Frank LaRose's Miami County campaign captain doesn't exist
Here's the story of how a deranged communist blogger became a county campaign captain for Ohio's leading Republican Senate candidate.
The only consistent ideology of President Xi Jinping’s Patriots Caucus is the desire to inflict pain and chaos upon our enemies. That makes us dangerous to the bipartisan hobgoblin cartel that controls Ohio’s local and state governments.
Back in July, a high-ranking member of the infamous cadre forwarded me the contact information to Frank LaRose, Ohio’s leading Republican Senate candidate who also moonlights as the state’s openly corrupt Secretary of State.
My initial instinct was to publish the number on Twitter. It wouldn’t have been the first time LaRose had to deal with everyday people having a direct line to tell him how much he sucks.
From Tina Korbe of heritage.org in March 2011:
When Ohio state Sen. Frank LaRose, shared his cell phone number with local leadership from the Service Employees International Union, the Republican legislator thought swapping contact information might open a robust, substantive dialogue with union leaders. He knows better now.
The pro-labor LaRose last week voted in favor of Ohio Senate Bill 5, which would eliminate automatic pay raises for public workers, base future wage increases on merit and, most controversially, limit public workers’ collective bargaining ability. The bill squeaked through the Senate on a 17-to-16 vote -- and union leaders decided to target LaRose, who they determined cast the deciding vote.
[…]
The SEIU robocall even reached the voicemail of LaRose’s mother, a teacher. She, of course, ignored the suggestion to tell LaRose she disapproved of his vote, but the state senator heard the automated message on her machine. It told him he was a Wall Street insider out to hinder the middle class.
Only in the pages of The Heritage Foundation could a Republican politician trying to gut unions’ collective bargaining power be described as “pro-labor.” And only in the pages of the Heritage Foundation could regular people telling a powerful politician how much they suck be described as “harassment.”
But I digress.
A member of the Patriots Caucus Advisory Council remarked that publishing his number, while funny, would be the easiest thing to do. He suggested I engage in some sort of long con, which comes naturally to anyone who has spent as much time in Marion, Ohio, the City of Kings, as I did.
At first, I was flummoxed about the direction of the scam. But then I remembered a genius ploy from Max Littman, special correspondent of The Rooster, who spent months undercover as a Catholic priest named “Father Lawrence” while texting former Republican Senate candidate Josh Mandel.
Unfortunately for us, the scam ran dry when Mandel’s campaign imploded like a dying star.
I decided to text LaRose under a similar guise—Pastor Jon Matthews of Movement Church in Tipp City.
I could have gotten a burner phone, but I figured my 937 area code and iPhone blue bubble text messages would further the scam as long as I wasn’t in the personal phonebook of Ohio’s Secretary of State.
Needless to say, LaRose ate it up. We began our unlikely friendship on July 25th:
LaRose then took the opportunity to make sure that I saw the video of a Black elected official not worshiping at the altar of the Second Amendment while addressing the gun violence that plagues his city:
I decided to wait until the next day to craft my response. I tried to think about how a Nazarene pastor with a right-wing congregation would respond to the video without using a racial slur:
This is where the wheels began turning. Maybe I could get LaRose to waste his time and come out to an empty warehouse in Miami County. I thought that would be the end of our discussion, but LaRose couldn’t resist the thought of connecting with an ostensibly successful pastor in the Republican hotbed of Miami County.
He volunteered to hook me up with Jay Bergles, the political director of LaRose for Senate political director. LaRose was probably unaware that I already had Bergles number. But Bergles called me like the faithful gremlin he is.
Jay Bergles would call me, but I wasn’t ready to talk on the phone yet. I had to think of an angle. So I did what any self-respecting scammer would do: Conjure a beautiful lie designed to delay our on-the-phone conversation for as long as possible.
Eventually, however, it became clear that talking on the phone would be unavoidable. Bergles and I planned to talk on August 3rd, a mere five days before Ohio’s pivotal Special Election to which LaRose had staked massive political capital.
I honestly thought I did a good job at throwing my voice enough to make it sound like I was a 50-year-old pastor in Western Ohio who was deeply concerned about the election of Secretary LaRose to the United States Senate.
