CNN severed ties with Jeffrey Lord on Thursday, only a few hours after he sent a controversial tweet.
According to Vox, Lord accused Media Matters president Angelo Carusone of “adopting allegedly Mussolini-style tactics” in an American Spectator column. When Carusone complained on Twitter about the headline of Lord’s column, Lord responded: “Seig heil.”
CNN said in a statement that “Nazi salutes are indefensible. Jeffrey Lord is no longer with the network.”
Lord, however, says that his tweet was misunderstood. He was mocking fascists, not supporting or honoring them. Vox spoke to Lord about his tweet, and he told them that he believes Media Matters has adopted the same “anti-free speech” tactics that Mussolini’s Ministry of Popular Culture used in Italy. Those tactics originally came from Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany, Lord told Vox.
According to CNN Money, Lord was one of CNN’s best-known commentators. He was the first explicitly pro-Trump commentator to join the network back in August 2015. Over those two years, he defended Trump’s encouragement of police brutality as a form of “New Yorker sense of humor,” blamed Ariana Grande for the Manchester terror attack and called Trump the “MLK” of health care, according to the Daily Beast.
After he was fired, Lord criticized CNN for their decision but thanked the network for “giving him a platform for the better part of two years.”
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