Inside "horseglue": How a Punk Song Became an Indictment of Beltway Journalism

"Like a fidget spinner in my head": Jael Holzman on "horseglue" and leaving the Hill

Nov 25, 2025

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I’ve been thinking a lot about how media shapes reality — how performance becomes truth, how spectacle drowns out substance. It’s something my friend Jael Holzman tackles brilliantly in today’s interview about congressional journalism becoming “TMZ for nerds.”

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If Mussolini wrote the playbook for turning politics into theater, then congressional reporters have become the stagehands — dutifully setting up each day’s performance without questioning why they’re part of the show.

Jael Holzman spent seven years as a congressional reporter, breaking important stories about Freedom of Information Act violations, PFAS contamination cover-ups, and conflicts of interest at the highest levels of government at Roll Call, Politico, and Axios. But after coming out as trans, she began to see how completely the performance had consumed in the profession she’d believed was her calling.

Today Holzman is a senior reporter at Heatmap News, where she authors “The Fight,” a newsletter covering local conflicts around renewable energy projects. She’s also the frontwoman of Ekko Astral, the Washington D.C. punk band whose debut album, pink balloons, was named Pitchfork’s #1 rock album of 2024. The band’s latest single, “horseglue,” is a searing indictment of congressional journalism. She wrote it on her iPhone notes app in the Senate basement tunnels while trapped in what she calls the “TMZ nerd” culture of Capitol Hill press scrums.

The song captures the dissociative experience of watching reporters obsess over sensational tabloid moments while ignoring urgent issues like food insecurity, the sabotage of energy and environment coverage, and the systematic use of quotation marks to diminish marginalized voices in favor of platforming authoritarian perspectives. It’s the same dynamic that lets strongmen turn governance into spectacle — journalists who know they’re being played but can’t stop themselves from amplifying the performance.

“‘horseglue’ was this little mental game I would play, almost like a tic, like a fidget spinner in my head,” she told me.

Holzman describes congressional journalism as “a bit of a cult” — one that beats reporters down and conditions them to accept a “mildly abusive” workplace. She reserves a particular contempt for the “Beltway media shitbags,” while maintaining respect for the many journalists still trying to do it right. Her critique is specific and damning: major outlets take fossil fuel money while covering climate change, and treat planted stories from sources as scoops in order to chase pageviews.

We spoke recently about the arc from dopamine-fueled breaking news addiction to disillusionment, why being a reporter on the Hill requires cult-like devotion, and what moral clarity in journalism might come to look like — if it’s even possible within existing structures.

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

What drew you to journalism in the first place?

I’ve never known how to do math. I couldn’t speak other languages well. Science never really took. But I was always really, really, really good at reading and writing. That was always a thing at the core that I could just kind of do easily, like, gliding through butter. And I’m the child of a lawyer, so go figure. A political science major too. Growing up, I would read the Post at my dad’s house in Rockville. I’m from Rockville, Maryland, right outside D.C.

Then I went to college and I became obsessed with that whole hard-news lifestyle, and got hooked on investigative reporting. For me, journalism was always a way to make a difference with my skill set without having to pick a side. Because the rules of journalism would tell me that was verboten. But toward the end of my time in college, I was exposed to innovators in that space. I was an early reader of Vox, and of that kind of perspective—explanatory journalism that didn’t stay neutral and just took a well-researched position, founded and built on subject matter expertise. It looked like that was where journalism was going to go; the “view from nowhere” was honestly kind of dead by the time I was leaving college, around 2016.

I started working on the Hill the week that Trump was inaugurated in 2017, and it was a renaissance for journalism. I would tell people I was a reporter on the Hill and they would be like, “That’s so cool! All of the crazy, corrupt shit going on!” And I would say, “Yeah, it is cool. I’m on the cutting edge.” There’s that adrenaline hit, too. I just kind of became addicted to that.

So the story of my career in journalism was like a morbid curiosity that turned into a morbid masochism built around addiction to dopamine hits.

