I have paid just a passing interest to the issue of ‘furries’, the people who role-play by dressing up as anthropomorphic animals. People have all kinds of hobbies and interests and this seems to be just another one, since it seems to be like people who dress up as their favorite characters from films and TV and get together with like-minded people. But the transphobes among us see them as dangerous allies of the transgender community, trying to create gender confusion.
It is astonishing that Tommy Tuberville, a current member of the US senate who is running the next governor of Alabama, seems to be obsessed with furries, and gave a nearly 20-minutes speech on the senate floor warning about the dangers of furries and the transgender community. You have to listen to the speech to realize how insane these ideas are.
That was not all. He later doubled down, going on a rant on Twitter/X about it.
With just weeks until the midterm elections, Senator Tommy Tuberville, who hopes to be Alabama’s next governor, is ignoring voter concerns to descend into a bizarre anti-furry frenzy.
In a series of social media posts Thursday, Tuberville refused to back down from his outrageous claims that many airline pilots, flight attendants, and air traffic controllers are part of a community of adults who pretend to be animals that have sex with each other.
“I know the deranged Democrats don’t like the fact that I called out the insane FURRY CULTURE this week. But the truth is, there is an ALARMING number of these DERANGED people working in our airline industry,” the Alabama Republican wrote on X. “Don’t believe me? Just a few months ago, PILOTS were MEOWING and BARKING at each other over the radio at DCA.”
Tuberville included a link to an NBC report from April that featured audio of two pilots doing just that: meowing and barking. (The report indicates the pilots were just joking around.)
In another post, Tuberville complained about an “Aviation Furs Meet-up” at the Furry Migration convention in Minneapolis earlier this month. “Ask yourself … would you be comfortable with a MENTALLY ILL FURRY being your pilot?” he wrote on X.
…The Alabama Republican falsely claimed there was a disturbing trend of violence on the left, specifically stemming from transgender people and furries—and mentioned Tyler Robinson and Thomas Crooks as examples (neither man is trans, nor have they given any indication of being a furry).
We are definitely witnessing seriously deranged behavior but it is not by furries or anyone in the transgender community. It seems to be with Tuberville and the members of his staff who are feeding him this rubbish.
I have no idea what the private lives are of the people whom I encounter in life, whether they be pilots, bus rivers or whatever. They may have all kinds of interests that they indulge in when off-duty. But why should I care? As long as they do their jobs properly, that is sufficient for me.
Naturally, Jimmy Kimmel had fun with this.
I think Tuberville is using the tactic that I have taken to calling “One-percenting”:
1. Identify a target group that makes up about 1% of the population (numerous enough that people are generally aware of them, but not so numerous that they make up a serious voting bloc themselves)
2. Mock and denigrate this target group to convince some of the populace that they are “squicky” in some way, so that people who are looking for a bullying target will bully them.
3. Wait for your political opponents to come to the defense of the now-bullied target group.
4. As soon as they do, suddenly start lumping your political opponents together as not just defenders of the target group, but actual *members* of the target group, and claim that they are either trying to make *everyone* into a member of the target group, or get special privileges for that group. Constantly attack them for things like “trying to push this unwholesome lifestyle”, so that the people that you convinced the target group was “squicky” will now transfer this opinion to your political opponents.
This is something that gets done over and over again, with the target groups variously being members of minority religions, members of minority ethnicities, hippies, gays/lesbians, transgender people, and now apparently furries. It only works for a while with any given target group, and so they need to keep switching targets.
hey might as well self-promote my old article about this…
What’s with the furries obsession?
Envy.
Furries have fun, and (at least in Tuberville’s mind) lots of wild sex.
… pilots, bus rivers or whatever.
How many buses does it take to make a river, instead of just a stream?
It’s hard to say because there are so many possibilities with Tubberville. He is a cynical politican who will make stuff up and intentionally target unpopular minorities but he is also a right wing nut who believes absurd conspiracies and over react to events.
He could be trying to build a new group for conservative public hate. Furries are considered a weird minority, are associated with sexual fetishes and take steps to keep it private so they can easily be targeted. It’s just hard to do without sounding silly yourself, so while a few conservatives have tried none have had public success targeting them.
He could have run into a couple of furries in public near a con and be having a freak out about it. It would be something he doesn’t know how to relate to. Conservatives can over react with fear and disgust when they encounter people they don’t relate to and/or don’t understand.
This is stupider than even that. There is a “tradition” of bored pilots (particularly at regional jet companies) getting bored and doing a “meow” on this particular channel, which can ignite replies. There was a recent incident in April. It has nothing to do with furries, but Tuberville is too stupid to know that, or know how to find out.
Achuach @ 5
From Pharyngula:
“There was an incident in DC in April where some pilots started barking a meowing over the Guard channel (a side channel that is supposed be kept clear). From what I can tell, it is a joke/tradition (goofing off) that some bored pilots very, very occasionally engaged in. (One guess of its origin is related to the very stupid movie Super Troopers.) In this case I saw that it was some regional jet pilots (who, on the whole, are less professional than others).
.
Again. Nothing to do with furries, except a chance for idiot Rs to gang up on people who are different in some way.”
There is, or was until today, the satirical website Air Line Furries Assn., Intl. It was fairly moribund almost as soon as it came online a couple years ago, with most of its “articles” consisting of lorem ipsum text. Nice logo though. 🙂
https://web.archive.org/web/20260925051413/https://airlinefurries.com/
I wonder how people like Taterville reconcile their fear and hatred of furries with the ubiquity of fur-suited sports mascots?
Also fur-suited employees at Disney resorts. Also Halloween costumes, and at least one pro-wrestler.
If you want to pick an outgroup to demonize, it helps to pick one that your target audience doesn’t actually know. It’s much easier to paint a group of people as The Enemy if the people you’re taking to have never actually met one of them. This is why anti-immigrant sentiment tends to be strongest in places with very few immigrants, and why institutional homophobia became harder to maintain once a lot of people started coming out.
@#9
I’m not so sure that’a true -- there are many counterexamples. In the southern USA whites have lived alongside blacks for centuries but that certainly hasn’t prevent racism and deep hostility. Plenty of Nazis in 1930s Germany knew Jewish people. People who had lived alongside each other in Yugoslavia became bitter enemies as that country broke apart in the 1990s.