Josh Mandel and OhioNavyMom61 enter the Thunderdome
Ohio's least savviest lawmaker gets burned with a burner, and one of the most rabid jackals in Ohio history appears to be back from the dead.
Welcome to a special edition of The Rooster.
It’s become a unique brand in Ohio politics thanks to the generosity of the Patriots Caucus, a bipartisan cabal of the biggest sickos from around America.
The Rooster can offer coverage that can’t be imitated because of a special kind of mental illness. The politicians have come to loathe this outlet because we know how to hit them where it hurts, as you’re about to see.
But also, it's because they can’t go crying to our a lizardly c-suite editor from the Jurassic Era, corporate sponsors, or a handful of wealthy benefactors to hamstring our coverage and demand The Rooster plays by their rules.
The goal is always to be both informative and entertaining. And we hope that anyone not familiar with the brand—or even the free-loading hogs in the parking lot—will purchase a subscription to help ensure another record payload of psychic damage upon the state’s miscreant political actors in 2026.
Thank you for your attention to this important matter.
If you’re here for Josh Mandel news, click here to skip to the main event. Note that you’ll have to part with some rubies to do so, if you haven’t already.
Kooksville’s Beath Lear launches hours-long, one-sided feud against Ohio’s most obscure blogger, only to go out like Stan Chera
I would have stopped trying to kill myself with drugs and alcohol in 2019 if I knew how easy it was to put psychic damage on Ohio’s alleged leaders by typing deranged sentences into the internet.
For example, you would sound insane to the average citizen if you told them that a viable State Senate candidate went on the warpath Friday night against an obscure blogger.
You might get the police called if you kept rambling about how that State Senate candidate used a Twitter burner to launch several personal attacks and smears against that blogger, only to immediately delete that account when the blogger outted her comments in an encrypted Signal group chat featuring a majority of Republican State Representatives.
But that’s exactly what happened to “OhioNavyMom61” and State Rep. Beth Lear (R-Kooksville) after what I can only assume was her guzzling a half bottle of high-priced Bourbon.
I already knew Lear would push me into a volcano if she were guaranteed to get away with the crime. And that’s fine. Her loathing is worth much more to me than her respect.
But I had never turned my jaundiced eye toward Lear. I don’t heckle her or badger her, nor have I ever tried to bust her up.
It’d be a waste of my time because nobody respects her. If cleveland.com hadn’t removed “Least Savviest Lawmaker” from the Sloopys—the Statehouse’s more prestigious and sexier version of the Oscars—then she probably would have won her only award in a landslide.
In a normal state, she would be relegated to the role of trustee of an obscure township that peaked as a railroad stop in 1891.
In Ohio, she’s a viable State Senate candidate.
So, it caught my surprise on Friday night when a four-star Republican general in the Patriots Caucus alerted me to the fact that Lear was in a Signal chat entitled “136th Republicans,” which featured a large majority of Republican State Representatives, looking for “proof” that I had “assaulted” my girlfriend.
I’m not going to sit here and pretend that I am different than any other alcoholic in that I have covered myself in glory with all my personal relationships, or that I don’t have regrets and guilt that I’ll take to my grave.
But my dad did taught me at a very young age was that, under no circumstances, could I ever put my hands on a woman.
“But what if they, like, have a knife?” I remember asking.
“Buddy, then you better figure it out!”
So, I can say, without a shadow of a doubt, that I have never “assaulted” a woman, even at my most diabolically drunken. You would not know The Rooster if I had.
There is no police report, 911 call, or anything evidence that could be produced in that regard, other than someone willing to walk into a defamation lawsuit.
Armed with a clear conscience, I let Rep. Lear know I knew what she was trying to do, even if to alert the Statehouse crowd that shenanigans were afoot.
I take pride in serving as a lightning rod for the likes of Lear, because it means they’re not spending their time thinking of ways to persecute transgender people, lower taxes on the rich, or peddle freakish lies against faceless Somali immigrants.
But I went to work trying to obtain that text message because Lear disgusts enough Republicans who have the sense not to brazenly smear me.
Within about 20 minutes, I had two copies of the same text message that allowed me to walk through her walls:
If Lear had been smart, and likely not drunk and enraged that I bashed her unemployed friend Mehek Cooke earlier in the day, Lear probably would have realized that, if there were some easily obtainable “evidence” about me committing an unforgivable sin, it would have been used against me already.
If critical thinking were her strong suit, she would have realized that, at this juncture, she was far, far from the first ostensibly powerful person to say “Fuck this guy!” and look for ways to ruin me.
