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The Weekly Scroll is a once-a-week roundup of the most interesting, strangest, and funniest stories from around the social internet.
This week, we’re talking about a nasty attack ad in Ohio, more cross-cultural battles on Twitter, and a surprising guest on Subway Takes.
Vivek October surprises himself
The bar for campaign attack ads has sunk unbelievably low, but Ohio gubernatorial nominee Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican previously best known for being so insufferable that even Elon Musk wouldn’t hang out with him,1 has somehow failed to clear it.
Earlier this week, the Ramaswamy campaign released an ad in which the Democratic nominee, Amy Acton, is assailed by her own mother, Donna Arthur. Arthur says that her daughter is a liar and implies she has mental health issues.
What makes the ad so egregious is that Acton’s legitimate cause for estrangement from her mother is a matter of public record: She accused her stepfather of sexually abusing her when she was 12 years old, and he was subsequently arrested and indicted for rape in 1978. Arthur lost custody of Acton and her younger brother, and the stepfather fled prosecution and died without ever having faced trial. All this time, Arthur stood by him and remained married to him until he died.
That’s the subtext that’s not immediately apparent in the ad: Ramaswamy’s campaign brought in Acton’s mother to call her a liar, and what she’s implying is that Acton lied about being molested as a 12-year-old.
Standing with a woman who allegedly failed to protect her daughter from sexual abuse is ... an interesting campaign tactic. Condemnations came in from both sides of the aisle. While Democrats predictably pilloried the ad, so did many Republicans: Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, who has endorsed Ramaswamy, called the ad “wrong” and “deeply, deeply troubling” and said the campaign should withdraw it. Former South Carolina Gov. and presidential candidate Nikki Haley called Ramaswamy “a bad guy,” while Ohio Republican Sen. Jon Husted said he would not have run the ad.
Now, look. I’m not a professional campaign strategist. But when you’ve lost the moral high ground to Nick Fuentes, it might be time to re-examine your tactics. (Fuentes, who has long opposed Ramaswamy’s campaign and called him an “anchor baby,” may, of course, have had less savory reasons to join the dogpile.)
Ramaswamy’s attempt to spring an “October surprise” seems to have backfired, making him look cruel to anyone with a shred of humanity. Luckily for him, there are plenty of people in politics without even that shred. Plenty of pro-MAGA voices are standing behind the ad, with Ben Shapiro engaging in some both-sides-ism and both President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance directly defending the video.
Beyond the obvious shock value that a campaign would do something like this, there are a few things I find interesting about this episode. The first is that the ad wasn’t initially run on TV but instead circulated online. It was first leaked to the Ramaswamy-critical Ohio politics blog The Rooster, and from there, right-wing accounts like Walter Curt, Donald Trump Jr., and many others amplified it as a “bombshell” that would devastate Acton’s campaign. Ramaswamy’s team didn’t actually take credit for the ad right away.
The Rooster told CNN that it obtained the video from a voter who had seen it as part of a poll and recorded it. We know that the Ramaswamy campaign went to the trouble of finding Acton’s mother and filming a slick, professionally produced video with her. But then it only put it into a few push polls two weeks before the election? And it had to be discovered by an anti-Ramaswamy blogger by accident? Really?
Unfortunately for Team Ramaswamy, social media makes it much harder to keep this kind of thing under wraps. If you show a video to any appreciable number of people, someone’s going to film it and stick it online. This could also explain why it took nearly 24 hours for Ramaswamy’s team to even acknowledge it was the one who produced the ad.
This entire episode is another instance of the disarray we’re currently seeing in the Republican Party. Whether it’s the Acton ad, the fake Talarico conspiracy theory, or podcasters discussing the “Indian Question,” these are not the actions of a movement that’s confident in its position going into the 2026 midterm elections.
This is what you see from a flailing, frightened party anticipating a wipeout, desperately throwing anything it can at the public to see if it will stick.
Found in translation
Last week, we talked about Chinese and Brazilian leftists fighting on Twitter about whether leftism should promote gay rights or protest police brutality.