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.
