News/Commentary

Someone explain to Mitch McConnell how White Nationalism and White Supremacy are different!

July 12, 2023 | | Print Article

Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s tacit defense of white nationalists in the U.S. military has not sat well with either Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, or CNN’s Jake Tapper.

As previously reported, on Monday the senator butted heads with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins when she harangued him about possible white nationalists in the U.S. military. Her intent was to get him to denounce white nationalists as racists, but he didn’t budge, instead arguing that white nationalists are just Americans with different opinions.

He later conceded that racism is bad and that white nationalists are bad if they’re racist. But again, he abstained from automatically labeling white nationalists as racists, arguing that there’s a difference between white nationalists and white supremacists.

The reason he refused to throw white nationalists under the bus was likely because of the habit of leftists smearing standard conservatives as white nationalists.

Indeed, while speaking with Collins, Tuberville said, “The thing about being a ‘white nationalist’ — it’s just a cover word for the Democrats now where they can use it to try to make people mad across the country. Identity politics: I’m totally against that.”

Now fast-forward to Tuesday, when CNN’s Manu Raju questioned McConnell about Tuberville’s difficulty “denouncing white nationalism, especially as it pertains to white nationalism in the military.”

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Instead of first perhaps conferring with Tuberville about the meaning of his remarks, McConnell rushed to give a statement to the media.

“White supremacy is simply unacceptable in the military and in our whole country,” the Senate GOP leader replied.

Listen:

McConnell’s pithy response did not sit well with the GOP base, as many rushed to lecture him about the difference between white nationalism and white supremacy.

“The meaning of white nationalism has nothing to do with white supremacy at all. na·tion·al·ism identification with one’s own nation and support for its interests, especially to the exclusion or detriment of the interests of other nations,” one critic tweeted.

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“Does Sen. Tuberville go around promoting white nationalism or is this a controversy manufactured by a journalist’s question? To me, it looks like the same old attempt to FRAME things around white nationalism and racism, which the Dem media does every time there’s an election,” another wrote.

See more criticism below:

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Schumer also responded to Tuberville’s remarks.

“The definition of white nationalism is not a matter of opinion. White nationalism—the ideology that white people are inherently superior, that people of color should be segregated, subjected, and relegated to second-class citizenship—is racist down to its rotten core,” he tweeted Tuesday.

Look:

Then there’s CNN’s Jake Tapper.

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“Just for those who are out there wondering, white nationalism is racism,” he said. “It is the belief that whites are superior to other races. That’s what it means. That’s the definition,” he told his audience Tuesday.

Listen:

The problem is not everybody agrees with that definition. Nor does everybody agree that white nationalism is a problem. In fact, many say that black nationalism is a far more pressing problem in modern America.

See some criticism below:

Vivek Saxena
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