Screenshot of the online advertisement from the campaign of Vivek Ramaswamy

The GOP nominee for Governor in Ohio, Vivek Ramaswamy, provoked widespread condemnation this week as a result of an online campaign ad starring the biological mother of his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton. It is difficult to recall a political ad quite like this one.

With a camera aimed directly at her face, Acton’s elderly mother denounces and maligns her daughter with an unflinching venom rarely seen in a parent's attacks on their own child, particularly when spewed so publicly. Her condemnation of her own daughter has nothing at all to do with policy or ideology and everything to do with personal animus. With visceral contempt, Acton’s mother proclaims her to be a lifelong liar, a manipulator, and someone “who needs help.” She thus urges Ohioans to trust nothing her daughter says and “not to vote” for someone who is so mentally ill, pathologically deceitful, and just a generally horrible human being.

This innovative ad, quite predictably, drew immediate and intense online and media outrage, including among some GOP officials . The use of other people’s family members in politics generally reeks of a certain kind of desperation, and it is not hard to understand why Vivek’s campaign would be eagerly grasping for unorthodox tactics.

Though Barack Obama twice won the state of Ohio, it has been reliably red in the Trump era. Trump won the state in three consecutive presidential elections. It has had a GOP Governor since 2011, and its two Senators are Republicans. JD Vance won a Senate seat there in 2022, and the Democrat Sherrod Brown lost his bid for a fourth term in 2024 by losing to Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH).

Yet in the race for governor, polls all year have shown the highly ambitious Ramaswamy running slightly or moderately behind Acton, who has never before held elective office. Prediction markets have been even more pessimistic about Ramaswamy’s chances. In the state’s race for Senate, Sherrod Brown has maintained a solid polling lead in his attempt to avenge his 2024 loss and win his fourth term, now running against incumbent Sen. John Husted (R-OH).

As the party out of power in the White House, with Trump’s popularity suffering all-time lows as he heads into his lame-duck period, and with Trump’s Iran war still causing high gas prices, the still-unpopular Democrats have a multi-pronged structural advantage in the midterm election. Vivek himself has never won an election, and — as a billionaire with a less-than-inspiring origin story for his wealth — faces his own unique challenges as an untraditional GOP candidate in the Midwest. In sum, Vivek is a desperate candidate. And like desperate people generally, desperate candidates often resort to desperate acts.

When the ad first appeared online on Monday, it did not bear any official connection to the campaign. It lacked, for instance, the now familiar legally required line: “I’m Candidate X, and I approve this message.” But Vivek’s campaign ultimately assumed responsibility for its financing and production, and is now spending at least $4 million to put it on air in Ohio.

The creators of this new ad, including Vivek, almost certainly knew it would provoke a reaction that would be, at best, deeply polarizing. Everything about the ad is strange, dark and unsettling.

This is hardly the first time a campaign has exploited an opposing candidate’s angry relative or their family strife to gain an electoral advantage. In the last decade, Democrats often featured Trump’s various cousins and the like viciously condemning his character. (Democrats elevated Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, into a very wealthy woman for doing so). Once RFK Jr. began opposing the Democratic Party and then joined Trump’s campaign and administration, his very large pseudo-royal family members were given endless media space to attack him in the most vitriolic and personal ways imaginable, and have never stopped doing so .

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As part of the anti-Trump #Resistance, Democrats cynically promoted the 15-year-old daughter of George and Kellyanne Conway to stardom when she covertly filmed and then posted her screaming matches with her pro-Trump mother on TikTok, and Elon Musk’s trans daughter has appeared on countless shows to elaborate on her hatred for her father.

Still, there is something particularly alienating about using someone’s elderly mother in a political attack ad. At best — meaning: even if everything the script alleges is accurate — the ad is viscerally crude and repellent. That is not to say that using someone’s close relative as a character witness in a political campaign is never justifiable or is an absolute taboo. But even in the abstract, one struggles to imagine a scenario where using an old woman in this way is both justified and effective.

