Francesca Hong, 37, is making a name for herself as the socialist Asian gal who is the Democrat primary candidate for Wisconsin governor and may win the November election. There’s just one problem: She has a very serious mental illness that would see a rational electorate disqualify her.
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Hong is the American-born daughter of immigrants from South Korea. Hong herself is a college dropout who chose instead to become a chef. She and her former husband eventually had a small restaurant in Madison, but COVID restrictions killed the business.
Hong is also a deep red socialist. While in the Wisconsin state legislature, in addition to pushing to teach Asian American history, she also worked to advance socialist policies:
- Free school breakfasts and lunches for all students.
- Paid family and medical leave.
- Increased state funding for public schools and special education.
- A higher minimum wage.
- Tenant and affordable-housing protections.
- Greater taxation of high earners and large corporations.
- Immigration legislation limiting cooperation between state or local institutions and federal immigration enforcement.
- A moratorium on major data-center construction until Wisconsin adopts stronger protections for its electric grid, water supply, and farmland.
- A state-owned public bank
Her gubernatorial platform is similarly socialist:
- Universal or heavily subsidized child care.
- Universal paid family and medical leave.
- Universal school meals.
- A state role in reducing health-care costs and moving toward universal coverage.
- A $20-per-hour minimum wage.
- More state funding for schools and municipalities, reducing dependence on local property-tax referendums.
- A new income-tax bracket for millionaires and higher taxes on wealthy individuals and some businesses.
- Publicly owned or publicly operated services, including a state public bank
Ultimately, the state treasury is Hong’s piggy bank and the state’s earners are her indentured servants. She’s also in the “Israel is a genocidal nation” crowd, wants to end ICE and data centers, and used to claim that police needed defunding, although she’s trying to change her tune on that one.
Currently, Hong has a huge lead in the Democrat party primary. Depending on the poll, she’s to 29 points ahead of her next closest rivals (one of whom just dropped out). Hong’s massive support comes from the hard leftists within the Wisconsin Democrat party, which tells us that the momentum in Wisconsin’s Democrat party is pure socialism.
Hong’s likely Republican opponent in the governor’s race will be U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany. , Tiffany has a 3-point lead that’s well within the statistical margin of error. Amongst likely voters, Tiffany and Hong are running neck-and-neck.
There’s a problem with this, though. It seems that Hong is mentally ill…seriously mentally ill:
Francesca Hong was diagnosed with 1) bipolar disease, 2) had a mental breakdown, 3) was placed in psychiatric hospitalization, 4) did self-harm by cutting, and 5) experienced a lithium overdose. My source: Francesca Hong in a 2023 interview. Her own words. She is running for… pic.twitter.com/R9pHxnoFGM
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— Peter Bernegger (@PeterBernegger) August 1, 2026
More specifically, in that interview, she stated,
At 18, I had a mental breakdown,” Hong told Meal Magazine. “I didn’t actually walk at my high school graduation because I had been hospitalized for a week at a child psychiatric hospital. I just felt like nothing had meaning anymore. It was a numbness that took over, and a pain that I couldn’t describe. I couldn’t feel anymore, and that scared the hell out of me. And I found myself self-harming to feel something… It was cutting. I was diagnosed with bipolar disease. I was taking SSRIs and I’d overdosed on lithium.
Hong certainly deserves praise for overcoming her breakdown. Having said that, this was not a temporary adolescent depression. Bipolar disorder is a forever disease. It can be medically controlled (and we don’t know if Hong is doing that), but medicine can stop working, people stop taking the medicine when they feel good, and stress can trigger bipolar breaks even if someone is taking the medicine.
And her instability is definitely there, just below the surface. Thus, in 2019, at a local Culver’s (a great Midwestern burger and ice cream chain), she wasn’t merely distressed, as any good socialist would be, by seeing “old white people.” Instead, she barely escaped an anxiety attack:
I ate two bites of my kid’s cheeseburger at a Culver’s in black river falls and told him they ran out of ice cream. Mostly just wanted to leave bc I was on the verge of a anxiety attack…to many old white people who didn’t think we spoke english
— Francesca Hong For Governor (@FrancescaHongWI) July 2, 2019
I wonder how many of those “old white people” were responsible for her parents living in free South Korea and being able to immigrate to America, unlike the unlucky ones trapped in the dream socialist hellhole of North Korea.
Bipolar disorder is a terrible burden in life, and Hong, no matter her obscene political ideology, deserves our sympathy. Nevertheless, it would be insane for Wisconsin to elect a governor with a known mental illness that can trigger her into dysfunctional depression or mania with stress or just bad luck. But when you look at what once sturdy Wisconsin has become, it’s very hard to assume that Wisconsinites won’t be insane.
For those who are sane and haven’t been voting lately, I urge you to change that behavior now.
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Image created using AI.