Sen. Tommy Tuberville on Wednesday called for jailing all Gaza protesters — two months after he took a very different tune for January 6th protesters.
“When it comes to protesters, we got to make sure we treat all of them the same. Send them to jail,” Tuberville told Fox Business. “Free speech is great, but hateful, hate, free speech is not what we need in these universities.”
In the interview with Fox Business, the Republican senator from Alabama rejected any free speech argument to defend pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses, after the Trump administration arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of such protests at Columbia University. The White House detained the lawful permanent resident and sent him to an immigration detention center in Louisiana without charging him with a crime.
But on January 21, Tuberville made the opposite argument to defend Trump’s pardons of January 6th protesters, which freed some jailed insurrectionists:
“I’m for the — pardon every one. They’ve been there long enough,” he told ABC News. “Most of them hadn’t been charged with anything.”