Listening to the audio, though, it’s clear that it’s me. Thankfully Bergles made the always fatal flaw of not subscribing to The Rooster:
Bergles officially offers the fictitious pastor, who could have been a child molester for all he knew, the Miami County campaign captaincy starting at the 3:05 mark in the audio.
I won’t lie, I was taken aback when the LaRose campaign offered me a position as his Miami County campaign chairman. Miami County is a Republican hotbed, and I figured that a Republican who had won two statewide elections would already have somebody much more important in that position.
But I thought wrong! Because it goes back to what I originally said about LaRose’s dead-on-arrival Senate campaign. He and his team are in no way the political masterminds that they envision themselves to be.
Special Election Aftermath
While Ohio Right to Life Michael Gonidakis was on CNN pretending that the effort to raise the state’s constitutional amendment threshold still had a chance, LaRose was already privately conceding the Special Election to a communist blogger posing as a Nazarene preacher.
The “glory to those in the arena” quote is like a balm on any losing candidate’s soul. As someone who once lost a Statehouse race in MAGA country by 47 points, I would know!
Touching base about LaRose firing his longtime spokesperson after reporting from The Rooster
Days after a humiliating 14-point defeat for LaRose in the Special Election, The Rooster published an exposé about the pseudonymous account of Rob Nichols, LaRose’s longtime press secretary.
The article exposed Nichols for harassing private citizens for having the audacity to criticize his glorious leader on social media. More egregious to LaRose was Nichols authoring several anti-Trump tweets as the Senate candidate campaigns for the endorsement of President Business Deals month after telling an audience Trump’s endorsement “didn’t mean as much as it used to.”
LaRose initially planned to suspend Nichols but then made the surprise decision to fire a longtime loyalist who was popular with the co-workers who hadn’t yet left the Secretary’s office.
LaRose never responded, though his read receipts showed he indeed saw the message.
The end of the friendship
I worried that I might have blown my cover when I reflexively sent a Venmo request to LaRose for a 40-cent reimbursement for what he owed every taxpayer for the August Special Election that he railroaded through the State Legislature.
You can make a similar request at LaRose’s Venmo account, which is located over here.
But I was relieved to learn when I sent a comment about a Republican Senate debate that LaRose had not deleted my number.
I was going to lay in wait until the turn of the New Year, but then “the LaRose War Room” gave me the high honor of being called “the worst” when I dared question why Ohio’s Republican Senate candidate was appearing on a podcast called “Pillow Talk” hosted by some woman who claims to be Joe Biden’s granddaughter.
As always, I wear their hatred like a badge of honor. In 2020, after LaRose retweeted an obvious joke as a threat to election integrity. Unfortunately for him, he caught me in the middle of slowly killing myself with Tito’s Handmade Vodka at The Patio, and I reflexively called him “a dumb son of bitch” and threatened to put him in a Figure 4 leg lock.
LaRose has only reaffirmed that opinion in the three years since that tweet. He is an openly corrupt Secretary of State who has a bunch of clowns working for his Senate campaign.
That’s why he couldn’t find a real Republican in a place like Miami County and had to offer its captaincy to the first grifter who showed a thirst for a proximity to power.
This broke bum is supposed to defeat two multimillionaire Republicans in the most expensive primary in state history and then go on to unseat longtime Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown? Please. He needs to go home and be a family man before he brings further shame to his name and his daughters grow to revile him like the rest of us do.
The LaRose Dossier
Here’s the high school yearbook where Ohio’s Secretary of State makes a lynching joke. Internal LaRose campaign documents show that LaRose had an entire battle plan designed if this moment from his past ever went public. He has never publicly disavowed his past neo-Confederate views as a teenager in suburban Akron.
RIP Frank LaRose’s Senate campaign. Declaring LaRose’s Senate ambitions dead back in April before that bum ever declared.
Why does Ohio’s Secretary of State employ a social media troll? The article that led to LaRose dismissing his longtime spokesman for anti-Trump tweets and other gross behavior.
When the clowns run wild. Dissecting the chaos and low morale that LaRose has brought upon the Secretary of State’s office with a case study of Alex Pavloff, the staffer who is a deadbeat dad who wrecked the marriage of a Statehouse candidate during his overseas deployment.
Father Lawrence stands with you Pastor Matthews! Romans 14:4.
I love a long con. This was very satisfying to read.