My not-so-secret weapon, as we’ll see in a minute, is living my life as an open book. It’s hard to embarrass me with skeletons and personal flaws that I’ve already written at length about.
But then a funny thing happened.
Twitter user “OhioNavyMom61,” appeared in my mentions, claiming that Beth Lear would not waste her time with somebody as “pathetic as me.”
Amused by what I assumed was her husband or some other rich pervert in Galena, I dropped the atomic bomb:
I have to use an image of the exchange because OhioNavyMom61 immediately deleted her account, which I didn’t even notice until a friend pointed it out.
Given the nature of the exchange, I suspected that it had to be Lear behind the account, because who else would go to war over Beth Lear and then delete their account? But I had nothing other than instinct.
That was until my friend sent video evidence of what OhioNavyMom61’s timeline looked like before the deletion:
As her official biography notes, Lear is an Ohio mother of a Navy officer. She represents the 61st district—the same number at the end of OhioNavyMom’s handle.
That would have been damning enough in retrospect, but as the video shows, Lear had launched an hours-long vendetta against me—attacking my work as far back as December—while also engaging with Republican posts about Rep. Lear dating back to July.
She even insulted a protected Republican class in automobile dealers when she pot-shotted future Senate President Bill Reineke (R-Tiffin) as a “car salesman.”
The most damning evidence linking Lear to the account is OhioNavyMom61 calling me “The Chicken”—a lazy nickname originated by State Rep. Gary Click (R-Vickery)—at the same time Rep. Lear was seeking damaging information about “The Chicken” in a group she thought only her fellow Republicans could see.
Along with “assaulting” my girlfriend, Lear also referenced the most bone-headed moment of my life, when I, in November 2007, as a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of Montana, conspired with six other idiots to rob an interstate drug trafficker.
It didn’t go to plan, if you can believe that.
Because Lear thinks reading anything other than the King James Bible is a communist plot, she conflated me with another co-conspirator who used the street nom de plume “Dirty,” if that gives you any idea of the geniuses that I fraternized with.
Ultimately, the prosecutor gave me a break because I, the inside man, had called off the plot due to the target having locked up his money and pounds of California-grown marijuana in a six-foot-high safe.
I learned a couple of months later that’s not how prosecutors look at conspiracies. Most importantly, however, I learned at an early age that crime isn’t for me.
But thanks to my minimal role in the debacle, I can say I am not, nor have I ever been, a felon.
Lear was only the latest loser to attempt embarrassing me about something that everyone in my life knows about. It’s a well-known story on Capitol Square, and something I wrote about in The Rooster, albeit in 2019:
Rooster: Hell, I'm Not Perfect
Nothing like being on vacation — eating delectable hummus on the patio of The Harvest in Blue Ridge, Georgia, to be specific — when Earle Bruce’s disgraced carnival barker of a grandson claps back on Twitter with the darkest chapter of your life.
It did, however, crystallize why, over the previous couple of days, random Twitter users were accusing me of “breaking and entering,” or “being a felon,” or even “selling my car for more drugs,” despite my 20-year documented history of being able to afford drugs.
Lear and the unemployed lawyer have been stoking sentiment among their pudding-brained followers that I had “threatened” the unemployed lawyer by pontificating on her unpaid clown act flying close to Ohio’s beautiful Stand Your Ground laws, which zealots like Lear enshrined into state law.
They do the bad-faith crying about “threatening” a carnival barker because they know, in turn, that anonymous fascists will, in turn, try to intimidate me into silence:
I am not a tough man. But I grew up around some. And I could call a couple hombres if the situation called for drastic actions.
That proximity has taught me that tough people don’t waste their time lodging Twitter threats. But if these worms somehow did kill me, it’d be the most honorable endorsement of my work with The Rooster.
Or I’d survive and somehow become even more insufferable.
But the ominous thing about my line of work is that it’s impossible to know everyone who wishes me harm while walking around in public, mocking powerful people.
I temper this feeling with riding my bike everywhere in Columbus. Even a legitimate threat against my personhood, while serious, would pale in comparison to the risk that I take every day that some drunken maniac won’t clip my ass while texting his cocaine dealer as he speeds down Sullivant Avenue on the way to Private Dancer.
And while Lear and her crowd would relish me walking away and getting a normal job, my social media history and persona over the past seven years, while great for business, have made me unemployable among less noble business owners than myself.
Don’t weep for me, Ohio.
The wages for my past sins are having to waste dwindling brain power on people like Rep. Lear.
