broken.

What exactly are these candidates thinking of winning besides a chance to feather their own nests with either power or money or both on the backs of others?

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I spent most of this afternoon going through everything I could find about the rape of Ohio Democratic gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton when she was 12 years old. Nearly all of it was about the disgusting ad being run by Republican Vivek Ramaswamy.

I pulled myself up short. Amy Acton is much more than a victim of childhood sexual abuse. She overcame it and worked her way through college, went to medical school, got an advanced degree in public health, and became Ohio’s Director of Public Health in 2019. She received the “Profile in Courage” award from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library for her work in Ohio during the COVID pandemic and has held several jobs running non-profits since then. She announced her candidacy for governor in 2025 and ran unopposed in the state’s Democratic Party primary.

The coverage of the ad Ramaswamy is running against her is voluminous. Her birth mother, from whom she has been estranged since she and her brother were removed from her mother’s custody when she was 12 years old, appears in person in the ad calling her a liar, saying that she “needs help,” that if people vote for her daughter, it will only make their lives worse.

Naturally, Donald Trump and his vice president, JD Vance, a former senator from Ohio, have weighed in, endorsing the despicable ad. Trump said “Vivek should keep it up,” referring to the ad. Ramaswamy should “let everyone listen to the mother of a defective, dishonest, and incapable Candidate, explain how the daughter is a DISASTER who, uncontrollably, lies, cheats, and steals!” Trump posted on his failing social media platform, Truth Social, today.

Democrats have denounced the ad and demanded that Ramaswamy take it down. In response, Ramaswamy has committed $4 million in campaign funds to keep it on the air. Some Republicans, including Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, have denounced the ad. DeWine called it “deeply troubling,” and encouraged that it be taken down. Still, he has kept alive his endorsement of Ramaswamy.

And so, the back-and-forth has gone for the last several days, with the press and the political commentariat concentrating on the politics of the moment and whether the ad will work for Ramaswamy or backfire against him.

All of which would be normal in today’s political climate, when seemingly nothing is off the table in the knock-down-drag-out battle for control of Congress that will be decided at the polls 12 days from now.

Except for one thing. What Trump and Vance and Ramaswamy are talking about is a woman who was repeatedly sexually abused and raped by her stepfather when she was nine to twelve years old, a fact that has been lost in the political heat surrounding the ad.

I looked up everything I could find about the facts of what happened in 1978. Acton’s mother divorced her husband and named Cledith Arthur, who had already been charged with abusing his daughter in a previous marriage. The charges were later dropped. When his abuse of Amy was reported to the police in July of 1978 by her biological father, Arthur was arrested and charged with sexual abuse of a minor. The local NBC affiliate in Youngstown, Ohio, where Acton was living in July of 1978, published the file of court documents from Mahoning Valley Clerk of Court. The entire file amounts to 37 pages of documents showing that Arthur was arrested and charged with “sexual conduct with, [name blacked out], not the spouse of the offender, when the other person is less than 13 years of age, whether or not the offender knows the age of such person.” Yes, the language is that dry.

Arthur was given a $2,000 personal appearance bond and released. After failing to make court appearances, he was eventually charged by a grand jury with sexual abuse of a minor under 13 years of age. Multiple arrest warrants were issued, one in October of 1978 and a second in December of 1981, accusing Arthur of rape of a minor. Arthur and Amy’s birth mother, now known as Donna Arthur, fled the state to Pennsylvania.

No attempt was made to pursue Arthur to Pennsylvania. At that time, there was no national crime database, and states did not share information about arrest warrants. Arthur died in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, near the state capital of Harrisburg, in 2004.

The greatest tragedy of this case is that the sexual abuse of Amy Acton is being used against her in the campaign for the Ohio governorship. The other tragedy, that I would argue is just as great, is that while the abuse of minor children is common, it is not talked about by victims and certainly not by the criminals who abuse them. It is of course up to Amy Acton whether to talk about what happened to her as a child, and if she decides to discuss it, how much she should say. Acton has refused to debate Ramaswamy, at least in part because of the ad he is running, and because he has attacked her in the past using false charges that were leveled against her when she was the state’s Director of the Department of Health.

The statistics regarding child abuse are astounding. A third of women report being abused as children. I have written this before, but I feel the need to say it again: I have known multiple women in my life who experienced abuse by a family member or close relative or friend of their families. When I lived in California in the early 2000’s, the state passed a law that required registered childhood sexual abusers to report their addresses to the state, and made that information available to the public. California put up a website where you could access maps that showed the addresses of sexual abusers. We lived in the Hollywood Hills, and when our first daughter was born, I logged on to the website and accessed the map of our neighborhood. It was filled with little red dots signifying the addresses of child sexual abusers. Dozens lived within walking distance of our address.

It wasn’t like we let our seven- or-eight-year-old daughter walk around the neighborhood by herself. We didn’t. But the number of child sex abusers was scary. These guys had been convicted, probably on reduced charges, and imprisoned and been released early enough in their lives that they took up living as free men again, had jobs, qualified to rent apartments or buy houses. Amy Acton’s abuser lived similarly out in the open in Pennsylvania, not even having faced a court or conviction. Nobody in Mechanicsburg knew an accused child abuser lived down the street from them.

It isn’t until something like the horrid Ramaswamy ad against Amy Acton makes the news that the subject of childhood sexual abuse becomes a “thing” by the press in the political firmament. But it’s everywhere. If it is a fact that a third of women admit to being abused as children, it is a certainty that the number is much, much higher, because of the painfulness of the subject and the desire of most people to keep their lives private.

It’s no wonder. Even having heard women I have known personally describe the horrors that happened to them as children, it is impossible for me to imagine myself into their experience, impossible for anyone, I would think. How can you see in your mind’s eye the violence that happened to a small child in the dark of a bedroom or in the closet of a school or the seat of a car or in the leaves under a tree in the woods? Do you see what I mean? The pain. The shame of not telling anyone. Being so young. So vulnerable.

Writing those phrases feels dry to the point of being clinical. The reality had smells and blood and bodily fluids and stains and more agony than could ever be described, even by those who experienced it.

And this is what Vivek Ramaswamy and his enablers in the Republican Party, including the President and the Vice President of the United States, think is an appropriate “issue” to be flung at a victim of sexual violence to win a political office.

I despair not only about what this country has become, but what it has always been. It is even worse to think of what it says about how we, as human beings, can live among those who would use such deeply personal pain against another human being just to achieve power they want to exert over others.

Words fail me. We cannot fail Amy Acton.

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