It took Jeffrey Lord outing himself as a possible Nazi sympathizer for him to finally be fired by CNN.
The contributor, who was hired by the cable network to defend Donald Trump at all times and through all tribulations, was let go by the company on Thursday after he Tweeted the Nazi salute "Sieg Heil!"
Despite protestations that he did so in order to make fun of fascism, Lord is now out of a job.
“Nazi salutes are indefensible,” a CNN spokesperson said simply. “Jeffrey Lord is no longer with the network.”
The back-and-forth that landed Lord in hot water took place between him and Angelo Carusone, the president of Media Matters for America, a liberal media watchdog organization.
It has been supporting an advertising boycott of Sean Hannity’s program on Fox News, which prompted Lord to pen a column in the American Spectator Thursday scolding the group as “anti-free speech bigots who, in typical fascist style, make it their mission to shut down speech they don’t like.”
He had previously this week compared MMFA to the propaganda machines in Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy.
After Carusone replied to Lord and mentioned that name was misspelled in the headline of Lord’s piece… Lord responded, “Sieg Heil!”
Seems like a bit of an overreaction, no?
In a multitude of follow-up message, Lord argued that invoking the Nazi salute was a way of “mocking” Carusone and the organization.
Shockingly, this contention did not sway his bosses at CNN.
Following the controversial “Sieg Heil!” tweet, Carusone issued a statement on Twitter asking for Lord to be fired.
It read as follows:
To many CNN viewers and media critics, the only surprising development here is that it took so long for CNN to give Lord his walking papers.
The pro-Trump pundit has said many things over the past several months that many people thought would get him fired.
On Super Tuesday in 2016, he described the Ku Klux Klan as “the military arm, the terrorist arm of the Democratic Party, according to historians.”
In reference to Democratic congressman Bakari Sellers, an African-American, he once asked:
"When is Bakari going to get around to apologizing for slavery? I’m still waiting on that."
With a serious face, he said at one point:
"Think of President Trump as the Martin Luther King of health care."
More recently, Lord brushed off Trump’s encouragement of police brutality by saying that was simply a "New Yorker" having a "sense of humor" and he had gone on record by defending the President against talk of collusion with a foreign adversary.
"I don’t care what he says to the Russians," Lord says of Trump.
The only positive to the existence of Jeffrey Lord is that he got into an on-air tiff with Anderson Cooper a few months ago, which led to Cooper saying to the biased non-journalist:
“If he took a dump on his desk, you would defend it.”
We’re almost glad CNN hired Jeffrey Lord just for that one exchange.
But he’s a horrible human being.
UPDATE: Said Lord to Entertainment Weekly after he was let go:
“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…
"I have absolutely zero regrets for mocking people who use Nazi tactics and fascists tactics to silence people in the media. None.”