Sorry, haters: The Rooster is bigger than the Everything App
“There's an old saying in Tennessee—I know it's in Ohio, probably in Tennessee—that says, 'Fool me once, shame on—shame on you. Fool me—you can't get fooled again.'”
I joined Twitter in September 2009, as perhaps the coolest 22-year-old in American history, to tweet things like “Go Buckeyes!!!” and “Where da hoes at?”
I was skeptical of the platform at first, namely because I didn’t see the value of learning about what various celebrities and pop culture icons ate for lunch that day.
But while I’ve never been an official “Big J” journalist, I have always been a newsman—going back to my days loading The Drudge Report as my first stop on my daily journey along the super-information highway.
Twitter revolutionized the way I consumed news. Instead of visiting a handful of websites, I could curate a feed tailored to my interests and ingest current events from voices located across the political spectrum.
From the assassination of Osama bin Laden to Metta World Peace sinking the vile Boston Celtics in Game 7 of the NBA Finals, Twitter was unrivaled in making metasized cultural moments feel like you were in your living room, surrounded by the most interesting minds you knew.
Eventually, like anything cool, the corporate advertisers and publicists descended upon the platform. Ohio State football coaches apparently didn’t approve of their players tweeting about “neck dinners” at odd hours of a weekday morning.
But despite the inevitable capitalist sanitization, Twitter remained unrivaled as a news medium. It was also the last egalitarian public square on the internet where you could tell the rich and powerful to go fuck themselves to their faces.
Twitter probably peaked somewhere around 2016. But it died on Oct. 28, 2022, after the richest man in the world accidentally tweeted himself into a hilariously inflated $44 billion buyout of that public square.
Any honest observer of Twitter before and after Elon Musk purchased the platform knows what happened next. Voices like petite Mexican Neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes were let back onto the platform, with the algorithm pushed toward right-wing outrage slop as the default setting.
Musk, the Ketamine-addicted South African billionaire, currently has 100 million more followers than former president Barack Obama.
If you think that’s organic, consider that Musk once called his threadbare engineering team into headquarters on Super Bowl Sunday to tweak the algorithm, because he was angry that then-President Joe Biden received more views on a generic “Go Eagles!” tweet than he did.
Since then, the site has been largely propped up by unchecked bot networks while the government openly tweets Nazi-coded messages. This has only emboldened the most grotesque elements of the site—always hiding behind anonymous accounts—to hurl homophobic slurs and make threats of violence against Ohio’s fifth-most famous blogger.
I stayed on that dump because, at a certain point, it became about principle. It was going to take more than the world’s richest stone-cold loser and his horde of doughy, misshapen eugenicists to run me off a stoop that I had maintained for 16 years.
It also helped that the #brand evolved from the voice of a cranky drunk who once challenged Secretary of State Frank LaRose to “come get a taste of my Figure-4 leglock” into becoming to the leading leftist voice in Ohio politics.
If only I stopped trying to kill myself one double Tito-and-soda at a time sooner. Alas.
Musk’s dumpy Zombie Twitter was still a potent vehicle for putting kinetic psychic damage upon Republicans in real time.
It was also nice being able to distribute my most fleeting thoughts throughout Ohio’s political class with a few flicks of my thumb, even if Musk’s tweaks to the algorithm ruined Twitter’s ability to drive new customers to my business.
But that crippling addiction to a creaky social media platform came to a crashing halt last Saturday around 5 p.m. ET.
The music stopped after I reflexively reacted to the Department of Homeland Security deciding that the Department of Homeland Security would investigate the Department of Homeland Security’s execution of Alex Pretti for having the audacity to film paramilitary activity in his neighborhood:
Twitter banned me roughly 30 minutes later.
Almost a week later, I have received not a single word about why they booted a trusted revenue-sharing partner off their beautiful platform.
But I can guess it had something to do with these two tweets.
Obviously, these tweets were never going to hang in my Hall of Fame. I attribute the casual vitriol to my genuine anger at the news, knowing that nobody will be prosecuted for a capital crime that we all watched on video.
It was an edgier, albeit poorly worded, way of saying that Noem will have to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law by the next Democratic Administration, if we somehow survive this storm to have one of those again.