I tried to limit that to whenever we crossed paths at the Statehouse, when she would look at Bisexual Brad Pitt like the Devil himself.
Needless to say, she has my full and undivided attention.
That means she’s about to find out how difficult I can make a Senate campaign, especially one well within biking distance from my camp along the Camp Chase Trail on the Hilltop.
Crystal Ball: Notorious Conman will tap Jesus Christ’s No. 1 Jewish soldier as his running mate on Wednesday
The following is the product of conversations with roughly 12 unnamed sources over the weekend.
On Dec. 22, in a dispatch about State Senator Kristina Roegner displaying a slave shackle on the mantle of her home, The Rooster reported that “all signs were pointing” to Republican gubernatorial frontrunner Vivek Ramaswamy tapping Secretary of State Frank LaRose as his Lieutenant Governor candidate.
It’s with deep pleasure that I can now state, without any couched language, that Third Place Frank’s candidacy imploded at the finish line and that he has been informed he will not be Oho’s next Lieutenant Governor.
It’s a delicious comeuppance for LaRose, who, not that long ago, was harboring illusions of grandeur that he’d cake-walk into the United States Senate.
In reality, he’s hanging out at Young Ohio Republican Christmas parties for clout while his nemesis, Bitcoin aficionado Bernie Moreno, will likely become the next chairman of the National Republican Senate Committee.
LaRose’s latest humiliation seemingly cleared the way for Senator Roegner, Secretary of State Robert Sprague or Senate President Rob McColley, whose wife is understandably hesitant about her husband spending large swaths of time in the cocaine swamps of Washington D.C.
The Rooster can report that, barring some unforeseen seismic event, Ramaswamy will not name Roegner, Sprague or McColley on Wednesday.
Ramaswamy is set to announce his Lieutenant Governor selection in downtown Cleveland on Wednesday at 6:30 p.m.
It’s a curious choice of locations, to say the least. Traditionally, the Lieutenant Governor is announced on their home turf, not a Democratic hotbed like Cleveland.
That rules out Sprague (Findlay) or McColley (Napoleon).
Roegner is from Hudson, which is at least an easy commute to Cleveland. However, The Rooster can report that she has been told she’s not the selection, either.
Knowing who Ramaswamy’s pick won’t be means that we’re looking at a candidate who was not on anyone’s radar—including mine—before Christmas.
And while I can’t get into the parameters of my knowledge without burning my beautiful sources, I came to the conclusion late Saturday night that the political career of State Treasurer Josh Mandel had seemingly been resurrected from the dead.
The name, on its surface, seems so insane that numerous friendly Republicans thought I was trolling when I broke the news about the possibility.
With Hilltop Husband out of town, I worked the phones until the early morning hours. I went to bed pretty confident that Mandel would be the pick.
Conversations on Sunday only solidified that belief.
I can’t confirm the news Ramaswamy’s team on account of that time I tricked him into thinking he was meeting Ohio State football coach Ryan Day at Raisin’ Canes, but I am predicting that Mandel walks onto that stage with Ramaswamy on Wednesday.
Given what I know about the candidate profile, the only other possible names were Congressman Max Miller (R-Bay Village) or State Treasurer candidate Jay Edwards, given his deep union connections in Cuyahoga County.
Both were eliminated as candidates by Saturday at 11 p.m. It won’t be former State Senator Matt Dolan (R-Rocky River), either.
Talking to some sources, the only other viable option in Republican is allegedly McColley.
McColley leaked news that he wouldn’t seek the Republican nomination in Ohio’s Ninth District on the same day that Ramaswamy announced his “special announcement.”
The obvious conclusion would be that McColley will be the guy, especially considering Sprague, LaRose and Roegner have been told it’s not them.
But why would Ramaswamy announce McColley in Cleveland, where most people wouldn’t know the Senate President if he were outside shitting on the hood of their Ford 250?
I haven’t talked to a single Republican who had a good answer for that.
In my opinion, McColley’s name is still alive as a candidate because McColley believes there’s still a chance he might be governor.
Perhaps Ramaswamy’s team wants to add mystery to the selection.
But, I believe the MAGA crew is stringing McColley along to pull the rug from under him as retribution for putting his personal interests above MAGA’s in the “deal from Hell” that The Rooster needed two dispatches to unravel in full.
Depending on who you talk to, McColley has already told the White House he isn’t going to run for Congress—or that he only came to that final decision when he failed to impress Donald Trump.
Whatever the truth may be, I don’t believe McColley will run for Congress when he learns his fate, if he hasn’t already. But I’m not ready to rule that possibility out just yet.
