Who is D.J. Byrnes?
With a lull in the political season, it's time for some personal lore. Here's how I came to do what I do. It wasn't a straight line to success, if you can believe that.
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I always assume that people are familiar with my personal lore, given that I am the universe’s singular protagonist.
But a commenter asked me last week how I came to do what it is I do. And given the post-primary lull, I figured it would be a good time to give a somewhat authoritative backstory.
The Rooster, as I explained earlier, began as the blog—before the word “blog” existed—of a typically acerbic middle-class honkey that loved writing edgy, typo-ridden screeds about how much my high school sucked. Sound familiar? Maybe.
The truth is I was condemned to having a politics-poisoned mind at an early age. My mother, God bless her #ResistLiberal soul, took me to the inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1992.
You can probably imagine what eight years of that demon Ronald Reagan, followed by four years of one of America’s evilest people in George H.W. Bush, did to her psyche. I remember standing there, staring into the asses of strangers among unwashed masses, and being swept up in the moment.
America was going to change for the better.
Most people know what happened next. Clinton gutted the welfare state. He signed NAFTA into law, and that free-trade agreement put the dagger into post-industrial cities like my hometown of Marion and laid the groundwork for the opioid crisis to come. After he left office, he showed himself as a criminal pervert who routinely hung out with Jeffrey Epstein.
Did I learn my lesson? Absolutely not. I bought the same snake oil from Barack Obama over 20 years later. I remember standing in the RPAC at Ohio State, watching Obama take his second oath of office, and naively thinking that the Republican Party had been condemned to a regional party of angry white crackers.
I never had much direction at Ohio State. It didn’t help that I was supposed to be graduating during The Great Recession, and my college-educated friends were fighting over retail jobs. But the truth is, even though it worked out for me in the end, I regret never taking my formal education seriously. I stayed at the party too long, and I left Ohio State without graduating but having established toxic habits that led to the crippling alcoholism that would almost claim my life a decade later.
Thankfully, despite my substance abuse disorder and lack of general life direction, I had cultivated a singular marketing skill: Typing deranged sentences for the entertainment of internet strangers. I credit this to my mother indoctrinating me with a love for reading at an early age and spending ample time on EverQuest forums during my formative youth.
I am thankful that at 37 years old, I came of age when the internet had become mainstream but was not yet accessible via supercomputers that everyone carried in their pockets. Facebook didn’t become a thing until my senior year of high school, and even then, it was only available to the select few who had .edu email addresses.
Given the trouble The Rooster caused me in high school, I am thankful I didn’t have social media. I probably would have been wearing a black bag over my head for 23 hours a day in Guantanamo Bay, as my mind would have been even more chaotically splintered than it was anyway.
In my spare time, while working odd jobs and participating in medical studies, I blogged for LakersNation. You can still see some of my laughable Kobe Bryant takes. In my defense, I didn’t realize LeBron James would still be playing at an All-NBA level 13 years later, and that’s my bad.
But as anyone familiar with the business world can attest, it’s more about who you know than what you know. Along with LakersNation, I also maintained a Tumblr blog that, thankfully, has been wiped from existence.
I had one post entitled, “Things Kyle Rowland thinks are amazing.” From that post, you can trace every cent I have made from writing on the internet.
Rowland, currently a sports reporter for The Toledo Blade, was my longtime high school friend and former roommate on Iuka Avenue. He loved to call things “Amazing.”
The article was simply a list of his tweets about all the random things that he had called amazing. I think one involved Akron earning a 13-seed in the NCAA Tournament if that tells you anything.
It caught the attention of Jason Priestas, the owner of Eleven Warriors, where Rowland then worked as a beat writer. Back then, Eleven Warriors was merely an upstart blog, not the powerhouse that has since been fused into the Ohio State Athletics Department.
Priestas offered me a volunteer gig, and having nothing better to do, I took it.
To give you an idea of how far the site has come since then, I used to be the singular employee sent to write about weekly Luke Fickell press conferences during the worst Buckeye football season in 50 years. I still remember wanting to kill myself when my ringtone featuring Eminem and The Game’s We Ain’t went off in the middle of a press conference and an already overly stressed Fickell looked like he wanted to strangle me.
