Few things would make the schadenfreude flow like Bud Light at an Ohio State football game than for every single one of these crypto bros to end up broke:
Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, said on Thursday that it had halted withdrawals after it was attacked by hackers who made off with more than $6 billion in digital coins, in what could be the biggest crypto heist in history.
The exact nature of the attack was not immediately clear. Binance’s founder, the crypto billionaire Changpeng Zhao, said it “does look like a hack.” The company said it had temporarily suspended all deposits and withdrawals and that its customers would be made whole.
Binance said that it would cover all losses, estimated at about $6.3 billion. The company said that it had coordinated with other crypto firms to freeze about $3 billion in assets that were swept up in the hack.
The message “don’t worry we have enough of somebody’s real money to pay you back your fake money” achieves Zen-like levels of obscurity for me, but I’m an increasingly confused elderly person who doesn’t understand the world today.
The attack appeared to be the work of “North Korea’s elite hacking unit,” according to TRM Labs, a crypto research firm.. The attack on Binance was a stunning illustration of the risks of trading crypto, a renegade branch of finance. For years, the industry has sought mainstream respectability, pouring money into politics and earning the support of President Trump, who pledged to make the United States the “crypto capital of the planet.” But the industry remains a wild west, vulnerable to hacks and fraud.
News of the security breach caused chaos in the crypto industry, which has faced a string of damaging cyberattacks over the years. In February 2025, Bybit, one of Binance’s top rivals, lost $1.5 billion to North Korean hackers — the largest crypto heist at the time. The Binance attack appears poised to top it.
Outlaw regime steals outlaw money sounds like a good Netflix series premise.
On social media, Mr. Zhao tried to steady nerves with a mix of soothing responses and prayer hand emojis. He suggested in a post on X that customers’ investments were safe because they were backed by an emergency reserve fund.
“It hurts, but we will survive,” Mr. Zhao wrote on Thursday evening.
He also spent time combating what he interpreted as trolling by X’s owner, the billionaire Elon Musk. After an X user compared Mr. Zhao’s statements about his customers’ deposits to the reassurances of Sam Bankman-Fried during the collapse of his crypto exchange, FTX, Mr. Musk responded with a grimacing emoji.
“Elon, have a lot of respect for you, but bad time to troll,” Mr. Zhao replied. He then noted that Binance had helped Mr. Musk in the past, investing $500 million in his acquisition of Twitter.
Insert let them fight meme here.
Binance has weathered years of legal and regulatory problems. In 2023, the company pleaded guilty to violating anti-money-laundering laws and paid $4.3 billion in penalties to the U.S. government. Mr. Zhao was sentenced to four months in federal prison.
After his release, Mr. Zhao received a pardon from President Trump. Binance has also forged a business relationship with the Trump family crypto business, World Liberty Financial, a major source of the president’s wealth.
I remember when this kind of thing would have been some sort of significant scandal for an American president. We’re obviously way past the concept of scandal even having any sort of applicability to Trump. He is the scandal.
The message “don’t worry we have enough of somebody’s real money to pay you back your fake money” achieves Zen-like levels of obscurity for me, but I’m an increasingly confused elderly person who doesn’t understand the world today.
Last week, following a full day of people thinking it might be too unfair to blame the Vivek Ramaswamy Ohio gubernatorial campaign for an ad featuring his opponent Amy Acton’s estranged mother, the campaign came forward not just to take credit for the ad, but to announce their plans to drop $4 million to spread it far and wide. Because they thought it was like, a really good, really powerful ad.
And it has been! Just not in the way that Ramaswamy had hoped. Despite both Donald Trump and JD Vance backing the ad and promising everyone that it is good, actually, the ad was so bad and so damaging that public polls and leaked internal polls found him losing to Acton not long after it debuted.
Even Trump saying that it was unfair that anyone would suggest that the ad was anything other than a mother who hadn’t seen her child for 50 years testifying as an expert to the fact that she was lying about Vivek Ramaswamy, in particular, and nothing else? Well, that didn’t seem to help much, either.
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Even people in his own party like Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, Nikki Haley (who went so far as to say “he’s a bad guy”), and Nancy Mace have come out against the ad, probably realizing it could hurt them more than help him at this point. Even leaders in the biotech industry where Ramaswamy made his money have come out to tell him he needs to take it down and apologize to Acton.
