MSNBC host Chris Matthews faced calls to resign after comparing Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ win in the Nevada caucus to the Nazi invasion of France.
"I'm reading last night about the fall of France in the summer of 1940," Matthews said after Sanders clearly emerged as the winner. "And the general calls up Churchill and says, 'It's over,' and Churchill says, 'How can it be? You got the greatest army in Europe. How can it be over?' He said, 'It's over.'"
Sanders won the caucuses with about 47% of the vote.
Matthews previously ranted about socialist executions earlier this month.
"You know, I have my own views of the word 'socialist,'" Matthews said. "They go back to the early 1950s. I have an attitude about them. I remember the Cold War. I have an attitude towards Castro. I believe if Castro and the Reds had won the Cold War, there would have been executions in Central Park, and I might've been one of the ones getting executed, and certain other people would be there cheering, OK? So, I have a problem with people who took the other side."
Matthews is the second MSNBC host to invoke Nazis while discussing Sanders.
"I wanna bring up something Jonathan Last put in the Bulwark today," host Chuck Todd Todd said earlier this month "It is about how… we have all been on the receiving end of the Bernie online brigade—and here's what he says. He says, 'no other candidate has anything like this digital brownshirt brigade. I mean, except for Donald Trump. The question no one is asking is this, what if you can't win the presidency without an online mob? What if we live in a world where having a bullying agro social online army running around popping anyone who sticks their head up is either an important ingredient for, or a critical marker of, success?'"
MSNBC colleague slams Matthews:
Many called on Matthews to resign and the Jewish group IfNotNow called for him to issue an apology.
MSNBC political analyst Anand Giridharadas slammed his colleague’s comments on Sunday.
"Why is Chris Matthews on this air talking about the victory [of] Bernie Sanders, who had kin murdered in the Holocaust, analogizing it to the Nazi conquest of France?" he said. "People stuck in an old way of thinking, in 20th-century thinking, are missing what is going on. It is time for all of us to step up, rethink the dawn of what may be, frankly, a new era in American life."
"This is a wake-up moment for the American power establishment," he added, comparing establishment figures lamenting Sanders' rise to “out of touch aristocrats in a dying aristocracy."
MSNBC keeps piling on:
It wasn’t just Matthews.
MSNBC host Joy Reid accused Sanders, who vowed that the Democratic establishment would not stop him, of "essentially sort of kicking to the curb 65 million people who voted for Hillary Clinton, Obama Democrats, people who consider themselves lifelong Democrats."
"No one is as hungry, angry, enraged, and determined as Sanders voters," she added. "Democrats need to sober up and figure out what the hell they are going to do about that."
Host Nicolle Wallace dismissed Sanders supporters as a “squeaky, angry minority.”
The network hosted strategist James Carville, who argued that Sanders’ claim that he will increase turnout is “stupid” and the equivalent of “climate-denying.”
A recent analysis found that Sanders "received not only the least total coverage (less than one-third of Biden's)" on the network, "but the most negative."
Sanders campaign manager Faiz Shakir credited CNN with trying to "diversity their voices" and said even Fox News has been "more fair than MSNBC."
"You can feel the disdain they have for Bernie Sanders's supporters," he said. "It's a condescending attitude: 'Oh, they must not be that intelligent. They're being deluded. They're being conned. They're all crazy Twitter bots.' My view is that there's a bit of detachment from MSNBC and the people who this campaign gets support from. It feels like they're covering progressives from an elitist perspective."
