Tommy Tuberville has a theory about the engineers, FBI agents and young families moving to north Alabama: they were brainwashed in school.
The Republican nominee for governor said it this week on "The Jeff Poor Show," AL.com reported:
"You've got people coming from other states that were brought up in these government-educated schools that have taught socialism and Communism."
And his plan for them:
"It's hard to get them out of that mindset. And that's what we have to do. We have to educate them."
He also told listeners that the mainstream media is "encouraging people to go out and vote for this socialist, Communist nonsense."
Who he's talking about
The Huntsville area is one of the fastest-growing parts of the state. Madison County grew 11.7% between 2020 and 2025, to about 433,500 people, and Limestone County grew 18.7%, according to Census Bureau estimates cited by AL.com. Part of that growth comes from the region's federal, aerospace and defense jobs at places like Redstone Arsenal, where the FBI says more than 1,300 of its people now work.
Tuberville even pointed to those FBI families himself. He said "six to seven hundred FBI agents and their families" had come to north Alabama, were shocked at how much better the schools and the living were, and that "their minds have even changed."
So by his own account, the newcomers he says arrived with that mindset include the FBI families he held up as proof that minds can be changed. They will be his constituents if he wins. And he went on the radio to say they need to be educated out of it.
It didn't go over well even in his own party. A Republican state lawmaker whose district includes part of Huntsville pushed back publicly, saying Tuberville's claim was "not correct."
"Government-educated schools" — like Alabama's
Tuberville's complaint is about "government-educated schools." That means public schools.
Alabama's public schools are government schools too. A candidate for governor who calls public schools a source of communism is telling teachers and public-school parents what he thinks of them before he takes office.
The man complaining about people "coming from other states"
There's a bigger problem with Tuberville lecturing anyone about where they came from.
He spent the summer fighting a lawsuit that said he hasn't lived in Alabama long enough to be governor. Alabama's Constitution requires seven years of residency. Tuberville owns a home in Florida and was living there in 2017. He registered to vote in Walton County, Florida, in 2017, and he and his wife voted in Florida in November 2018. Instead of proving he lived here, he asked the court to throw the case out — and on Oct. 9 the Alabama Supreme Court upheld the dismissal, ruling that a party nominee can't be challenged that way. No court ever decided whether he meets the residency requirement. We laid out the whole residency fight here.
So the candidate who says people "coming from other states" need to be educated before they understand Alabama was himself casting ballots in Florida eight years ago.
A pattern of treating outsiders as a threat
This isn't the first time Tuberville has talked about Alabama as a place under siege. In August he told Charlie Kirk's show the state might need a 30-foot wall around it.
Now the worry is the people who move here for good jobs. Tuberville's answer was turnout: Republicans, he said, "outnumber them pretty much two-to-one."
What we know
Tommy Tuberville, the Republican nominee for Alabama governor, said on the radio that people moving to fast-growing north Alabama were taught "socialism and Communism" in "government-educated schools" and that "we have to educate them." He held up the region's FBI families as newcomers whose minds had changed. A Republican lawmaker who represents part of Huntsville said that was "not correct." Tuberville himself got a lawsuit over whether he has lived in Alabama long enough to serve thrown out on procedural grounds, with no court deciding the question — after registering to vote in Florida in 2017 and voting there in 2018.
