Tommy Tuberville Begrudgingly Admits White Nationalists Are Racist

Tommy Tuberville has finally cleared the bar of acknowledging that white nationalists are racist. “White nationalists are racists,” he told reporters after leaving the Senate floor on Tuesday.

The admission — which came a day after the Alabama senator told CNN it was a matter of “opinion” whether white nationalists are racist — didn’t come easy. He initially responded to questioning by arguing that the idea that white nationalists are racist is part of the Democratic spin machine: “I’m totally against racism, and if the Democrats want to say white nationalists are racist then I’m against that too.”

Tuberville went on CNN Monday night to discuss how he’s been single-handedly stonewalling military promotions for months, to the point that the Marine Corps is now without a Senate-confirmed leader for the first time in over 150 years. Host Kaitlan Collins brought up comments Tuberville made in May in which he very explicitly defended white nationalists and white extremists in the military. He responded by doubling down. Collins tried to explain that white nationalists are racist, but Tuberville wouldn’t have it. “If we’re going to do with most white people out of the military, we’ve got huge problems,” he said, adding that “white nationalists” simply “have a few different beliefs.”

Tuberville insisted he wasn’t racist, to which Collins explained that a white nationalist, someone who wants to turn America into a white ethnostate, is by definition a racist.

“That’s your opinion,” Tuberville said.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called out Tuberville on Tuesday. “The senator from Alabama is wrong, wrong, wrong,” he said on the Senate floor, adding that pushing the idea that whether white nationalists are racist is a matter of opinion is “dangerous” and “disturbing.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said later that white supremacy is “simply unacceptable in our military and in our whole country.”

It’s hard to tell exactly what Tuberville was thinking on Monday. It almost seems like he doesn’t know what a white nationalist is, with his comments to Collins suggesting he thinks a white nationalist is just an American who is white, or at least something other than what one actually is.

But it’s a little hard to believe that member of Congress in 2023 could be unfamiliar with the term white nationalist. It’s especially hard to believe that Tuberville doesn’t, considering how he came under fire in May for defending their place in the military. “We are losing in the military so fast,” he told an Alabama NPR affiliate. “Our readiness in terms of recruitment. And why? I’ll tell you why, because the Democrats are attacking our military, saying we need to get out the white extremists, the white nationalists, people that don’t believe in our agenda, as Joe Biden’s agenda.”

Tuberville’s office later tried to clarify that the comment “shows that he was being skeptical of the notion that there are white nationalists in the military, not that he believes they should be in the military.”

Tuberville’s comment in May and his office’s explanation don’t really jibe with what he told Collins on Monday, and it seems like one of two things is true: Tuberville is either so dumb that even after everything he still isn’t able to comprehend what white nationalism is, or he is so racist that he thinks white nationalism is a benign belief held by most white Americans. He could also very easily be both.

Regardless, this man is a United States senator.

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