WHEN THE MASKS COME OFF THE HOODS GO ON (profanity alert):

It must have been 6 p.m. -- metaphorically, if not actually -- when first-term Alabama GOP Sen. Tommy Tuberville took the stage at Saturday's Trump rally, encouraging voters to go Republican in Nevada's neck-and-neck Senate election which may decide who controls that body in 2023. Tuberville surely drowned out the noise from the fire station with his own six-alarm siren appeal to voters' darkest instincts -- taking the greatest hits from a Republican fall campaign that has increasingly fallen back on racist fearmongering and making it much, much worse.

"They want to take over what you've got," Tuberville warmed up the pro-Trump crowd -- "they" his amorphous term that could have meant Democrats, or Black people, or the Washoe People, or some other "Other" -- in what the journalist Matthew Chapman noted is a literal echo of language used by the KKK to rile up Southerners in the 1960s.

The Alabama senator made his pitch for Nevadans to elect Republican Adam Laxalt, the challenger with 2022′s best shot at unseating a Democratic incumbent in Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, by echoing the new party line that Democrats are "pro-crime," in a year when voters are more alarmed than usual about that issue. But then he took it next-level by leaving no doubt who he wants his audience to see as the criminals.

"They want to control what you have!" Tuberville told the assembled Trumpists. "They want crime because they want to take over what you've got! They want to have reparations because they think the people that do the crime are owed that. Bull[***]!" The crowd roared. "They're not owed that."

Suddenly, the ambiguity surrounding "they" was all cleared up, since the main (although not only) group that's made a case for reparations are African Americans, once enslaved and then subject to racial apartheid, especially in Tuberville's Alabama and the rest of the Deep South. A U.S. senator was openly equating Blackness with criminality, layering on the outrageous claim that "they" have the nerve to demand reparations while taking your stuff.

'I mean, I've watched and listened to A LOT of old George Wallace speeches," Tom Moon, a columnist for Alabama Political Reporter, wrote on Twitter. "You'd be hard pressed to find many that were worse than this. In 2022. Just disgusting."

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