Hours after CNN fired pro-Trump commentator Jeffrey Lord for mocking Nazis and fascists with a “Sieg Heil” tweet, White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon reportedly called Lord to encourage him to “keep fighting” on what Lord said would be his “no apologies tour.”

As Breitbart News reported, “CNN—the network that allowed anchor Brooke Baldwin to falsely smear Breitbart News as the “most prominent platform” for the ‘Nazi salute’ and enabled New York Times columnist Charles Blow just a few weeks ago to falsely defame Breitbart News as the home of ‘Neo-Nazism’”—purged Lord for his clearly sarcastic tweet “directed at a Media Matters activist who is trying remove Sean Hannity from the airwaves and has called for Lord’s firing in the past.”

Lord was speaking to a Pennlive.com reporter on Thursday evening when Bannon called him.

“It’s Stephen K. Bannon,” Lord reportedly told the reporter while reading his caller ID. “I have to take this.”

Lord reportedly “took the call in his mother’s” living room before moving to his home office. He told Bannon that there was a reporter in the room and would not comment on what Bannon told him.

Lord told the reporter that Thursday was “was the first day of my non-apology tour.”

Lord explained to Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow on Friday’s Breitbart News Daily on Sirius XM Patriot channel 125 the background between him and the Media Matters activist that targeted Lord, who had written an American Spectator column denouncing the left-wing organization’s campaigns to pull conservatives like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh off the airwaves.

“I genuinely find this amazing. I mean, this was such an obvious joke, and they say, ‘Well, you’re not supposed to joke about these things.’ First of all, I was mocking these people. As people in your audience would know, if they’re familiar with American culture, which I know they are, everybody from Charlie Chaplin’s ‘Great Dictator’ back in 1940 in which he mocked Adolph Hitler all the way up to the Blues Brothers with Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi, in which they mocked Nazis, mocking Nazis is a good place to be,'” he said.

Lord tweeted “Sieg Heil” back at the Media Matters activist who had obviously read Lord’s article because he was hectoring Lord about piece.

“I, of course, took the side of the First Amendment. I printed the text of the First Amendment, and then I went into fascism and compared them to the Ministry of Popular Culture, which was a Mussolini invention, which basically decided what could and could not be published or broadcast in the day, in the 1930s. That in itself, as I learned in doing my research, was modeled after the Third Reich and their Bureau of Propaganda or whatever that Joseph Goebbels ran,” Lord said of his article. “So I wrote this in the column, and tongue in cheek, I rewrote the First Amendment as Media Matters would like to see it. At the end of it, I said the American Spectator couldn’t confirm whether it was true that they said, ‘Sieg Heil’ in their draft amendment.”

As Breitbart News reported, an examination of Lord’s twitter feed right after he “Sieg Heil” tweet clearly shows that Lord was indeed mocking the “Media Matters Fascists.”

“It was pointed out to me that there are all kinds of people that get in these situations, and the first thing that they do is issue some meager apology and all that. Well, that’s not coming from me. I know exactly what I was doing,” he said.

Lord added that he would have tweeted the same thing had he known it would have gotten him fired.

“Had I known that this would happen, I’d have done it again,” he said on Breitbart News Daily. “This is very much about free speech. This is very much about a very serious issue. If this were just me in isolation, it would be one thing. But it isn’t me in isolation. They can come after somebody else and somebody else and somebody else. That’s what their intention is at Media Matters.”

Lord emphasized that he will continue to fight “bullies” who try to shut down free speech.

“If you don’t stand up and fight the bullies, they’re going to win, and there is far too much at stake here to do that, so I have every intention of going on with this fight,” he said.

Lord’s attempt at humor was so obvious to anyone with half a brain that even anti-Trump left-wing journalists took Lord’s side:

Is there any other possible interpretation here ? The enforced humorlessness of these situations is absurd. https://t.co/2QBgGOGktD — Ben Smith (@BuzzFeedBen) August 10, 2017

It was obviously an attempt at humor. Fire the guy for legit reasons? Fine. Not this. https://t.co/lGFWodgc8K — Josh Greenman (@joshgreenman) August 11, 2017

In the meantime, Lord will have more time to spend with his ailing mother.

“My mom just turned 98. She can’t walk, and as happens with people her age, she sort of cruises in and out of dementia, so I use the Visiting Angels when I go off on these CNN jaunts. CNN would pick me up at 2:00 in the afternoon, take me the three hours into New York. I would do the shows and then get in the car and come back and get back here around 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning,” Lord told Marlow on Breitbart News Daily. “For people in your audience that are familiar with dealing with seniors and senior care, you know routine and stabilization is important. I’m part of her routine here, and I would make it a point to get back and do it. So I have some time off now, and I will be at home,”