The gig went well until I got into a heated argument with some commenters on a post that I think has aged quite well. It was another day of arguing with strangers on the internet for me, but I learned the difference between being a random commenter and someone who was writing under a legitimate business operation. Instead of taking a two-week suspension from an unpaid position, I quit.
I resurfaced under Luke Zimmerman, my former colleague at 11W who had since left to take over Landgrant Holyland under the SB Nation banner. Zimmerman will forever have the dubious distinction of being the first person to think my writing was worth compensation. I made $50 a month for one or two articles a week—big money in 2012!
That led to some sort of mental health crisis if you can believe that. I left Landgrant and, having nothing better to do once I recovered, went to writing blog posts on Eleven Warriors as a random commenter in order to humble myself.
I eventually returned to Eleven Warriors with pay! It was like $35 a month to write one Skull Session a week.
From that point, however, I worked my way up to a full-time position and became the first writer to publish the famous Skull Session morning wrap-up every day. Covering the 2014 championship season from my coach remains a personal highlight of mine, as does being a part of Eleven Warriors, quickly evolving from a chirpy blog to a legitimate powerhouse in the Buckeye ecosphere.
But as I have said before, everyone wants to write about sports on the internet until it’s time to write about sports on the internet. Ohio State football never sleeps, and that was before Eleven Warriors started covering non-revenue sports with a gusto unrivaled by its competitors.
It amounted to a year-long slog with only a week of vacation, with football season being an almost round-the-clock affair. It’s not like I was mining coal in West Virginia, but it gets tough to have to pause a romantic dinner with your girlfriend to run to your car to make a couple of blog posts because a random teenager decided to commit to the local football team.
One memory that sticks with me was cooking breakfast in my kitchen on Sunday, a rare day when I had no official duties other than writing the Skull Session that night.
In the middle of cooking, my laptop “pinged” with a Slack notification, and, like Pavlov’s dog, I dropped everything I was doing to walk over to my computer. It was only after a couple of minutes I realized it wasn’t my problem!
In July 2018, I had since moved to Piqua, Ohio. (The things we do for love, right?) After Donald Trump's election, I became involved in the Miami County Democratic Party, which was about eight souls on a good day. We had a candidate for Ohio House who dropped out because he realized what most qualified candidates in that area already knew: It was a suicide mission that would alienate you from your neighbors.
The Ohio Democratic Party made it a mission that year to field candidates in all 99 districts. Having the opportunity, I decided around July 4th to pursue an appointment to the race. Given that I can never do anything in moderation and am already concerned about work-life balance, I decided to quit my job, too. I left Eleven Warriors making around $35,000 a year with year-end bonuses. It wasn’t much in retrospect, but was more than I ever envisioned making on the internet!
There’s a documentary about my suicidal mission against current State Rep. Jena Powell (R-Arcanum), who I later exposed for living 75 miles outside the district in Mason.
I regret that I cost us a trip to Sundance by not shocking Ohio Political Knowers. I still think the documentary would have done well on the circuits, but coronavirus had another idea.
People have since asked me if I have regrets about running and taking a 47-point ass-whipping. The only thing I really regret is how much money the campaign spent on yard signs. They can’t vote!
I could have also spent about $10 and gotten similar results. Not only were my views generally reprehensible to the voters of the Ohio House 80th District, but I also had zero roots in the area.
But I wanted to do my part to mobilize Democratic voters to the polls and help statewide candidates. Democrats can’t win statewide if we continue to absorb 40-point losses in every rural county. And I hoped that my campaign would earn the respect of more impressive candidates, and I could go work for them in some capacity.
Nope! We all lost. I still remember walking into the UAW union hall in Troy on Election Night and thinking that local supporters were watching another 9-11 attack.
Republicans swept the statewide races. Sherrod Brown, projected to beat Jim Renacci by 12 to 15 points, held on for a six-point win. But it was somewhat cathartic to see other, more well-run campaigns lose in a similar fashion. And as hard as the final margin was to take, I’ve since realized it was a blessing in that it didn’t leave me with any second guesses about what I could have done differently.
Still, I had a bigger problem. I had quit my job and spent the last five months campaigning around Miami County as a pro-union, worker-first candidate—not exactly the type of person that business owners want to hire!
Thankfully, I still had that one famous marketable skill in typing deranged sentences for strangers. Through Eleven Warriors and my campaign, I had compiled a decent social media following. Right around that time, Substack had launched, and I decided I might as well try to hang my own shingle.
