Blitzkrieg Bernie? Sanders’ victory in Nevada like NAZI invasion of France – MSNBC’s Chris Matthews

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews has compared Bernie Sanders’ win in the Nevada caucuses to Adolf Hitler’s WWII takeover of France. As Sanders pulls ahead of the pack, the media has labeled him a nazi, a communist, and a Russian stooge.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders declared a resounding victory in Saturday’s Nevada caucuses, the third major showdown of the primary season. With some results still outstanding on Sunday morning, Sanders has won just over 46 percent of the vote, more than doubling the score of former Vice President Joe Biden, currently in second place with 19 percent.

After a strong showing in Iowa and victory in New Hampshire, the win in Nevada cements Sanders’ status as frontrunner, widening his lead over centrist candidates like Biden and Pete Buttigieg.

Rather than recognizing the campaign outreach and swell of grassroots support that propelled the socialist senator into first place, MSNBC host Chris Matthews saw Sanders’ success as reminiscent of the Nazi invasion of France in 1940.

“It’s a little late to stop him,” Matthews said on Saturday night. “I was reading last night about the fall of France in the summer of 1940,” he continued. 

“And the general, Reynaud, calls up Churchill and says, ‘It’s over.’ And Churchill says, ‘How can that be? You’ve got the greatest army in Europe. How can it be over?’ He said, ‘It’s over.’ So I had that suppressed feeling.”

The condemnation from progressives was swift and hard. “Chris Matthews just compared Bernie Sanders, a Jewish man whose relatives were killed by the Nazis, to the Nazi army,” one commenter wrote. “He should be fired immediately.”

Comparing a surge of left-wing votes to actual panzer columns overrunning the Maginot Line might seem like a ludicrous reach, but Matthews isn’t the only mainstream media talking head to draw Nazi analogies about Sanders, a Jewish descendent of Holocaust victims.

A week earlier, MSNBC’s Chuck Todd read out a passage calling Sanders’ vocal army of online supporters a “digital brownshirt brigade” – a reference to the Nazi Sturmabteilung paramilitaries who terrorized Jews, communists, and trade unionists during the early years of Hitler’s rule.

To supporters of President Donald Trump, Nazi comparisons from the mainstream media are nothing new – they’ve been listening to cliched Hitler references for four years now. However, the establishment media seems to have gone all in as of late to sink Sanders’ candidacy, giving the socialist upstart a taste of the same tactics they’ve deployed against Trump time and time again.

As newspapers called him a “left-wing version of Trump,” Democratic strategist James Carville branded Sanders a “communist,” whose nomination would spell the “end of days” for the Democratic Party. That’s the same James Carville who was given 10 minutes of airtime on MSNBC on Saturday to expound his theory that Russian President Vladimir Putin is “doing everything he can to help Trump, including trying to get Bernie Sanders the nomination.”

The accusation of ‘Russian meddling’ was made by the Washington Post on Friday, one day before Nevadan Democrats cast their caucus votes. Citing anonymous “people familiar with the matter,” the Post warned of a Russian effort to assist the Sanders campaign, without describing “what form that Russian assistance has taken.” 

The “bombshell” report angered Sanders’ supporters and drew derision from Trump himself, who blasted the “fake news media” for adding “Crazy Bernie to the list of Russian Sympathizers.” 

“It’s all rigged, again, against Crazy Bernie Sanders,” Trump tweeted on Friday.

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