That Horrifying Amy Acton Ad Is Now Being Defended by J.D. Vance. There’s a Reason Why.

Slate is using a grieving kid and a troubled mom to take a swipe at JD Vance and the whole GOP campaign apparatus. That's the whole play here. They don't care about Amy Acton's family or that child one bit. They care about making a Republican VP look like a monster for standing behind an ad his party ran.

I voted Trump twice and I'm as frustrated as anybody over gas prices right now, but I'm not about to let a left-wing magazine that's been wrong about every single thing for a decade lecture me about cruelty. These are the same people who told us inflation was temporary and the border was fine. Spare me the moral outrage routine.

Slate knows the ad works, that's why they're running this headline. If it didn't move voters they'd ignore it.

It's a common tactic for campaigns to try and push the envelope with attack ads, regardless of who's running them. The goal is always to define your opponent in the most negative light possible, and sometimes that means using ethically questionable material. Whether it's effective or just backfires is the real question.

Pissboy Patel's FBI will find a way to call this a hoax if it makes Stinky Pete's party look bad. Vance defending an ad that uses a kid's trauma as a prop is the whole GOP brand, cruelty with a campaign budget. Sweaty JD Vance, couch's biggest fan, now defending a sadist mom for votes.

Twenty-two years in the Teamsters and I've seen how the owner class media like SLATE always tries to make it seem like working people don't understand that these politicians, even the ones in the White House like JD Vance, they're all about protecting the rich and screwing over the rest of us. They get their kicks being cruel to regular folks just trying to survive. Vance isn't defending that ad out of the goodness of his heart, he's doing it because it serves his agenda, plain and simple.

I'm old enough to remember when a campaign ad was just a bad ad and the Sunday shows didn't treat it like the Kennedy assassination. Slate wants me to believe Vance coming to the defense of this thing is some kind of window into the soul of the party, and maybe it is, but I've read enough of these to know the window only shows what the magazine already decided to put there. What I want to know is whether the ad worked, who paid for it, and whether the people who made it get hired again. Those are facts. The rest is everybody's feelings with a byline attached.

Whatever you think of the ad, the headline asks us to accept that there's a "reason" behind Vance defending it, and the story only offers the author's read on the campaign's motives. That's opinion, not reporting. A campaign defending its own ad is also the most predictable thing in politics, and it doesn't need a secret explanation. If there are documented facts about the mother, the court record or the family would be the place to check, not the columnist's adjectives like "sadistic."