All I needed was a name for the operation. I was stumped until my then-girlfriend said, “What about The Rooster?”
I officially launched the brand in December 2018 with a post entitled “Adios, Urban,” in which I explained why I wouldn’t miss Urban Meyer coaching my favorite local team.
Eleven Warriors promptly called it The Worst Take of 2018.
That would be the last rendition of the series as my take went on to age like fine wine.
But with a small cadre of loyal disciples, I originally planned to make The Rooster a Skull Session-styled morning round-up of Buckeyes and Browns news with an eclectic mix of Ohio-based politics and weird events. The WMDs at the end of the articles are about the only thing that remained the same.
It didn’t take long for politically poisoned readers to overrun my subscription list. And in the end, I would much rather cover politics than think of new and creative ways to say, “I think Ohio State football will be good this year!”
At that time, my alcoholism had led to another failed relationship as I moved back to Columbus, at least thankful to be in a city where my views were reprehensible for an entirely different reason.
I used to think that having a few beers before writing made me creative. I’ve since realized that I was succeeding in spite of my disorder, not because of it.
And somehow, through it all, I continued to send my little screeds and The Business Line continued its humble albeit consistent ascent.
I hit the crossroads in 2020, as you might imagine. My drinking had always been problematic, but I took it to another level in February of that year—a month before the coronavirus landed on our shores. I went from drinking IPAs to preferring Tito’s Handmade Vodka at The Patio, a longtime Franklinton bar that was a mere two blocks from my landlord’s spare house.
During George Floyd protests, I woke up one morning on a ventilator with missing teeth, nine broken ribs, and a broken ankle. I wrote a blog post from the hospital bed on my phone.
My jaw was wired shut for a month and coincidentally got unwired on the day that the FBI arrested Larry Householder. I still can’t tell you where I drove my car into a wall, just that it was on fire when the paramedics arrived and nobody else was hurt.
Most people would have considered that an opportunity to reassess their decision-making processes. Not me! I instead doubled down on my drinking, even when my jaw was wired shut.
Later that year, a therapist suggested that instead of sitting on Twitter during the day and reading about all the world’s ills, perhaps I find a day job to occupy my time.
I completed The Building Futures Program in Columbus, which takes people with no background in manual labor, gives them some training, and places them with highly sought-after apprenticeships in the various construction trade unions.
There was never a better time to get into the business! And though I was never close to being named The Best Apprentice Ever, I could have enjoyed a career in that field as long as I could arrive on time and remain somewhat sober. I enjoyed the feeling of satisfaction after every day of work, good or bad.
But that changed on one fateful night in November 2021 when half drunk, I obtained footage of Urban Meyer receiving a lap dance from a woman who was not his wife inside his Short North restaurant.
In retrospect, I could have sold the footage to TMZ for $20,000. But no, I wanted people to know it was me that embarrassed Meyer, who was still one of the most influential men in Columbus despite his ongoing embarrassing tenure as coach of the Jacksonville Jaguars.
When The Wall Street Journal came calling, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to pick up the phone. How often do guys like me get a chance to use the phrase “shit cocktail” in America’s foremost business rag?
You can read all the mean things Wall Street Journal readers said about me over here.
The first sign of trouble came in that week’s apprentice night school class. The class openly discussed the saga, and when the teacher discerned what had happened, he simply shook his head and said, “Oh no. Oh no.”
It turns out that multimillion-dollar construction contractors don’t enjoy the thought of employing somebody like me when their clients include Facebook, Amazon, and Google, especially when that somebody is a first-year apprentice.
I could have survived the storm if I had worked 2,000 hours and was no longer a probationary member. The union executive council all liked me.
Instead, I was fired on a Friday afternoon in the Columbus casino's parking lot. I was dog-walked into a hit by my foreman, whom I had only met that Monday but, in retrospect, had been tasked with babysitting me while they found something worth firing over me.
The official definition was a picture I had taken from the parking lot of a data center and posted to my Instagram Stories. I was still on company property and thus subject to their non-disclosure agreement. I probably should have just denied it, as it was only a sheet of paper, and the post had long since disappeared.
Another foreman, who was a company man like so many are in that union, later told me that he had not seen an effort to fire an apprentice like the one that mustered to end my nascent career. I learned later that Meyer had a business relationship with the contractor through his foundation.
