00:00:14.000Shame on Vivek Ramaswamy, the Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate, for putting out that ad against Democrat Amy Acton, starring Amy Acton's mom.
00:00:23.000I cannot imagine a campaign using members of the family of a politician to attack that politician.
00:02:20.000Dr. Brill wholeheartedly endorsed Dr. David Brill for Congress.
00:02:25.000Yeah, I'll bet you didn't remember any of that because nobody was outraged because they were attacking a Republican.
00:02:30.000Remember that time that Amy McGrath, she was a Democratic candidate in Kentucky, ran an ad against Mitch McConnell that basically targeted Elaine Chow, his wife, for being Taiwanese American?
00:02:58.000Or that time the Washington Post ran a cartoon attacking Ted Cruz's daughter, or the time the Democratic groups ran trucks around Josh Halley's sister's office in Missouri, or the time the entire media ran with the joke lie that JD Vance had sex with a couch.
00:03:11.000I know we're all supposed to have short term memory loss, but I got to tell you, the pearl clutching is a little bit much here.
00:03:19.000It turns out that in politics, lots of bad things happen and people cut really mean ads about each other, going all the way back to James Callender running interference for Thomas Jefferson against John Adams, and then later turning around and hitting Thomas Jefferson for sleeping with Sally Hemings.
00:03:34.000So, you know, there's kind of a long history, as it turns out, in American politics of scurrilous ads or hard hitting ads or ads that everybody clutches their pearls about at the time.
00:03:43.000But let's go through this Amy Acton ad.
00:03:46.000That it turns out was funded by Vivek Ramaswamy's campaign.
00:03:48.000We're going to play the whole thing so we know what we're dealing with here because there's some controversy that's attendant on exactly what happened between Amy Acton and her mom.
00:03:58.000My name is Donna Arthur, and I'm Amy Acton's mother.
00:04:02.000I worked at the Children and Family Service Association, building one of the first two sexual abuse programs in America.
00:04:11.000I love my daughter, but when I saw her lying about her opponent, and it's not easy for a mother to say this, but Amy has a serious problem.
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00:05:57.000Okay, so the blowback on this thing is that there are accusations that Amy Acton, when she was a child, when she was between the ages of nine and 12, was molested.
00:06:10.000And so, therefore, there's sort of a she said, she said about her childhood and sympathy with the child and all of that.
00:06:16.000Okay, so let's go through the facts here because we may as well, you know, actually go through the things you need to know.
00:06:20.000So, back in 2020, Amy Acton's estranged mother, Donna Arthur, spoke to the press to share concerns about her daughter.
00:06:29.000She disputed the amount of times they moved, and she disputed Amy Acton's claims that the men in her life sexually abused her.
00:06:37.000So, when she was 12, Amy accused her stepfather of sexual abuse and rape.
00:06:42.000A grand jury never brought any charges.
00:06:44.000The mother eventually got college degrees, including a master's in public administration from Penn State.
00:06:50.000According to Operation Rescue, reporting in 2020, Acton has repeatedly told the story that she was neglected as a child, moved 18 times in the first 12 years of her life, was homeless and living in a tent over one winter, and often did not have food to eat.
00:07:03.000Acton alleges that her mother was a loose woman who had a cast of characters of men in her life, one of which became her stepfather, who abused her when she was between the ages of 9 and 12.
00:07:11.000Acton also alleges that criminal charges were filed against both her mother and her husband.
00:07:15.000Who skipped town and have not been heard from since.
00:07:18.000Okay, so in 2019, she gave an interview to The Vindicator, which was a daily newspaper in Youngstown, Ohio, in which she said that she'd been sexually abused between the ages of nine and 12.
00:07:32.000According to a newspaper report at the time, Acton's stepfather was charged with raping her in 1978 after her biological father made a report to the police.
00:07:40.000But police and court officials in the Youngstown area could not actually produce records from the 1970s.
00:07:47.000At that point, Acton's mom came forward to say that after her husband was arrested, she supported her husband rather than her daughter.
00:07:53.000She denies that the charges were ever filed against her or her husband in Mahonan County, and they moved away until things could calm down and charges could be dropped.
00:08:00.000The AP reports that Acton's stepfather was indicted by a grand jury but failed to show at a court hearing and remained a fugitive until at least 1981.
00:08:07.000So, this is all under heavy, heavy, heavy dispute, obviously.
00:08:30.000This particular ad, obviously, springing from a source who is, shall we say, questionable based on the available evidence, that is a risky business at best.
00:08:41.000Now, CBS is reporting that originally the origin of the ad was unclear because it lacked the mandatory disclosure of who paid for and authorized the spot.
00:08:49.000On Tuesday, Ramaswamy told reporters it was an ad from the campaign.
00:08:53.000And then he said, quote, Connie Locke, who's a spokesperson for Ramaswamy, said in a statement, We don't know what happened between Amy and her mother, who first spoke out about Amy in 2020.
00:09:06.000We know that Amy Acton is a serial fabulist who has some serious problems with the truth the public needs to be aware of before deciding who to entrust as governor.
00:09:13.000So, again, we should separate off now the ad and the character of Amy Acton.
00:09:19.000Okay, because it seems to me that actually what the Ramaswamy campaign should have done is just put out ads pointing out all the things that they've been saying about Amy Acton.
