Alabama’s Tommy Tuberville, the former Auburn f’ball coach who managed to fail his dumb ass all the way up to the US Senate, just can’t seem to stop saying things that sound remarkably like what you’d find on the White Power message board Stormfront a few years ago, or anywhere on Elon Musk’s Twitter right now. Tuberville has been on a tear lately, insisting that Democrats want reparations for “the people who do the crime” (he meant Black people) and complaining that the military simply can’t recruit patriots because it doesn’t welcome white nationalists — whom he simply calls “Americans.”
Shortly after that, the vile tuber explained that white nationalists weren’t necessarily Nazis, although maybe Democrats might say such things. Tuberville clarified earlier this month that it’s all just a terrible libel to conflate Trump supporters with white nationalists, before he immediately said they’re one and the same:
“Well I don’t look at it like that […] I look at a white nationalist as a Trump Republican. That’s what we’re called all the time, a MAGA person.” Then he added, “I agree that we should not be characterizing Trump supporters as white nationalists.”
So don’t you go around implying that Tommy Tuberville is some kind of a racist, because he’s quite capable of doing that all on his own without you bigfooting him like that.
Gentle reader, we hope you will not be so shocked that you drop your teacup, but Mr. Tuberville is at it again. Late last week, he explained on Donald Trump Jr.’s internet pretend-TV show that the entire reason there’s a crisis in education these days is that teachers in “inner city” schools probably cheated to get their degrees and are pretty much illiterate. But those lazy teachers still think they deserve to be paid more! Here’s the video:
Tuberville said that the COVID pandemic
really brought it out how bad our schools are and how bad our teachers are — in the inner city. Most of them in the inner city, I don’t know how they got degrees, to be honest with you. I don’t know whether they can read and write.
Don Jr. jumped in to add that these illiterate teachers — in the inner city, mind you — are the ones who want “parents to have no say” in their children’s education, although Tuberville continued before Junior could say “Marxist indoctrination” or “critical race theory.”
The real problem, Tuberville added, is that all these inner city teachers are lazy:
“They want a raise, they want less time to work, less time in school. We ruined work ethic in this country. We don’t work at it anymore. We push an easy life.”
Tuberville somehow held back from calling those inner city teachers “shiftless,” even though many of them no doubt drive hybrid cars equipped with those newfangled continuously variable transmissions. As the owner of a Ford Fusion hybrid, I myself have been shiftless since 2019.
Tuberville also cited a February report that in post-pandemic standardized testing, 23 schools in Baltimore had no students who were proficient in math, which clearly proves all you need to know about the lazy inner city schools with their lazy inner city teachers and their lazy inner city student populations. (It couldn’t have anything to do with the fact that the pandemic interruption exacerbated already terrible educational disparities that are rooted in inequality. Only a commie would say that.)
Not surprisingly, a lot of people reacted to Tuberville’s comments by recognizing exactly what he meant, condemning his comments as racist — yes, even though he magically didn’t say the word we all know “inner city” was standing in for. Historian Heather Cox Richardson noted on Twitter, “this is literally the language former Confederates used about Black Americans during Reconstruction to justify white supremacy.”
Others, like the Alabama Education Association, focused more on the cartoonish attack on the teaching profession, noting that it was insulting to teachers everywhere, and that “a former coach at an Alabama university, he should know the rigor and steps it takes for teachers to receive their degrees and certification.”
Not that it mattered in the least, because rather than acknowledge the obvious racist dog whistle, Tuberville’s comms director doubled down, insisting the Coach only meant inner city teachers in urban BALTIMORE, but added that “there are countless examples of this problem nationwide,” like in urban inner city places like CHICAGO and WASHINGTON DC, to name two completely random urban inner city thug gang food stamp Obama birth certificate welfare queen [racist racist and more racist deleted for you, the reader] examples that do not at allbring to mind Lee Atwater, no they do not.
In conclusion, this is absolutely fine with Republicans these days, and we’re eagerly placing bets on whether Tuberville, Donald Trump, or Elon Musk becomes the first rightwing hero to openly reclaim the n-word in an unapologetic public statement, probably by fucking July, the fucking end.
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