[Laughter]

What were your expectations going in and how quickly did reality diverge from them?

I got my job on the Hill working for Roll Call—Congressional Quarterly Roll Call—because they needed help after Trump won. I worked my ass off because it was a prestige publication, believing (correctly) that really working my butt off in an unhealthy way for a few years might lead me to be hired by a bigger publication. D.C. is one of the few places where you can make a livable wage in a city and also be a journalist and have a stable job.

The first few years of my reporting career were really exciting. I broke a lot of big stories. There was a whole series around Freedom of Information Act violations at the Interior Department that delayed the nomination of the top attorney for the department, Daniel Jorjani, and led to an inspector general investigation. I covered conflict of interest issues surrounding a Democrat in Congress who had commercial ties to the Interior Secretary.

The landmark Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report — the one that said we had only about 12 years to really right the ship, before we’d start careening off the path of Paris—came out around the midway point of the first Trump administration, along with the first attempts to formulate the Green New Deal. All these outlets started hiring climate journalists. I became obsessed with that topic.

I did a lot of reporting on PFAS contamination. The Trump administration covered up the extent of PFAS contamination to a dramatic degree. There were such clear examples of the bigger story. Lobbying conflicts, so much intrigue in D.C. to uncover, stories with real stakes.

Things diverged from that pathway — of me being a Pulitzer Prize – winning, New York Times, whatever asshole I was going to be — when I came out as trans. When lockdown happened, when the world stopped distracting me for five seconds, the thing that I had struggled with for 14 years finally burst out again and was uncontrollable, which was my dysphoria and my regret around not transitioning when I first knew I was trans, at age 11.

After I came out, Politico poached me from S&P Global, and then I was hired to build a newsletter for Axios. I still excelled as a journalist. But all that time, it became difficult for me to reconcile whatever romance I had left about my profession with the utter failures I was witnessing in terms of media coverage of people like me. And then once I saw that flaw, it became easier for me to see the many others. It’s really easy to view media as fair when you’re within the in-group of who’s producing the information. But if you’re in the out-group, it’s always just stunning and obvious how off the mark and divorced from reality the news coverage is. Who wasn’t spoken to? Who wasn’t listened to?

I ultimately wound up leaving when Libs of TikTok claimed that there were sex parties going on at the William Way LGBT Center in Philadelphia, and demanded that it lose federal funding. Even though Libs of TikTok tweeted a slide from the center showing a sign that literally read, “No sexual activity allowed,” these journalists whom I had worked alongside and gotten drinks with—people who had welcomed me when I came out — had just regurgitated profoundly queerphobic questions in their coverage of this center that was providing healthcare services and social services to the LGBTQ+ people of Philadelphia. Lawmakers were having to respond to this.

That day, I left the Hill in a form of mental paralysis. I couldn’t stop crying and I called my boss up and I said, “I can’t go back anymore.” I wound up looking elsewhere to try to do the things that I still love doing. I still love exposing the truth, I still love speaking truth to power, and I love what I do now. Heatmap is an ethical and powerful independent news organization that covers climate change and the need to decarbonize.

However, I now stand, intentionally and publicly, in opposition to the Beltway media shitbags who have taken what should still be an honorable profession and completely mutilated it. Those scrums are a joke. I felt like I had to dissociate in some of those because the questions they would ask would be just so fucking stupid.

The day that Paul Ryan resigned in disgrace, I watched him run away from a giant mob of reporters. I saw a lot of historic stuff, and I’m proud of that, but it’s one of those “rumor it happened” things, where now I look back through these glasses of—I wouldn’t even say rose-tinted, it’s kind of opaque and a little yellowy.

Do you still have relationships with any of your old colleagues from the Hill?

I still maintain relationships with a select few people who were there for me when I was struggling. But the day I said, to quote South Park, “Screw you guys, I’m going home,” a lot of people who’d been nice to me and welcomed me just kind of iced me. I learned that being a reporter on the Hill is a bit of a cult: if you’re not in it fully, then you are cast aside.The rituals around it and the way they beat you down and condition you to enjoy what is ultimately an at least mildly abusive workplace—it is bewildering to me that that’s acceptable.

