Last Thursday night, I went to bed before Katie Britt, the junior senator from Alabama, responded to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address. I know—it wasn’t very intrepid of me. But SOTU rebuttals are never good. It’s also never clear to me who the audience is for them. A handful of political junkies like us? The twelve civilians from the “other party” who tuned in to a president they dislike and distrust? Unaffiliated voters doing their homework eight months early?
Britt’s speech was no exception to the rule when it came to quality, delivery, and information. We did learn, however, that the GOP is pivoting away from hate, and back to its happy place, hate and fear. And who has more to fear than The American Mom? If it isn’t inflation, Harvard, trans girls on the volleyball court, and a culture that feminizes their husbands and sons, it is (wait for it): bloodthirsty, undocumented immigrants who stream across the border for one thing, and one thing only: raping and killing American women.
The American Mom, when she appears on a conservative political stage, is always a white woman. Fear is her heritage and her birthright, and fear of sexual assault by men of color her guiding star. That has been historically true in American conservative politics; it is true now. The American Mom never appears in a political setting to tell you everything is ok and you can relax.
And it kind of works. In the last two election cycles, the majority of white women have repeatedly voted Republican: 55% in the last Presidential election, slightly more than in 2016. Fears in 2022 that Republicans were steadily losing that demographic turned out to be unfounded.
That was before Dobbs unleashed the whirlwind. Now, The American Mom is beginning to realize that the Republican party might be her worst enemy. Amanda Eid nearly died in Texas when, after 18 months of fertility treatments (that some Republicans are also endangering) doctors refused to perform a medical procedure to remove a fetus that was dying inside her. A 13-year-old in Clarksdale, Mississippi gave birth to her rapist’s baby because there are no abortion providers in her state, and her family is too poor to travel. Maternal death rates in states that restrict abortion access were already 62% higher in 2020 than in states that didn’t restrict. Now, an expectant mother has to imagine driving or flying to another state if something goes wrong, regardless of how far along in her pregnancy she is.
Let’s be clear: Katie Britt is not a dummy, nor is she “just a Mom.” Among other things, Britt is a high-powered lawyer, a skilled political operative, and the former comms director for the man she replaced, Alabama Senator Richard Shelby. She was also a far better choice than the person she defeated for the Republican nomination in 2022. That was election denier Congressman Mo Brooks, one of the central figures in the January 6 insurrection. Brooks is also a proponent of the “independent state legislature theory” that would allow states to nullify federal legislation and replace actual votes cast by actual Americans in a presidential election with a vote by a partisan state legislature.
All I am saying is that Katie Britt is really not the worst that Alabama has to offer us. Yet, despite all of her professional accomplishments, she chose to veil her accomplishments and take American Mom as her brand. Her campaign catchphrase was Momma on a Mission, and the theme of the SOTU response was: Katie Britt is a senator, but really a wife and a Mom. (Quiz: when was the last time you heard a man run for office with these phrases: “But really—I’m A Dad,” “Determined Daddy,” or “Fearless Father.”) Britt even stole Joe Biden’s (admittedly worn out) narrative of the family sitting around the kitchen table solving problems, and the "empty chair” Bidenism, this time signaling a family member killed by an immigrant, or fentanyl, or a sex trafficker, or all of the above.
Britt’s speech is a preview of how the GOP plans to run the 2024 campaign: every vile GOP policy will be broadcast to women cloaked in the pink haze of maternal love. The American Mom suffers, it is her job to suffer, and only the GOP feels her pain. Britt reassures us that education and success do not have to make a woman less of a Mom or less submissive to men. Here, the green dress that bears a close resemblance to the uniform worn by Serena Joy on Hulu’s dystopian series about Christian misogyny, The Handmaid’s Tale, was a good touch.
And what causes the American Mom more suffering than anything else? That the Biden administration has “invited” undocumented immigrants to rape, murder, and traffic her daughters. Elevating the recent, tragic murder of white Georgia nursing student Lakin Riley, allegedly by an undocumented man of color, Britt re-introduced a time-honored trope that will resonate in southern states where the GOP needs to shore up support, like Virginia, Florida, and Georgia.
