On Tuesday afternoon, White House press secretary Sean Spicer stepped in some shit when he appeared to imply that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was worse than Hitler. He also stated, inaccurately, that Hitler never used chemical weapons, either during WWII or against his own people. What he probably meant (although, after four separate clarifications in a single hour, it was somehow still unclear) was that Hitler didn't use them on the battlefield. Either way, Spicer was the No. 1 trending topic on Twitter for several hours.
"We didn’t use chemical weapons in World War II. You know, you had someone as despicable as Hitler who didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons," Spicer said. "So you have to, if you are Russia, ask yourself: Is this a country and a regime that you want to align yourself with?”
As you learned in social studies, or maybe while watching The History Channel before it totally lost its shit and started airing shows about aliens making contact with ancient civilizations, Hitler oversaw a number of concentration/extermination camps where millions of Jews, Slavs, Roma, dissidents, people with disabilities, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, and others were gassed to death.
Later on Spicer was asked to clarify his remarks, and maintained there was a difference between Hitler's and Assad's usage of poisonous gases. "I think when you come to sarin gas, [Hitler] was not using the gas on his own people the same way that Assad is doing," Spicer stated. The press secretary then mentioned "Holocaust centers," by which he almost certainly meant Nazi death camps. That didn't go over well with people either, and it also began its own Twitter trend.
After the briefing, Spicer attempted to fix things with a statement, saying:
“In no way was I trying to lessen the horrendous nature of the Holocaust. I was trying to draw a distinction of the tactic of using airplanes to drop chemical weapons on population centers. Any attack on innocent people is reprehensible and inexcusable.”
Spicer's comments sparked outrage, which you're free to point out isn't unusual.
The Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect (not an organization you'd want to criticize any Holocaust-related statement you might make) called for Spicer to be fired:
