Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt is facing backlash after suggesting that America is a white homeland that “belongs to us.”

Schmitt made the controversial comments during the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C. earlier this month. During his speech, titled “What Is an American?,” Smith argued that the U.S. is fundamentally a white homeland rooted in European settler history.

America is “not a universal nation,” the senator declared.

“America doesn’t belong to them — it belongs to us,” he continued. “We can no longer apologize for who we are.

Schmitt went on to celebrate a tradition of European settlers who he said “repelled wave after wave of Indian war band attacks.” He portrayed all of America’s major achievements as inherited from those founding European populations.

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