Former congresswoman Katie Hill is currently engaged in one of the biggest public gaslighting campaigns ever seen outside of Trumpworld. And she has the willing assistance of the mainstream media.
Since her resignation last October, Hill has been under the cloud of an ethics investigation for abusing her position to have affairs with junior staff members and then using congressional resources to cover her sins up. This includes the payment of a $5,000 bonus to her own campaign finance director, with whom she was also having an affair. Yet somehow, even in the #MeToo era, Hill has become a media darling, both on and off the air. It helps that she’s not a man.
In her resignation speech, she blamed a culture of misogyny and bigotry. She blamed a lack of tolerance for bisexuality (Sen. Kyrsten Sinema is also bisexual, something no one bats an eye at). She also blamed Republicans and conservative media, who broke the story of her indiscretions. In a turn of events that should surprise no one following the media’s cozy relationship with future inmate Michael Avenatti, she has become the object of media affection. The press is letting her reshape her image into a bold and daring millennial feminist frontierswoman for the digital age, who is simply pushing the boundaries of sexuality and combating revenge porn and online bullying, or something.
Soon a personal Twitter account popped up, and Hill was a guest at the State of the Union. She has been given a book deal and started a personal action committee. She sat down for interviews with The View and George Stephanopoulos. In a lengthy new profile for New York magazine, Hill continues to blame an abusive husband and a salacious conservative-media complex for publishing explicit photos, as well as the staffers she found herself in a relationship with on her payroll. New York magazine presents Hill as a bold risk taker with no filter.
You might think this is all happening organically — a new hero rising up against the pussy-grabber in the Oval Office and the perfect attractive face of a new uninhabited generation of extremely online millennials. But none of it came about by accident. There is a purposeful effort underway to rehabilitate Katie Hill. It is being driven by some of the most powerful players in media.
As revealed on Page Six, Hill was seen at a Manhattan book party hosted by feminist writer Molly Jong-Fast, mingling with several other journalists, including Alex Thomas from Playboy, whom she has been linked to romantically. Thomas was one of the loudest voices in media pushing back against the accusations against Hill, bragging on Twitter that he was going to receive a Pulitzer for his work, and targeting both Red State for publishing the original story and the NRCC for supposedly shopping it to news outlets. Thomas has since recanted that story and deleted tweets. He of course did not reveal the nature of his relationship with Hill, yet his colleagues don’t seem particularly interested in holding him accountable.
Also seen at the party were righteous CNN media reporters Oliver Darcy and Brian Stelter. Hill appeared on Stelter’s ironically titled Sunday morning show Reliable Sources on November 23 of last year, the theme of the segment being ‘Katie Hill’s Experience with Right-Wing Media Smears’. Stelter, who has a habit of keeping mum on stories that involve his own credibility, at last revealed on Twitter that he hadn’t seen Hill at the party, before blaming Fox News.
We have had two years of the #MeToo-oriented media warning us about superiors leveraging their positions of power to exploit underlings. Now the same media has thrown any learned lessons out the window in order to appease a young attractive Democrat. Part of the reason is because conservative media were the ones to blow the lid off the story. They can’t abide that, and they’re prepared to shred what’s left of their credibility to get revenge.