In the specific case of the Acton ad, all of those questions quickly became irrelevant once the tragic circumstances of this family and this “mother/daughter” relationship are known. Despite being presented in the ad as a reliable character witness to condemn the integrity of the Democratic nominee, the woman in the ad — though Amy Acton’s biological mother — has had nothing to do with her daughter’s life for almost the last 50 years.

That is because, in the 1970s, Acton’s biological mother abandoned her daughter and her son (Acton’s younger brother) when Amy was just 12 years old. She fled her home and left her children in order to be with her boyfriend, losing custody of both children. How can any woman — even if she is the biological mother — purport to reliably evaluate the character of a 60-year-old woman whom she has not seen since that woman was a child?

What made the ad even more repugnant were the reasons why the two of them had been estranged for so long. Amy Acton, at the age of 12, accused her mother’s boyfriend of having assaulted and raped her, accusations supported by her brother. This was not some recovered memory found in therapy 20 years later. It was reported to the police immediately at the time.

And there was at least enough evidence to lead the police to arrest the boyfriend and for him to be charged with those crimes. Once he was out on bail, he fled to avoid facing the charges, and his girlfriend — Amy Acton’s mother — chose to leave with him, even though that choice meant abandoning her own daughter and her younger son. This is who Vivek’s campaign decided to make the star of this attack ad against Amy Acton: someone who, at the very best , abandoned her own children at a young age and, if the accusations were true, did so in order to side with her own daughter’s pedophile rapist.

Eventually, Amy Acton overcame all of this to go to college, graduate from medical school, rise to be Ohio’s Health Director, and is now the frontrunner to be the state’s next governor. Acton has all sorts of political views and prior decisions worthy of perfectly viable opposition — including her statements and policies regarding the COVID crisis — but the absolute last person qualified to speak on any of this is the mother who abandoned her 50 years earlier.

The obvious villain in the story is the woman presented as the ad’s protagonist. Even for those who see politics as a dirty, no-holds-barred, win-at-any-cost game, this was a bridge — many bridges — too far.

Fortunately for Vivek, he had an obvious and easy way out of this problem. All he had to do was denounce the ad. It did not bear his name when it originally emerged. His campaign had not yet run the ad. And there was no evidence he was involved in its production.

And even if he had knowledge of it or participated in its production, all he had to do was repudiate it before it aired. Any random person, let alone an experienced political consultant, would know what to say: I believe Amy Acton is deeply unqualified to govern Ohio and her ideology would damage the lives of the people of our state. For that reason, we should focus on what matters in this election. Like all campaigns, we test many ads and I concluded that this one does not meet our standards and will not air. We will focus only on Amy Acton’s liberal policies that will harm working families in Ohio.

That’s it. That is just a simple, straightforward assumption of responsibility and apology: the kind any decent person, by definition, makes all the time. For those of us with children, the assumption of one’s own errors and the virtue of apologizing are foundational to basic parenting. We all make mistakes, of course, and most people admire those capable of acknowledging those mistakes and apologizing for them, precisely because doing so requires some minimal degree of integrity, humility and personal responsibility.

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Yet, in the face of widespread denunciations even from many of his own partisan allies, that is not what Vivek chose to do here. He actually did the opposite. He defended the ad. His campaign released a statement that began: “We do not know what happened between Amy and her mother.” What? That is not true. We may not know for certain that the woman featured in the ad had a boyfriend who raped her own daughter — even though the police seemed to have found the accusations credible — but we know that she abandoned her own daughter at the age of 12. That, by itself, should disqualify any ad featuring this woman.

But Vivek’s campaign was not done justifying the ad. “What we know,” Vivek’s campaign argued, is that “Amy Acton is a serial fabulist who has some serious problems with the truth.”

Maybe that is true. Many politicians have a precarious relationship with the truth. Amy Acton may be one of them. That is obviously a relevant issue to raise in a high-stakes political campaign. But the absolute last person qualified to speak on that question is her biological mother, who has not been in her life since she was 12 and who is under the cloud of heinous allegations.

So — in the wake of all this public indignation — why did Vivek embrace and justify this ad rather than simply apologize for it or at least renounce it and then move on? There are likely multiple motives, but one thing is clear.