Everyone who builds a company in our industry asks for trust: from patients who take an unproven medicine and from the people who fund and prescribe it. You asked for that trust when you built Roivant, and you received it. The obligations that come with it are simple. Follow the evidence. Never use the suffering of the people who depend on your judgment against them. Those obligations do not lapse when you file for office, and your advertisement violates both. […]
Consider the message. We work every day with people who have disclosed abuse, or an illness they spent years unable to speak about. Their willingness to seek help rests on a single promise: that their vulnerability will be met with respect. In pursuit of your political ambition, your advertisement attempts to shame a survivor of rape and deny the awful family trauma she experienced, as supported by overwhelming evidence. Anyone who has sat with a patient knows the harm in that message. You know it too.
It’s almost as though people think that kind of thing is pretty gross.
Ramaswamy has even found himself confronted on the campaign trail by people who think that, because of this ad and the other one featuring an actual pedophile, he might be interested in cheering for the pedos of America.
In the meantime, even more has come out about Cledith Arthur, the stepfather Acton accused of raping her until the age of 12. Like the indictment from when he was accused of raping his own daughter.
One of his other daughters has also come forward to back up Acton’s story about living in a tent and to say that she believes that he raped her, because he had raped her other, since-deceased sister Christine “more than once.”
“It was a terrible time for our family and it’s very hard to talk about it,” she told the Daily Mail. “My brother won’t say anything at all. It’s a nightmare for us to relive what happened in our family after all these years.”
“Christine was a wonderful person but she was very damaged by it,” she added. “It affected her. Our whole family was. Seeing it played out in this campaign and on TV has brought a lot of terrible memories back.”
Alas, it seems they only got to drop $1 million on promoting the ad, as they’ve pulled it for just no apparent reason following the bad polling. Ramaswamy told reporters that the ad “ran to completion.” So he’s pulling it, but not admitting that there was anything wrong with it or that they had to pull it since it was killing him and making him look like the terrible person he very obviously is. Surely, everyone will believe that this was the plan all along, even though it looks exactly as though he’s admitting it hasn’t worked out the way he’d hoped.
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If this tanks Ramaswamy’s campaign, it’s going to be a very big deal for Republicans. Donald Trump got elected despite, and probably even because of, all the horrible things he said about women. I don’t think anyone thought there were lines left to cross here, anything that could go too far. If Republicans have to now consider that there is a “too far” they could possibly go when it comes to being horrible to women, that could certainly make a few of them nervous about how to navigate 2028. Should they not call female reporters “pigs” or will people still find that charming?
What if Vivek loses and Max Miller, accused wife beater and Republican candidate to represent Ohio’s 7th District wins? Will it be determined that beating a woman is okay but siding with her rapist isn’t? Or vice versa if Vivek wins and he loses? How will future Republicans figure this out?
These are just very complicated issues, and a Republican candidate needs to learn the precise way to denigrate women that will earn him favor with the misogynists but still be something the pretend moderates can pretend to ignore and say they haven’t heard about.
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If this tanks Ramaswamy’s campaign, it’s going to be a very big deal for Republicans. Donald Trump got elected despite, and probably even because of, all the horrible things he said about women. I don’t think anyone thought there were lines left to cross here, anything that could go too far. If Republicans have to now consider that there is a “too far” they could possibly go when it comes to being horrible to women, that could certainly make a few of them nervous about how to navigate 2028. Should they not call female reporters “pigs” or will people still find that charming?
What if Vivek loses and Max Miller, accused wife beater and Republican candidate to represent Ohio’s 7th District wins? Will it be determined that beating a woman is okay but siding with her rapist isn’t? Or vice versa if Vivek wins and he loses? How will future Republicans figure this out?
These are just very complicated issues, and a Republican candidate needs to learn the precise way to denigrate women that will earn him favor with the misogynists but still be something the pretend moderates can pretend to ignore and say they haven’t heard about.
What’s more wondrous than towering spires on a building? Stained glass? Vaulted windows, or garden roofs? One word: Ghouls. Nothing jazzes up a normal old cathedral or mansion more than a mischievous face etched in stone, smiling (or, more likely, grimacing) at those passing below. Gargoyles and grotesques, in their own endearingly ugly way, are one of the best ways for architects to let their creations stand apart from the pack and inspire reflection for centuries to come.
