Tuberville: Communist, Islamic Rats in Our Cities
The linguistic stylings and white supremacy of Tommy Tuberville.
I have, from time to time, mentioned Senator Coach Tommy Tuberville (or is it Coach Senator?). I think the first time was just over five years ago when he was opining about “the cities” and Sharia law. I also mentioned his foray into the branches of government. I also noted his views on education (which also dealt with white nationalism in a way that is quite relevant to this post), which again found him speaking poorly of American cities (here and here). I will quote myself, and be immodest in doing so, noting that this is a good line from one of those 2023 posts linked above:
Without hesitation, I can say that every time I hear Tuberville speak I am reminded of the importance of education.
I will confess that prior to my retirement, I was somewhat circumspect in direct criticisms of Tuberville, as I was aware that my position as dean might have caused some problems if my university needed funding or other legislative support from the federal government. In retirement, I can say that Tuberville may well be the dumbest member of Congress that I have observed in almost half a century of paying attention to American politics, at least based on his public pronouncements. In private, he may well be an erudite genius, capable of nuanced policy discussions and who deploys vocabulary and syntax with alacrity and precision.
But based on his public pronouncement, I think I am not exactly going out on an empirical limb to note that he doesn’t sound very smart. Worse, he sounds like a white nationalist, if not simply someone who uses and endorses fascist views.
To quote a certain fictional Alabamian, “Stupid is as stupid does,” I guess.
Have I mentioned that he may soon be governor of my state? Well, at least if he is working in Montgomery, he will be closer to his home in Florida. The only other positives I can conjure are that he will be out of Washington and that, since I am retired, my odds of having to be in the same room with him are quite small.
Quite frankly, I don’t know why the man doesn’t just retire. He has to have plenty of money in the bank, and Santa Rosa, Florida, is pretty nice. But I guess some people can’t live without the spotlight.
But I digress.
Here’s what started me down the pathway with ol’ Coach. I honestly got drawn in first by wondering, “Words, what do they mean?” (I mean, just parsing out his statements is a bit of challenge) and then got suck in by the white supremacy of it all.
From AL.com: Tuberville says ‘inner city rats’ live off the American taxpayers: Trump should send them ‘back home’.
“You can stop the federal funding,” Tuberville said. “President Trump can do anything he wants when it comes to the federal. Again, these inner-city rats, they live off the federal government. And that’s one reason we’re $37 trillion in debt.
“And it’s time we find these rats and we send them back home, that are living off the American taxpayers, that are working very hard every week to pay taxes.”
I am drawn to the phrase “President Trump can do anything he wants when it comes to the federal” both because it is largely nonsensical (“the federal”?) and because it is yet another Republican politician who seems to love the notion of letting Trump do whatever he wants.
There is also the outright lie that there are all these people living for free off of, you know, “the federal” and that’s why we are in debt. This is just dishonest scapegoating with huge white nationalist/proto-fascist points for using the language of infestation to describe people he doesn’t like. (I suspect that reaching for “vermin” taxes the Senator’s vocabulary a tad, so we just get “rats.”)
Tuberville drew fire for some comments about whether people from urban areas should come to Alabama.
“Well, don’t be expecting a free lunch, I promise you,” he said. “Bring your lunch with you because you’re not going to be welcomed if you’re going to bring that Communist, Islamic atmosphere with you. We’re not going to deal with it. I’m telling you right now…
“They are going to try and overwhelm us….We have got to fight back.”
And what, pray tell, is “that Communist, Islamic atmosphere”? It is as if he knows that a lot of his voters probably don’t like communists or muslims, and so why not just fear-monger both? And in terms of fearmongering, please note that “they” are going to “overwhelm us” (emphasis mine).
Gee, I wonder who the “they” are and the “we” are in this scenario?
The comments came after Johnson asked Tuberville about Zohran Mamdani, a New York State assemblyman who won the Democratic primary for the New York City mayor’s race on Tuesday.
Mamdani, a democratic socialist born in Uganda to Indian parents, became an American citizen in 2018, shortly after graduating college, according to the AP.
Johnson called Mamdani a “communist,” and said Democrats are encouraging illegal immigration to expand the party’s voting bloc. Tuberville said large cities, like New York and Los Angeles, are havens for undocumented immigrants.
“That’s the easiest place to do it, Benny, in these big cities with all these government handouts, where they can hang out on the street, steal whatever they want to steal,” Tuberville said.
“Chicago, Detroit, they’re all next. It’ll happen in the big cities, it’ll sweep across the country, and then they’ll try to start going into the medium-sized cities. But we can’t wait ‘til that point.”