Vivek’s refusal to apologize illustrates a prevailing cultural ethos that is corrosive and demeaning. It equates apology with weakness, admission of wrongdoing with cowardice, and acknowledgment of error with surrender. Within this twisted framework, the only way to demonstrate courage, conviction, and a willingness to fight for a cause is to insist on one’s own infallibility and, most urgently of all, to never back down.

This amoral code of ethics did not just randomly emerge one day. It was, at least in part, a backlash — an understandable one — to the social justice bullying campaigns that tried to force people to renounce their own beliefs and submit to public humiliation rituals as punishment for any kind of wrongthink . It is understandable that the reaction to coerced public apology rituals was to encourage people to insist upon the right to hold their own views regardless of their unpopularity. And from that emerged a collective resolve in many factions never to appease an angry online mob out fear rather than a genuine sense of regret. All of that is understandable, even necessary.

When public penance is demanded by an angry mob, an apology proffered out of fear often does not placate the mob but rather emboldens it. That is because those trying to force others to publicly apologize are doing so not with any righteous cause but as a display of raw power. Within that mob dynamic, the extracted apology is treated as weakness, not as remorse.

As the popularity of this sadistic ritual has risen, many have learned the lesson that defiance is the only solution. Online mobs who are seeking retribution, not genuine remorse, have fostered a backlash in which their targets are understandably reluctant to apologize, even when they know they should, because it will do nothing but fuel further attacks.

Dan Hauser, a top adviser to Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), originally promoted the Vivek attack ad, but then publicly apologized for doing so once he learned the circumstances underlying Amy Acton’s family relationship. That, to me, seems like exactly what we should be encouraging one another to do: admit error and apologize when we realize our mistakes. So I praised him in what seemed to me to be a rather standard and unremarkable exchange:

Apparently, this exchange was seen by many as anything but standard. Both Hauser and I were quickly deluged with angry attackers insisting that his original act could not be forgiven, that this apology should be scorned, not accepted or praised. This is the culture that has somehow portrayed apologizing as the worst, or at least most self-defeating, act, and it is the reason why so many are now so averse to doing so. So I fully understand the backlash. Why apologize if you will only be vilified even more?

As understandable as that reaction is, we should not allow these mob excesses to foster the opposite cultural extreme, whereby apologies are deemed an act of cowardice and capitulation. Yet this is, in many of the precincts Vivek occupies, the new code. To admit the validity of a criticism is to strengthen one’s enemies. No matter how ignoble, immoral and despicable one’s own act may be — such as featuring a mother who abandoned her own children in an attack ad in the wake of rape accusations — the only thing worse is apologizing for the ad.

Aside from being bereft of ethics and accountability, and aside from depriving us of the only action which enables us to personally and societally evolve (namely, internalizing and admitting our own mistakes and vowing to avoid them in the future), this never-apologize dictate inverts reality. Admitting error and apologizing for it requires strength and courage, not weakness and submission.

Publicly acknowledging wrongdoing is possible only for those sufficiently secure, courageous, and self-possessed. Only those who are petrified of public vulnerability, or insecure about their own character, are afraid above all else to publicly admit error. That is why those a steadfast refusal to admit error is also self-defeating in the extreme. We all have encountered such people in our lives. Most people understand what this recalcitrance reveals about someone’s character.

This is why Vivek’s behavior — not just the attack ad but far more so his defense of it and refusal to withdraw it — has produced so much contempt. In case there is doubt about that, observe how, in the wake of this debacle, Vivek’s perceived chances for victory in November have plummeted to an all-time low:

As it happens, there is a perfect counterexample from within the last twenty-four hours that illustrates all of these points from a very unlikely source. One might call it the anti-Vivek lesson. It features someone who found himself in a very similar situation as the one Vivek confronted, but chose to handle it by choosing the exact opposite path and, likely, with very different outcomes.

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This very different choice took place yesterday in Brazil. That country’s presidential run-off — between incumbent President Lula da Silva and Sen. Flavio Bolsonaro — will be held on Sunday. To call Brazilian politics polarizing, and to observe that the two candidates despise one another personally and politically, is to understate the case.