While most of these creatures are made in a similar style, with recognizable bodily features, expressions, and poses, there are a handful around the globe that are unapologetically unique: sometimes familiar, sometimes offbeat, and always worth a closer look.
A Note on Gargoyles vs. Grotesques
Both are ornate stone figures carved into buildings; however, gargoyles also double as waterspouts to drain rainwater off a building, whereas grotesques are purely decorative.
D.C.’s National Cathedral is the largest in the U.S. and the sixth largest in the world, but it has another, less obvious claim to fame: a small carving of Darth Vader among its spires. When the cathedral underwent constuction in the 1980s, it held a contest for schoolchildren to submit designs, and this infamous villain took third place, earning it a spot on the exterior. For the best view of the Dark Lord, grab your binoculars and head to the northwest parking lot. Near the top of the northwest tower, Vader is just above a large skull.
Polish-Ukrainian architect Vladislav Gorodetsky, “the Gaudí, of Ukraine,” intended for this animal-themed building to be his permanent residence; however, he was forced to vacate it when his pocketbook ran dry. The house, located in Kyiv’s historic Lypky neighborhood, is right across the street from the Ukrainian president’s office and has been used for diplomatic ceremonies since 2005. Its gargoyles and grotesques were inspired by Gorodetsky’s love of hunting, and inside is even filled with stuffed versions of many of these same animals.
Architect Changiz Tehrani designed this mixed-use structure with 22 different WhatsApp emoji faces that stare out at passersby, including fan favorites like the smile, the wink, the heart eyes, the kissy face, and the winking face with tongue out. Tehrani drew inspiration from an Amsterdam building called “The House with the Heads,” which depicts the faces of six Greek gods.
An officer who died in the line of duty is memorialized on the south-facing outer wall of Carlisle Cathedral, surprisingly inconspicuous beside the medieval gargoyles and grotesques. Police Constable George Russell’s stone likeness wears a helmet and star badge, marking his life’s dedication to service and safety. Russell is buried in Carlisle and also honored by a plaque at the Oxenholme Lake District railway station.
Among the Duomo’s many easy-to-miss intricacies is this stone bull’s head facing Via Ricasoli and right over the Porta della mandorla, the door that allows one up into the grand dome. There are two explanations for the bull’s origin: One holds that it was the builders’ tribute to the draft animals used to construct the cathedral. The other (far more fun) theory is that a stonemason designed the bull to look straight into the shop of his girlfriend’s husband, a daily reminder that it was the stonemason she truly loved.
For over a century, this deformed rabbit has sat at the back of St. Nicholas Cathedral, but no one can say why or how it came to be. Some say it represents the coming of spring (à la the Easter Bunny), whereas others insist it was built to scare away grave robbers. Still others believe the creature was intended to be a normal rabbit but, unfortunately, its ears were accidentally put on backward.
When Paisley Abbey underwent renovations in 1993, 13 of its gargoyles were removed and replaced with updated versions, though one of the stonemasons on the job took some major creative liberties. His contribution to the facade looks strikingly like H.R. Giger's Xenomorph from the “Alien” franchise, though it’s never been confirmed whether this was his exact intention or a happy coincidence.
E.E. Roberts designed a number of homes in this sleepy Chicago suburb, working in styles that ranged from Victorian to Tudor to Prairie. Perhaps his most fanciful building, Park Grove Manor is adorned with playful, chubby-faced gargoyles and grotesques. Above the service entrances to the building are sculptures depicting an architect and a bricklayer, both of them amusingly cartoonish. This may have been Roberts becoming less self-serious in his older age, joyfully deriding the pretensions of modern architecture.
Leo Sands reports for the NY Times (archived) on the rediscovery of a forgotten recording from 1935:
In a doctor’s waiting room in Lafayette, La., Emma Benoit was puzzled: A bespectacled academic was there with a hulking machine that looked like a wooden closet. He wanted her to speak into it. The man was Lorenzo Dow Turner, a pioneering Black scholar of linguistics. He was crisscrossing southern Louisiana in the summer of 1935 with an enormous recording device that weighed 100 pounds and required at least two people to carry.
Ms. Benoit leaned toward the machine and began outlining the “passing of my life.” A 69-year-old widow, she was born in the ashes of the Civil War to a formerly enslaved mother and a white father. She spoke in Louisiana Creole, a language that only a few thousand people now use but was once the predominant one in parts of the state.
