President Donald Trump on Wednesday said that Ohio Democrat Senate nominee Sherrod Brown, who served three terms in the Senate after some time in the House of Representatives before losing his seat in 2024, "was a stone-cold loser for Ohio."
The post Trump: Democrat Senate Candidate Sherrod Brown ‘a Stone-Cold Loser for Ohio’ appeared first on Breitbart.
My home state of Ohio has earned a not-so-nice distinction in the 2026 election: It is the site of "the ugliest" contest in the country. Nasty attack ads have been an ongoing feature of the governor's race between Republican Vivek Ramaswamy and Democrat Amy Acton—piercing many a peaceful Hulu-watching session on my end with allegations that Acton is a pill-popping drunk and Ramaswamy a con man.
But the nastiness reached a whole new level in recent weeks, with the release of a Ramaswamy campaign ad implying that Acton lied about childhood sexual abuse by her stepfather.
Understandably, many Republicans bristled at being viewed as the party that defends accused child rapists. Not Trump. His only regret here is that he didn't get to run an ad like this, he said.
The ad features Acton's mother, Donna Arthur, from whom Acton has been estranged for decades for what seem like very good reasons. When Acton was 12, her mom took her stepfather's side when she accused him of sexually abusing her for years.
In 1978, Acton's stepfather, Cledith Arthur, was arrested and charged with child rape. Records from the case, obtained by Signal Statewide, "also contains a reference to a previous incest charge against Cledith Arthur from 1974…although it's not clear how that case was resolved."
Acton's mom lost custody of both Amy and her brother. But the stepfather was never tried, since he and Acton's mom fled the state. He remained a fugitive—and married to Amy's mother—until he died in 2004.
In the new Ramaswamy campaign ad, Acton calls her daughter a liar. "It's not easy for a mother to say this, but Amy has a serious problem. She is a liar," says Arthur in the video. "She lies about her past.…She's lied her entire life. My daughter needs help."
Arthur doesn't outright say "she lied about being molested by her stepfather," but given the historical context here, the implication is pretty clear. In effect, the Ramaswamy campaign has helped Acton's mom accuse her daughter on a national scale of making it all up.
That's despicable, even by political campaigning standards.
And—providing us with some hope for humanity—it also backfired. People roundly condemned the ad and the Ramaswamy campaign for running it. Acton's brother, Philip Stearns, corroborated her story. Even many Republicans have objected to the ad.
There are still some lines you don't cross, public figures left and right seemed to agree.
Public figures except President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance.
Telling Republicans to "stop whining" about the ad, Vance said he was getting "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."
"Vivek Ramaswamy had the audacity to run a TV commercial which calls it out like it is and calls Amy Acton a liar," Vance continued.
Trump went further, calling the ad "very powerful" and urging the Ramaswamy campaign to keep it up. Trump also criticized the current Ohio governor, Republican Mike DeWine, for calling the ad "deeply troubling."
DeWine is a moderate Republican who, for the most part, adheres to pre-Trump standards of decency. Their differing reactions here seem a perfect microcosm of pre-MAGA and post-MAGA standards for conduct and bounds of acceptability.
DeWine "probably wants a Dumocrat to win," Trump wrote in a Truth Social post last Thursday. "I suggested, on the other hand, that Vivek should keep it up, and 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!"
Talking to reporters that same day, Trump just kept repeating that if an ad had been made with his mom calling him a liar, the press would love it. He stuck to that talking point again and again, acting clueless about the childhood sexual abuse allegations at the center of this whole controversy.
The idea that the president would passionately post about and answer questions about this without knowing the whole story is almost beyond belief. But even if Trump somehow didn't know the full context when he first started talking about it, he was made aware and then kept right on praising the ad.
Trump on Ramaswamy Ad: The mother is calling the daughter a terrible person and a liar. Why would you shield somebody from that? Why would we do that? So I told him, leave it up and say thank you God. I only wish I could have had an ad like that. pic.twitter.com/M2TYz3jhUy
— Acyn (@Acyn) October 23, 2026
At a campaign rally in Iowa last Thursday, he said, "I only wish I could have had an ad like that against somebody."
Ramaswamy has also defended the ad, saying, "Unfortunately, the person I'm running against does have serial problems with the truth" and that the ad highlights a "pattern" of the "people who are closest to her" telling Ohioans not to vote for her.