The current President, Lula, was term-limited out of office in 2010 after serving two terms, and was then imprisoned on corruption charges as he planned to run for President again in 2018 against Flavio’s father, Jair Bolsonaro. With Lula imprisoned under an 11-year sentence, Bolsonaro defeated Lula’s party rather easily and became President in 2018.

Once Lula’s conviction was nullified and he was released from prison, he ran against Jair Bolsonaro and very narrowly defeated him in 2022. Bolsonaro himself was then imprisoned on charges that he attempted to stage a coup after his election loss, and is now imprisoned himself, serving a twenty-eight-year sentence at home. From his prison cell, Bolsonaro chose his son Flavio — a Senator from Rio de Janeiro — as the presidential candidate for his party for 2026. The word “polarization” does not do justice to Brazil’s prevailing political climate.

The first round of voting in Brazil was held on October 5, and Bolsonaro surprised pollsters by finishing two points ahead of Lula. Since neither presidential contender received more than 50% of the vote, they now face a run-off to be held on Sunday. Nonetheless, Bolsonaro’s right-wing party enjoyed a historic victory: it utterly destroyed Lula’s left-liberal party in every region of Brazil and now dominates the Senate, the House, and key governorship races.

After those results, Flavio Bolsonaro has been considered the clear favorite to win the run-off against Lula and become the country’s President, avenging his father’s 2022 defeat and subsequent imprisonment.

Two presidential debates were scheduled before the run-off. The first debate between Bolsonaro and Lula was held last Sunday. From the start, it was so personally acrimonious and unrelentingly ugly — so filled with one attack and accusation after the next — that even political professionals and devoted partisans found it deeply unpleasant to watch. A quick consensus emerged that it likely did neither of them any favors, particularly with the voters they most need: those who refused to vote in the first round and appeared wise for their abstention.

The second and final debate was held last night. Both candidates were clearly advised to restrain their behavior, do their best to conceal their personal disdain, and try to focus on their claimed intentions to improve the lives of voters. While they largely succeeded, Flavio Bolsonaro had a particularly notable lapse when he referenced Lula with a derogatory nickname the Brazilian Right has long used: nine fingers (“nove dedos”). That “nickname” mockingly refers to the fact that Lula had his left pinky amputated when he suffered an accident while working in a factory at the age of 17.

This insult left Bolsonaro’s mouth when he was responding to Lula’s claim of raising the minimum wage for workers. Bolsonaro replied that the raise was deceptive given that inflation and other cost-of-living increases caused by Lula would erase that wage increase. “It does nothing,” said Bolsonaro, “if you give with one hand, you take away with the other nine fingers.”

Screenshot from Brazil’s second presidential debate, October 23, 2026

Lula is now 80 years old and seeking his fourth term as president. Though not even in the same universe as Joe Biden when it comes to the infirmities of age, he is visibly slower and less politically adept than the highly charismatic figure who has dominated Brazilian politics for almost three decades. Still, the opening Bolsonaro gave him was far too wide for a cunning politician like Lula to miss.

Lula instantly seized on Flavio’s insult by dramatically and righteously touting what has long been, and remains, his political superpower: the extreme poverty and deprivation that Lula — like tens of millions of Brazilians — had to navigate throughout childhood and into his adult life. Whatever one thinks of Lula, emerging from the brutality of Brazilian poverty — one of ten children, illiterate until he was nine, denied every basic opportunity for advancement — is a life that merits respect and admiration.

Referring to Bolsonaro’s alleged ties to the country’s feared and armed militias, Lula inveighed: “I will not allow a militiaman to call me ‘nine-fingers.’ You’ve never worked a day in your life; you don’t even know what a formal employment record book is. […] You are going to have to apologize to me.” Echoing a grievance about employers shared by a huge bulk of the Brazilian working class, Lula added: “Millions of workers suffer accidents due to the irresponsibility of their employers.” Lula concluded by again demanding an apology.