Nearly a century later, the machine’s aluminum disc recordings were analyzed and shared publicly on Friday for the first time. Oliver Mayeux, the Cambridge University linguist who found Ms. Benoit’s interview alongside 12 others from Dr. Turner’s trip, said they were the oldest known examples of someone speaking Louisiana Creole, also known as Kouri-Vini. (Older recordings exist, from 1934, but the language is sung rather than spoken.)
“The moment I heard these recordings, I knew that they would drastically change our understanding of this language,” Dr. Mayeux said. His research findings were published in the journal “Language Documentation and Description.”
(The LDD article is open access.) It’s great to be able to hear the recording; I was surprised at how much it sounds like regular French, but Sands covers that:
The rediscovered spoken recordings revealed that the language borrowed far more from French than was previously known, Dr. Mayeux said. They showed how speakers of Louisiana Creole readily threw in French grammatical forms and switched between the languages midflow.
(We covered Kouri-Vini back in 2023.) Thanks, Eric and Bonnie!
This is good. Not in the sense that it is good that these things are happening, but the successful resistance is definitely good:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used a slur to proudly announce to an auditorium of Marines in September that he was ridding the military of all transgender troops.
The Pentagon had set up review boards at bases around the globe, manned by everyday uniformed service members with narrow orders that all but ensured that the trans troops appearing before them would be voted out.
But just steps from the auditorium where Mr. Hegseth spoke, at Marine Corps Base Quantico, boards assigned to carry out those orders were doing the opposite. Instead of firing trans Marines, the boards were voting to keep them.
The same was happening in the Navy: Boards given strict rules instructing them to force out sailors were rebelling and voting to let them stay.
It is not just a few outlying individuals. Navy and Marine Corps boards have voted to retain trans members in nine of 12 cases.
A majority of Americans, 58%, continue to favor allowing openly transgender men and women to serve in the U.S. military, but support has declined from 71% in 2019 and 66% in 2021. The latest reading is from a Gallup poll conducted as President Donald Trump took two executive actions — one on his first day in office and another a week later — to reinstate a ban on openly transgender service members.
Every time a Democrat is asked “why do you favor allowing men to play women’s sports?” the answer should be “why do you favor throwing patriotic, loyal American out of the armed forces?” Republicans want to fight on the former question, and they’re terrified of the latter; there’s no reason we should yield to them the choice of battlefield.
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Content warning: This story includes descriptions of sexual violence. Please take care while reading.
Donald J. Trump was found liable in 2023 for raping journalist and author E. Jean Carroll at a New York City department store in the mid-’90s. The following year, he was re-elected President of the United States. With that decision, Republicans voters made it clear: Sexual violence was no longer a red line.
In those cloudy weeks between Election Day 2024 and Trump’s January inauguration, I remarked online, “When I look at this incoming administration, all I see is rape.” It was in the people he was choosing for his cabinet; it was in the way he spoke to and about women; it was the way he bulldozed through any situation, regardless of consent. A decade on from the Access Hollywood tape, the culture Trump wrought has metastasized, with rape and rape culture influencing campaigns at all levels and lacing the current media landscape with landmines. Nowhere has that become more clear than Ohio’s gubernatorial race, where Trump-backed Republican Vivek Ramaswamy has thrown himself in the gutter in a bid to defeat Democrat Dr. Amy Acton by weaponizing the sexual assault she endured and survived as a child.
On Monday, October 12th, Ohio political blogger JD Byrnes wrote in his newsletter The Rooster that there were “rumblings” that “Ramaswamy's team plans to roll out an endorsement, such as it is, from Acton's estranged mother.” By early this week, an unaired ad began circulating online featuring Donna Arthur, Acton’s birth mother. Arthur lost custody to her children in 1978 after siding with Acton’s stepdad when the then-12-year-old alleged he’d raped her over the course of years. That context is conspicuously absent from the ad, with Ramaswamy giving Arthur space to slander Acton and urge people not to vote for her.
“She is a liar,” Arthur says in the ad. “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.”
At first, Ramaswamy, who has consistently been polling behind Acton in recent weeks, was cagey about whether or not his campaign was behind the ad. Spokesperson Connie Luck wrote in a statement early this week: “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.”