Let me emphasize: the idea that white women are always in danger from men of color, wherever they come from, is categorically false. Black, Native American, and Latina women are at higher risk for rape and a much higher risk of murder than white women; 80% of rapes are committed, not by a stranger, but by someone known to the victim; and 57% of rapists are white (an additional 27% are Black, not Latino.)
In other words, if the GOP’s proposal is to deal with rape by shutting the border, they are not really interested in preventing rape. We knew that.
The racism of this theme was then compounded by Britt’s misrepresentation of a lurid sex trafficking story meant to stigmatize both Mexicans and Joe Biden. Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler characterized the grisly ordeal suffered by Karla Jacinto Romero as the “centerpiece” of the GOP “rebuttal to Biden’s address.”
I won’t tell Romero’s story here (this is a family publication): it’s genuinely awful. But here’s the thing. Romero was not held captive and repeatedly assaulted in the United States. It happened in Mexico; and even if you presume that the United States government controls events in Mexico, Romero’s ordeal occurred during the George W. Bush administration. The victim herself says that there were no drug cartels involved, and she was never trafficked across the border. You can read more details about Romero’s story here; despite all evidence to the contrary, Britt insists that the story is true.
What does all of this tell us? First, that the place of white women in the GOP comes from a conflicted and confused set of demands: do they have power, or do they not? (The answer is both.)
This is why Britt’s speech was so easy to parody, and why parody can serve as the most incisive analysis of a policy speech that is not one. Two days later, in the Saturday Night Live cold open, Scarlett Johansson (who also didn’t write her speech) sums up the GOP White Woman Strategy by introducing herself as a Senator whose job is to serve the people of the “great state of Alabama. But tonight, I’ll be auditioning for the part of scary mom. And I’ll be performing an original monologue called: This Country is Hell. You see,” Johansson continues, “I’m not just a Senator. I’m a wife, a mother, and the craziest bitch in the Target parking lot.” Later in the speech, she promises, “like any Mom,” she will “pivot into a shockingly violent story about sex trafficking.” At another point, the screen transforms into a Home Shopping Network template, and Johansson offers the cross she is wearing around her neck for sale.
It’s a brilliant sketch, not just about how Britt’s speech failed, but also—like the former Confederacy under Jim Crow— in its central truth: there is no place for women in the GOP but as enablers of white men and as victims.
Believe it or not, this idea annoyed numerous Republican women. Former Trump aide Alyssah Farah Griffin Xeeted: “I do not understand the decision to put her in a KITCHEN for one of the most important speeches she’s ever given,” while conservative podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey characterized Britt’s speech as “hard to watch.” Backstage, it wasn’t so polite. An anonymous GOP strategist growled: "everyone's f---ing losing it. It's one of our biggest disasters ever."
Weirdly, I think Britt’s speech would have worked if they had chosen another vessel—say, Kari Lake, Marjorie Taylor Greene (who would have to work on her reading skills), or Marcia Blackburn—to give it. At least it might have seemed authentic.
However, one of the most delightfully contemptuous responses came from Ann Coulter, who has managed to make it through an almost 40-year career as a conservative pundit without allowing her femininity to compromise her rage (and vice versa.) Once an enthusiastic Trump supporter, less than a year after he was elected, Coulter broke with him over his failure to enact a radical anti-immigration agenda. Since then, she has also vigorously refuted election denialism. As a consequence, she has been virtually blacklisted from every conservative forum that MAGA dominates, and relegated to Substack like the rest of us.
Coulter promotes the same politics she always did, though, and remains adamantly anti-immigrant, legal or illegal. So, while she may have approved in principle of Britt’s lengthy, and false, anti-immigrant rant, to Coulter, the medium was the message. The idea of women as living in fear of sexual assault and Britt disavowing her own intelligence and authority as a Senator pissed Coulter off mightily. Characterizing Britt on her Substack, Unsafe, as “estrogen-laden” and “tearful,” Coulter quipped that the GOP chose a kitchen for the speech “presumably because a nursery school wasn’t available.” She also pointed out that no white Republican male has been asked to respond to a Democratic SOTU since 2012: “WE’RE NOT THE PARTY OF IDENTITY POLITICS, YOU UTTER IMBECILES.”