If Lula knows how to do anything, he knows how to use his undeniably inspiring life story to connect to the average Brazilian worker, including those who long ago soured on his decades of unfulfilled promises and his party’s rampant corruption scandals. To cover this debate, news outlets had assembled random, “independent” voters to record their real-time reactions to the debate. Lula’s angry reaction to Bolsonaro’s “nine fingers” insult, and his subsequent speech about Brazilian workers, unsurprisingly, registered his most favorable reaction by far.

The Bolsonaro movement has embraced the same never-apology ethos as many other nominally anti-establishment political movements around the democratic world (including, arguably, MAGA). Given Lula’s dominance over Brazilian politics for the last twenty-five years — he was first elected president in 2002 — a visceral hatred of Lula has long been a centerpiece of Bolsonaro politics and a driving force of its movement. Apologizing to Lula is not something that any of them would do lightly, if at all. Many would rather swallow their own tongue.

Yet the gravity of Bolsonaro's mistake and the efficacy of Lula's righteous rage — framed as a defense of the dignity of Brazil's long-suffering working poor — were palpable. Bolsonaro was clearly in a very precarious spot. In that moment, should Bolsonaro apologize to Lula, his movement’s most hated and demonized enemy? Could he do so without appearing “weak,” and alienating and embarrassing his core voters? Or should he follow Vivek’s path of doubling down?

This seemed like a rather decisive moment, the kind that can swing an imminent election. As soon as Lula was done, Flavio calmly walked to the center of the stage and, with a self-possessed and measured tone, turned directly to Lula behind him and offered an apology largely free of caveats or smug justifications: “Lula, if I offended you for referring to you as ‘nine fingers,’ I apologize to you, genuinely. I did not want to offend you.” He repeated: “I genuinely apologize.” He then used that as a transition to ask Lula if he would apologize to all the Brazilians suffering under the 20 years or so of Lula’s governance.

What is most notable here is the instant reaction to Flavio’s apology by the media’s testing group. Just as Lula’s objections to Flavio’s insult registered as Lula’s best moment, Flavio’s apology registered as his best moment up to that point. Contrary to the apparent assumption of Vivek and so many others, apologies are not perceived as character flaws, or signs of weakness, or a lack of internal fortitude.

Anyone who has had to apologize or admit error before understands the difficulty of doing so. One must summon humility to recognize one’s own error and then express it publicly. It requires particular courage to do so in front of large numbers of people, and it requires an even greater degree of resolve when the apology is addressed to a hated rival.

And voters — undoubtedly tired, especially in the internet age, of being berated with an endless stream of character attacks and accusations both within politics and outside of it — obviously reacted to Flavio Bolsonaro’s apology with appreciation and a likely sense of relief. Perhaps someone close to Vivek Ramaswamy should

There is no need to romanticize any of this. I need no sermons about the serious problems of the Bolsonaro movement, of Lula’s candidacy, or any other political faction. I am well aware of all the nuances and countervailing points when praising these apologies.

I can anticipate and fully agree with the arguments that many will mount against it. Sometimes politicians apologize purely for personal gain, because they realize they have to, and no commendable attribute or genuine sense of regret underlies it. Perhaps that was what motivated Flavio’s apology. Some mistakes are unforgivable even if followed by a short apology. Some acts reveal far too much personal malice and poor character to be remediable with a quick note of remorse. The version of apology accompanied by the conditional phrase “if I offended you” is generally less genuine than one without that qualifier. And oe and on and on. I understand all of that.

The point here is not to rise in praise of Flavio Bolsonaro or to condemn Vivek Ramaswamy in these two instances. I have met and to some extent know both of them and see neither of them as simple caricatures. I have no doubt that each of them, in other contexts, has likely exhibited traits opposite to the ones I am highlighting here. That is true of most if not all of us.

The far more important dynamic, as I see it, is the now-dominant culture that teaches that apologies — and expressions of regret generally — are solely for the weak and spineless. Nobody benefits from a social dynamic which disparages admission of error as capitulation, or which equates an unyielding insistence on one's own infallibility with some sort of noble resolve. That is a set of cultural norms far more likely to promote and empower the worst of us.