Don Lemon is one of the many anchors on CNN for whom continued employment seems increasingly difficult to understand. After all, given that the network’s slogans include “The most trusted name in news,” “Facts first,” and “The worldwide leader in news,” Don Lemon’s “reporting” seems to fly in the face of these goals.
Here are examples from just the last few days alone in which Don Lemon proves himself to be an unprofessional, unserious commentator masquerading as a news anchor. If the legacy media actually values truth, and CNN’s proud slogans are grounded in reality, it’s impossible to justify Lemon’s continued presence on our airwaves.
If you voted for Trump, you’re with the Klan and the Capitol Hill rioters.
In one of his many segments with fellow pseudo-intellectual Chris Cuomo, Don Lemon argued that voting for Trump meant that you were on the side of the Klan, Nazis, and those that “treat their fellow Americans as ‘less than.’”
CNN's @DonLemon: If you voted for Trump, you're with the Klan & the Capitol Hill rioters pic.twitter.com/xDi7zQwt9O
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) January 14, 2021
This, itself, is an inflammatory, insulting, and ignorant statement. To boil down the entire political spectrum into “the side of the Klan and Nazis” and everyone else is simply an attempt to dilute it down to the “good and the bad,” with Don Lemon’s side being the good by default. It’s unimportant to Don Lemon that the vast majority of true conservatives vocally reject the Klan, Nazis, white supremacists, and other members of the far-right or alt-right factions. Lemon, a supposedly serious journalist, doesn’t care about “the facts.”
Not only that, Lemon’s entire argument is predicated on treating his fellow Americans as “less than,” by drawing a thick ideological line which places 75 million Americans into his “other” category.
He is the biggest snowflake of them all! Shut up!
After an — admittedly amusing — claim by a guest on another network that Trump was the most masculine president in history, Don Lemon dedicated a segment on his “serious” and “objective” network show to provide multiple intelligent, thoughtful, and dispassionate counter-arguments, including “c’mon man,” “shut up, shut up,” and a handful of delightful impressions.
How did I miss this?! Damnit!! Just going HAM pic.twitter.com/oIcJAiai3K
— Leslie Jones 🦋 (@Lesdoggg) January 13, 2021
CNN. “Facts first.”
You can’t compare BLM riots to the Capitol building
In another high-level conversation between Lemon and Cuomo, they discussed whether you can even compare the US Capitol building riots in Washington, D.C., on January 6th to the months of BLM and Antifa riots last summer. Lemon, who was happy to justify and distract from the riots last year, doubled down on his position, saying that he was “sick of people comparing. You can’t compare what happened this summer to what happened at the Capitol. It’s two different things.”
“One is built on people, on racial justice, on criminal justice, right, on reform, on police not beating up — or police treating people of color differently than they do whites. Okay? That is not a lie. Those are facts. Go look at them. What happened at the Capitol was built on a lie perpetrated by the president and the people who support him,” he continued. “So, just on that one merit, if you want to call it, it’s not comparable. That things are not comparable. So they should not be doing it. And stop this whataboutism.”
Perhaps Lemon should follow his own advice and “go look at” the facts. Lemon, an anchor on a network which supposedly prides itself on truth, promulgated the continued lie that racist treatment is systemic in law enforcement. Not only that, which is disqualifying in itself if you care about reality, he used his position as — again, a supposedly objective journalist — to justify one riot while editorializing the other as being unquestionably perpetrated by his ideological enemies. The facts, despite his claim, simply don’t matter.
Ian Haworth is an Editor and Writer for The Daily Wire. Follow him on Twitter at @ighaworth.
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.