Cliff’s Note:
Alabama drivers are paying more than $6 for diesel. Their senator, who wants to be their next governor, told CNN they’re happy to pay it. Then he went to the Senate floor to warn America about furries flying our airplanes.
You can’t make this up, and David Shuster doesn’t have to. He brings the receipts: the floor speech, the Community Note that fact-checked it in real time, the actual research on the furry fandom, and the gas prices Tuberville would rather you not think about. It’s funny as hell, and it’s the whole MAGA playbook in one speech: when you can’t fix people’s problems, invent a scarier enemy.
This is what your membership pays for: reporting that takes these clowns apart with facts and still makes you laugh. If you’re not a paid member yet, now’s the time.
—Cliff
by David Shuster
There are moments in the U.S. Senate when the “world’s greatest deliberative body,” as it has been called, brings attention to the leading issues of our time and the questions upon which civilization itself depends. Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama just showed us his priority: Furries.
Yes, while gasoline in Alabama is over $4.10 a gallon and diesel has climbed above $6, while families are being squeezed by an affordability crisis, and while the United States wrestles with the economic and technological consequences of artificial intelligence, Senator Tommy Tuberville recently took to the Senate floor to warn us about people who dress up as anthropomorphic animals.
One trembles to imagine what would have happened had Tuberville discovered the existence of Comic-Con. But I digress. During a Sept. 22 Senate floor speech, Tuberville spent several minutes thunderously condemning transgenderism and what he called the “furry community.”
He declared that research shows 25 percent of furries are “gender confused,” and then announced an even more terrifying discovery: many airline pilots, flight attendants and air-traffic controllers are supposedly furries.
“Lord help us,” the senator exclaimed.
Indeed. Lord help us.
Especially those of us who were hoping that the people flying airplanes had been selected according to such quaint criteria as training, licensing, experience and competence rather than whether they own a fox costume.
Tuberville offered no evidence that a significant number of aviation professionals are furries, much less that furry fandom has anything whatsoever to do with aviation safety.
Tuberville then posted excerpts of his Senate floor speech on X.
His post quickly got slapped with a community note as readers added context they thought people might want to know. Quote: Airline pilots must meet 1st-class medical requirements; being a part of the furry fandom or playing dress-up is not listed in 14 CFR 67.107(c) as a disqualifier. Hiring is entirely merit-based per OpSpec A134; Airlines will hire whomever is qualified and certified.
Tuberville’s underlying statistical claim about furries and the transgender community was also off. DurScience, a research organization studying the furry fandom, reported 12.2 percent identifying as transgender in one study.
More recent studies find that roughly one-quarter to one-third of respondents do not identify primarily as cisgender—a category that includes identities beyond simply “transgender.”
But facts are such inconvenient creatures. They lack the dramatic possibilities of a conservative senator imagining himself boarding an airplane and suddenly realizing that the captain might own a fur suit.
Perhaps this will be new category in national security.
The Russians have spies. China has industrial espionage. Iran has missiles. Artificial intelligence threatens to end humanity. And Tommy Tuberville has discovered Captain Foxington in the cockpit.
Tuberville is leaving the U.S. Senate and running for Governor of Alabama. So, his effort to demonize the transgender community, or anybody who is LGBTQ, is a political gambit of sorts. Still, even for the Alabama voters who are terrified of the dozen or so NCAA athletes who are trans out of the 500,000 total NCAA athletes, one imagines most Alabamians have more immediate concerns than the sexual orientation of a pilot or what outfits and costumes the pilot, flight attendant, and controller may own.
