The answer to the Acton ad is more speech, not less

Opinion

By Silas Wren

No Prior Restraint — a column on free expression

Ohio’s governor’s race has produced the kind of political ad that makes decent people wince. Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign is airing a spot in which Donna Arthur, the estranged mother of Democratic nominee Amy Acton, calls her daughter a “liar” and asks Ohioans not to vote for her, NBC News reported. Acton has said she was sexually abused by her mother’s husband, an account her brother has publicly backed, and the ad says nothing about it.

Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican who still endorses Ramaswamy, called the ad “deeply, deeply troubling” and urged the campaign to take it down. The campaign has instead moved to a 30-second version, according to NBC.

Whatever one thinks of the ad, and there is a strong case that it is unfair, the right response is the one Ohio is already seeing: more speech.

The other side has a point

Start with the strongest objection. Acton’s defenders, and DeWine, are not making a frivolous complaint. An ad that puts a parent on camera against her child, without disclosing the abuse allegation that both the candidate and her brother have described, can leave viewers with a false impression even if every word spoken is the mother’s honest opinion. Philip Stearns, Acton’s brother, put the omission starkly: their “birth mother stayed married to Amy’s rapist until he died.” For Acton, the ad is not an abstraction about campaign tactics. It reopens something deeply personal in front of voters across the state.

It is also worth being clear about what DeWine did. He asked a candidate to pull an ad. That is not censorship; it is a governor using his own voice to criticize a choice he thinks is wrong. Free speech protects his criticism as surely as it protects the ad.

Why the law leaves this to voters

The question is what happens next, and here American law is unusually clear about who decides. When a legally qualified candidate uses a broadcast station, Section 315 of the Communications Act says the licensee “shall have no power of censorship over the material broadcast.” The Supreme Court took that seriously in Farmers Educational & Cooperative Union v. WDAY in 1959, holding that a station could not be held liable for defamatory statements in a candidate’s broadcast it was barred from editing.

The rule reflects the logic of the First Amendment generally: the people least suited to filter campaign messages are those with a stake in the outcome or a license to protect. A world in which stations, platforms or regulators trimmed candidate ads for fairness would be a world in which someone other than voters decided what counted as fair.

Justice Louis Brandeis made the deeper argument nearly a century ago in Whitney v. California: “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.” There is time here. The election is Nov. 3, and Ohio voters have now heard from the ad, from Acton, from her brother, from the Republican governor, and from the president.

The marketplace is working

That last point matters. The debate over this ad is happening in full public view, and it is not one-sided. President Donald Trump defended the spot on Truth Social as a “very powerful Ad,” and he argued that if his own mother had criticized him, the press would “play it up.” Vice President JD Vance told Republicans to “stop whining about an advertisement.” Ramaswamy spokesperson Connie Luck said Acton was “the first and only candidate to attack the mother of her opponent in this race” and accused the media of double standards. Sen. Jon Husted said he “would not have run that ad.”

Voters can sort that out. They can decide the ad is a legitimate window into a candidate’s character, or a cruel stunt that tells them more about the campaign that made it. Either judgment is theirs, and either is better than one imposed from above.

The risk in moments like this is the temptation to move from criticism to pressure on intermediaries, the stations that air ads or the platforms that host them, to make the content disappear. That pressure should be resisted, whoever is applying it and whichever party benefits. The same tools that would take down an ad you find repugnant would be available to take down one you find essential.

Hold the speaker accountable, not the microphone

None of this means the ad is beyond criticism. Free speech is not a promise that speech will be well received. If Ohioans think the ad crossed a line, they have the most powerful remedy in a democracy, and they get to use it in nine days.

Ramaswamy is entitled to run the ad. DeWine is entitled to condemn it. Acton is entitled to answer it, and voters are entitled to hear all of it and decide. That is not a breakdown of the system. It is the system.

Photo: NJM2010 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0, cropped.

Silas Wren is the pen name of a Washington Inquisitor opinion columnist writing from a free speech absolutist perspective. The views expressed are the author’s own and not those of The Washington Inquisitor.