But this is no longer just about one candidate's mistake or one campaign's poor judgment. The response from Trump and Vance has raised Ramaswamy's ad into bigger and uglier territory.
"It's actually kind of hard to find a prominent Republican who is defending the ad other than Vivek Ramaswamy himself, Vice President JD Vance and, quite fervently today, President Trump," noted CNN's Kaitlan Collins last Friday.
But Trump and Vance are the leaders of not just the Republican Party but the nation. And as we've seen again and again, Trump's responses tend to set the tone for what will become acceptable among conservatives by and large.
"Vance's acceptance of this campaign ad only breathes life into the disease that we should be seeking to cure," former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie told The Washington Post.
Do voters agree?
Whatever happens with Ramaswamy next Tuesday, it will be impossible to know how much of it is related to this ad campaign and how much of it is related to many other possible factors. But it's hard not to look at the Ohio gubernatorial election results now as something of a referendum on what type of political discourse is OK. Are voters over Trump-style belligerence and nastiness? Or do they accept the premise that politics is a war in which no low is too low if it helps you win?
Release the FISA Ruling: "Two Democratic senators who have long overseen US intelligence say the Trump administration is illegally withholding a secret court's findings from Congress until lawmakers renew a program that lets federal agents read Americans' communications without a warrant," reports Wired:
Seven months ago, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court objected to search filters that let intelligence analysts pull Americans' messages from intercepted data without the approvals, written justifications, or records the law requires. The court approved another year of surveillance anyway. The ruling has never been made public, and Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Adam Schiff of California say the administration's own deadline for releasing it passed in September.
"This opinion details serious abuses of Americans' rights under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and, by law, should have been released before September 13," wrote Wyden and Schiff in a letter to the director of national intelligence and the U.S. Attorney General. "Yet this opinion remains hidden over a month later, suggesting that the administration hopes to secure a renewal of Section 702 while keeping Congress and the public in the dark."
Wishful thinking from Flock. Garrett Langley, the CEO of Flock, told a conference of cops to believe him rather than what's right in front of their eyes. The backlash to Flock "is not real," he said at the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference, per leaked audio obtained by 404 Media:
"Somebody was paying for [the social media posts and] stopped paying for it," Langley said about the many viral posts criticizing his company's technology. "Social media chatter on Flock is down about 95 percent from July. It went down 50 percent last week when Ukraine bombed a Russian data center with a drone. Literally 50 percent overnight. And so look, I'm the last person, my wife as well, she's like 'This is crazy, these people are getting paid to say these things,'" he added, repeating a disproven theory that Ukraine's strikes on Russian data centers had a significant impact on internet bot activity.
"It's anonymous bots, and so it is not real," he continued. "Inorganic activity has led to organic activity, but when I look at protests across the country, it is the same people with the same signs and the same message. That's not normal. That's not organic at all." Langley's comments echo another unsubstantiated theory that said opposition to Flock comes from a far-left network spreading propaganda at the behest of China.
Cute spin, but I don't think "Russian bots" can explain this congressional hearing, or Sen. Josh Hawley's (R–Mo.) Stop Flock Abuse Act, or this recent court ruling, or Connecticut's new restrictions, or canceled contracts, or all the charges that police officers are facing for abusing Flock, or poll results like these.
The backlash is widespread and multifaceted. Backlash to Flock "has just exploded, like no other issue that I have seen in my time at the ACLU," Becca Eastwood, deputy policy director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa, told Reason recently.
Techlash on the campaign trail. Democrats have been panning data centers in campaign ads, but artificial intelligence was the subject of only a small fraction of ads, notes the Blue Horizon Project, an initiative from Chamber of Progress "to restore tech optimism in the Democratic Party and reset the relationship between Democrats and the technology sector." And when Democrats have focused on AI and data centers, it's been more about economics than general anti-AI sentiment, Dave Vorland writes:
Data centers are the important exception to the lack of ads focused on AI and technology. In AdImpact's tables, they appear among the three leading Democratic advertising topics in 5 of the 21 Toss-Up House races. They are not politically irrelevant, and dismissing the local backlash would be a mistake.
But look more closely at what these ads actually argue. Using AdImpact's data on 2026 campaign spending, ads matching either a tax-language screen or energy message, or both, account for $69.76 million, or 76.2% of all data center advertising.
