Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ Tuesday night rebuttal to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union Address shows that Republican politicians seem completely unable to deliver a message aimed at audiences beyond the party’s Fox News base. 

Sanders opened and closed her speech with personal anecdotes, and peppered it throughout with the sort of false and misleading claims about the Biden administration’s record and policy agenda that typify GOP State of the Union rebuttals. But she devoted the spine of her speech to themes that might be incomprehensible to those not steeped in the narratives of the right-wing press. 

In Sanders’ telling, Biden’s surrender to the “woke mob” is the greatest threat the country faces. She criticized the president for “weakness” and declared him “unfit to serve as commander in chief.”

“While you reap the consequences of their failures, the Biden administration seems more interested in woke fantasies than the hard reality Americans face every day,” she said. “Most Americans simply want to live their lives in freedom and peace, but we are under attack in a left-wing culture war we didn’t start and never wanted to fight. Every day, we are told that we must partake in their rituals, salute their flags, and worship their false idols.”