Alabama's Tommy Tuberville injects the ghost of Bull Connor into 2022 midterms

[Nevilledog]

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Will Bunch
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Trump's weekly hate fest again gave me fodder - a rock-bottom racist rant by AL's Tommy Tuberville about reparations and myths of Black criminality. This from a mediocre white dude who got rich on free labor from Black athletes

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inquirer.com
Alabama’s Tommy Tuberville injects the ghost of Bull Connor into 2022 midterms
Forget dog whistles — Tuberville went six-alarm racist Saturday at a Trump rally as the GOP's midterm strategy hits a new low.
12:10 PM · Oct 9, 2022

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/tommy-tuberville-racist-trump-rally-20221009.html

No paywall
https://archive.ph/yQzIP

In the morally downhill midterms of 2022, there are dog whistles ... and then there are just whistles. Nowhere is that more obvious than a place called Minden, Nev. — a small town near the California border where Donald Trump brought his traveling dog-and-pony show on Saturday night, exactly one month before Election Day.

Amid the political cacophony and nonsense that accompanies The Former Guy — at 6 p.m. Pacific, to be precise — the rally attendees probably heard it: a loud siren, coming from the direction of the fire station downtown. The practice began in the 1920s — not coincidentally, heyday of a Ku Klux Klan revival in America — and heralded the so-called sundown laws in Minden and surrounding Douglas County that required locals belonging to the native Washoe Tribe to get off the streets at night, or else be arrested.

“Skins, it’s time to go home,” an 82-year-old member of the Washoe People named Wyatt Vernon recalled in a 2020 article. “Get out of town.” The “sundown law’ was finally repealed in the 1970s, and yet Minden never stopped blasting the whistle at 6 p.m., alternately claiming it’s an emergency test or else copping to a warped historical tribute. Said the Minden town manager J.D. Frisby: “There’s a lot of sentimental feelings nostalgic to that siren.”

It must have been 6 p.m. — metaphorically, if not actually — when first-term Alabama GOP Sen. Tommy Tuberville took the stage at Saturday’s Trump rally, encouraging voters to go Republican in Nevada’s neck-and-neck Senate election which may decide who controls that body in 2023. Tuberville surely drowned out the noise from the fire station with his own six-alarm siren appeal to voters’ darkest instincts — taking the greatest hits from a Republican fall campaign that has increasingly fallen back on racist fearmongering and making it much, much worse.

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*snip*

[OrlandoDem2]

1. Most white people in Alabama applaud his repugnant rhetoric and nod in approval.

[Solly Mack]

2. K&R

[Biophilic]

3. They just want to make sure everyone knows exactly who they are and where they stand.

[Deep State Witch]

4. Wow

I grew up in a suburb of Pittsburgh, down the road from a fire station that blew it's siren at 6 PM. I was always told that it was to test the system. I was today years old before I realized that it was probably a warning to POC to get out.

[underpants]

5. 👀 He had a rally IN a sundown town?

[Nevilledog]

6. Yes

[underpants]

8. Couldn't watch as we are watching something else.

The article spelled it out. That writer really poured it out there.

This was Trump’s “coming for the suburbs” thing in 2020. Everyone knew it and it didn’t score well in the ‘burbs

[Haggard Celine]

7. I've heard similar things being said all my life.

Demagogues in the South like to exploit racial problems and stir the pot. I guess Republicans in other areas of the country do the same. That's all they have, really. Well, now they have gay people and others to go after, too. If Democrats are talking about healthcare or school lunches or whatever, the Republicans will bring up trans people using the 'wrong' bathroom. Or they'll talk about making wedding cakes for gay people. It's always stupid culture wars. They have no idea how to make our world better. They just want to burn it all down.

[underpants]

9. 👆

[nycbos]

10. Unfortunately most people do not know who Bull Connor was.

What is the most Americans can't name all three branches of government.