The race with the highest spending on data centers is the Ohio Senate race, where Democratic spending accounts for $32.10 million. AdImpact's data shows Sherrod Brown's campaign spent over $1.5 million to air a data center ad 3,100 times. The message shows that while he is willing to hit his opponent for the data center tax breaks, his solution is ensuring that data centers don't raise energy costs, an idea that could have been drawn directly from our Data Center Development Playbook.
Vorland points out that "AdImpact's data for 2026 Congressional spending shows that less than $2.5 million went to ads supporting a data-center construction pause, moratorium, ban, or stopping new construction, a minuscule portion of the Democratic ad buy."
Interesting that "let data centers build but don't subsidize them" is the implicit message here. It feels like at least somewhat of a good sign that Democratic candidates don't by-and-large think "ban new data centers" is a message that voters want to hear.
• An interesting essay in Works in Progress looks at "the rise of prudishness" and what demographics might have to do with it.
• "Technology has advanced for centuries, shuffling workers among occupations, industries, and regions without making human labor obsolete," writes Nathan Smith at Human Progress:
As machinery pushed millions of Americans away from farming over the past century, most workers moved to factories, towns, and cities. They ended up with more comfortable lives than their predecessors plowing the fields. The AI economy will likely follow the same path: destroying jobs while creating better ones.
• The New Jersey Assembly recently advanced a bill that would increase prostitution penalties, and several other prostitution-related criminal justice bills are pending in the Assembly and state Senate. Tara Burns has details.
• Florida's attorney general said he plans to introduce even more stringent social media regulation, even as the state's earlier restrictions on minors using social media are still being challenged in federal court.
• Sarah Hepola takes a stand against…vibrators?
• British tech regulator Ofcom says its Online Safety Act isn't actually stopping kids from seeing "harmful content" online. So it wants to do more of it. "Instead of suggesting to repeal the Online Safety Act because it does not seem to be working or because it imperils online freedom, Ofcom's report proposes to broaden the law's scope," writes Reason's Meagan O'Rourke.
Ofcom have found "no significant change" in children encountering harmful content since the law came into effect last July. This is despite the signifigant threats to free speech and privacy.
— Matthew Lesh (@matthewlesh) October 22, 2026
• "Social media decentralized the information environment and weakened the influence of expert opinion. LLMs are likely to have the opposite effects," writes Dan Williams at Persuasion. "Whereas social media has been a democratizing technology, LLMs are a technocratizing force. They shift influence back towards expert opinion."
• Ten states have no birth centers and eight others only have one, according to a new report from The Commonwealth Fund. "Two dozen centers closed between 2023 and 2026, with some publicly blaming onerous regulations and steep increases in malpractice insurance," notes Ohio Capitol Journal.
The post Ramaswamy's Attack on Amy Acton Was Bad Enough. Trump and Vance Made It Worse. appeared first on Reason Magazine.
On this week's episode of Freed Up, Robby Soave and Christian Britschgi condemn Vivek Ramaswamy's new attack ad against opponent Amy Acton before discussing their predictions for the 2026 midterm elections. Next, the boys get biblical with references to their favorite parables as they discuss Tyler Cowen's latest article on why he thinks Elizabeth Holmes—and most other non-violent female criminals—should not be in prison. The episode wraps with a thoughtful discussion on aging, state attorneys general, and the latest Meta settlement.
00:00—Vivek Ramaswamy ad controversy
20:00—2026 midterm elections
25:50—Should Elizabeth Holmes be in prison?
49:20—Getting older
58:55—An update on Rep. Ilhan Omar
1:03:10—The importance of grain
1:06:14—Robby and Christian extol author Michael Crichton
1:11:30—The war in Ukraine should end.
1:14:50—Meta settled with the state of New Mexico
1:20:00— Christian continues his crusade against state attorneys general.
If you enjoy Freed Up, come watch Robby debate at our upcoming Reason Versus in D.C. Tickets are available here.
The post Vivek Ramaswamy, Elizabeth Holmes, and Jesus appeared first on Reason Magazine.
© Illustration: Fatima Ruiz
In this segment of Free Media, Reason Senior Editor Robby Soave and Daily Caller Editor in Chief Amber Duke discuss Vivek Ramaswamy's controversial attack ad against his opponent Amy Acton in Ohio's gubernatorial race.