So, we have the lie that illegal immigrants are voting for Democrats and that communism is about to sweep the nation. And, you know, especially in cities where you can “hang out on the street” and “steal whatever you want to steal.”
I also found the notion that our cities were once great, but now they’re not, to be noteworthy.
“Our great cities of L.A. and New York have to be the spotlight for our country, but they’re gone,” Tuberville said.
I have heard conservatives complain about cities my whole life. But here we have the typical reactionary notion that in some mythical past, it was all better. I wonder when Tuberville thought cities were better?
It is actually worse to see the interchange, wherein Johnson cites the great replacement theory.
AL.com columnist Kyle Whitmire (Tommy Tuberville’s ‘rat’ talk isn’t just racist — it’s a warning) adds context.
If you don’t know who Johnson is, a quick Google search will return important information — like how his show was once secretly sponsored by the Kremlin and how he helped spread the lie that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating people’s pets.
These sorts of things might once have caused elected officials to stay away. Today, they’re an ideal forum for Alabama’s senior senator.
When Johnson started asking Tuberville what he thought of the Great Replacement — a racist claim that white people are being purposefully replaced to steal control of America — Tuberville didn’t seem fazed at all. He rolled with it, calling immigrants in major cities “rats.”
[…]
We’ve heard this sort of talk before — in Nazi Germany, and Rwanda, or the pre-Civil War South. When powerful people refer to minorities as vermin, horrible things tend to follow.
Whitmire notes a few things about Tuberville’s vacuity on policy, and then notes this.
“Poisonous ideologies like Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), which teach our kids to hate each other, should have no place in our government or our schools,” Tuberville says.
That’s funny coming from a guy who just referred to human beings as rats.
Indeed.
All of this is part of a very ugly trend in American politics that too many people are ignoring and, worse, that too many people are actively embracing.
And this is where I come in with a repeat of my “Tommy Tuberville is a POS” post:
From 2012:
Tommy Tuberville reportedly ditches recruits in the middle of dinner to take Cincinnati job
Disclosure: In case you are wondering why I care, two of my kids went to Texas Tech.
One might wonder how many times the subdued, compliant civilian population in Nazi Germany assured themselves after each appalling development that “maybe the worst is over.”
We haven’t seen “peak” Trump-Miller yet.
If these “rats” are just hanging around doing nothing but mooching off the government, why are so many ICE raids at workplaces?
For John Kennedy of Louisiana, to select an example, it’s obviously an act. Tuberville and Ron Johnson seem to be sincerely and genuinely as dumb as they sound.
I can’t begin to express how much Tuberville disgusts me.
@gVOR10: If Kennedy just stuck to the good ol’ boy shtick he would just be a self-serving piece of garbage, but he throws in a good measure of truly vile racist remarks and behavior. He’s not just a phony Will Rogers wannabe. It seems like there is klavern somewhere missing a leader.
A couple of his greatest hits:
Mexicans “would be eating cat food out of a can and living in a tent behind an Outback” Steakhouse restaurant if it were not for their nation’s proximity to the US, and their country should be invaded because of the presence of drug cartels there, the US senator John Neely Kennedy has said.
The Sept. 17 Senate Judiciary hearing was meant to address rising hate crimes against Jewish, Palestinian, Arab and Muslim Americans. But instead of discussing incidents of hate at home, Kennedy asked Berry, executive director of the Arab American Institute, “You support Hamas, do you not?”
He continued his line of questioning by asking Berry if she supported Hezbollah and Iran. Moments later, he told Berry she should hide her “head in a bag.”
@Lucysfootball: Kennedy is a racist, to be sure. But I do agree with @gVOR10, the aw-shucks backwoods routine is an act. He may be an awful person, but he’s not stupid.
That’s the lesson I got from McKay Coppin’s hagiography of Romney a while back. Sad.
ETA: “I also found the notion that our cities were once great, but now they’re not, to be noteworthy.”
As one of the socialist union laborers I used to work with liked to say, “It’s not like it was in the old days, course it wasn’t like that THEN, either.”
And remember, the immigrants eating people’s pets were Haitians. Coincidence? I think not in re DHS protected status changes.
@Steven L. Taylor: I should have mentioned that I agree that its an act. He went to Oxford and was Univerity of VA law review editor. He’s a smart phony who is a stone cold bigot. I think he’s worse than Tuberville, who really is dumb, I suspect that the average tuber is smarter than Tommy Tuberville.
@Jobeth:
Because the homeless population is too diverse to spot immigrants easily? Most immigrants, undocumented and otherwise, aren’t actually homeless? Mongo not know. Mongo only pawn in chess game of life.
