Alabama's Best?

I didn't watch the Republican response to the State of the Union address, though I've seen some clips from it now that Alabama Sen. Katie Britt's odd performance has become at least a social media news story.

I'm not sure how widely the second part of the story has gotten out beyond social media circles, but a guy named Jonathan Katz deconstructed Britt's claim that a woman at the Texas border told her about being sex trafficked as a child. Britt's delivery implied that it happened in the U.S., and — less clearly but one would have assumed because of her rhetorical omission — that it was under a Democratic president.

With minimal sleuthing and using only publicly available information (yet undiscovered by "real" journalists, who clearly didn't look), Katz put the truth together. The now clearly adult woman Britt referred to was 12 at the time, but her trauma happened back during the George W. Bush administration in Mexico — and nowhere near the border. 

Britt heard about it during a 2023 trip to Texas, but it wasn't a confidential heart-to-heart moment — again, something that she implied in her speech. The information came from a statement made by the survivor-activist at a press conference. She has told her story many times, including in front of Congress.

Yes, women and girls are sexually assaulted while trying to come to the U.S. for asylum or otherwise without documentation. They're victims, and for the Right to use that experience against immigration reform is bad enough, but to lie about it just shows the depths of their moral vacancy.

As historian Will Jones said about the lie on BlueSky,

That Katie Britt lied about rape to mobilize violence against migrants makes it even more similar to the way racists used rape scares to encourage lynching of Black men in the 20th century. We can't just laugh this off as a lie — it's a very deliberate strategy.

That's clearly what they're up to, and have been up to since at least 2015 when Trump came down the gold escalator and declaimed that Mexico was sending its rapists—even though all the statistics are clear that immigrants (including undocumented immigrants) commit far less crime than people born in the U.S.

The lies continue. While the liars wear crosses around their necks, of course.