Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) slammed Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) after he gave an outrageous defense of white nationalists Monday, claiming many of them simply have different beliefs as “Americans.”
“I think we really need to treat what’s going on with alarm. I mean a huge ring, all the bells. This country is on fire, and what Sen. Tuberville is doing is trying to normalize white nationalism and racism,” Warren told a group of reporters at a Black media roundtable Wednesday.
Tuberville’s unprecedented hold on hundreds of military promotions in protest of the Pentagon’s abortion policy has prevented the Marine Corps from confirming a leader for the first time in over 150 years. The Alabama senator was asked by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins to clarify comments he had made in May about white nationalists serving in the military, to which he said he simply called them “Americans” with “different beliefs.”
“[He’s saying] those are just Americans just like you and me, those are the people we should arm, and those are the people who should be in our military because that’s just part of Americanism,” Warren said of Tuberville’s comments.
“If that doesn’t set everybody’s hair on fire in this country, then we are in real trouble because this is an attack on what it means to be a democracy in this nation.”
However, Tuberville backtracked his initial comments on Tuesday, telling D.C. reporters, “White nationalists are racists,” CNN reported. The lawmaker has refused to apologize for his earlier comments.
Warren also slammed the Supreme Court for embracing legacy admissions and declaring that programs designed to help Black and Latino students access higher education were unlawful. She added that the Alabama lawmaker and the high court’s decisions are linked to a broader regressive movement.
“They take every word and turn around what it means. We totally embrace equality. We totally embrace a form of college admissions that says to white families who have children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, you can get special help,” she explained. “But people who have been discriminated against over and over and over, you can’t do anything to try to level the playing field. Even a tiny little bit.”
Warren made it clear that stopping the normalization of white nationalism cannot be put on hold until the upcoming 2024 election. “We can’t wait for an election … [Elections] matter, but we got to start shutting this down. They are trying to rebuild an America that’s always been there. They want to normalize that throughout this country, and we’ve got to call it out for what it is.”