CNN’s Abby Phillip shut down a conservative pundit’s complaints about name-calling with a supercut of President Trump calling his opponents “communists” and “fascists.”
MAGA radio host Ben Ferguson tore into Gavin Newsom on Wednesday’s Newsnight, accusing him of stoking division by branding the Trump administration “authoritarians” and “fascists” in response to this week’s shooting at an ICE facility.
“After the assassination of my friend Charlie Kirk, and after multiple attacks on ICE facilities, I would hope that leaders in the Democratic Party, and one of those leaders is Gavin Newsom, would know better than to go on TV and say that ICE agents are the bad guys and that they’re authoritarian and then expect that no one’s going to listen to what he’s saying or respond to it,” Ferguson said.
“Let me just ask you a question about that, OK?” Phillip responded. “Because I think at the heart of so much of this is your insistence that using certain words leads to violence. Is that what you’re saying?”
Ferguson agreed with the host. “Calling people fascists and Nazis and authoritarian? Yeah,” he added.
Phillip then played a series of clips of Trump referring to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as “radical left communist marxist fascists.”
“She’s a Marxist. She’s a fascist,” Trump said in one of the clips, while another saw him frame the upcoming election as a choice between “communism and freedom.”
This language incites violence and terrorism. https://t.co/iUJRepECl2
— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) September 24, 2025
Phillip told Ferguson, “Are you so committed to this idea that we should just ban certain words from the lexicon? ‘Authoritarian,’ ‘fascist,’ ‘Nazi,’ ‘communist;’ should we just ban them because they’re all leading to violence, or is it just that it’s not OK when your political opponents use them?”
Ferruson demurred in his response. “When you demonize law enforcement to the point where what is happening is becoming regular against ICE agents because it’s coming from people like Gavin Newsom, we should know that there is a correlation there,” he told the host.
But despite his concessions, Phillip continued to point out the hypocrisy in the pundit’s statement. “To a degree, I take your point about demonization, I think generally, but I’m asking you about your insistence that certain words that are being used by your political opponents should be off limits. If that is your contention, then I think lay that on the table and let’s make that clear and let’s apply it to everybody.”
The CNN panel followed backlash from conservatives after Newsom referred to ICE as the president’s “private domestic army” and accused the Trump administration of “authoritarian tendencies,” remarks made in the wake of this week’s shooting at an ICE facilitythat left three people dead.
In response, White House aide Stephen Miller accused Newsom of inciting “violence and terrorism” with his remarks.
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