It’s vintage Coulter. You have to admit she has a point: by mining the small number of women and people of color in the party for high profile events, the GOP is implicitly saying that race and gender do matter, even though all their policies say that these things don’t matter.
Coulter also lectured Britt for being girly: grown-up Republicans, she lectured, politicians don’t use diminutives like “Katie.” In fact, Democrats of both genders do use diminutives, which—I am a longtime student in the School of Coulter Studies—actually reinforces her point, because Republicans aren’t Democrats. Republicans can’t expect voters to think that their policies are distinctive if they don’t present themselves as distinct.
Politics, Coulter argues, should be politics, and sugar-coating hard messages is dumb—particularly if you are trying to frighten people about the future. As she snarls:
For the love of God, quit it already with the kitchens, dining room tables, fireplaces, living rooms, sofas, or anything else warm, fuzzy and cozy. It’s politics, for crying out loud. Normal people want politicians working to make their lives better, not emoting with us — least of all with the completely unbelievable story about her “sitting around the kitchen table” trying to figure out how her family can ever get by on her $174,000 base salary, PLUS premium health care for her whole family, PLUS a gigantic pension (which no longer exists anywhere in America except for teachers).
OK,—cops, firefighters, and other public employees too. But the basic point stands—and can I add something? If that is indeed their kitchen, Mr. and Mrs. Wesley Britt absolutely have enough money to replace that ugly brown tile. You won’t say it, Ann, but I will.
The big takeaway from this little episode? That the Republican party knows it cannot afford to lose even a few points of white women’s votes in November 2024.
And yet, lose white women they surely will, because the GOP’s extreme position on abortion has put everything from birth control, to IVF, to actually living through a wanted pregnancy, on the table. They have been losing white women when abortion is on the ballot. And don’t think the Democrats are not going to hammer at this issue from now until election day. The best part? We really believe it!
Britt gave us a big grin at one point and said that the GOP supports IVF. But why should anyone believe them when there was no concerted campaign to eliminate IVF in the first place—and yet a Supreme Court judge in Britt’s very own state tried to do exactly that? As IVF clinics across the state shut down, with couples in mid-treatment and embryo transfers scheduled, the Alabama legislature had to quickly pass a bill protecting service providers and patients. Governor Kay Ivey sprinted to her desk to sign it.
The GOP can’t put the rabbit of reproductive rights back in the hat. Logically, the judge was right. If your position is that human life begins when the sperm and egg fuse (that is Britt’s, and the position of the GOP’s Life at Conception Act, then the survival of frozen embryos is just as much the state’s concern as a fetus nearing viability. And yet Republicans seem not to understand the implications of the laws they pass for real people. For example, the Alabama state senator who hastily wrote the bill to protect IVF admitted that the Republicans have no idea what they are doing. "A lot of people say conception, a lot of people say implantation, a lot of people say heartbeat," Dr. Tim Melson said on the floor. "I wish I had an answer.”
Gee Tim: and you a doctor too.
Furthermore, extremist rants about immigration may backfire when their cruelty exceeds the protected space of a MAGA rally or Facebook page. Although Donald Trump’s hatred for people of color and race-mixing appears to be genuine, that isn’t true of most Americans. The 2020 census reported over 33 million Americans identified as multi-racial: this means that across party lines, exponentially more white people have people of color in their immediate families.
Let’s even assume that the white women who vote Republican share Trump’s view. Think about it. Should you terrify women about the imminence of rape at the same time as the Democrats are there to remind them that the GOP is working hard to eliminate access to the morning after pill, or any kind of abortion that might result from that sexual assault?
I have an answer—and I doubt it is one the Republican party can hear.
The Biden Campaign’s latest ad drop:
He’s cute, isn’t he? Remember the sexist antiwar slogan from the 1960s, “Girls say yes to boys who say no?” Well, let’s update that to: Voters say yes to presidents who get things done.
