Katie Britt has arisen from deep, prayerful reflection on her disaster of a SOTU response to double down on the lie that she didn’t lie about the sexual abuse she called out (the account of the abuse she heard was real, but the abuse itself happened in Mexico during the GWB administration, not during the Biden administration, something she was at a minimum crystal unclear about). I thought the Guardian headline captured it well: Katie Britt defends sex trafficking story she falsely links to Biden presidency.
Anyway, yeah, nobody’s buying her bullshit excuses except perhaps her fellow evangelicals, and why is that? I think it’s because lying is so baked into their game that they expect it, tolerate it, and find comfort in it. Their church experience is full of lies, and I’m not talking about the belief in some benevolent sky prince as described in their fairytale bible. Rather, it’s the other shit that they swallow all day. “We love everyone” except trans and gay folks, and sluts who use birth control and/or have abortions. (Of course, they use birth control and have abortions, in the closet, just as many of them are gay or bi, in the closet.) “We live chaste, virtuous lives” except for their clergy, who are forever being found sticking their dicks in kids and women who aren’t their wives. “We tithe for the greater good” which includes lining the pockets of their leadership. They are also brought up to seek coded messages in the main text of their faith, since that’s the only way to make sense of a bunch of disjointed rambling assembled over hundreds of years from disparate sources.
I think there are a fair number of evangelicals who live their faith and won’t vote for Trump, but for every one of them, there are ten who find him a familiar, comforting presence. He’s a leader who molests women and is notoriously unfaithful to his wives (just like their preachers). He rips off his followers, fucks them over with scammy shit like golden sneakers and generally treats them as marks, just as they are treated in their megachurches. He’s full of coded messages and wink-wink, again, something they hear every day. It’s no mystery why these people flock to Trump, when you take a clear-eyed look at what happens in their churches.
I believe that what I’ve expressed here is pretty much commonly acknowledged truth about a lot of evangelicals, but because they have “beliefs”, the media (which they despise and would destroy the minute they’re in power) treats them with kid gloves. These fuckers have burrowed themselves far too deeply into our society already, and we need to start seeing them as the threat they are. They’re un-American because they would burn the Constitution as soon as they’re in power, they’re un-Christian, in the sense of following the teachings of Christ, and they are a god damned menace to civil society with their church school ignorance and anti-vaxxism. Katie did us all a service with her Stepford wife performance (more on that from Cheryl Rofer, well worth reading). She reminded us that she, and her kind, are the enemy, and it’s good to remember that.
