Days after former GOP senator Rick Santorum was fired by CNN over his racist comments about Native Americans, he showed up on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show to gripe about “cancel culture” and the “intolerance of the left.”
The Huffington Post broke the news last week that nearly a month after Santorum sparked backlash and condemnation for dismissing Native American culture at a conservative youth conference, CNN had quietly fired the political commentator. “We birthed a nation from nothing, I mean nothing was here,” Santorum said at the conference. “I mean, yes, we have Native Americans, but candidly, there isn’t much Native American culture in American culture.”
Santorum’s termination, according to HuffPost, came after he made an appearance on Chris Cuomo’s show that displeased network leadership. With Native American groups calling for his firing, Santorum merely insisted he “misspoke” and refused to apologize. “None of the anchors wanted to book him” after that, according to a CNN senior executive, and Don Lemon complained to Cuomo that the anchor’s Santorum interview made him “furious.”
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On Monday night, making his first on-air appearance since the CNN firing, Santorum stood by the remarks that landed him in hot water, claiming that what he said “was not at all disparaging towards Native Americans.” Indeed, he was merely telling “the truth” about the founding of the United States of America and was “savaged by telling the truth,” he told Hannity.
Santorum, who gave CNN credit for keeping him around for several years despite criticism from the left, conceded that the network “has a right to fire me if they don’t like what I’m saying or what I am doing.”
While adding that he has “no animus” toward CNN and “appreciates the opportunity” the network gave him, he also leaned hard into conservative grievance culture, claiming that the “intolerance of the left is really the issue here and the cancel culture that is flowing from it.”
Furthermore, the pro-Trump pundit even claimed that he’d heard from “many CNN contributors who talked to me afterwards who are very concerned about the cancel culture that’s now hitting them at CNN.”
Hannity, for his part, hyped up his own network as a place with a “diversity of views” before wondering aloud if Santorum—who has been a Fox News contributor in the past—was maybe considering a return to his old stomping grounds.
“I assume the application is in at Fox or no?” the Trump-boosting host quipped with a smirk.
“Well, I’m just taking a little time off to regroup here a little bit and see what opportunities come my way,” a laughing Santorum replied.
