There are many things about life inside the Beltway (physical and metaphorical) that people in the rest of America might find strange. The subway system has ads from defense contractors boasting about their new warplane in between ads for a new salad at Panera; there’s often an important person’s motorcade blocking your route home; and you might end up eating dinner one table over from Stephen Miller and be forced, by all standards of moral decency, to call him a prick before you leave.

One of the strangest phenomena is that so many people seem to have full-time jobs in “advocacy,” which is a Beltway term for undisclosed lobbying, churning out total nonsense that is micro-targeted at an audience of the hundreds or dozens of other Beltway suits who control the levers of policy. Does any of this actually work, you might wonder? Is it a good use of their clients’ money, for these people to spend their entire, well-paid work day at their “public affairs” firms doing things like creating Twitter accounts for fake grassroots campaigns, or ghostwriting editorials for some other schmuck to attach their byline?



It is that last part that seems to fuel a significant portion of opinion pieces at The Hill, a newspaper and website that very important Beltway people mostly read for news from inside the grim machinery of our government, and which has drawn in a large audience beyond that crowd thanks to its laissez-faire approach to breaking news aggregation—the faster (and more useless) the better. These stories tell us important facts like, for example, that anonymous Democratic staffers and members of Congress are mad at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or Have Concerns about Medicare for All. But its opinion section is even more egregiously attuned to the interests and concerns of whoever happens to have the most money to spend. It is a dumping ground for whichever policymaker, think tank lanyard, or corporate CEO might want to publish some poorly-written—and self-serving—dreck about public policy that day.

It was also a regular platform for John Solomon, who until last week was the executive vice president of The Hill. Solomon also wrote regular columns for the paper, making him more productive than most executive vice presidents of anything. These columns, in the words of The Washington Post, “veered rightwards”; in more honest terms, they were right-wing fever dreams.

Solomon’s work this year for The Hill feels a lot like the right-wing equivalent of the effluvia in which Resistance liberals partook during the Mueller investigation: inscrutable to people who are not already major Nellie Ohr enthusiasts, deeply satisfying to those who are gullible, thinly-sourced, and not moored to reality.

