CNN urged to fire Rick Santorum after racist comments on Native Americans

The former US senator and CNN political commentator Rick Santorum has sparked outrage among Native Americans, and prompted calls for his dismissal, by telling a rightwing students’ conference that European colonists who came to America “birthed a nation from nothing”.

“There was nothing here. I mean, yes we have Native Americans but candidly there isn’t much Native American culture in American culture,” Santorum told the ultra-conservative Young America’s Foundation’s summit, entitled standing up for faith and freedom, and shared by the group to YouTube.

“We came here and created a blank slate, we birthed a nation from nothing,” he said.

Santorum’s comments, effectively dismissing the millennia-long presence of Native Americans and the genocide inflicted on them as the Christian settlers transformed and expanded their colonies into the United States of America, angered many within the Native American community, and beyond.

“The erasure of Native people and histories, which existed before and survived in spite of a white supremacist empire, is a foundational sin of a make-believe nation,” the activist Nick Estes, a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux tribe and host of the Red Nation podcast, said on Twitter.

“According to Rick Santorum, the US was founded as a ‘Judeo-Christian’ theocratic state. He might be right about that, but the idea that the first colonizers escaped religious persecution is laughable. Invasion was an economic enterprise for god, glory, and gold.”

In his remarks, Santorum, a two-term US senator for Pennsylvania and a twice-failed candidate for the Republican party’s presidential nomination, likened the colonization of Native lands to an act of religious freedom.

“I don’t know of any other country in the world that was settled predominantly by people who were coming to practice their faith,” Santorum said. “They came here because they were not allowed to practice their particular faith in their own country.”

Others were outraged but not surprised by the comments of Santorum, who joined CNN as a senior political commentator in 2017.

“Rick Santorum is just saying what the majority of Americans silently believe – the only ‘real history’ is US history,” said Brett Chapman, a Native American attorney and descendant of Chief Standing Bear, the first Native Indian to win civil rights in the US.

“Everything centers around it. Many claim to appreciate and respect Native history yet know nothing about it. Let’s not act like he’s some lone wolf out there on this.”

The Cherokee writer Rebecca Nagle pointed to CNN’s lack of Native American commentators, while giving a platform to Santorum, who has previously made offensive and false claims about other minority communities.

On Monday, the Native American Journalists Association cautioned Native American and Alaska Native reporters from working with, or applying for jobs, at CNN in the wake of continued racist comments and insensitive reporting directed at Indigenous people.

Last week, a CNN host incorrectly identified Minnesota’s lieutenant governor, Peggy Flanagan, a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe, as a white woman. The network has yet to correct its mistake.

Politicians also weighed in. “Seriously is anyone surprised to hear this hot garbage coming from Rick Santorum?” Jaime Harrison, chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) said in a tweet. “Nothing was here?! No native American culture in American culture?! America hasn’t changed?!”

Mark Pocan, Democratic congressman for Wisconsin, was even more critical. “Native & Indigenous nations lived, governed, and thrived here before their land was stolen and they were murdered in a mass genocide, you ignorant white supremacist,” he wrote.

Meanwhile, Nick Knudsen, executive director of DemCast USA, a digital hub of Democratic opinion and online activism, said it was “long past time” for CNN to cut ties with Santorum, whose extreme views have become a lightning rod for controversy in recent years.

In 2015, he insisted the US supreme court would not have the final say on same-sex marriage, the same year he said he regretted his comments from a decade earlier comparing homosexuality to bestiality.

In 2018, shortly after a former student killed 17 teenagers and staff at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida, Santorum taunted survivors who formed themselves into gun reform campaigners.

“How about kids, instead of looking to someone else to solve their problem, do something about maybe taking CPR classes or trying to deal with situations that when there is a violent shooter that you can actually respond to that?” he said on CNN’s State of the Union.

The politician, who claimed the survivors’ March for Our Lives group was supported by “Hollywood elites and liberal billionaires”, later tried to distance himself from his comments, claiming that he misspoke.

In a statement, the National Congress of American Indians, the nation’s largest organization representing American Indian and Alaska Native groups, attacked the former senator.

“Rick Santorum is an unhinged and embarrassing racist who disgraces CNN and any other media company that provides him a platform,” Fawn Sharp, the group’s president, said.

She said Santorum’s assertion that settlers birthed a nation were wrong. “What European colonizers found in the Americas were thousands of complex, sophisticated and sovereign Tribal Nations, each with millennia of distinct cultural, spiritual and technological development,” she said.

“Hopefully, sophisticated and humane Native American philosophy will win out over the caveman mentality of people like Rick Santorum.”

CNN did not respond to a request from the Guardian for comment.

In a brief statement to the Guardian issued through a spokesperson on Monday afternoon, Santorum said: “I had no intention of minimizing or in any way devaluing Native American culture.”