GOP senator’s office forced to walk back comments about white nationalists in the military

A Republican senator from Alabama found himself issuing an awkward clarification on Wednesday after attempting to knock President Joe Biden for his efforts to rid the US military of white nationalists and other right-wing extremists.

Sen Tommy Tuberville was speaking with a local radio station on Monday when he first made the comments in response to a question about Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s work to weed out persons with ties to dangerous extremist ideologies, in particular the white nationalist rhetoric known to have spawned the recent racist massacre in Buffalo, New York, among other attacks on US soil.

While attempting to respond, he seemed to equivocate between Americans with explicitly racist views and the throngs of Trump supporters who attacked the Capitol on January 6 — or, at the very least, argue that the Biden administration sees no difference between the two groups.

“You mentioned the Biden administration trying to prevent white nationalists from being in the military. Do you believe they should allow white nationalists in the military?” asked the WBHM interviewer.

The senator responded: “Well, they call them that. I call them Americans. What happened after January the sixth – and I was here on January the sixth – we were attacked on the Senate floor. Saying all these people that came into the Capitol were extremists, they were against the country. There was a lot of people. There were probably a hundred of them that came in, broke windows and broke doors that should have been locked up. That’s not how we do it in America. But there were hundreds of thousands that didn’t come in, outside, that were true Americans that believe in this country.”

He then linked the decision by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to pursue extremist rhetoric and views in the armed forces as an effor to tar all Trump supporters as such — though Mr Austin’s efforts notably have done no such thing.

“[R]ight after that, we, our military and Secretary Austin, put out an order to stand down and all military across the country, saying we’re going to run out the white nationalists, people that don’t believe how we believe,” he said. “And that’s not how we do it in this country.”

By Wednesday, his office had been forced to clarify that Mr Tuberville was not complimenting racists. Instead, his staff said in a statement, Mr Tuberville was disputing the presence of such ideologies in the armed forces at all.

The comment, his staff said, “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”.

His remarks nonetheless spawned a flurry of news coverage at a time when America is still reeling from the latest consequences of white nationalist ideologies: A mass shooting in Allen, Texas, where a suspected gunman is thought by law enforcement to have shared neo-Nazi views online prior to the rampage.