Remember Derrick Hollie?
No?
What, you don't have an Encyclopedia Lie-tannica in your head?
Ah, well, in that case, a quick catch-up: Derrick Hollie is a career advertising marketer who first caught our eye in 2019 when he started talking about how the fossil fuels that are disproportionately harming Black people like him are actually good for them. In 2020, we enjoyed his appearance in a press release praising fossil fuels that accidentally acknowledged its Chevron affiliation, and in 2021, he was surfing an industrial wave of woke-washing.
But now he's got a new gig, one that's seemingly less reliant on his novelty of being a Black man acting as a spokesperson for an industry that harms Black people, and instead just bread and butter political activism: attacking low-level Biden administration staff.
Staying true to his dirty energy clientele's favorite outlet, Hollie promoted this general anti-Biden advocacy in an op-ed in RealClearEnergy, with a tantalizing headline asking, "What's lurking inside Joe Biden's basement?"
But it's actually "who", because Hollie's real question is, "Who exactly has filled out the thousands of positions in charge of policy, regulation, and oversight in the Biden Administration?"
With a new explicitly-appealing-to-Hunter-Biden-obsessed-weirdos name and website (with maybe a little Pizzagate innuendo thrown in), Hollie's organization Inside Biden's Basement, "has started by gathering and analyzing thousands of public records exposing who these officials are – from cabinet officials to the special assistants and senior advisors who advise them and fill out the ranks of political leadership at federal agencies. No one gets a pass."
Which on its face is fine, in that compiling public records about who's employed by the government is the sort of thing that an opposition party should be doing. However, in practice the website's numerous references to Hunter Biden disinformation and the fact that harassing people is a standard tactic in the disinformation playbook suggest that this will be an effort to find vulnerable young people within the administration, attack them on Fox News and hope to "cancel" them from the administration.
But again, it is generally a good thing for the public to know who's staffing the government. For example, Hollie notes that "the most senior ranks of the Administration are filled with millionaires (436) and former lobbyists (93) who seem immune to the daily struggles of the people they are supposed to be serving. Perhaps this is why Americans are callously instructed to just buy a Tesla when they complain about their pain at the pump."
Not a terrible point! And of course, if we paid our public servants better, the government could attract more diverse and representative talent so that our government isn't disproportionately run by people who can afford the pay cut from the private sector.
Also, how many billionaires is Hollie investigating? We ask, because Derrick Hollie worked for the Department of Transportation's Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization from October 2020 to January 2021.
And the Trump administration, you may recall, included such down-home working class characters as billionaire Betsy DeVos, CEO of ExxonMobil Rex Tillerson, and hedge fund manager, movie financier and James Bond villain-couple inspiration Steve Mnuchin.
Too bad they employed Hollie, otherwise a man of his ethics and morals certainly would have started "Inside Trump's Basement."
