In response to being fired from CNN for tweeting a Nazi slogan yesterday, former commentator and current Trump sycophant Jeffrey Lord simply posted “LOL!” on his Twitter timeline. Though it looked like the one-time Reagan crony might just forget his words whenever he’s being asked to defend anyone but the current president, Lord has followed up that attempt at pithiness with an interview with Entertainment Weekly. He still doesn’t demonstrate much eloquence, but Lord does go on a bit of a tear against fascism, though he might not quite grasp the meaning of that term either, directing it as he does towards the media watchdog group, Media Matters For America, and not at, say, the individual who has been dispensing xenophobic rhetoric and ridiculous conspiracy theories since before he made it into the Oval Office.
Caving to bullies, caving to people who use fascist and Nazi-style tactics to try and remove people from the air is unacceptable. I mocked this guy. Mocking Nazis is okay. That’s a good thing, not a bad thing. A writer has only a handful of tools in his writer’s box, and mockery is one of them. To suggest that this is anything other than that, to my way of thinking, is caving in. And I’m not going to cave.
Lord then does or does not compare himself to Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator, telling EW that by tweeting “Sieg Heil!” at a journalist, what he was really doing—though he apparently emphasizes that he’s not putting himself on Chaplin’s level—he was mocking fascism, or something? “So that’s what I was doing. I have absolutely zero regrets for mocking people who use Nazi tactics and fascists tactics to silence people in the media. None,” Lord said, with no hint of irony, because the sound of dog whistles is music to his ears, as he frequently proved in his commentating tenure. Then, as all these right-wing numbskulls do in these situations, he tried to hide behind the First Amendment, even though he was an at-will employee and CNN is not the government. Lord actually seems clear on the latter concept, and is presumably just waiting for his turn through the revolving door that is the communications director position at the White House.