Appearing in Mobile on Tuesday, Sen. Tommy Tuberville celebrated local industry, shared a few insights into his time in office so far and blamed a failing education system and a couple of lazy generations for a “crisis” pushing the country to the brink of socialism.

Tuberville was the featured speaker at a Forum Alabama breakfast presented by the Mobile Chamber and attended by local business leaders. He later spoke to media in an appearance at Austal USA after touring the shipyard.

At the breakfast, where he was introduced by Austal USA President Rusty Murdaugh as “Alabama’s junior but soon to be senior senator,” Tuberville received standing ovations at the beginning and end of his address.

In between the rounds of applause, he ranged over an array of topics. He spent a portion of his time extolling the youth and ambition of his staff and giving some insight into his experiences since his election. “It’s amazing how the first two years is almost gone,” he said.

His strongest remarks concerned education, particularly as it relates to workforce development.

“Our country is in trouble,” Tuberville said. “We’re in trouble. And it all starts in one area. Educating our youth. It scares me, because again, saw it for the last 15 years as a coach and now that I’m on the Education Committee, my gosh. We talk about things that we shouldn’t even be talking about. We should be talking about things that make it better, and we always talk about the problems and we don’t solve those problems. But I want you to understand this. Of all the places that I go, not just in the state of Alabama but all over this country, if you’re going to grow you better have a good education system. You’ve got to have education and you’ve got to have hospitalization. If you don’t have those two things, somebody’s going to outgun us and outduel us for a manufacturing facility, some area that’s going to grow where [they] can bring in workers and have growth, we’re going to lose that.

“Our education has got to improve. Because right now we’re about a third of what we were about 20 years ago,” continued Tuberville, apparently offering a general rating rather than any specific metric. “Our high schools and our colleges. We’ve got to get back to teaching. We’ve got to get back to technical training. We’ve got to create jobs. There’s not one place I go, not just in this country but all over the world, ‘What’s your biggest problem?’ ‘We can’t find people to work and it’s getting worse.’ And it’s going to get worse unless we solve the problem ourselves and it goes back to what? It goes back to education. It goes back to somebody that wants to work. What’s happening in our country right now, we’re getting too many takers in our country. Too many people to take a check and they don’t want to give back. They don’t want to go to work. We’ve got to get Generation X and these Millennials to understand that you have to tote your own load.”

Generation X, while not precisely defined, generally refers to people born between the mid-’60s and the early ‘80s, meaning adults who are now between their early 40s and late 50s. Most Millennials are now in their 30s. Tuberville may have been using the terms to refer generically to youth.

“We’ve got to do it. I don’t know how we’re going to do it. But we’ve got to get everybody on board with that,” Tuberville said. “Because there’s not one person in this room that owns a business that will say ‘I’m full up, I’m full up and I don’t need help.’ And it’s getting worse. It starts with education and what we’re teaching in education and it starts with how we handle the future of getting our kids to understand you have to pay your own way.”

According to statistics recently released by Gov. Kay Ivey and the Alabama Department of Labor, state unemployment held at a record low 2.6% in September. The civilian labor force of 2,294,506 and the number of people employed, 2,234,948, both were new record highs. ADOL gave the national unemployment rate for September as 3.3 percent, slightly higher than Alabama’s but still low in historic terms. Nonetheless, Tuberville said the situation was dire.

“I don’t have to sit up here and tell you, I hope I don’t have to tell you, how close we are to a socialist country,” he said. “I hate to tell you that. I see it every day. We are so close. Because we’re getting to the point we have more people sitting home taking a check than we do that’s working to get an education and go to work or people that are actually working.”

Though Tuberville did not dwell on the topic of “hospitalization,” he did clarify that having a robust healthcare system was essential to strong economic performance.

Later, taking questions at Austal, Tuberville doubled down on his view that despite the employment numbers, there was a plague of people living off government benefits.

“There’s still a lot of money out there, a lot of checks still going out,” Tuberville said. “A lot of unemployment insurance, a lot of people go to work one day, quit and go back home, start collecting that check again. As I said, we’ve got way too many takers, not enough givers. … I can understand if you’re not able to go to work, but this administration has pretty much doubled the food stamp recipients in the last 20 months and we can’t afford that.

“We’ve get back to work, we’ve got to go back to work, not working from home,” he said. “There’s going to be different circumstances for everybody. But we’ve got to make sure that all the money that we’ve pushed out there and continue to push out there is used in the right way. There’s been a lot of fraud.

