Tucker Carlson: Don Lemon reflects the growing darkness of American liberalism
Fox News host Tucker Carlson reflects on Don Lemon's controversial comments on 'Tucker Carlson Tonight.'
Well, it looks like Don Lemon's long television career is finally over. Mr. Lemon has been sentenced by the High Court of Wokeness to a term in the H.R. gulag. He'll undergo a procedure called sensitivity training, which is always the first step to being disappeared, or in his case, to doing late night infomercials on BET. Say goodbye to Don Lemon.
His colleagues at CNN are adamant they don't want him back ever on moral grounds. So, that's it. And we'll admit to feeling some sadness at this news. The prospect of cable without Don Lemon isn't quite as bright as we'd imagined.
As the tide of dullness and uniformity sweeps over American culture, as everything becomes the Apple Store, there was a certain joy in watching his unpredictable low I.Q. zaniness. Let's see – we're a conventional news anchor working for a conventional news-based news network and a Malaysian air flight disappeared over the Pacific. You would immediately think hijacking or mechanical failure. Not Don Lemon. Only he had the childlike creativity to imagine the plane had been swallowed by a black hole, in case you've forgotten that legendary moment.
DON LEMON: Whether it was hijacking or terrorism or mechanical failure or pilot error, but what if it was something fully that we don't really understand? A lot of people have been asking about that, about black holes and on and on and on and also referencing The Twilight Zone, which is a very similar plot. That's what people are saying. I know it's preposterous, but is it preposterous, do you think?
Is it preposterous? Mock that clip, if you will, but there was a kind of demented genius on display there, and we appreciated it.
Now it's over. But the story of Don Lemon is more than about one man's dead career. It is, in fact, a fascinating tale that illustrates the growing darkness of American liberalism, something that affects all of us. Whatever else he was, Don Lemon was no ideologue. He'd never met a fixed belief. Don Lemon was a careerist. He was a man who rose in television by parroting the instructions of his bosses, who received their instructions from the Democratic Party. And in that way, Don Lemon is the perfect measure of how the nation is changing and where it's going.
During the Obama years, when we were all told the country might finally move past our divisive racial history, Don Lemon reflected the current trend. At one point, he even attempted one of those authentic conversations about race we were always being encouraged to have. Here it is.
CNN host Don Lemon suggests Nikki Haley is past her prime on Thursday, February 16, 2023. (Screenshot/CNN/CNNThisMorning)
DON LEMON: Black people, if you really want to fix the problem, here's just five things that you should think about doing. Here's number five: Pull up your pants. Some people, a lot of them Black, gave me flak for saying that recently on "The Wendy Williams Show." I hosted a special on the N-word, suggesting that Black people stop using it and that entertainers stop deluding yourselves or themselves and others that you're somehow taking the word back. Now, number three, respect where you live. Start small by not dropping trash littering in your own communities. Number two, finish school. You want to break the cycle of poverty? Stop telling kids are acting White because they go to school or they speak proper English and number one, and probably the most important, just because you can have a baby, it doesn't mean you should.
So, stop littering, show respect, go to school because the rules apply to everybody, no matter what they look like. It's impossible to imagine the Don Lemon of today – it's impossible to imagine anyone of today – speaking like that because times have so completely changed and was the arrival of Donald Trump that upended the rules. During the Trump era, Don Lemon bosses instructed him to shift gears radically and attack middle-class White Americans as the problem because middle class White Americans were Donald Trump's electoral base. That was the point of that. So, Don Lemon dutifully did. Watch.
LEMON: I think you're letting them off easy. I don't believe that it's just because they think Joe Biden would be worse. I think it's because they like it. They like the racism. They like the misogyny. They like all of it because if they didn't, they wouldn't support him. If you are on that side, you need to think about the side you're on. I'm never on the side of the Klan. I am never – principled people, conservative or liberal – never on the Klan side, principled people conservative or liberal, never on the Nazi side
LEMON: What does it say about you that no matter what, no matter what, you continue to make excuses for this man, for his vile behavior, this sort of vile behavior? Doesn't that make you just as bad, if not worse than him?
