Opinion: What Sen. Tommy Tuberville waffling on White nationalism really means

Editor’s Note: Nia-Malika Henderson is a senior political analyst for CNN. The views expressed here are her own. View more opinion on CNN.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville, an Alabama Republican, is not someone known for being well-versed in history or facts.

In an interview with the Alabama Daily News shortly after winning his Senate seat, he said that the US House of Representatives and the US Senate represented two distinct branches of government. (Both are part of the legislative branch).

He misidentified the reason for World War II, stating his father fought to liberate Europe from “socialism.” (It was fascism – not socialism – that drove the US to intervene).

And he thought that former Vice President Al Gore served as president-elect for 30 days during the Florida recount.  (This never happened).

But maybe his most troubling, ahistorical musing is on White nationalists. He has suggested that they may be misunderstood White people, wrongly disparaged by Democrats who want to enrage Americans and engage in “identity politics.”

To Tuberville, born and raised in the South at the height of some of the most notorious and deadly acts by White nationalists, they may or may not always be racists.

They “probably have a few different beliefs,” he said to CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Monday night, as he argued about whether they should in fact be allowed to serve in the military.

“My opinion of a White nationalist, if someone wants to call them a White nationalist, to me is an American,” he said. “If that White nationalist is a racist, I’m totally against anything that they want to do because I am 110% against racism.”

Confused? Well, that might be the point.

First, to clarify. White nationalists are indeed racists. They believe that White people are superior, intellectually and culturally, to every other race of people. They also pose the greatest domestic terrorism threat, according to law enforcement officials. Those are the facts.

Instead, Tuberville seemed to have a very specific goal – mainstreaming the term “White nationalism” by erasing the actual meaning and replacing it with something much more benign.

It’s “just a name that has been given,” he said. White nationalists may simply be White Americans who love their nation, but who Democrats see as an opportunity to score political points against, Tuberville suggested.

On Tuesday, following condemnation from members on Congress on both sides of the aisle, Tuberville finally conceded that White nationalists were “racists.” He noted, though, that he didn’t reverse course because of GOP leadership pressure – and that he was tired of “so many people looking at conservatives, Republicans and Trump supporters as racist.”

His waffling on the issue is a kind of feigned ignorance that amounts to whitewashing. And we’ve seen this before. In many ways, Tuberville has learned from the best.

As he was running for president in 2016, Donald Trump pulled a similar move in pretending not to know who David Duke was. After the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard endorsed his candidacy, Trump told CNN’s Jake Tapper, “I don’t know anything about David Duke, okay? I don’t know anything about what you’re even talking about with White supremacy or White supremacists.”

When Tapper pressed Trump to condemn Duke and fellow White supremacists, he, like Tuberville, talked in circles, saying he would have to do research on those groups before passing judgment, but added he would definitely “disavow [them] if I thought there was something wrong.”

As president in 2017, Trump said there were good people on both sides of a violent conflict between White supremacists and people protesting White supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, the scene of a horrific rally that left one innocent woman protesting bigotry dead.

When asked in a 2020 presidential debate to tell the Proud Boys, a right-wing extremist group, to “stand down,” Trump instead told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.” He later denied knowing the group at all.

But on January 6, 2021, they, as well as other extremist groups, heeded his call – as did current and former members of the US military. Some 10% of those charged in the attack on the US Capitol had ties to the military.

The specter of American citizens trained by the military storming the Capitol led Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to mandate anti-extremism training in the ranks. Tuberville, in an op-ed with Rep. Kevin Hern of Oklahoma, denounced the move as yet another example of President Joe Biden’s “woke social… agenda.”

It’s no surprise then that Tuberville is currently single-handedly blocking hundreds of promotions over the military policy of allowing service members to have time off and receive travel reimbursements for out-of-state abortions.

But the reality is the military does have a problem with extremism and has for decades. In her book, “Bring the War Home,” historian Kathleen Belew outlines how disgruntled Vietnam veterans helped militarize White power groups in the 1970s. And a new documentary by Charlie Sadoff, “Against All Enemies,” makes a similar point, relying on footage from January 6 to tell the story of military radicalization.

Tuberville’s attempt to downplay and erase the racism of actual racists echoes attempts to downplay the violence of the largely White mob on January 6. More broadly, it’s part of the attempt to erase and downplay the role of race, racism and racists in American history and culture.

In this version of events – not explicitly espoused by Tuberville – the Civil War was just a failure to compromise.

The 1921 Tulsa massacre was an attempt by White Oklahomans to protect their city.

And the January 6 insurrectionists – Proud Boys among them – were just unruly tourists.

It’s how Nick Fuentes, a White nationalist and Holocaust denier, ends up as a featured speaker at a national convention of college Republicans, months after dining with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. (Post-dinner, Trump denied knowing who Fuentes was.)

While Tuberville might not be a student of history, he certainly has learned well the lesson of rewriting history, downplaying racism and absolving White nationalists.

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