“10 million jobs we have open, they’re out there,” he said. “A lot of people aren’t working. All you’ve got to do is look at the people collecting checks. There are a lot of people collecting checks. We need to take care of the elderly, we need to take care of people that health problems, we need to take care of our veterans. But there are a couple of generations here now that need to understand that it’s time to put the metal to the pedal, so to speak, and get to work and help this country grow.”

Other remarks of note:

Tuberville brushed off a controversy around remarks made at a Trump rally in Nevada, where he said Democrats “want reparation because they think the people that do the crime are owed that.” The casual equation of Black heritage with criminal inclination prompted considerable criticism and outrage.

Tuberville deflected a question on the topic to say that crime was the problem, exacerbated by “a group of progressives that for some reason, they tend to think the people committing these crimes are the victims. And they’re not.”

“We don’t have enough people right now paying the price for a lot of the crimes that are being made,” he said. “They don’t need to be rewarded for it. They need to understand that we can’t run a country — it’s like a football team. If you’ve got people going in different directions breaking all the rules, you’re not going to win. And we’re not going to win in this country unless we get people on the same page, believing that, hey, we’re going to do our fair share to make this work. And again, I’m all for equal opportunity. Equal opportunity is what this country’s about.”

The senator praised Austal as a company critical to the country’s defense. “This is my second or third time here,” he said. “As we speak, we’re trying to get the NDAA [National Defense Authorization Act] passed, to where we can get more work done here at Austal. It’s a very important part of our national security, this area right here. Indo-Pacific is being threatened by China and we’re going to need more boats, more ships, more things that we can use on the water. … They do a great job for the economy here in this area. They train a lot of people, and we want to make sure they continue to work. What they do here is for everybody in this country, not just for the people in Mobile and Alabama.”

“We’re behind China,” he added, saying that the United States had to transition from ground wars in the Middle East to a potential sea fight in the East. “Being on the Armed Services Committee, I see what they have and what we have … We’ve go a lot of catching up to do. They have more ships, they have more of everything now. … It’s a pretty scary time right now.”

Tuberville downplayed his status as a senator, saying that he had been working to adjust to the slow pace of progress in Washington. “People ask me, coach do you like what you’re doing? Not really. Not really. But I’m glad I’m up there,” he said. “I have learned more in the last 20 months, and I can help more people doing what I do now than I’ve ever done before. … I have learned an amazing amount in 20 months. I do nothing but read, listen, ask questions … I’ve been a sponge. It’s not rocket science. It’s really not.”

He praised Sen. Richard Shelby for steering federal money to major Mobile industrial centers such as the port. “The GDP of this state is going to continue to grow, just from this area,” Tuberville said. He chose an incorrect example, however, to illustrate his point. “We make a million cars a year in this state,” he said. “Until a couple of years ago, when they left this country the left through Savannah, Ga. Now most of them leave from here. It’s because of guys like Richard Shelby and [Former U.S. Rep., now head of the Mobile Chamber] Bradley Byrne, the foresight that they had.”

In this, the senator was a bit ahead of reality. The Port of Mobile does have a new “roll-on/roll-off” terminal designed to allow passenger cars and other vehicles to be drive on and off ships. However, an Alabama State Port Authority official present at the breakfast confirmed that the terminal has not yet captured auto export business. Port officials, including former docks head Jimmy Lyons, have said they hope the terminal will win auto imports and exports as contracts with other ports expire, including exports of autos made in Alabama.

Tuberville said a federal infrastructure bill had missed the mark, spending too little on infrastructure and too much on climate change. He also identified the preservation of water resources as a major concern. “Now, we all want our climate to be great. But that’s not our biggest problem. Our biggest problem is our debt,” he said, saying debt and inflation threatened to hamstring future generations. “For some reason we think that climate change and things that go around that are more important than what we do with our water, what we do with our food, what we do with our education, what we do with our roads and bridges,” he said. “There’s nothing more important than that. It’s like having an offensive line in college football, or high-school football. You can’t prosper in this country without roads, bridges and water. Water is one of our most important things. … We need to make sure our basics are taken care of.”

Tuberville celebrated the success of a bill he sponsored that increases the life insurance benefit for U.S. military service members. President Joe Biden signed the bill into law in mid-October. That made him “one of the few Republicans in the last 20 months that’s had a bill passed through Congress and signed by President Biden. It’s a small thing but it’s huge for our veterans,” he said.