The rebuttal US Senator Katie Britt (R-AL) offered to President Joe Biden's State of the Union address Thursday sparked criticism not only from Democratic lawmakers — but from Republican leaders as well.
The Daily Beast reporter Jake Lahut the next day reported, "The freshman senator is considered a rising star in the party. But her speech’s intense tone — with an over-the-top dramatic cadence that was delivered in a kitchen — left political operatives and observers struggling to make sense of it. In particular, some Republicans watched the high-profile speech with a grimace."
In her GOP response, Britt (R-AL) "described travelling to the Del Rio sector of the US-Mexico border and cited the case of an unidentified woman, whom Britt said confided harrowing experiences," according to The Guardian. Britt "implied these were a direct result of the ongoing crisis at the border, which Republicans have sought to exploit as a campaign issue."
READ MORE: Even Republicans are slamming GOP senator’s SOTU response: 'One of our biggest disasters ever'
The Guardian reported Saturday:
*However, in a seven\-minute video posted on TikTok, \[Jonathan\] Katz – a former \[Associated Press\] reporter who has written on drug wars in Mexico – cited details that appeared to show the story Britt was describing had happened not just outside the US, but many years before Biden became president\.*
He concluded that Britt had deliberately misrepresented the tale of Karla Jacinto Romero, an activist who has publicly recounted her experiences on numerous occasions at the hands of sex traffickers in her native Mexico.
During Sunday's episode of MSNBC's The Weekend, co-host Alicia Menendez emphasized the "real danger" in Britt's rant.
"I'm not over the Republican response yet," Menendez told co-hosts Michael Steele and Symone Sanders Townsend. "This fact check that was originally done by Jonathan Katz and then picked up by The Washington Post about what is was that Katie Britt did here. She sort of makes a reference to a survivor of sex trafficking. She is not specific about when it happened, as you [Steele] said happened, sometime 2004 to 2008. That is such a misuse of a survivor's story."
Menendez continued, "It is unfair to the survivor who has been brave enough to come forward to share the story. Because the reason you sit on a panel with lawmakers is so that they can do something about it. So that they can understand the root cause of what it is that you have suffered, so they can then go back to their jobs and create legislation that will stop it from happening."
READ MORE: 'Explain the falsehoods': Pete Buttigieg blasts Katie Britt over misleading border story
The MSNBC host emphasized, "Not so that your story can be weaponized on the national stage to the opposite effect. So, to me, I'm so grateful for this fact check. I'm so grateful that we are talking about this. 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."
Watch the video below or at this link.
'Ugliest thing you can do': MSNBC host emphasizes 'real danger' in Katie Britt's SOTU response youtu.be
