More: O’Reilly Reflects on Mandela’s Life: ‘Great Man, but He Was a Communist’

Bill O’Reilly’s first invocation of Nelson Mandela following his death Thursday night was in a segment with Rick Santorum on the future of the Republican party. But that wasn’t the strangest part of it, it was when O’Reilly felt the need to declare, a number of times, that Mandela was a communist.

And how did Santorum respond?

Santorum, for his part, spoke highly of Mandela standing up against a “great injustice,” and he argued that the United States faces similar injustice in the form of the “ever-increasing size of government that is taking over and controlling people’s lives, and Obamacare is at the front and center of that.”

That’s right, Rick “man-on-dog” Santorum just compared opposition to Obamacare to Mandela’s decades long struggle against Apartheid.