Phony Moderate Poser, Rep. Katie Hill (D), Resigns After Media Exposes Her Weird Dysfunctional Darkside

I was pleased to learn that Rep. Katie Hill (D CA-25) has resigned today. A copy of her resignation letter is saved below. You can also access this document through this link.

In the end, even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, could do nothing to protect her. Pelosi issued a statement saying, “Congresswoman Katie Hill came to Congress with a powerful commitment to her community and a bright vision for the future, and has made a great contribution as a leader of the Freshman class.”

“She has acknowledged errors in judgment that made her continued service as a member untenable,” Pelosi wrote. “We must ensure a climate of integrity and dignity in Congress, and in all workplaces.”
Katie Hills resignation today was a striking contrast with her statement earlier this week which indicated she was going to stick around and fight the charges against her. In a letter sent to constituents on Wednesday, Hill acknowledged that in the final years of what she called an “abusive marriage,” she began a relationship with the unnamed campaign staffer.

“I am going through a divorce from an abusive husband who seems determined to try to humiliate me,” Hill said in her statement last week. “I am disgusted that my opponents would seek to exploit such a private matter for political gain. This coordinated effort to try to destroy me and the people close to me is despicable and will not succeed. I, like many women who have faced attacks like this before, am stronger than those who want me to be afraid.”

She denied having an affair with a congressional staffer. This is the charge that started a House Ethics Committee investigation. Apparently, Hill's determination to stick around got weaker as more damning evidence appears which demonstrated her "errors in judgment." For example, media reported a series of purported late-night texts in which her estranged husband, Kenny Heslep, called into question Hill’s drinking. Other texts showed the female staffer involved in the “throuple” expressing concerns about Hill's drinking. On top of all of this, the texts revealed Hill was drinking on top of her existing psych meds. (I'm guessing she has been diagnosed with a bad case of bipolar disorder.) The situation was so bad that Hill had been missing her flights back to Washington.

I think Hill's bizarre behavior and what looks to me like a co-occuring mental health challenge inadvertently illustrated the statistical evidence which shows bisexuals to have a higher incidence of mental health problems compared to the rest of us.

According to research reported by the Human Rights Campaign HRC, "Although the LGBTQ community reports high rates of anxiety and mood disorders, recent statistics show that bisexual people are far more likely to experience mental health issues than either lesbians or gay men within the community." Among adults, like Hill, who report they are bisexual, approximately 40 percent have considered or attempted suicide, compared to just over a quarter of gay men and lesbians. HRC’s Health Disparities Among Bisexual People found that “when compared to heterosexual adults, bisexual adults reported double the rate of depression and higher rates of binge drinking.”

In her resignation letter, Katie Hill mentioned her role as a role model for girls. She wrote:

I know that as long as I am in Congress, we’ll live fearful of what might come next and how much it might hurt,” Hill wrote in Sunday’s statement. “That’s a feeling I know all too well. It’s the feeling I decided to leave when I left my marriage, and one I will not tolerate being forced upon others. I can no longer allow my community, family, friends, staff, supporters, and especially the children who look up to me as a role model, to suffer this unprecedented brand of cruelty.

Hill did not seem to understand that her status as a role model had been permanently erased much earlier in the week thanks to photos which showed her, naked, smoking a bong, with what appeared to be a Nazi-era tattoo in her bikini area.

“For the mistakes made along the way and the people who have been hurt, I am so sorry, and I am learning – I am not a perfect person and never pretended to be. It’s one of the things that made my race so special,” Hill wrote. “I hope it showed others that they do belong, that their voice does matter, and that they do have a place in this country.”

So, Rep. Katie Hill is leaving us with the suggestion that those with profound cases of mental illness, those who are most likely to show profound "errors in judgment" should nevertheless be allowed to make the rules that control and manipulate the rest of us. I don't think so...

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.

Pardon Our Insanity: Hank Payne, Kai Green and the Crazy Left at Williams College

Harry C. Payne, former president
of Williams College, 1994-1999.

While I was teaching at Williams College in MA, two of the 120 professors committed suicide.  I have always wondered if there was something wrong about the school which is - objectively - one of the most competitive, wealthiest and exclusive in the nation.  The three years I taught there were alarming to me in that I discovered a lot of hatred expressed against white people and - especially - young white men.  I remember leaving in 1989 thinking that it was an unhealthy institution - especially for young Christians.