The same goes for Strategy Group CEO Ben Yoho, who has defrauded almost every business partner he has ever had, en route to assisting in a $220 million heist of the United States Treasury under the cover of Kristi Noem’s office.
His wife, Tricia McLaughlin, is the Homeland Security spokeswoman who’s shredding any remnants of her soul with an insatiable love for spreading lies and fascist filth on behalf of the most corrupt president in American history.
Her ICE-styled “wanted” poster was gratuitous, especially with the pot-shot “joke” about her being wanted for methamphetamine possession.
But my patience is wearing thin watching vapid buffoons engage in brazen acts of corruption while pea-brained brutes shuffle around our urban cores to beat and kill peaceful citizens in servitude to a smelly, flatuous, dementia-addled conman.
It’s not an excuse. It’s an explanation.
Ironically, a trusted friend had already advised me to curb my most acerbic instincts hours before the ban. He argued that my days as a flippant blogger are over, and it was unbecoming to joke about a professional liar being wanted for methamphetamine possession
I didn’t agree with that good-faith criticism at the time. But I changed my position about 15 minutes before Elon dropped the hammer on my ass.
Most readers probably don’t know that not that long ago, I was an IBEW electrical apprentice.
I didn’t whistle and skip to work at 4:30 a.m., but I found fulfillment in building something every day, even if not very well.
Those dreams ended in Oct. 2021, when The Rooster broke the story about Jacksonville Jaguars coach Urban Meyer receiving a lap dance from a woman who was not his wife at his personally branded chophouse in the Short North.
A couple of days later, I spiked the football in The Wall Street Journal by saying that, historically speaking, I’m a guy who enjoys serving shit cocktails to the rich and powerful.
I’d like to think that was the first time the phrase “shit cocktail” appeared in The Wall Street Journal. (You can read all the mean things Wall Street Journal commenters wrote about me, over here.)
I didn’t know that my contractor, the so-called Superior Group, had a business relationship with Urban Meyer’s charitable foundation. But that’s how I learned that if you set off a bomb, you'd better be prepared to be burned, too.
I was fired like a dog in the Columbus casino’s parking lot at 2 p.m. on a Friday, two weeks after the Dublin Dad story dropped. To the Superior Group’s credit, they handed me a check for 40 hours of work, despite only working 38.
The company henchmen claimed the ouster was for posting an Instagram Story from the parking lot of a data center, which technically violated the NDA that I signed.
But my previous foreman, a journeyman for over 20 years, said he’d never seen anything like the week-long huddling to find a reason to fire me after “the call came down.”
I guess that was news that he didn’t think would interest me.
If office gremlins hadn’t gotten me for the Instagram Story, it would have been something else, even if I hadn’t made it easy with my unusual routine in the industry of coming to work on time and sober.
My brother had a deft line after the fiasco: “You can be an electrician, or you can be a journalist, but you can’t be both.”
Over the past four years, I’ve intentionally structured my life so that no singular entity has that kind of leverage over me ever again.
That dream has become reality thanks to my ongoing sobriety and the brave and noble Patriots Caucus.
Being fired in a casino parking lot and being banned from Twitter aren’t analogous situations. But the lesson about leverage has bubbled back into my baked-potato head over the past few days.
Thankfully, Musk’s hostile takeover of my sacred sentence dojo forced me to diversify my social media presence by late 2023. If I hadn’t had that CEO mindset, this ban would have destroyed the only marketing tool I had to expand my readership.
But I’ve realized the foolishness in letting any Big Tech platform control my audience when I’m the one who built it.
Substack respects that value. I could export my list and take my business to a competitor if I got banned.
I can’t do that with any other platform. Therein lies the problem.
So, even if one of the few remaining long-shot efforts to overturn my ban succeeds, I’m going to work to build a Twitter-adjacent structure that I control to disseminate breaking news, observations, and other content that I used to give away to Musk for free.
I’m envisioning an SMS, text-based service that wouldn’t be susceptible to the drug-addled whims of a fascist billionaire with over 100 children despite his purported botched penis implant surgery.
Because my power has never been about viral reach. It’s based on having the attention of Ohio’s political class.
Stay tuned on that front. And no, it won’t cost subscribers another cent. That much I can guarantee.
Here’s one weird trick to defeat the Big Tech tyrants
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Elliot Forhan is out of pocket, but he still raises a salient point
