Rick SantorumThe Republican former US senator and presidential candidate was dismissed from CNN as a senior political commentator a month after his racist remarks about Indians, including claims that there was “nothing” in North America until white colonizers arrived.
“We gave birth to a nation out of nothing. I mean, there was nothing here, ”Santorum told students last month at an event organized by the Young America’s Foundation, a right-wing group with ties to former Vice President Mike Pence. “I mean, yeah, we have Native Americans, but honestly there isn’t a lot of Native American culture in American culture.”
Jennifer Bendery of Huffpost, who first reported on the termination of Santorum, described his remarks in April as “as offensive as it is inaccurate”.
“Indigenous peoples lived in America for thousands of years before European explorers emerged in the late 14th and 16th centuries,” Bendery wrote at the time. “They had their own rich cultures and traditions. European settlers tried to eradicate all of this by forcibly removing tribal peoples from their lands, slaughtering them, infecting them with new diseases, rounding them up and placing them on reservations, breaking contracts with them and taking their children from them and taking them on board Schools to try to integrate them into white culture. “
Ever since Santorum hit the political stage in the early 1990s, it has tried to be at the center of the American culture wars and position itself as a right-wing Christian religious warrior. He made a name for himself attacking the LGBTQ community and even ran a Christian film company for a short time after his disastrous 2006 Senate re-election offer.
CNN has confirmed Santorum’s termination.
A CNN spokesperson confirms that the network has split from Santorum https://t.co/k1hTLkFfKd
– Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) May 22, 2021
Rick Santorum, fired from CNN for his racist comments on Indians, first appeared in the New Civil Rights Movement.
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