I was somebody who really cared about workplace treatment. I helped with the Politico union after it was formed and the bargaining committee. But I don’t consider it to have been like, they failed me. That way of putting it doesn’t feel right because ultimately the buck stopped with me, the choice to be there every day, and it was ultimately me who decided that I had had enough, right?

[My leaving] has as much to do with my feelings about the way that the news has handled, for example, Palestinian sovereignty, immigration, the unhoused, and climate change. Many, many urgent issues rooted in science and fact that are kind of suborned by this weird politicization.

If these reporters view themselves as stenographers, fine, but if they’re stenographers, they should at least reckon with that fact. But that’s not what they’re doing. Instead, they are participating actively in propaganda. And then the cult part of it is the unwillingness, the resistance, and the stubborn denial of the fact that this is what is actually happening.

In the piece you wrote in Medium about “horseglue,” you talked about the AI video that Trump posted of himself pooping on people. And most major outlets—

You mean “brown liquid.”

Yeah, “brown liquid,” as the Times put it.

If you go on Twitter right now, my former colleague Andrew Solender at Axios reported on a congressional candidate, Kat Abughazaleh, [being indicted]. He tweeted, “Abughazaleh says it’s a political prosecution.” Are you fucking kidding me? These are politicians literally being indicted. It is, by design, a political prosecution — putting it that way is demeaning. It’s snide. Why do you have a tone about that?

When you’ve done journalism this long, you get used to seeing when quotes are happening and when quotes aren’t happening. I’ve noticed over time that major news outlets are now intentionally using quotes to be dismissive toward the vulnerable and towards those who are targeted by authoritarianism. And then choosing to omit quotes when they’re representing a perspective that is the farthest right-wing, the farthest authoritarian, the most fascist.

When Donald Trump gets on stage and says, “fake news,” unfortunately, it’s important to understand how the news itself is, increasingly, deliberately designed. More journalists need to have the confidence and the guts to come out and say that editors and top journalists make deliberate decisions to represent the world in ways that are not always as accurate as you would like, in ways intended to please or to serve specific constituencies.

That isn’t meant as an insult to the many people who continue to do this profession and try to do it right. There are still so many of them. At the end of the day this is about the people that we typically call the MSM, the people who matter the most, because their failures have the most impact. They reflect so poorly on the fourth estate.

You’ve pointed out how much D.C.’s energy and environment coverage is funded by fossil fuel money. How much do you think financial incentives versus cultural dynamics drive journalism’s failures?

I do think that news outlets are afraid of offending the eradicators. Information is currency but in the Beltway it’s doled out by people in power, and not by journalists themselves: a source texting or calling some reporter they already knew and had drinks with a couple times and then just feeding them information anonymously. There are a lot of planted stories in this city. And if you want to get that planted story, have that tweet pop off and get a lot more page views, you’ve got to make sure you don’t upset the people who are going to feed you that stuff. That’s how you get places like Punchbowl.

But when it comes down to fossil fuel money in the news business, I think that one is purely financial. Oil and gas companies come to the table with so much money that the news business, at least in the Beltway, is just looking the other way. There’s this one news outlet, NOTUS. Just this morning I opened their newsletter and saw a big-ass “sponsored by BP” logo. I was like, damn, alright that sucks. I’m not going to read this today.

I do think we need to start boycotting news outlets that take fossil fuel money. We need to treat fossil fuels like cigarettes, because that’s what they are for our planet. If news companies telling people about climate change also sell ad space to oil and gas companies, then a news consumer is going to see that in the news and be like, “Well, is it really that serious?”

Inside "horseglue": How a Punk Song Became an Indictment of Beltway Journalism

"Like a fidget spinner in my head": Jael Holzman on "horseglue" and leaving the Hill

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