How Can CNN Continue To Employ an Ignorant Jerk Like Rick Santorum?

This week, calls came in from all corners of the internet demanding that CNN end its working relationship with failed politician Rick Santorum after offensive and historically inaccurate remarks he made during a speech went viral. At a conservative function, Santorum, amongst other idiotic things, claimed that “We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here. I mean, yes we have Native Americans but candidly there isn't much Native American culture in American culture."

It was a truly moronic thing to say and also a truly offensive way to present the American experience. Dismissing these statements as proof of Rick Santorum’s profound ignorance doesn’t take into account his very racist and fundamentally white supremacist use of language in describing an American cultural history devoid of non-white Anglo-Saxon Protestant Europeans. The fact that Benjamin Franklin used the already more than 500-year-old Iroquois model of confederacy to shame fellow North Americans Europeans into creating the beginnings of our country’s union is just one of the important cultural, ideological, and historical fabrics woven into our country. 

The National Congress of American Indians' (NCAI) president, Fawn Sharp, released an official response to Santorum’s grotesque views. She did not hold anything back, saying: “Rick Santorum is an unhinged and embarrassing racist who disgraces CNN and any other media company that provides him a platform. Televising someone with his views on Native American genocide is fundamentally no different than putting an outright Nazi on television to justify the Holocaust.” 

The Native American Journalists Association came out with a statement that “strongly cautions Native American and Alaska Native reporters from working with, or applying to jobs, at CNN in the wake of continued racist comments and insensitive reporting directed at Indigenous people.” They also called for CNN to immediately dismiss Santorum, saying this was an issue of accountability and ethics in journalism.

As Walter Einenkel points out, people like Santorum don’t just simplify history in a racist way because it suits them and dealing with the messy complications of history are too difficult for their little brains to manage. They oversimplify things in the most racist way possible because ultimately they believe that their small identity is the only worthwhile story to tell, and anything that adds even the tiniest bit of moral complexity to their lives threatens to tear apart the fabric of how they see the world.