"This is the sixth time in the last year she’s told this story to blame Biden. Any claims she just made a mistake is also a lie.
In their response to the State of the Union speech, Britt and the GOP have managed to insult the status of women, exploit sex trafficking for their own gains, and lie to the public about the facts to erroneously blame Biden. This is certainly the state of the Republican Party."
When Kareen Abdul-Jabbar says that Katie Britt has told her lie about Biden and immigrants being sex-trafficked five times in the past year, he links to this news report (see link below).
Why did Republicans choose to put Alabama senator Katie Britt front and center in their SOTU response? Professor Sheri Rogers explains:
"Platform a woman. This is becoming an increasingly common and intentional tactic, especially if you can use that woman to promote the heteronormative (and white) family archetype. Place the woman in an environment that promotes traditional gender roles, even if it is a façade."
"Use references from the majority culture, like religious symbols and practices, references to ethnicity, or language (wearing a cross, referencing prayer). Raise the alarm about the threats to children. The threats to children are always a powerful motivator….
Frame immigrants as a threat to women and children, especially white women."
"First, and most importantly, is the intentional framing. Putting women in leadership positions softens the rough edges of the movement that historically has been patriarchal and misogynistic. This mainstreams the movement.
Second, use women and children (especially children) as a foil against whatever you’re fighting against: current leadership, immigrants, foreigners, etc. Who doesn’t want to do whatever you can to protect children? This motivates participation."
"Dobbs was payback to the tiny but motivated Republican zygote wing, but it is a disaster electorally. The GOP appears to believe they can defy the numbers by trotting out peppy, younger female MAGA shills - so far to ridiculous effect."
I think we know--other than Trump-- who has cognitive issues, and it's not Biden.👇🏼
Via Scott MacFarlane:
At news conference, Sen. Mitch #McConnell (R-KY) comment on Sen. #KatieBritt (R-AL) response to State of the Union: "We were proud of Senator Britt. Thought she did a great job. I have zero criticism of her performance. I thought it was really outstanding"
"If there’s one thing the last 72 hours have taught us, it’s how hard it is to be a woman and a Republican these days," Lucian K. Truscott thinks. He adds, "the Republican way of life has emptied [Katie Britt] of anything even marginally recognizable as real."
This is why, he thinks, her SOTU performance was so surrealistic as she whispered “our country is less secure” and then smiled bizarrely into the camera.
Parker Molloy says that it matters that mainstream media missed Katie Britt's lie and big-name news outlets got scooped by someone with a newsletter and a TikTok account.
"Where was the mainstream press on this? Why did it take an independent journalist like Katz digging into the details of this story for it to come to light that the points within were built on misrepresentations, if not outright lies?"
"Throughout [Katie Britt's] remarks, her face was frozen into a ghastly cheerleader’s rictus—an effect that became especially gothic as she doted with unseemly relish on the details of alleged immigrant rape, sex-trafficking, and other mayhem."
"(What’s more, Britt’s central immigrant horror story turned out to be a repurposed saga of cartel-driven sexual abuse in Guadalajara dating from the second George W. Bush administration, which she dishonestly and cynically presented as an American calamity, authored by the immigration policies of Joe Biden.)"
"One person truly loved Britt’s speech: Donald Trump. The GOP’s leader praised Britt as delivering a 'GREAT' speech that was in his view 'compassionate and caring.'
Trump’s accolades for Britt should not come as a surprise. After all, Britt took a page from Trump’s own playbook by baselessly stoking fears about Brown immigrants to scare voters into supporting the white supremacist GOP."
…Emma Stone on her role in Poor Things where she plays an adult woman with a mind of a child, kinda like the woman who gave the response to the state of the union Thursday night. #Oscars2024#Oscars
@GottaLaff I LOVED the performance (by Scarlett Johansson) the performance by #KatieBritt was cringeworthy.
I especially love that the
writers pointed out that the story of the woman who was sex trafficked took place in Mexico from 2004 - 2009 under George W Bush.
Here is the #SNL cold open cued up to that part. https://youtu.be/cCfLpuLdF8Q?si=TscBcE6xe9OfB6lG&t=219
“Because here is real danger in what Katie Britt did. And I want to take a moment and sit in the danger and talk about the fact that she weaponized someone's story, not to actually get something done, not to make someone's life better, but to score political points. It's just about the ugliest thing you can do in American politics.” — Alicia Menendez, on MSNBC’s The Weekend.
Jay Kuo zeroes in on the "bold-faced lie" Katie Britt told in her SOTU rebuttan — "that a sex trafficking victim, who was raped repeatedly at age 12, had met with Sen. Britt and was a stark example of Biden’s failed border policies."
As he notes, Jonathan Katz, a freelance journalist and reporter with years of experience as an AP foreign correspondent in Haiti and Mexico, surfaced Britt's bold-faced lie.
As Kuo adds, yesterday Washington Post in a report finally published on Saturday, the Washington Post confirmed what Katz has reported about Britt's bold-faced lie. He states.
"[Karla Jacinto Romero] is a sexual trafficking victims’ rights advocate. Her story is widely known. In fact, she testified before Congress in 2015 about being forced to work in Mexican brothels from 2004 to 2008—again, back when George W. Bush was president."
"Yet Sen. Britt took that story and made it one about the border, which it most certainly was not. …
Biden, the border and the cartels had nothing to do with Romero. According to her testimony, cited by the Post, after her mother threw her out of the house, a pimp took advantage of her, and she spent four years in a brothel, escaping at age 16.
Nor was Romero ever trafficked across the border to the U.S."
"As Jonathan Katz noted in his now viral TikTok video about Britt’s lies, the senator had made it seem like she had met the woman 'sitting by the banks of the Rio Grande, … holding her hand … getting her to tell her the story that she won’t tell anyone else.' In fact, Britt met Romero at a press conference organized by three GOP women senators, including Britt, and a Fox News reporter known for inflammatory pieces on immigration."
"Sen. Britt tried to scam the entire nation by trying to spin a story from two decades ago about a child victim of sexual tourism into a story today about Biden’s failed policies, sex trafficking across the border, and cartels. For that, the Washington Post gave her four Pinocchios—its worst rating, a real whopper."
"It takes a complete absence of a moral compass to leverage someone else’s tragic story—one she has carried for decades and made her life’s mission to tell others—into a tool for raw and cynical political gain. ...
It is incumbent upon the media, the public, and our Democratic leaders to call out the cheap ploys and race-baiting that Trump, Britt and the rest of the GOP deploy to rile up the public, all while doing nothing to actually fix the problem."
@GottaLaff#KatieBritt did a masterful job of using a story that had nothing to do with the border crisis to incite the #TFG base. But that's what the #GQP has become now: a falsehood-generating behemoth.
They got nothing. And we're gonna show the world just how empty their policies are come November, starting with the campaign I'm working on just over the WI border. #MovingTheFirstForward#SantosForWisconsin
David Pepper discusses the huge lie Katie Britt told in her SOTU rebuttal about Karla Jacinto Romero, a trafficking victim. Britt placed the story of what happened to her in the US under Biden, when it's clear Britt knew this happened in Mexico in 2004-8.
"Trump and his allies are deathly afraid of losing. And as Britt showed the entire nation, that fear and desperation mean they will lie about anything.
Moreover, this was a lie that they must’ve known was easily disproved. Just like most of Trump’s daily lies are so obviously false.
But they don’t care.
Because in today’s media environment, certain media outlets will run with that lie and spend no time rebutting it even now."