One glaring problem with Luck’s statement is that it’s simply not true that we don’t have a record of what Acton’s stepfather did to her. Conservative outlet The National Review found that court documents confirmed Acton’s account.
“While Donna Arthur was married to Cledith Arthur in 1978 when Acton was 12 years old, Cledith Arthur was charged with having sexual contact with her, documents show,” per the National Review story. “Evidence against him included a sworn statement from Acton’s biological father, and Acton herself was called to testify as a witness. Following his indictment by a grand jury, Cledith Arthur skipped town.”
By Tuesday evening, Ramaswamy had not only taken credit for the ad, but revealed he’d be putting a $4 million ad buy behind it.
Trump and Vice President JD Vance have remained steadfast in their support for Ramaswamy. Before a Ramaswamy campaign event on Wednesday, Vance told reporters that he was “a little bit disgusted when I see Republicans across the country who are whining more about that advertisement than they are about what the congressional Democrats and other Democrats want to do to the United States of America.”
Trump called it “a very powerful ad” in a post on Truth Social Friday morning, later saying “I know nothing about his stepfather,” in the midst of his jabbering outside the White House and seeming confused about whose stepfather to whom the reporter was even referring.
Trump wants us to believe that his support for Ramaswamy’s ad featuring Acton’s estranged mother has nothing to do with his support for it, when it’s obvious that he supports the ad because of it.
In a 2024 piece, I described what it was like being a working journalist the day the Access Hollywood tape dropped:
It’s late afternoon on Friday, October 7, 2016, and I’m at my desk in the newsroom, mentally heading towards the weekend. Election Day is one month away and I’m already exhausted by candidate Donald Trump’s relentless attacks on abortion rights, immigrants, any of his perceived enemies, and particularly his attacks on women. But, I think, soon it will be over. Soon Hillary Clinton will be president and Trump will be banished to stew on his golden toilet.
But then around 4pm, the Washington Post drops a story about an old Access Hollywood tape; one where Trump can be heard telling host Billy Bush, “I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait…And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Whatever you want. Grab them by the pussy.”
By then I knew full well that Donald Trump hated women, but the tape laid bare the abject violence he was willing to perpetrate against any one he felt entitled to conquer. In fact, he had already been accused of this sort of violence by multiple women—but this time we got to hear it in his own words. I felt nauseous. Every cell in my body burned with rage. And then I got to work writing about it, because that’s what journalists do.
I’ve felt that burning rage many times over the past decade, but some instances stand out more than others. One was the day Susan Collins announced she’d be voting to confirm Brett Kavanaugh as a Supreme Court Justice; another was this past Monday when I watched the ad with Acton’s birth mother.
But Acton’s sexual abuse isn’t the first time the topic has come up this election cycle.
A Phoenix New Times exclusive published October 7th—incidentally, the 10-year anniversary of the Access Hollywood tape—detailed Arizona congressional candidate Bernadette Greene-Placentia’s rape in August. Speaking for the first time about the assault, Greene-Placentia said she was out in the very early morning hours fixing broken campaign signs around the district—something she had been doing to avoid the punishing Arizona summer sun—when “An attacker smashed her over the head. She blacked out. She woke up to find a strange man on top of her.” She said she waited weeks to share her story because she was embarrassed.
Greene-Placentia told the New Times that she believed the rape may have been politically motivated. “She heard him mumble something like, ‘-ic bitch, not a very good fuck,’ which her mind filled in as ‘Democratic bitch,’” according to the story. “She wasn’t sure that was exactly what he said.”
Her bravery in coming forward was immediately met with right-wing influencers “dissecting her story, alleging various discrepancies and accusing her of fabricating an allegation of rape for some kind of political gain,” per Talking Points Memo’s Christopher Mathias. In an episode of The Charlie Kirk Show the day after Greene-Placentia came forward, co-host Blake Neff read out loud online comments from viewers. “‘She either made it up or had the best night of her life,” Mathias reported. Another read by Neff said: “If she was too stupid to go to ER and do a rape kit, she’s too dumb to be in Congress.”
Greene-Placentia’s opponent, incumbent Republican Abe Hamadeh—who has publicly supported Andrew Tate, the manosphere influencer indicted on charges of trafficking minors, sex with a minor, and money laundering—condemned the allegations.