@gVOR10: @Steven L. Taylor: @Lucysfootball:
They don’t make them stupider than Coach Tommy.
Last July, on the drive from Texas to North Carolina, we stayed overnight in Montgomery AL. I was stationed at Gunter AFS from 1980-84. Even owned a house on the East side. So we wandered around looking at old haunts. I have to tell you, it was looking pretty shabby. At least around Gunter, Eastern Blvd, and Eastdale Mall. Tuberville should still to his own backyard.
OTB Today, June 29, 2025
A Taylor Tabs post highlights an op-ed centered on SecDef Hegseth* calling reporters liars**.
This post centers on a Tuberville interview conducted by Benny Johnson. Johnson got fired from BuzzFeed for plagiarism. He moved on to IJR, and was subsequently accused of plagiarism by staffers. Then:
For more, referenced BI piece.***
And per the open thread, the NIH archive hosting a piece that highlights descriptive data about covid, RFK, Jr., and anti-vaxxers is a question of trust.
Would it be dishonest of me to claim that actual reality offends half the country?
*This rendering of his title and name makes him sound cool. I will never use it again.
**Remember, no one calling the reporters liars dispute that the document reported on exists. Nor do they claim that the reports were inaccurate on the contents of the document.
***FTR, I wouldn’t describe plagiarism as a lie. Rather, I would describe them both as distinct forms of dishonesty.
@Scott: I have lived in the area almost exactly 27 years. I have noted that what happens is that Montgomery slowly creeps eastward but not so much because of growth as it just wealth moving and leaving behind the husks what it no longer wants.
I will say, on a positive note, downtown has become more alive during that same time period, although it still has a ways to go.
(And Coach Tommy rarely is in Montgomery, which is one of the reasons I marvel he wants to be Governor)
@Kurtz:
It is a claim that has much credence.
In regards to plagiarism I used to tell students that it was theft, lying to me as the instructor, and intellectually dishonest.
@Steven L. Taylor:
It’s possible Coach thinks he can continue to live in Florida and still be governor of Alabama. He’s sufficiently dimwitted.
But then again, maybe he can. He was a senator from Alabama while living in Florida, right?
A fair number of elected Democrats are making some pretty racist and Islamophobic comments about Mamdani as well.
Eric Swalwell, for instance, will casually drop a “I don’t associate myself with what he has said about the Jewish people” without saying what Mamdani has said about the Jewish people. Gillibrand claims (falsely) that Mamdani has spoken favorably about a global jihad.
And then you have a bunch of NY State democrats, like Gov. Hochul, who aren’t endorsing him. The “vote blue no matter who” crowd seems hesitant when it comes to a Muslim Democratic Socialist.
And former governor Cuomo, who resigned in disgrace, is currently planning on staying in the race despite losing the Democratic primary, on his novelty party line, “Fight, Fondle and Deliver.”
@Kurtz:
I don’t think so, but I used to do an in-class exercise with my level 2 composition students (research-based persuasion/argument) students that we called “fact or opinion,” and the statement seems pretty clearly opinion to me. I bring this up because my take is that opinions are truth-neutral-neither honest nor dishonest. People are frequently either one or the other, but the statements themselves are neither absent additional context.
I doubt that most of this audience will agree with me and know for sure that some won’t. Still, I will hold that the statement isn’t dishonest. (But might also be non-factual. I don’t know, but MY bias leans toward “factual” FWIW.)
ETA: As an identifier for Hegseth, I prefer “Whisky Pete,” but I’ll cop to being biassed about him, too.
@Lucysfootball:
I’ve never heard a potato say something stupid.
Yes, the mask is fully off.
It isn’t just Tuberville.
The entire MAGA movement from top to bottom is obsessed with racism and misogyny.
Not that they happen to be casually racist and misogynist, the way people are who are nonetheless willing to tolerate others.
No, they are now furiously obsessed with it, and taking open glee at the suffering of their hated outgroups.
Whatever sense of shame they may have once had is gone now.
@Kathy: I did notice that a typo makes his name Tubervile, and hence the vile tuber.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
That line did not land the way I intended.
@Chip Daniels:
I think this is the heart of it.
Whether it is simple, profound ignorance (in the case of Tuberville et al) or malignant, willful ignorance (in the case of most elected MAGAs), the ignorance serves the purpose of severing these people from their shame. Trump has shown them that having no shame is key to power in this age of siloed polarization and none of these Republicans come to shamelessness as naturally as the born grifter DJT.