What I’m reading:
Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story (Simon & Schuster, 2024.) I am a huge Kara Swisher fan. Ever since I began listening to Pivot, her podcast with entrepreneur and New York University business professor Scott Galloway a year ago, I have probably learned more about how the economic side of media works than I ever learned in my previous 64 years. Both hosts are forthright and irreverent: Galloway makes jokes in bad taste that are also really funny, and Swisher plays the straight man (I mean that in a comedic sense) to perfection. She’s also a really out, really butch lesbian only a few years younger than me. This will surprise you, but there really aren’t that many of us in this generation.
That said, Burn Book is a memoir with very little in it that is personal. To that extent, it is a little disappointing for those of us who know the history of digital technology well. The brash attitude that works so well in the podcast gets a little grating after the first hundred pages or so, and it reads a bit like a book that was dictated and then edited, by someone else. That means you get a lot of Swisher’s snappy style—but it also hops from subject to subject far too quickly for my taste.
But Swisher’s lifetime of deep reporting on the tech industry means that she has a lot to say about her relationships with the people and companies she covered. She also has a lot of insight on why some tech companies thrive and others (in fact, nearly all others) fail. If you want a survey of the recent history of tech, this is the book for you. If you are into the liveliness and sharp intelligence that Swisher brings to the table, listen to the podcast.
Short takes:
Interested in the details of the $91.6 million ($88.3 + 10%) that Donald J. Trump will presented to the court for approval on Monday? Of course you are. Despite much boasting that he has billions of dollar in assets, the bond has been guaranteed by the Federal Insurance Company, a subsidiary of Chubb and a company with which Trump has a long history. If accepted by Judge Lewis Kaplan, it carries a 2% interest rate, and should Trump’s appeals fail, Chubb has up to 60 days to collect before putting Melania’s bedroom set out on the street. As Judd Legum at Popular Information points out, because Trump is a presidential candidate, how he is financially encumbered matters. “Trump is facing a cash crunch, and may not be able to (or want to) set aside $91.6 million in unencumbered assets for this purpose,” Legum writes. The Former Guy “has numerous mortgages coming due and has to somehow obtain a bond for the $464 million New York fraud verdict by the end of the month. That raises the possibility that the structure of the bond could make Trump financially reliant on other people or entities, including those with a vested interest in the policies of the next president.” (March 11, 2024)
A broad coalition of American progressive groups have launched an attack on the United Democracy Project, a mostly Republican-funded Super PAC steered by American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). According to Ben Samuels at Ha’aretz, the Reject AIPAC Coalition claims that perhaps the most conservative pro-Israel organization in the United States will spend $100 million to unseat Israel’s critics in Congress. “As part of its efforts, the Reject AIPAC coalition is launching a seven-figure electoral defense campaign across paid media and field organizing efforts aimed at defending progressive Democrats targeted by AIPAC's multimillion dollar efforts,” Samuels writes. “It will also aim to counterbalance AIPAC's lobbying efforts—at the core of its mission for decades prior to the creation of its federal political action committee and super PAC in the last election cycle—through mass-scale mobilization efforts across the country demanding a cease-fire and ending unconditional U.S. support for Israel.” (March 11, 2024)
Part of what still stuns many of us about the effort poured into investigating all the people who enabled Trump is that mostly it’s the small fry (yes, those little people who love him best and showed it by trying to violently overturn the 2020 election) who have gone to the Big House. Well, one is scheduled to check in for spring break in Florida next week: Peter Navarro has been ordered to report to federal prison on March 19 for defying a subpoena from the January 6 Committee. “Navarro, an economist who advised Trump on trade issues, was the second former Trump aide convicted for refusing to cooperate with the Jan. 6 panel. Steve Bannon was convicted by a jury in July 2022 for similarly blowing off a subpoena from the committee,” Kyle Cheney reports at Politico. “However, the judge in Bannon’s case, U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, agreed not to enforce Bannon’s four-month sentence while he appeals his conviction to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. Navarro’s judge, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta, rejected Navarro’s attempt for a similar stay, and Navarro is now asking a three-judge appeals court panel to stave off imminent jail time.” (March 11, 2024)
so glad you liked it, Ken!!
Or she used IVF :-)