This is an opinion column.

Don’t adjust your television. What we saw wasn’t an AI deepfake. That was Katie Britt. That speech happened.

But don’t call it real.

The junior Senator from Alabama gave up being genuine a while back, and on Thursday night, her phoniness rose to the surface in full view of millions of Americans.

There’s nothing I can quote from Britt’s speech that can convey the strangeness of it — the mismatched emotions, the smiles in the wrong places, the jaw clenched when it shouldn’t have been — just the indescribable weirdness. It was something that had to be seen, but even then, couldn’t be understood — like postmodernism, avant-garde performance art or an involuntary behavioral science experiment.

It was supposed to be a rebuttal to the State of the Union, but the best argument for Britt’s success was that, after it was over, no one was talking about Joe Biden’s speech.

Katie Britt glitched out on national television and left millions of Americans asking what the heck they just watched.

Even had she not, the odds were stacked against her. The rebuttal to the State of the Union has always been a trap for the politically ambitious. It doesn’t matter how many bleached bones lie at the bottom of that pit, someone new will try to jump across when given the chance — a dangerous shortcut to becoming a national political figure. And they’ll be impaled at the bottom on its spikes with all the rest — somewhere between Bobby Jindal and Marco Rubio’s water bottle.

Thursday night, it was Britt’s turn to try.

All she had to do was look into the camera and read, but she tried to do more. Too much more. Her handlers attempted to brand this political newcomer as “America’s mom,” but instead, she came off as the aunt who’s been spending too much time on Facebook, and if you don’t change the subject soon, she’s going to tell you about sex dungeons beneath the pizza parlor.

I supposed we should focus on the substance of Britt’s speech, instead of its delivery, but that, too, seemed written by ChatGPT.

There was a lot of talk about illegal immigration and the border. Only Britt lacks the standing anymore to speak to such things. She lost it after she helped put together a deal to fund border security (and aid for Israel and Ukraine) and then voted to kill that deal because it might hurt Donald Trump’s political odds in the fall.

The border talk was as phony as her smile.

There was the anecdote about the retiree in Chilton County who had to work a gas station cash register to pay for his medication. For a second, I thought Britt might get behind Medicaid expansion and then I reminded myself she’s a Republican from Alabama and we don’t do that here. Nor did she offer other options.

And then, there was the story of the sex-trafficking victim she says she met at the border. Her description of the crimes was horrific and such criminality deserves our attention, only Britt didn’t say what should be done for such women except building an impenetrable wall.

And how are we to take such talk seriously from someone who endorsed Trump for president after a jury found him liable for having sexually assaulted a woman and then defaming her when she complained about it? Britt seems to care about sexual predators except when they’re picking running mates.

For months, Britt hesitated to back Trump, saying she wanted to remain neutral as the political process played out — only to endorse him hours before other GOP hopefuls debated in her home state.

We’ve seen this sort of thing before in Alabama. Years ago, Congressman Artur Davis had such ambitions for higher office. A political robot, he couldn’t find a path through the bizzaro world of Alabama politics, either, and rebooted himself again and again until he couldn’t win a campaign for Montgomery City Council.

And then, of course, there was George Wallace, who ran as a racial moderate until he realized that wasn’t how he could get elected in Alabama, then flipped again after the Voting Rights Act put ballots in the hands of Black Alabamians.

Britt’s problem is an old one in Alabama politics — she couldn’t be genuine and win. So she chose to be fake.

There might be a simple explanation for Britt’s odd delivery Thursday night: Perhaps she couldn’t believe what she was saying either.

And like so many Alabama politicians before her, she left us asking …

Was she ever real?

Kyle Whitmire is the 2023 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. You can follow him on Threads here and subscribe to his weekly newsletter, Alabamafication.