00:09:37.000She put out a headline saying, Billionaire scammer Ramaswamy used mother to manipulate clinical trials and pump and dump scheme to make millions.
00:09:55.000And this is, I think, the thing that we all ought to remember about all of these campaigns.
00:09:59.000In the end, one of these people will be sitting in a seat of power and one of these people will be unemployed.
00:10:03.000And so, you shouldn't decide that based on whether you like a particular ad or don't like a particular ad.
00:10:08.000You should do it based on whether you think this person will be good for you or not good for you.
00:10:12.000So, if you haven't been following the Ohio race, the reason the Ohio race is very, very important is not just because Ohio is a state that used to be a bellwether and now has moved into the red.
00:10:21.000And if it moves back blue, that's sort of an indicator of coming things.
00:10:24.000It's also because if Amy Acton wins the governorship in Ohio, there's a very high likelihood that Sherrod Brown is also going to win that Senate seat in Ohio, which puts Republicans on the brink of losing the Senate.
00:10:34.000So, let's talk about Amy Acton for a hot second.
00:10:38.000Now, if you lived in Ohio in the spring of 2020, you know who Amy Acton is.
00:11:26.000We were actually working on things in January, the second we knew about it.
00:11:30.000By June, when we reopened, because we actually reopened earlier than everyone else, it's because we took swift, decisive action, the mortality had gone down to 5%.
00:11:38.000We learned how to treat it, we learned how to save lives.
00:11:42.000Okay, so we should point out at this point that there was no point at which the mortality rate for COVID was 50%.
00:13:25.000Then he closed the bars and the restaurants.
00:13:27.000And then March 16th, the night before the Ohio presidential primary, Acton signed an order closing the polls.
00:13:33.000March 22nd, that was the stay at home order.
00:13:35.000All non essential businesses were shut, gyms and salons and the whole thing.
00:13:38.000In May of that same year, 35 gyms sued, and a Lake County judge blocked the department from enforcing the closure, saying the state went beyond its authority.
00:13:47.000And when there was a big question about nursing home deaths, because as you recall, many of the lockdown states basically locked a bunch of old people together in a place and told them not to go outside.
00:13:57.000And the nursing home deaths skyrocketed.
00:13:59.000The department initially refused to release facility level data and told county health agencies to do the same.
00:14:04.000They kept all the schools closed through the end of the year.
00:14:07.000And then in June, the House voted to strip her emergency powers.
00:14:30.000Okay, so again, she was a terribly ineffective Ohio Department of Health director.
00:14:38.000Basically, the only thing she kept open in the state of Ohio was the abortion clinics.
00:14:42.000So, back in 2020, abortion was legal in Ohio up to 20 weeks of pregnancy.
00:14:48.000But she is deeply tied to Planned Parenthood.
00:14:50.000And so, during the pandemic, she said that the abortion facility should be kept open.
00:14:57.000And then there are some questions about her actual activities.
00:15:00.000So, in 2019, for example, According to NBC News, police in Bexley, Ohio responded to a report of a domestic dispute at the home of Dr. Acton.
00:15:09.000Acton, who was then the director of the state's Department of Health, pulled a mirror off a wall, shattering the glass when she became upset because she felt her husband was antagonizing her, according to a police report.
00:15:19.000She told officers she'd been drinking, had taken an unknown amount of prescription drugs, and was about to drive away in the car before her husband, who also said he'd been drinking, talked her out of it.
00:15:28.000According to Operation Rescue, it turns out that when she applied for her initial medical license dated 1994, she checked yes to the box for the question Have you ever been treated but not hospitalized for emotional or mental illness, drug addiction, abuse, or an alcohol problem?
00:15:46.000So, again, all this is weird, and there have been some kind of strange events on the campaign trail.
00:15:51.000There's one situation on the campaign trail where a suspect named Patrick Havis went to the Canfield Fair and was kind of Shoving his way through the crowd and knocked a couple of people down in the process.
00:16:04.000And she said there was an attempted alleged assault on her.
00:16:08.000Here is what the actual event looked like.
00:16:10.000And then it turns out the prosecutors were like, she was very unhelpful in this particular case.
00:17:06.000It shows him walking into the tent, recording, and moving forward, calling out her name.
00:17:13.000And the state patrol then, her security, I shouldn't say the state patrol, somebody in her security comes forward, and then his phone is either dropped or tossed, and that's all we have.
00:17:24.000Now, again, the initial reports were that this person was attempting something truly violent against her, and the evidence didn't back all that up.
00:17:30.000But again, put all this stuff aside, all of that, right?
00:17:32.000The 2019 domestic dispute with her husband, and.
00:17:36.000What she was checking on her medical applications and all of that kind of stuff.
00:17:39.000Let's focus on what she would actually do as governor.
00:18:35.000But the attempt to get people to stay home based on the ad is really, really silly.
00:18:39.000If you're a Republican, you're staying home because you don't like Vivek Ramaswamy's ad.
00:18:42.000Let me introduce you to American politics, which have been pretty down and dirty for quite a while now, for those who have not suffered from short term memory loss.
00:18:52.000Some of us would still like for the Democrats not to win, for them not to be in power.
00:18:56.000Amy Acton, as governor of Ohio, is not a corrective to an ad you don't like from Vivek Ramaswamy's campaign.
00:19:01.000What an amazing video you just watched.
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