But I do know he won’t be walking onto that stage on Wednesday as Ramaswamy’s running mate.
That news would have excited me last week, because I long viewed McColley as the savviest pick. He’s never been accused of being exciting, but he’s a proven legislator and seems like a natural referee for when Ramaswamy and Speaker Matt Huffman inevitably think about assassinating each other.
That was until I expected the likely grim reality of one of the most shameless perverts in Ohio history returning to politics despite losing his last statewide election and having no viable route to return to public life.
The Mandel selection wouldn’t be as insane as it looks on its face
We last saw Josh Mandel in 2022, not only as the most predictable divorced dad perhaps in the 4,000-year history of marriage, but also as a U.S. Senate candidate.
His most notable moments came when Trump called him a “weirdo” while gossiping about Mandel’s long-rumored bisexuality, Mandel doing himself no favors in that arena by trying to kiss the late Mike Gibbons during a heated debate, eating a cold Denny’s meal off the hood of his car, and beefing with a veteran-owned brewery in a national scandal he sparked by bragging about his waitress coming into work sick.
Shortly after his loss, Mandel slithered to Pepper Pike, an affluent, Democrat-loving suburb of—you guessed it, Cleveland. He lives in a McMansion that belongs to an LLC attached to his uncle.
Most recently, Mandel appeared at the White House Hanukkah party in December, where he told a Spectrum News reporter that he was retired from politics:
That would seemingly eliminate Mandel from contention as Ramaswamy’s running mate.
But that’s without knowing the ultimate truth about Mandel: He’s a shameless liar willing to spin whatever he thinks will get him elected, even to his friends.
In retrospect, it’s not a coincidence that Mandel was at the White House roughly two weeks before I learned of his apparent resurrection. I believe that the ball was already rolling in that direction.
Jared Borg, a longtime Ohio Republican operative, managed Mandel’s failing 2012 Senate campaign and now works as “Special Assistant” to the President, whatever the Hell that means.
On its face, it’s preposterous that Ramaswasmy, a Hindu monotheist, wouldn’t pick a Christian to reinforce his right flank, especially with someone as, uh, “controversial” as Mandel.
To which I’d point to Mandel’s 2022 Senate campaign, in which he barely mentioned his Jewish faith, while bragging about “running his campaign through the churches, with a Bible in one hand and the Constitution in the other.”
I understand the liberal notion that Mandel’s selection would be akin to the late John McCain picking Sarah Palin as governor. I would stress that Ohio, not America, will decide this election.
We’re also a far, far way from 2008.
Mandel already has a network of pastors ready to go. And trust me when I say, those Evangelical hucksters are shameless enough to have zero problem pitching a Hindu-Jewish ticket as the saviors of White Jesus to their flocks in return for proximity to naked political power.
In my opinion, Ramaswamy selecting Mandel would be more equivalent to Trump choosing Vance in that he seemingly added nothing to the ticket other than exciting the most odious fringes of the Republican Party.
It worked in Ohio for Trump, where he increased his margins despite Vance only being a two-year Senator.
Ramaswamy carries the big man’s endorsement, and Mandel speaks the MAGA language and has more credibility than any Jewish man in Ohio when it comes to legitimizing a Hindu to Evangelical preachers.
Mandel’s baggage is lightened by his not taking the spotlight at the top of the ticket. Ramaswamy’s team is probably wagering, correctly, that only the biggest freaks alive (myself included) are motivated to the ballot box by the Lieutenant Governor ticket.
But even if Mandel is the exception to that, he still brings a lot to the table, which is frankly a sentence I would have hit you in the face with a brick if you had told me I’d type just last week.
Why Can't Josh Mandel Say He's Jewish?
There’ve been more words written the past few months about how shitty of a person Josh Mandel is than the English language probably has. He is an awful amalgam of Trumpism, neo-fascism, and faux-nationalism all wrapped in one spiteful 5’8” bundle. His
Mandel is a proven workhorse on the campaign trail.
You think a guy like Ramaswamy is relishing the opportunity to rub shoulders with old, largely uneducated Evangelicals who think he’s burning in Hell without recognizing Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior?
Do you think he’s rubbing his hands together in anticipation of defending the religion he’s held his entire life to people who view it as little better than pagans selling healing crystals on Facebook?
Mandel takes that all away from him.
Ramaswamy, as a salesman who knows the perfect words to say to anyone, can handle the meta events where he can pitch himself as a “conservative without being combatitive.”
Most General Election voters won’t remember Mandel. He last made it that far over 10 years ago.
