And Tommy Tuberville may not be the racist asshole he seems to be, but there're lots of people who wear the label "Racist Asshole" like a merit badge, and they all think he's one of their own.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) said that the definition of a “white nationalist” is a matter of “opinion” during a television interview Monday night in which he was given the opportunity to clarify remarks from this spring, when he appeared to be advocating for white nationalists to serve in the U.S. military.
During the CNN interview, Tuberville repeatedly said that he rejects racism but pushed back against host Kaitlan Collins when she told him that by definition white nationalists are racist because they believe their race is superior to others. Tuberville at one point in the back and forth characterized white nationalists as people who hold “a few probably different beliefs.”
The interview resurrected another controversy for the first-term senator, who has been in the news mostly for stalling scores of senior military nominations in an attempt to stop a Defense Department policy that helps ensure access to abortions for service members and their families.
In a May interview with a local public radio station in Alabama, Tuberville, a former football coach, criticized Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin for his efforts “to get out the white extremists, the white nationalists” from the military. Tuberville said it was part of an effort to politicize the armed services and accused Pentagon leaders of “ruining our military” and driving away supporters of former president Donald Trump.Asked to clarify his comments on white nationalists in the military, Sen. Tommy Tuberville's response: pic.twitter.com/deTfS4XKnR
— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) July 11, 2023
Tuberville subsequently told reporters that he looks “at a white nationalist as a Trump Republican,” adding: “That’s what we’re called all the time.”
Defending white nationalists, Tommy Tuberville fears a military that is ‘going wrong’
On Monday night, Collins pressed Tuberville on whether white nationalists should be allowed to serve in the military, offering a definition of a white nationalist as someone who “believes that the white race is superior to other races.”
“Well that’s some people’s opinion,” Tuberville said.
Asked for his opinion, Tuberville said: “My opinion of a white nationalist, if someone wants to call them white nationalist, to me, is an American. It’s an American. Now if that white nationalist is a racist, I’m totally against anything that they want to do because I am 110 percent against racism.”
Tuberville then accused Democrats of using the term to push “identity politics,” which he said is “ruining this country.”
Collins continued to press Tuberville on whether white nationalists should be able to serve in the military, saying they are people who believe “horrific things.”
“Well that’s just a name that has been given,” Tuberville said of white nationalism.
Collins told him, “it’s a real definition.”
“If you’re going to do away with most White people in this country out the military, we’ve got huge problems,” Tuberville responded.
“It’s not people who are White. It’s white nationalists,” Collins said.
“That have a few probably different beliefs, they have different beliefs,” Tuberville said. “Now if racism is one of those beliefs, I’m totally against it. I’m totally against racism.”
Earlier in the interview, Tuberville cited his coaching experience at Auburn University and elsewhere.
“I was a football coach for 40 years and had the opportunity to be around more minorities than anybody up on this Hill,” Tuberville said.
“A white nationalist is racist, senator,” Collins said.
“Well that’s your opinion, that’s your opinion,” Tuberville said.
He added: “I’m totally against any type of racism.”
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “[w]hite nationalist groups espouse white supremacist or white separatist ideologies, often focusing on the alleged inferiority of nonwhite persons.”
“Their primary goal is to create a white ethnostate,” the group says on its website. “Groups listed in a variety of other categories, including Ku Klux Klan, neo-Confederate, neo-Nazi, racist skinhead and Christian Identity, could also be fairly described as white nationalist.”
Military leaders have long worried about extremist views in their ranks.
A study by the Center for Strategic International Studies found that 6.4 percent of all domestic terror incidents in 2020 involved active-duty or reserve personnel, more than quadrupling the tally from the previous year. Hate groups actively target troops to become recruits while encouraging their own extremists to join the military ranks.
The presence of many military veterans at the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol further alarmed senior Pentagon officials and prompted Austin to create a counter-extremism working group in April 2021.
BTW, WaPo - maybe you could ask the Senator to name a kind of politics that isn't "identity politics".
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