In my experience, I think the money and prestige of Williams can be used to disguise a lot of deviant behavior and mental illness - as long as it is packaged as leftist ideology and academic perfectionism.

To give you a little insight into Williams College, I should report that one of its most recent presidents committed suicide in 2008.  Harry C. "Hank" Payne, pictured above, jumped from an eighth-floor hotel room in Atlanta, GA.  In my view, the twisted policies of Williams College - including its absolutely inhumane affirmative action policies - imply that any white guy that rose to power in that environment would have to have serious internal conflicts and a stinging case of bipolar disorder or schizophrenia.

I did a little research about mental illness and Williams College and found a lot of bad news consistent this this sad pattern.  For example, I found that a recent student, Katie Craig, was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and took her own life in 2007.  On a more positive note, another former student, Jon Stanley, freely advertises both his graduation from Williams and his bipolar disorder.  In the worst case, we have Eric Bellucci, a man diagnosed with schizophrenia who killed his mother and father in a borough of New York City.  He attended the prestigious Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan and graduated from Williams College. Mr. Bellucci boarded a plane to Israel and was apprehended after a ticket agent in the Ben Gurion Airport recognized him from media accounts and called the Israeli police.

One very sad case is that of Jamie Neal. She dropped in and out of Williams College and made it to her sophomore year before she took another medical leave from Williams College in early 2010. By March of 2010, the 21-year-old killed herself in the family's home.

One of the most spectacular examples is found in an NYT story regarding a black alumni, Natasha Williams '93, who died at 46 after many years of living on the streets in New York City. Surprisingly, she was in touch with a number of fellow Williams College graduates. Unfortunately, none of them applied enough pressure to get her into an institutional setting that would have addressed her rather obvious schizophrenia. She left behind two young children.

My concern is that the recruitment strategies used by Williams College are biased towards selecting mentally ill students, faculty and staff. After all, no sane person would ever contort their life to the extent demanded by the school's overwhelmingly leftist ideology.

I found out that Kai Green ’07, an assistant professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies (WGSS), is spending the 2019 spring semester on medical leave. According to her own Facebook report, she suffered a profound psychotic episode in November 2018. She is a black transgender man. She reports "I started taking my clothes off piece by piece, so by the time I got to the Clark I was completely naked. My clothes were like breadcrumbs on the dark road. Eventually police came and put me in the back of the car. I can’t remember if I had handcuffs on. I remember handcuffs because I was singing to myself 'we have nothing to lose but our chains.' I remember thinking the song was magic spell that would unlock the cuffs."

As I write today, I understand that students at Williams College have built a shrine in Kai Green's honor and are treating her like a martyr to the cause of outspoken social justice.

In reality, of course, she is just a hurting mentally ill person. She is suffering from a chronic condition that will not change or go away. Unfortunately, like Harry C. "Hank" Payne, Kai Green is destined to suffer longer than she should because her mental illness is disguised under layers and layers of unhealthy, misguided and dysfunctional leftist nonsense.

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.

Should I Attend Williams College? Just Say No to Icy Roads

Red Truck on an Icy Mountain Road 

by John C. Drew, Ph.D. November 13, 2015.

I spend some time on the College Confidential website. I entertained myself by offering my matter-of-fact, truthful, comments regarding the most of the hot questions posed at the website including what are my chances of getting in? How does Williams compare to Stanford, Harvard, Yale and Dartmouth? Is Williams College a welcoming place for conservatives? It only took a matter of hours for the folks at College Confidential to delete the threads I was posting on and block my account. So much for the tradition of free speech...

At any rate, I thought it would be a valuable public service to offer my take on a Williams College education based on my personal experience of having taught there in the 1980's and subsequently following the school's history through various websites including the independent Ephblog. One of my most prominent negative memories of teaching at Williams College in the late 1980's was how dangerous it was to drive there in the winter. I suppose that memory may have inspired the oil painting I did this afternoon.

What are My Chances of Getting In?

I guess I ticked off College Confidential by encouraging a young student from Washington State to apply for admission to Williams College. Since the school values geographic diversity, it was often easier for a student to get into the school if they came from a western state. Due to this geographic affirmative action, I think there is a stereotype on the campus that teaches students from outside the New England area are less bright than those who grew up closer to the campus. I also indicated that the school was generally hostile to conservative and Christian students. I recommended that a conservative Christian student, a poor white male, keep his political views secret if he really wanted to secure a place at Williams College.

