Useful Idiots: Katie Hill on Her Scandal and New Book
In this week’s quarantine episode of our Useful Idiots podcast, hosts Matt Taibbi and Katie Halper are joined by former Congresswoman Katie Hill, who spoke about life after her resignation from Congress.
For Republicans Suck, Matt offers his take on what’s going on with the U.S. Postal Service, mail-in voting, and new Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. “You could easily make the argument that undermining the Post Office is going to make fewer Democratic votes counted,” says Matt, who also points to longstanding financial assaults on the USPS, and the conspiracy theories that have spun into the conversation since the story got legs.
For Isn’t That Terrible, Katie highlights a story involving a member of a Facebook group dedicated to taking pictures of loaded guns being pointed at one’s own genitalia. Spoiler alert: It didn’t end well.
Then Matt and Katie discuss their favorite moments from the first two days of the 2020 Democratic National Convention [Editor’s Note: This episode was taped on Wednesday, before the third day of the DNC].
Matt’s pick is John Kasich standing at a literal crossroads when he delivered his aisle-crossing speech. “Thomas Friedman has to be put on alert, because that is going overboard on a metaphor right there,” says Matt. Katie enjoyed Michelle Obama’s framing of the 2020 election, and voting for Joe Biden, as harm reduction.
Former Congresswoman Katie Hill joins our hosts to talk about her life post-resignation, why she stepped down, her new book She Will Rise, and what she thinks about the future of the Democratic Party.
Katie asks our guest how she sees, and characterizes, the events that led to her resignation.
“I have come to just, for lack of a better phrase, call it a ‘scandal,’ and basically call it a ‘sex scandal,’ because I don’t know what else you could refer to it as, especially because mine involves many different aspects,” says Hill. Separate from the Daily Mail photos, when speaking on her relationship with a staffer, Hill explains, “I didn’t feel like there was this power differential, especially when it started. I certainly didn’t feel like I was in the same category as you know, Harvey Weinstein or any of the other ones. But I still had to come to terms with it… I get why, and I get that the accountability that we have come to expect form people in these kinds of situations, whether they’re men or women, I’m kind of setting the tone of it a lot of ways. I was the first woman in a scandal like this in the post-#metoo era.”
Listen and watch the full interview here. You can find the show on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.