They don’t know his history. By the time the summer rolls around, Ramaswamy’s swollen warchest will be pushing him as a United States Marine and father of a beautiful white family.
The other thing that Mandel brings to the table is relentless fundraising.
This race gets more expensive for Republicans by the day with Trump’s increasing unpopularity and right-wing skepticism of Ramaswamy in a campaign where every reliable Republican who doesn’t vote is a win for Dr. Amy Acton.
Mandel is also a certified cryptocurrency pervert, as evidenced by his final act as State Treasurer, which debuted a way for Ohio businesses to pay taxes in cryptocurrency.
You can count the number of businesspeople who used the program (one was future Senator Bernie Moreno) before Attorney General Dave Yost shuttered it as illegal.
Mandel has a fellow traveler in fake internet pedophile money in Ramaswamy, who will undoubtedly want to push the idea of investing tax money into cryptocurrency that House Speaker Huffman has already called a “bad idea.”
While I would never besmirch the honor of Republicans in Ohio, it’d be easy to see how Ohio’s top two crypto-shilling executives could enrich themselves through the preferred currency for bribes, as the Trump family has done, if that’s something they’d be interested in doing.
Ramaswamy isn’t getting that kind of synergy or blind eye from any of the other contenders.
Most importantly, however, the consensus among friendly Republicans who spoke to The Rooster over the last month is that Ramaswamy won’t be an eight-year governor.
Ramaswamy’s ego is constructed in a way where the highest executive office in America’s seventh most populous state is nothing but a stepping stone toward the presidency, the only public office worthy of his vast intellect and skills.
If he wins, Ramaswamy will run for president in 2028.
And unlike the Vice President, Ramaswamy signaled—in the New York Times of all places—that he’ll call out antisemitism as one of the two unacceptable bigotries in the party.
Mandel brings the pro-Israel network into the fold. More importantly, however, Mandel is connected to the billionaire-funded Club for Growth, which endorsed him in 2022.
Club for Growth, along with Americans for Prosperity, is one of the most influential donor networks in Republican politics. One of its biggest donors, billionaire Jeffrey Yass, has already cut a $10 million check to Ramaswamy.
Ramaswamy’s calculus in choosing Mandel can be explained, at least in part, by showing fealty to Club for Growth in hopes of earning their endorsement in 2028 against the MAGA heir apparent in J.D. Vance.
It’s hard to believe Ramaswasmy will become president. But I probably would have said that about Trump around this time, too.
Maybe Ramaswamy realizes that governing is a lot less fun and way more time-consuming than galavanting around Ohio and promising everything to everybody.
Ramaswamy could declare “mission accomplished!” and then resign to focus on his presidential campaign.
He doesn’t need the money. And if he did do that, Mandel would be elevated to governor, and the Ohio Republican Party bylaws mandate the endorsement of any incumbent officeholder.
That would also prevent Ohio junior Senator Jon Husted, who has a web of hobo diarrhea where his brain is supposed to be, from returning from exile in Washington D.C., with MAGA credentials and without Governor Mike DeWine’s musk to run for governor, which has always been his dream.
Because what do once-apparent frontrunners like McColley, Sprague, Roegner, and especially LaRose have in common?
They’re all establishment types who only became “MAGA” because a senile gameshow host overran their party and at least had the decency to throw former governor John “No. 1” Kasich in the dumpster before coming to power.
Mandel’s Senate campaign burned every bridge he had within the DeWine-Husted wing of the party. Sure, Trump isn’t enamored of him, but Ramaswamy already has that endorsement.
That Mandel also isn’t MAGA in his soul is less important than the fact that the right people hate him. And if he did become governor, it would be curtains for the Old Guard.
By summoning one of the biggest freaks from the political hinterlands, Ramaswamy will burnish his outsider credentials despite already co-opting all the party’s traditional machinery.
And if he wins, Mandel will be in the driver’s seat of preventing the County Club wing from returning to power in Ohio when (if) Trump leaves office in 2028. And that’s ultimately what matters to the Ohio MAGA forces pushing Mandel.
A Ramaswamy-Mandel ticket would damage our already fledgling national brand. But it will be phenomenal content, roasting two of the most egotistical, sexless, and selfish men in Ohio politics for the next 11 months.
If Ramaswamy and Mandel win, well…. At least we’ll learn what Mandel’s “two tours in Iraq” taught him when he sees my swollen Irish potato skull bobbling toward him in the Statehouse.
This one's an all-timer. Almost every line is gold.
Josh Mandel found a SECOND woman to marry him?