DON LEMON TAKING A 'HOLIDAY,' WILL RETURN ON AIR DEPENDING ON 'WHERE HIS HEAD IS AT:' CNN INSIDER
We used to call the middle-class "Americans." Now we call them "the Klan" because politics. So, Don Lemon instantly understood what everyone in the media now understands, which is that there's nothing you can't say about middle-class White Americans. They are core of the Republican Party, so no slander is too extreme. There are no limits to how much you're allowed to hate them. Go crazy.
Joe Biden himself just accused middle-class, White America of wanting to kill Black people merely for being Black. They're murderers, explained the president of the United States.
PRESIDENT BIDEN: Pure terror to systematically undermine hard fought civil rights. Innocent men, women, children hung by a noose from trees, bodies burned, drowned, castrated, lynched for simply being Black. Nothing more. With White crowds, White families gathered to celebrate the spectacle, taking pictures of the bodies and mailing them postcards. Hard to believe that's what was done and some people still want to do that.
Don Lemon saw all this and much, much more like it and he thought he understood the new rules. White Republicans are bad, attack them relentlessly. But because nuance has never been his strength, Mr. Lemon missed one essential distinction. White middle-class voters are bad because they comprise the majority of the Republican electorate, but White elites are good. They're Nancy Pelosi. They're on our side and upper income, college educated, liberal White women are best of all, they are the Democratic base. See how that works? Both groups are White, but one of them is evil and one of them is holy.
Now, in political terms, that distinction makes sense, but it was way too subtle for Don Lemon, went right over his head. And that leads us to the final fateful day of his television career last week when he dared to criticize Nikki Haley. Watch.
DON LEMON: I think it's a wrong road to go down. She says people, you know, politicians are something and not in their prime. Nikki Haley isn't in her prime. Sorry. When a woman is considered to be in a prime is in her twenties and thirties and maybe forties. That's not according to me.
POPPY HARLOW: Prime for what?
DON LEMON: It depends. I mean, it's just like prime. If you look it up, if you look, if you Google "when is a woman in her prime?" it'll say twenties, thirties and forties.
Oh, he stepped in it. But to be fair to Don Lemon, Nikki Haley seemed like perfectly fair game. She's a Republican presidential candidate, so savage her for all you want. Oh, but no, because, in fact, in all the ways that matter, Nikki Haley is a member in good standing of the most protected class of all: upper income, liberal White ladies with fashionable political views. She may be running to be the Republican nominee, but she is fundamentally indistinguishable from the neo liberal donor base of the Democratic Party.
Nikki Haley believes in collective racial guilt. She thinks Ukraine's borders are more important than our own, far more important. She believes identity politics is our future. Vote for me because I'm a woman, she says. That's her pitch.
Don Lemon should have caught this, but he missed it completely. He didn't get it and so he stepped in his final bear trap. Don Lemon may be Black, but that doesn't mean he's allowed to criticize Nikki Haley. Sorry.
If it's a choice between a Black man and a liberal White lady, the Democratic Party will drop the Black guy every single time. Who makes up a bigger proportion of the American electorate, the Don Lemons or the Nikki Haleys? It's not a close call. Shut up, Black guy. How dare you criticize girl power? Pretend that biology is real. You're fired. That's what happened to Don Lemon.
So, once again, the revolution eats one of its own. A faithful servant of the Democratic Party is crushed by its remorseless gears.
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CNN's Don Lemon speaks at Harvard University Kennedy School of Government Institute of Politics in a program titled "Race, Media and Politics" on February 22, 2019 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (Photo by Paul Marotta/Getty Images)
This is the unsentimental math of identity politics. Not all groups are created equal. Know your place. Violate the rules of the hierarchy of the caste system and you die. Nikki Haley understands that. Don Lemon doesn't, and now he's heading off to do infomercials.
But the real question is, where does this leave the rest of us? Well, at a dead end, which is what identity politics is, it's the ultimate national cul-de-sac. Identity politics is the precise inversion of the American idea: out of many, one. That becomes "out of one, many." Results? Balkanization, atomization, racial strife, hatred, division and craziness. In the end, Rwanda.
No country can survive identity politics. We know that. We have to stop it, but how do we stop it? Maybe by remembering that our nation is actually about something bigger and by restating clearly and out loud the principles that bind us to one another. What, in other words, do we have in common? That's a real question. In fact, that's a question we can't avoid if we want to continue.
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