As my brother said in the aftermath: “You can be an electrician or a journalist. But you can’t be both!”
It was a lesson learned in the hardest way possible, which is generally the only way I can learn simple truths about life.
Back to square one, I continued The Rooster as my drinking reached the point where my friends no longer wanted to watch me kill myself, one double-Tito at a time.
In July 2023, at the behest of my then-girlfriend, my old Eleven Warriors protége Kevin Harrish, strolled into my landlord’s spare half of a house and said he was there to make sure I didn’t walk across the street to the Kroger liquor store. I probably resembled a squatting hermit getting startled by a property owner.
He said something I’ll always remember. He said I was nowhere near rock bottom, but I was on a one-way ticket there. And it was unfair to ask my friends to watch my grisly demise.
I was at the point where I was friendly with other alcoholics and knew their orders as we waited for the liquor store to open at 9 a.m. Another sign that I should have heeded, along with being incapable of riding my bike one mile down the street without severely injuring myself.
Those first two weeks of sobriety were miserable. At the start, it was simply taking pride in winning hours without drinking. And then, a month into sobriety, one of the best friends I’ve ever had in my life was killed by a sucker punch on High Street.
I had a choice then. I wanted to walk to the bar, order some drinks, and try sobriety another time. Not many people would blame me other than those who knew me most.
Thankfully, I realized that would be an insult to Greg’s memory. It made me realize that our last time together was spent drinking like we always did and that he never got to meet me without needing a drink in my hand.
And though previous decisions from the drunken schlepper that was my former self had cost me yet another loving relationship, I continued to press forward with The Rooster as the rewards of sobriety continued to mount.
In December of that year, I published an article that made waves in Statehouse circles.
The secret to my sobriety at that time was that I was smoking too much weed, and it made me a bit maniacal. I came onto the scene a little too hot. I would later quit the Devil’s Lettuce in April of 2023.
But The Rooster can be divided into two epochs: the time before January 3rd, 2023, and the time after.
I made the fateful decision to ride my bike to the Statehouse to look into the Swamp myself. For all my flaws, I was the only one who reported that State Rep. Derek Merrin's apparent speakership was in serious danger before the morning of the vote.
Merrin, the boy wonder who had been in politics since he was 19, fell through the floor in front of supporters across the state in the most humiliating way possible. My only regret was not filming the aftermath in the overflow room outside the House chamber as his supporters gasped as if they had just witnessed a murder.
I’ve never done heroin, but I imagine it is a lot like seeing that moment in person. It was a rare sight to see my political enemies suffer a modicum of pain they had routinely inflicted on Ohio’s most vulnerable populations.
It was on that day that I realized a simple truth. The Statehouse crowd is largely filled with the most insufferable classmates from high school. Worse, they had stuck around for 20 years and deluded themselves into thinking they were worthy of respect.
I realized that there was nobody at 1 Capitol Square who could play the game like me. And it was surprising to learn that the Serious People on the Square hadn’t heard of The Rooster, the daily grievance letter from the neighborhood drunk who had been shrieking about the hobgoblin class for four years.
The ultimate formula didn’t come together until weeks later, when I was standing outside The Patio at 945 Sullivant Road with my old drinking buddy, Joe. He’s about as far on the right as I am on the left, but he said a phrase I’ll never forget.
“Have you heard of Free Speech Audits?” he asked, explaining how YouTube bloggers went into public buildings and tried to get thrown out for filming in order to file lucrative lawsuits.
“You should look into that,” he said. “You’d be good at it.”
I went home and watched some films before realizing I didn’t want to earn my living through confrontations with government employees. Nor did I feel like drawing any more ire from the local police department for filming their substations.
But then it hit me. The Statehouse was The People’s House, and thus, a shooting gallery of the First Amendment kind. For some reason, it took me until that moment to realize that I could do what Tennessee Holler does in his neck of the woods:
I live a mile from the Statehouse. It’s a 15-minute walk or a five-minute bike commute, no matter the weather conditions. I don’t even have to deal with parking. I keep a Rolodex of sins committed by barely known state legislators. I’m able to confront them in a semi-respectful yet entertaining way.
In a way, I was the perfect man for the mission.