How does Williams compare to Stanford, Harvard, Yale and Dartmouth?

The worse roads I ever drove on in the winter were 

the ones leading in and out of Williamstown, MA.

Here, I just expressed my own preferences. I would pick Stanford over any of these other schools simply on the basis of climate and academic excellence. I shared that I liked Harvard and enjoyed Boston. I shared that Yale was in a depressing neighborhood and wasn't worth the time or money. I thought Dartmouth was more conservative than Williams, but as depressing as Yale. I would place Williams College at the bottom of any list simply because it is in a dangerous, rural, backward part of MA. The winters there were particularly terrible. The roads to the campus are these tiny, two lane death traps that become engines of mass murder during the winter months. I shared how one of my favorite students died in a car accident while traveling to a sister school for a weekend party. I never forgot that young man and how the terrible, dangerous roads of MA cut short what would have been an absolutely brilliant life.

For a student comparing Pomona and Williams College, I would -- without a doubt -- pick Pomona. I would make that decision simply on the weather factor alone. 

I also indicated that while Williams College is probably no more cliquish than other schools, it is virtually impossible to escape the cliquishness of Williams College. At Pomona, if you make a mistake, then you can always find friends at other nearby schools or in the larger community. At Williams College, however, you will find yourself trapped for a long time in a socially isolated place where there is no escape from cliquishness or social banishment. This, I think, is the sort of information which should be honestly shared with any student exploring Williams College using the resources of College Confidential.

In terms of the prestige of Williams College, I indicated that I had never heard of the school myself until I got the chance to interview there. While the school is famous among the East coast elite, it lacks the cache of a Ivy League school. Williams College students are seen as isolated, nerdy, and relatively unsophisticated compared to their Ivy League rivals. While most of us can name many famous people who graduated from Ivy League schools, I cannot think of any that came out of Williams College, except for Mika Brzezinski who graduated from William College the same year I resigned. If you do not know who she is, I am not surprised. She is the female co-host on Morning Joe.

In contrast, I can report I knew President Obama while he was at Occidental College prior to his matriculation to Columbia University. Meanwhile, Ann Coulter was one of my very first students when I taught at Cornell University.

Is Williams College a Welcoming Place for Conservatives?

Based on my personal experience and subsequent observations of Williams College, I can definitely report that it is extremely hostile to conservatives. Evidence of this hostility is immediately apparent in the school's hiring policies which have resulted in a faculty that does not contain a single conservative professor. Not one. For my take on what it was like to be a token conservative on the campus in the late 1980's see the interview I gave to The College Fix and the opinion piece I wrote for Campus Reform. One of the critiques of my perspective was that ex-MA governor Jane Swift teaches a minor leadership course on the campus. As I like to point out, I don’t think it is accurate to label Swift a conservative. After all, she is basically a pro-choice moderate. As you may remember, she was on the cutting edge of liberal Republicanism when she picked the openly gay Patrick Guerriero as her running mate for lieutenant governor. Given Swift’s political history, we shouldn’t pretend she is the MA version of Sarah Palin.

Williams College Weather: The Worst of the Worst

As a long-term resident of southern California, I cannot over emphasize how undesirable it is to live in Williamstown during the winter. I have already stressed how frightening it was to drive on small, windy, two-lane roads to get in and out of the Williamstown area. This discomforting fear was much worse during the winter when you faced the possibility of ice on the roads and the danger of going off a cliff as you climbed the mountains leading to the campus. What was most annoying to me was having to take little penguin footsteps for almost five months of the year or else risk falling backward on to an icy sidewalk. It makes my stomach knot up to remember the horrible climate of western MA. It is the sort of place that calls a portion of its highway Deadman's Curve because so many people have died trying to negotiate that piece of road.

My first winter on the campus the snow came early while there were still leaves in the trees. The weight of the snow broke trees in half and caused heavy limbs to fall on cars. It was terrible. I remember thinking I made a mistake accepting that job the first day I arrived on the campus.

All in all, I cannot recommend Williams College as a safe, pleasant or compelling place to go to school or work. It is a great place to visit briefly in the summer. If you actually try to live there, however, you will feel as if you have gone backward in time to pioneer days. College is difficult enough without the added burden of wondering if you are going to freeze to death in a snow storm on your way to the airport.

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.