Also in Ohio, we have Republican Congressman Max Miller running for reelection, despite a litany of allegations against him. He and his ex-wife Emily Moreno—the daughter of Republican US Senator Bernie Moreno—have been and remain in a bitter custody battle over their young daughter, the details of which gained national attention thanks to a July story by Abby Vesoulis at Mother Jones that dove into the legal records.
Earlier this year, Moreno took their two-year-old daughter to the emergency room with a broken collar bone: Moreno did not know how the injury happened. An investigation by the Ohio County Division of Children and Family Services ensued, and records from mid-March, Vesoulis reported, “show that Moreno told detectives that Miller had previously thrown hot water at her, shoved her, and held a gun to her head; therefore, she couldn’t rule out that Miller caused their daughter’s fracture.”
Other allegations of violent behavior towards women have come out as a result of Moreno’s lawsuit against Miller.
Perhaps in a different time of place, the types of allegations would have led a candidate to drop out; or at the very least, led to some introspection and shame on the candidate’s part. But Miller has denied all accusations, remained in his race, and recently used the episode for a political ad. “Too many of us know the pain of divorce. It’s messy and complicated,” Miller says in the ad. “For two years, my family’s heartbreak has been dragged on to your TV because, well, that’s politics.” In a post along with the video, he makes the unfounded claim that “The allegations against me have been proven false time and again.”
In response to calls for Miller to resign in early August, this was Trump’s response: “It's a very sad thing. I know Max. He's a good person. I mean, I always thought he was a very good person, and I'm going to let the families figure that out.” Not a single top Republican elected official called for his resignation. It was yet another moment where the party made it clear that the abuse of women and children was not disqualifying.
Rape has been top of mind this fall in the wake of a lawsuit filed against Cornell University by a former student identified only as Jane Doe, alleging she drugged and gang raped by seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity at their house. After she reported the 2024 attack, the university did little to remedy the situation, forcing her to finish out the semester. Two of the seven men were expelled, but none ever faced criminal charges. The story has led to nationwide fury about the acceptance of rape into campus culture, and the little recourse that exists for victims.
In response to the heinous allegations made against the seven fraternity members, Trump said “I feel badly” for the men—not for Jane Doe.
This rich history of the GOP’s support for rape and abuse of women and children certainly set the stage for the Ramaswamy ad, but it didn’t make it any less appalling. Because while excusing these sorts of behaviors may be normal to true believers, none of this is normal. Ramaswamy’s attack on Acton was so egregious that even fellow Republicans who’d typically just No Comment their way out of it chose to say something—no matter how tepid.
“The ad, on its face, is deeply, deeply troubling,” Republican Mike DeWine, who Ramaswamy and Acton are running to replace, said on Thursday. “I would just urge the Ramaswamy campaign to take this down.”
Ohio Senator Jon Husted, who’s running for reelection in a tight race against former Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, told reporters, “if it were me, I would not have run that ad." Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who’s also running for reelection, said “I probably wouldn't run an ad like that, but every candidate gets to make their own decision."
But beyond expressing disapproval over the exploitation of his opponents sexual abuse as a child, none of these Republicans have revoked their endorsements for Ramaswamy. DeWine confirmed to reporters that he still endorses “the whole ticket.”
The enormity of Ramaswamy’s choice to double down on the ad has already produced major responses.
MK Pritzker, wife of Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, announced a donation of $500k to Acton’s campaign in the wake of Ramaswamy’s ad. “Bad men gain power when we refuse to stand up and fight,” she wrote in a statement. “Vivek Ramaswamy represents everything that is wrong with our politics today: arrogance, cruelty, dishonesty, and the belief that it’s acceptable to say and do anything for power.”
Acton received the endorsement this week of the Columbus Dispatch Editorial Board, which called Ramaswamy’s ads against her “revolting and unsettling,” and writing that “sexual violence against children should not be politicized or taken as lightly as Ramaswamy appears to take it.” The Akron Beacon Journal and Chronicle Telegram Editorial Boards also endorsed Acton, citing Ramaswamy’s “below-the-belt personal hits.”
We won’t know the full impact of Ramaswamy’s ad until the polls close on November 3rd and every vote is counted. Donald Trump’s America has shown us that no conclusion is foregone, and victim-blaming sexual abuse victims may not be dealbreaker. With this attack, Ramaswamy has put rape back on the ballot. And it will be telling whether voters reject it or accept it.
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