Don Lemon: T-Shirt Hero
Don Lemon personifies America’s establishment media and our Left in general. They bought the T-shirt, so they did their part and imagined they mounted the barricades. However, at the first hint of trouble, they hide behind the legal system they flout.
Don Lemon joined with a group of agitators to storm into a St. Paul church during services because they mistakenly believed a minister in the church was involved with ICE (the person the agitators incorrectly intended to target was also not conducting the service they disrupted). They went to harass and to provoke. In doing so, they made the entire congregation collateral damage — oh well, these were mere casualties of the agitators’ conscience.
The agitators went with cameras and microphones in hand to record the reaction their “gottcha” moment got. The most memorable moments of their “heroic” assault were of terrified children crying, churchgoers being driven from their church, and Lemon lecturing the targeted.
Throughout their imagined storming of the Bastille, the antagonists preened and postured in front of the cameras, pretending that there was a higher calling to their basest of actions: Inflicting their hatred’s self-gratification on the innocent. Throughout it, there was Don Lemon, the most public prop of this see-through assault.
Of course, the whole thing was planned and staged — performance theater worthy of Jussie Smollett. It was a work, a fraud through and through; an aggressive confrontation hiding itself behind the trappings of “interviewing” those it was confronting.
He raced to the revolution but now runs from the results.
When what should have happened immediately — the arrest of these harassers — finally happened days later, Don Lemon ran for cover. He tapped out and copped out simultaneously: He is seeking to hide behind the façade that his role in the church storming was that of a journalist and worthy of First Amendment protection.
Of course, Don Lemon is not a journalist. He was fired by CNN in 2023. Even at CNN, Lemon was not a journalist, which is one of the reasons why they fired him. Nor was he acting as a journalist in the St. Paul church storming.
Desperate for the attention he no longer receives, he found this vehicle for his ego. It worked too, at least to some extent. It got him on the “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” show, where the two got to share their martyr complexes before a dwindling audience. And it has gotten him all the attention he can no longer get with a paid gig.
During Lemon’s Fallon segment, he came up with what his faux victimhood constituted. Said Lemon: “They want to embarrass you.” Embarrassment is the cross that Lemon claims to bear.
Even in the pursuit of his claim to this mildest of suffering, Lemon is wrong.
First, what the authorities were doing, belatedly, was trying to enforce the law — something Lemon and many of his fellow anti-ICE protestors have been flouting for some time in Minneapolis. Second, when it comes to embarrassment, the authorities didn’t need to do this because Lemon had already handled that job for them. No one could embarrass Lemon more than he had already done (and continues to do). Finally, embarrassment can only occur if you have something Don Lemon doesn’t have: a sense of shame.
When the authorities came for Don, he could have taken the principled path, claimed he was “protesting,” and simply taken his medicine — as anodyne as we know it will be from a Minneapolis legal system long-known for its leniency. True revolutionaries, the kind that Lemon is posturing to be, have not shied away from the label and willingly accepted the consequences. It would have been an “I am Spartacus” moment, one you would have disagreed with, but at least acknowledged as honest.
However, at the first gentle squeeze, this bitter Lemon was drained of his few drops of principle. Suddenly, he is a journalist; Lemon stood for his close-up to scream, “I’m not Spartacus!”
Conscious without consequences. He opted for victim-lite, embarrassment, not imprisonment, the Band-Aid of courage instead of the red badge.
Lemon’s performance epitomizes the virtue signalers of the Left. They are living bumper stickers of indignation, yard signs of sanctimony, lapel pins of principle, a multicolored flag, and a T-shirt of defiance. They are in-your-face, as long as it is safe, but “I know my rights” at the first sign of a fight.
These faux revolutionaries strike the pose, cop the attitude, mouth the platitudes, and then run from the confrontation they always intended to create. They treat the Constitution like a human shield, mocking what they would negate in an instant if given the chance.
Like the “limousine liberals” of yore, who rode up to their cause and then rode back to their elitism, today’s self-styled “progressives” are “EV extremists”: They have an even more limited range. They talk the talk but ride the walk. They pretend that they have done their part by playing a part: Donning Che’s beret while running from his bullet.
Lemon did what they all do. He raced to the revolution but now runs from the results. Sanctimony without sacrifice. They want to be lionized as martyrs without facing the lions. After all, they are already heroes: Can’t you see? My T-shirt says so, right on the front.
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J.T. Young is the author of the recent book, Unprecedented Assault: How Big Government Unleashed America’s Socialist Left, from RealClear Publishing. Follow him on Substack.