Editor's Notes: For MAGA, Children Are Property

On October 19, Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign for governor of Ohio took a strange and—as we shall see—disgusting turn. He ran an attack ad featuring his opponent Amy Acton’s mother, saying that Acton has “a serious problem, she is a liar… She’s lied her entire life. My daughter needs help.”

But the reason for Acton’s estrangement with her mother is known: her mother married a known pedophile and enabled him to molest Acton when she was between 10 and 12 years old. He was never convicted—because he pled not guilty, made bail, and skipped town, spending the rest of his life as a fugitive from justice. You can read the linked story yourself; it is a reminder of the desperate circumstances far too many children in this country fall into when their families and the state fail them.

If one were a curious sort, one might detect a certain link between this disgusting episode and the spate of recent articles chastising children for going no-contact with their parents. According to ever-centrist Atlantic, this is a result of changing values in a new generation, or possibly social media, or maybe that old stock trope, the wicked therapist. Translation, millennials are ungrateful. We just don’t care about family and loyalty and love. We see everything as transactional; we simply don’t appreciate what our parents have done for us.