If you enjoy Free Media, come watch Robby debate at our upcoming Reason Versus in Washington, D.C. Tickets are available here.
The post Vivek Ramaswamy Is Defending Controversial Ad With Amy Acton's Mother appeared first on Reason Magazine.
As the Trump administration's short-lived Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project implemented its plan to downsize the federal workforce, there was much wailing from the liberal institutions in Washington, D.C.
Federal employee unions filed lawsuits to block the effort. NPR ran profiles of federal workers who, for the first time, faced the prospect of potentially not having absolute job security forever. The Brookings Institution wondered how many jobs the federal government could shed before it crashes.
The answer: plenty. The Trump administration has cut more than 10 percent of the federal workforce, and the government hasn't crashed. Indeed, it hasn't even shrunk—if you're counting by dollars spent instead of people employed.
In a new article for City Journal, Manhattan Institute senior fellow Judge Glock highlights the tremendous gap between the dire predictions about DOGE's cuts and the reality that has emerged, more than a year after DOGE was shut down. Despite having only a modest impact on spending, Glock writes, DOGE "had a massive impact on the federal civil service."
This is true—to a point, more on that in a moment—and notable. Aside from a modest downsizing in the 1990s, the number of people employed by the federal government has been steadily growing for decades. Reversing that trend is one of the few genuinely libertarian accomplishments by the Trump administration.
The cuts to the federal workforce prove that "DOGE worked," argues Glock.
Well, hold on.
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy (who departed the DOGE project before Trump's inauguration and is now running for governor of Ohio) set some very ambitious goals after being appointed DOGE co-chairs in late 2024. In an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal in November 2024 where they promised "we won't just write reports or cut ribbons. We'll cut costs."
Musk repeatedly attached some rather absurd numbers to that promise. He said DOGE would cut $1 trillion or even $2 trillion in federal spending. In the end, it didn't come close. By DOGE's own (questionable) accounting, it cut $170 billion. Meanwhile, overall federal spending has increased in each of Trump's first two years in office, and the budget deficit has widened as well.
Yes, Musk and Ramaswamy also said they would reduce the federal workforce. But that was presented as a natural consequence of cutting spending, not as the primary goal.
Think about it like this. If I spent months promising my friends and family that I would lose 50 pounds on a new diet, and then didn't lose any weight, would it be fair to say the diet worked?
What if I reduced the number of donuts I eat every day, but still didn't lose any weight? Sure, that might be good for my health in some way—just like reducing unnecessary workers in the federal government is good for America's fiscal health—but it certainly wouldn't mean I had achieved the goal of losing weight.
Finally, even the claim that DOGE cut the federal workforce requires an asterisk. As Glock also notes in his report, the decline in federal workers has been offset by an increase in federal contractors.
It's not a one-for-one trade, of course. The new contractors are overwhelmingly concentrated in places like the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon, while the cuts mostly targeted other areas, like the Department of Health and Human Services.
"Most of that increase came from the buildup in homeland-security and defense contracting, including purchases such as surveillance aircraft and tanks, rather than substitutes for government workers," Glock writes. "DOGE achieved real contract savings, but these were more than offset by higher spending elsewhere, reflecting a shift in priorities rather than an overall reduction in contracting."
So, the government is eating fewer donuts but more pizza.
There might be libertarian reasons to prefer contractors over government employees. They are less likely to hold those jobs for life, for one. But there's nothing inherently good about a government policy that cuts jobs in some areas just to create more room in the budget for poorly trained immigration enforcement agents and defense contractors. That may even be a negative outcome for liberty.
In the end, the DOGE project looks less like a meaningful attempt at cutting government spending or employment levels and more like a way to purge parts of the federal workforce likely to get in Trump's way during his second term. "As long as [Trump's] larger commitment is to extending his power rather than rolling back power itself, you shouldn't expect the government to stop growing," as Reason's Jesse Walker wrote last year in comparing DOGE to President Richard Nixon's attempted purge of the civil service.
Did DOGE work? Only if you grade it on a pretty dramatic curve.
Yes, it proved that a president can slash bureaucratic jobs—particularly the bloated managerial and administrative types—without doing much damage to the government's core responsibilities. That's a lesson future administrations should remember.
Maybe, someday, a president will try applying the same logic to government spending too.
The post DOGE Worked? Only If You Grade on a Curve. appeared first on Reason Magazine.
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