Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville walked back his defense of “white nationalists,” but let’s be very clear—the hood is off.

I predicted the GOP would fully embrace white nationalism by 2024.

I was off by a year. It seems the record-breaking summer heat has finally forced some elected officials to take off their hoods.

Speaking of Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), the former football coach finally admitted that “white nationalists are racists” on Tuesday after receiving withering national criticism and pushback from Democratic leaders, such as Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), for his repeated failure to denounce white nationalism during a CNN interview the night before.

A few hours earlier, however, Tuberville was fine defending an extremist movement that has been responsible for centuries of violence and hate in America, telling reporters, “I’m totally against racism. If the Democrats want to say that white nationalists are racists, I’m totally against that, too.”

Tuberville’s sudden turn-about was most likely a result of marching orders he received from GOP leaders like Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who have long known that racism is a dish best served with dog whistles and attacks on “wokeness.” McConnell showed Tuberville how it’s done when he told reporters, “White supremacy is simply unacceptable in the military and in our whole country.”

It is, however, totally acceptable in the modern GOP. It seems Tuberville’s only mistake was being brutally honest.

During his Monday night interview with CNN host Kaitlin Collins, Tuberville—who couldn’t identify the three branches of government after he was elected to the Senate—repeatedly pushed back against Collins’ accurate description of white nationalists as racists. For Tuberville, a white nationalist is simply “an American” who “holds different beliefs.”

Ultimately, the end goal of white nationalists is to transform the United States into an ethnostate in which the white race rules over the rest of us. Those are the same beliefs of the “very fine people" who gathered in Charlottesville chanting “The Jews will not replace us,” before one of them, a Nazi, murdered anti-racist protester Heather Heyer. (Former President Donald Trump infamously blamed “many sides” for the violence.)

Tuberville did his best Trump impression on CNN. Specifically, he invoked The Dude card from The Big Lebowski, responding to Collins with “well, that’s your opinion,” when she repeatedly challenged his warped definition. (White nationalism apparently now joins climate change, the efficacy of vaccines, and a round Earth as matters of “opinion” and worthy of a “both sides” debate.)

He further elaborated, “Now if that white nationalist is a racist, I’m totally against anything that they want to do because I am 110 percent against racism.”

Tuberville tried to unleash the “I’m not a racist” card by bringing up his 40-year coaching history. In his words, he “dealt with more minorities than everybody in this building.” Interesting choice of phrasing, but regardless, all that exposure to young Black men wasn’t enough to deter him from seeing them as criminals. At an Oct. 2022 Trump rally, Tuberville told the MAGA faithful that Democrats want crime to “take over what you got,” and “they want reparations because they think the people that do the crime are owed that.”

In May, Tuberville whined the U.S. was “losing” the military because Democrats were trying to purge the armed forces of far-right extremists and white nationalists, whom Tuberville views as unfairly vilified Trump supporters.

According to Tuberville, removing hateful extremists from our armed forces harms our military “readiness.” Tuberville’s obstruction, ironically, might actually be responsible for the military “losing” top talent, according to Air Force Gen. Charles Q. Brown, who President Joe Biden nominated to be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Tuberville is so committed to a strong military that he’s single-handedly weakening it by blocking military officer nominations. This unprecedented obstruction has now led to the U.S. Marine Corps being without a leader for the first time in over 150 years.

Alas, white supremacy remains self-destructive until the end.

When people keep telling you who they are—again and again—take them literally and seriously, and stop whitewashing it as “economic anxiety.” It’s racism, which is the feature, not a bug, of the modern GOP.

The conservative movement realizes it can no longer politically afford to cast off white nationalists because they are part and parcel of their constituency. Last year, Trump dined with notorious racist and white nationalist leader Nick Fuentes. He “shied way from criticizing him” because he feared it would alienate his supporters.

Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Paul Gosar (R-AZ) have also spoken at Feuntes’ conference and openly promoted white nationalist conspiracy theories. Greene was recently ejected from the House Freedom Caucus, a rogue’s gallery of freaks, because of her spat with former fellow traveler Rep. Lauren Boebart (R-CO). Embracing QAnon, conspiracy theories about Jewish space lasers, and palling around with extremists is perfectly fine for GOP leadership—but chastising one of your own is a bridge too far.

Hitler is also making a comeback in conservative circles. A chapter of the extremist group Moms For Liberty was discovered to have quoted the genocidal Nazi leader in a newsletter. A similar version of the same quote, “whoever has the youth has the future,” was spouted by Rep. Mary Miller (R-IL) in 2021. She was addressing an event hosted by Moms for America, which seeks to “reclaim our culture for truth, family and freedom.” That event was also attended by Rep. Greene.

One could easily dismiss these examples as the “fringe” of the GOP, but the truth is that the fringe, and white nationalist talking points, are now the mainstream. Even a self-professed “moderate,” former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, has jumped on board. In June, she defended Moms For Liberty on Fox and tweeted, “If @Moms4Liberty is a “hate group,” add me to the list.

It brings me no joy to write any of this, because there’s a cost to mainstreaming hate. It's always borne in the blood of marginalized communities. White supremacist terrorism is now the leading domestic terror threat in America. Their talking points are openly shared by conservative pundits, GOP politicians, and Trump.

The more we “both sides” white nationalism, the greater the risk of embracing an ideology that has terrorized America every season since its inception. The only difference now is that you don’t need the hoods and dog whistle when you have an ignorant football coach in the Senate.