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Over the course of his brief political career, Sen. Tommy Tuberville has struggled on a great many fronts. The Alabama Republican is perhaps best known for launching an unprecedented, 10-month blockade, preventing confirmation of U.S. military leaders, all the while failing to understand the implications of his own tactics, but that’s really just the start of a larger conversation.
As we recently discussed, Tuberville is also known for his election denialism, his provocative rhetoric about race, his disparagements of the U.S. military, his difficulties with basic details related to civics and modern American history, his inability to discuss policy details, and his willingness to give Russia’s Vladimir Putin the benefit of the doubt.
But sometimes, the GOP senator’s perspective is just plain bizarre.
As my MSNBC colleague Hayes Brown noted, it was just last week when Tuberville lashed out at President Joe Biden as a “garbage human being.” Three days later, as The Salt Lake Tribune reported, the right-wing lawmaker traveled to Utah to campaign for a Senate candidate and shed additional light on his curious beliefs.
Alabama Republican U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville had a stark warning for the approximately 100 Utah GOP delegates who crowded into a Bluffdale warehouse to hear him speak on Friday afternoon: Malevolent supernatural forces are working to undermine America.
“I’ve traveled all over the country — all 50 states — I’ve been in good places and bad places,” the coach-turned-politician said. “The one thing I saw, we are losing our kids to a Satanic cult.”
I don't think he was kidding.
As part of the same remarks, Tuberville declared, “We’ve lost our moral values across the country. We’ve got to get back to the Constitution, and we have got to get back to the Bible. We’ve got to get God back in our country. There’s not one Democrat that can tell you they stand up for God.”
It’s difficult to unpack such angry-guy-at-the-end-of-the-bar remarks, though I’d be curious to know more about how Tuberville expects the United States to “get back to” both the secular U.S. Constitution and his preferred holy text.
As for the senator's insistence that zero Democrats are willing to “stand up for God,” it’s also worth noting that President Joe Biden is a devout Catholic who regularly attends church services, and at last count, there are no professed atheists in Congress.
Meanwhile, one of Tuberville's colleagues — Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia — is quite literally a Christian pastor who “stands up for God” during his weekly sermon. Perhaps this slipped the Alabaman's mind.
But wait, there’s more. The Salt Lake Tribune report added:
Tuberville even went so far as to claim the federal government has been corrupted to go after conservatives instead of criminals, which was seemingly an indirect reference to the hundreds of Trump supporters who were charged after attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
“We’ve lost our Department of Justice,” the Alabaman said. “In most of the country, we don’t have a criminal justice system anymore. Nobody goes to jail, unless you’re an innocent person that really loves this country, then they’ll put you in jail. We have never overcome a cult like we’re dealing with right now.”
Tuberville added that it’s Democrats who are trying to “push this cult on us.”
I’d be curious to know how many other GOP senators agree that a Satanic cult is gradually seizing American children — with the apparent cooperation of Democrats — and that “nobody” in the United States goes to jail except patriots who love their country.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.