Tommy Tuberville Vs. Chuck Schumer On "White Nationalism"—Or Americanism
07/11/2023
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In his Castle speech, Scott Greer mentioned that Alabama’s Senator Tommy Tuberville, who we all thought was a lame replacement for immigration patriot Jeff Sessions, actually ”delivered a terrific speech about reparations last year” and has ”defended political extremists” in the military.

The link on ”defended” above goes to GOP senator says of white nationalists in the military, ‘I call them Americans,’ by Azi Paybarah, Washington Post, May 11, 2023.

Paybarah wrote:

“We are losing in the military, so fast, our readiness in terms of recruitment,” Tuberville told radio station WBHM in an interview published online Monday. “I can tell you why. Because the Democrats are attacking our military, saying we need to get out the white extremists, the white nationalists” and others who do not believe in President Biden’s “agenda.”

In response, the reporter asked Tuberville, “Do you believe they should allow white nationalists in the military?” Tuberville said, “Well, they call them that. I call them Americans.”

Paybarah then goes on to quote the Southern Poverty Law Center (!) on what ”White Nationalism” is and what people who are called ”White Nationalists” believe. The problem is that the SPLC, not being ”White Nationalists” themselves, have really no idea what such people think.

This is back in the news because Kaitlan Collins asked Tuberville on CNN to condemn (a) white nationalists, and (b) by implication, himself:

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Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) faced renewed criticism Tuesday for refusing in a television interview to agree that white nationalists are racists and repeatedly insisting that it is a matter of opinion.

Appearing on CNN on Monday night, Tuberville 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.

Tuberville said 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. He said that was only her opinion and at one point in the back-and-forth characterized white nationalists as people who hold “a few probably different beliefs.”

Tuberville’s remarks drew a sharp rebuke Tuesday from Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), who urged Tuberville to apologize.

“The senator from Alabama is wrong, wrong, wrong,” Schumer said on the Senate floor. “The definition of white nationalism is not a matter of opinion. White nationalism, the ideology that one race is inherently superior to others, that people of color should be segregated, subjected to second-class citizenship, is racist down to its rotten core. For the senator from Alabama to obscure the racist nature of white nationalism is indeed very, very dangerous.”

Once again, Schumer has no idea what modern white nationalists, or white advocates, the term American Renaissance’s Jared Taylor prefers, believe.  I think he’s thinking of white Southerners in 1957, or possibly 1914.

However, if you’re familiar with the Dissident Right, which includes many people who think it’s OK for whites to advocate for their own interests, the way blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and other groups do, you will be aware that few of them believe the U.S. should recreated Mississippi in 1957 or 1946 or whatever Schumer thinks they want to do.

And you will also be aware that Tuberville is correct that they have “a few probably different beliefs” but the most obvious point is that they don’t want to subject blacks legally to ”second-class citizenship,”. they want to stop the US government from doing that to whites—which is what, in effect, Schumer is doing here.

In our FAQ section we have, originally written in 2006, VDARE.com editor Peter Brimelow’s Is VDARE.COM ”White Nationalist”?

The answer is more or less ”No.”

Much of VDARE.COM is devoted to technical analyses of immigration’s economic impact—for example Edwin S. Rubenstein’s demonstration that jobs in the post-2002 recovery have gone disproportionately to immigrants, while black unemployment has actually risen. (See The Employment Bus: Immigrants Drive, Blacks Sit in the Back, June 22, 2006) We are certainly politically incorrect—but the merest glance would show that we are not ”white nationalist.”

OK?

Now I will boldly go etc. We also publish on VDARE.COM a few writers, for example Jared Taylor, whom I would regard as ”white nationalist,” in the sense that they aim to defend the interests of American whites. They are not white supremacists. They do not advocate violence. They are rational and civil. They brush their teeth. But they unashamedly work for their people—exactly as La Raza works for Latinos and the Anti-Defamation League works for Jews.

As I said above, Taylor has since abandoned the term ”white nationalist” because of ranters and ravers like Schumer, but of course, most people in America who have the beliefs stigmatized as white nationalist—which includes resistance to mass immigration—would agree with Tuberville on what their beliefs imply: they’d call themselves ”Americans.”

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