Rick Santorum, the Republican former U.S. Senator and presidential candidate, has been fired by CNN as its senior political commentator one month after his racist comments about Native Americans, including claiming there had been “nothing” in North America until white colonizers came.
“We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here,” Santorum told students last month at an event hosted by the Young America’s Foundation, a right wing group with ties to former Vice President Mike Pence. “I mean, yes, we have Native Americans, but candidly, there isn’t much Native American culture in American culture.”
Huffpost’s Jennifer Bendery, who first reported on Santorum’s termination, in April called his remarks “as offensive as they are inaccurate.”
“Indigenous peoples had been living in America thousands of years before European explorers showed up in the late 1400s and 1500s,” Bendery wrote at the time. “They had their own rich cultures and traditions. European settlers tried to erase all of that by forcibly removing Indigenous people from their lands, slaughtering them, infecting them with new diseases, rounding them up and putting them on reservations, breaking treaties with them and taking their children from them and putting them into boarding schools to try to assimilate them into white culture.”
Since coming on the political scene in the early 1990’s Santorum has tried to be at the center of America’s culture wars, positioning himself as a right wing Christian religious warrior. He made a name for himself attacking the LGBTQ community, and after his disastrous 2006 U.S. Senate re-election bid, even headed a Christian film company for a short time.
CNN has confirmed Santorum’s termination.