The first-ever Bust Up was that of my old nemesis, State Senator Niraj Antani (R-Miamisburg), who I caught in the Statehouse rotunda hobnobbing with some sort of lobbyists.
I filmed everything on my iPhone:
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Antani, to his credit, later showed that he understood the game. He could handle the heat and would sit there, answer some questions, and then go about his day.
Others, like State Rep. Merrin, failed to grasp that basic math in a new era of Statehouse media. He promptly went into the blender after numerous press conferences, which anyone can attend, before ceasing to hold them due to having to deal with my antics.
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And there, the scheme was hatched. The average American understands that politicians of any stripe look guilty if they are running from basic questions—especially if they’re doing so inside a government building, the seat where they’re supposed to have the most power.
It also allowed me to dovetail off other outlets’ reporting, like when I confronted State Rep. Dave Dobos (R-Hilltop) about cleveland.com’s report that he had lied about having an MIT degree for over 30 years:
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It’s one thing to read about that in the paper. It’s another to see Dobos confronted and have nothing to say other than a “What are you going to do?” shrug before saying, “Well, they elected me!” For better or worse, we live in a video-based world these days. They travel better than the written word.
I quickly went from an iPhone to a GoPro as I realized that being my own boss allowed me to confront politicians in a way that no professional reporter actually could. I don’t have to play their game and accept their talking points, knowing they’ll be successfully regurgitated into press articles.
I enjoyed proving to detractors that, despite talking shit online, I had no problem confronting the likes of our Lieutenant Governor in the same fashion. For better or worse, my online persona isn’t an act.
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It took me one year of being sober and playing hardball with the politicians to turn The Rooster into what I always dreamt it could be in the abysses of my alcoholism. I’ve gone from 3,000 Twitter followers to 14,900 in that time, even if some are just following along hoping to witness my downfall. I’ve gone from a small cadre of diehard loyalists to Substack's best-seller status.
Thanks to noble and brave readers, I’ve gone from an iPhone to a GoPro to a DJI Pocket 3 and learned more about video editing than I thought possible.
Truthfully, The Rooster is the summation of the only marketable skill I’ve ever had. The only thing where I’m a little bit better than the average person despite probably not being able to pass a high school English test about basic rules of the language.
A Redditor pot-shotted me a couple of weeks ago saying, though they appreciated my presence, “We deserve better.” And there is some truth to that. I wish I had a better command of my singular language, and I wish I had better control of some of my worst neuroses. But if they felt that way, then they’re free to grab their camera and come show me how it’s done. Lord knows I could use the help!
Because while anyone could do what I do, somehow I’m the only one in a state of 11 million people doing it. And that’s because, unlike most people, I don’t have a boss that politicians can go crying to. The years of grinding The Rooster in the face of my alcoholism made me able to leverage the moment when it finally came.
It’s weird being recognized on the street as The Rooster. Yup, haha, that’s me… the balding, doughy middle-aged man who chases politicians while calling them perverts and hobgoblins.
I’d much rather remain a mysterious figure than reveal to fans that I’m just your typical dumb ass who turned his grievances against the state into a business model. But hearing from regular people who are appreciative of my work would require another self-aggrandizing blog post of 5,000 words—and even then, it might not convey what it actually means to me.
Well-intentioned people thank me for holding these scumbag politicians accountable. I have yet to do that since that happens at the ballot box; though, it’s possible I killed Frank LaRose’s Senate campaign by being his earliest and most fervent hater.
The best I can do is make fun of their ill-fitted suits and hope to raise awareness of the importance of state and local politics, even if it has made my mental health worse.
If the Republican cartel is intent on dragging us back to the Gilded Age, the least we can do is laugh at these losers along the way. Despite all their power, I’ve discovered that laughter grates their souls like nothing else.
In that regard, the work will continue.
The Rooster, despite what any naysayer wants to say, fills a much-needed void in the Statehouse mediasphere. And due to our current political climate, the freaks and lizard people that fuel the content won’t be going anywhere anytime soon.
Thanks to brave and noble readers such as yourself, neither will I. Together, we will continue dealing psychic damage to Ohio’s corrupt political class.
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Thank you for doing what you do. It is so important. Please continue to stay healthy!
So glad you survived the dark years & found your way to the statehouse. I (and clearly many others) truly appreciate your honesty & authenticity. Thanks for being who you are & doing what you do!