So, shut off the brain and quiet the conscience, otherwise the morally and intellectually indefensible positions (rooted in racism and misogyny) these Republicans take in public and push for in policy might keep them up at night.
If I’m recalling the statistic properly, the small minority of US counties that voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 are responsible for a bit over 60% of the country’s GDP. The rats are doing well…
@Steven, is Alabama one of the states that built fences around their biggest city/cities so they couldn’t pursue the wealthy as they moved out? Detroit is a classic example. Michigan changed their constitution so Detroit couldn’t annex across county lines. Then the big auto companies moved finance, research, and development across the line into Oakland County, still (I believe) the richest county in the state. Colorado changed theirs so Denver couldn’t annex w/o permission. The difference in the two is that with the auto manufacturing jobs also leaving, Detroit still hasn’t recovered from that crash; Denver’s more varied economy came back quite quickly.
Just to be pernickety, where in heck does the “Communist, Islamic” thing come from?
Most “Communists” have been equal-opportunity despisers of religions.
And, generally, Islamic believers seem as inclined as Christians to consider the Marxist-Leninist “materialist” stance as mistaken.
If I was being judgemental, this might seem rather like an attempt to rationalise a dislike of urban ethnic groups of certain skin tones who are inclined to vote for Democrats.
Possibly.
@JohnSF:
Oh, FFS. It’s Tuberville. He’s a moron. He probably believes Islam = Communism.
@Kurtz: Hard to say. My sense of nuance has been blunted over years here and was never particularly sharp to begin with.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Oh, bullshit.
As such, I blame myself.
ETA: truth-neutrality of opinion makes sense in some contexts within education, but I think it risk severing the relationship between opinion and truth.
Also, wrt to the original line, I had in mind Fortune’s comment and my response in the open thread, which I deleted the part of this post that referenced that discussion. May or may not clarify.
@Michael Cain: Alabama is really weird about local power and I don’t think what you are describing in possible here. Instead, localities often have to ask the legislature for basic things (and there often isn’t time for them to be addressed).
In terms of the weirdness of local politics, I am fairly certain there are only two incorporated cities in all of Montgomery County.
Most localities depend on weak/poor county governments for “services”
@JohnSF:
I realize the /s and tounge-in-cheek are in what you said were silent but all that is missing here is “gay” to cover all the bases of a certain mode of conservative thinking about all things un(Christian*)godly in the world.
*-Jews are given a kinda-pass in this worldview because they are, in the words of Ann Coulter “unperfected Christians.”
@JohnSF: I think “Communist, Islamic” might be replacing “Islamofascism” in that usage, as fascism is no longer bad.
I expect they will eventually get to “Sharia Communism” and possibly start using “bodega” as some sort of scare word.
Speaking of spreading acceptance of blatant racism:
New Army Shaving Policy Will Allow Soldiers with Skin Condition that Affects Mostly Black Men to Be Kicked Out
@Scott:
I have been reliably told you cannot consider racial impact in deciding any sort of policy.
To do otherwise would be “DEI.” And that is a moral soon worse than slavery or communism or heck anything.
This sums it up well. One of many very ugly trends right now.
I was in Elberta, AL recently visiting friends. I learned that residents pay 10% sales tax on groceries. This is not a wealthy area. Interesting.
Good skydiving in the area.
And, of course, bamahenge. Also interesting.
@Mimai: Our taxes are very regressive.
You know, sharks are not very smart, but they are successful. If you are really big and have lots of teeth, you don’t really have to be smart.
I think the same kind of thing applies to Tuberville. Although I will note that I had the impression that one needed to have some brains to be successful as a college football coach.
Just maybe not as much brains as I thought.
@Jay L Gischer: Maybe the reason Lil Tommy is so mean is that he had to kiss black teenagers’ asses to succeed as a coach. That is the definition of Hell for a committed racist like Tuberville.
If only Dems could be as truthful and cutting which Trump is so good at in describing Tuberville:
“President Biden, what do you think of Sen Tuberville?
“That guy has to be the dumbest Senator ever elected and that’s saying something coming from a state full of clowns and inbreds. Can he even spell IQ? Even if you spot him the I? When I look at him, it’s no wonder the South lost the war. Can you imagine a brigade of Tubervilles? They probably shot the wrong people they’re so stupid. The only thing dumber than Tuberville are the equally sick voters of Alabama who elected him. Come on man! What were they thinking? Oh, that’s right! It’s Alabama, no thinking allowed. Only cousin phucking and schite kicking.”
When will us pansy libs start “playing the dozens” with Trump and cohort.
(With apologies to Dr Joyner who I believe hails from Alabama and has my deepest thoughts and prayers)