This column originally appeared in Kyle Whitmire’s newsletter, Alabamafication. Sign up here to get it in your inbox for free.

Earlier this week, I wrote about my belief that Bernie Bros and MAGA Trump supporters are more similar than they are different. They share many of the same frustrations:

– Homes are priced out of reach.

– Political influence is exclusive to those wealthy enough to make campaign donations.

– Higher education is no longer worth the price of admission.

Plenty of politicians are trying to take advantage of those frustrations. But if we want to break free of the phony us-vs-them dichotomies of American politics, how do we tell good from bad or right from wrong?

Thankfully, we have the help of U.S. Senator and wannabe Alabama governor Tommy Tuberville to show us the difference.

This week, Tuberville went on the Benny Johnson Show. If you don’t know who Johnson is, a quick Google search will return important information — like how his show was once secretly sponsored by the Kremlin and how he helped spread the lie that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating people’s pets.

These sorts of things might once have caused elected officials to stay away. Today, they’re an ideal forum for Alabama’s senior senator.

When Johnson started asking Tuberville what he thought of the Great Replacement — a racist claim that white people are being purposefully replaced to steal control of America — Tuberville didn’t seem fazed at all. He rolled with it, calling immigrants in major cities “rats.”

“These inner-city rats, they live off the federal government,” Tuberville said. “And that’s one reason we’re $37 trillion in debt. And it’s time we find these rats and we send them back home, that are living off the American taxpayers that are working very hard every week to pay taxes.”

We’ve heard this sort of talk before — in Nazi Germany, and Rwanda, or the pre-Civil War South. When powerful people refer to minorities as vermin, horrible things tend to follow.

But you don’t have to believe Tuberville is setting the stage for a pogrom to be turned off by this kind of talk, because scapegoating immigrants is a warning of something else.

First, a candidate makes big promises to make people’s lives better. Then, they win office. Once there, they realize the problems they promised to solve are a lot harder than they thought. When they fail to deliver, they look for someone else to blame — Black people, immigrants, Jews, LGBTQ folks.

It’s their fault!

But Tommy Tuberville is already doing it, and Election Day is still a year and a half away. And let’s face it, what else has he got?

Go look at his campaign website for governor. His paragraph on education is a bunch of buzzwords that prior administrations in Alabama have already tried, to little effect.

He promises to defend the borders. Georgia will be relieved.

He says he’s pro-life. Alabama already outlawed abortion.

He’s for “Alabama values.” But whether that includes a lottery is anybody’s guess.

“Poisonous ideologies like Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), which teach our kids to hate each other, should have no place in our government or our schools,” Tuberville says.

That’s funny coming from a guy who just referred to human beings as rats.

To borrow a line from another (better) Alabama football coach, it’s rat poison — coming from a man who’s got nothing better to offer.

There are many distinctions for us to draw among our candidates for public office. And there’s one difference that matters most of all — the split between those who have ideas and those who don’t.

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THIS WILL BE ON THE TEST

🤬 State secrets. Bodycams were supposed to rebuild trust in police by creating a record everybody could see. Then Alabama made them a state secret. After a Homewood police officer shot an 18-year-old, the department and state investigators are again refusing to play the taxpayer-funded videos on taxpayer-funded equipment for the public.

Body cam video of Homewood police killing Aliceville teen is ‘being hidden,’ family lawyer says

[AL.com]

😂 Bunker busted. U.S. Senator Katie Britt went on TV this week to say Donald Trump was a “no doubt” shoo-in for a Nobel Peace Prize for [checks notes] bombing Iran. Late Show host Stephen Colbert dropped bombs.

No doubt? Some doubt.

[The Late Show]

😖 Born in the USA? Whatever! The U.S. Supreme Court kneecapped the federal judiciary, empowered the president to defy the Constitution and undermined the citizenship of natural-born Americans all in one fell swoop. Bulwark columnist Jonathan V. Last has dark thoughts.

The Supreme Court Just Made America a Dangerous Place

[The Bulwark]