A vintage clip of CNN anchor Don Lemon telling black people to act civilized and disregard “street culture” has the woke pundit’s detractors’ jaws on the floor, wondering what happened to him over the intervening seven years.
In the 2013 clip, Lemon praises Fox News host Bill O’Reilly as the Republican pundit decries the “disintegration of the African-American family,” even arguing O’Reilly “doesn’t go far enough” when he denounces “street culture.” The video was posted to social media by “Panda Tribune” on Wednesday and quickly circulated among conservatives, who had a hard time reconciling this Lemon with his painfully-PC modern-day counterpart.
Ordering black people to “pull up [their] pants,” stop using “the n-word” and littering, “finish school,” and wait until they’re married to reproduce, the CNN personality of seven years ago comes off as borderline unrecognizable to those who know him as the ultra-woke face of the “Orange Man Bad” network.
Also on rt.com CNN’s Don Lemon clashes with actor Terry Crews: Is BLM about police brutality, or problems in the black community?Fox News host Tucker Carlson aired the segment on his show Wednesday night, marveling that if Lemon or one of his colleagues came out with those lines in 2020, “that would be their last live broadcast ever - they’d be fired immediately.”
Glenn Beck’s The Blaze concurred, asking “what are the chances 2020 Don Lemon would cancel 2013 Don Lemon?”
Many on the right wondered what had happened to 2013’s Lemon, whom one user called “an uplifting news voice for positive change” turned “fear mongering race baiting outrage culture grifter”…
…or even the Lemon of 2014, who’d said he was “tired” of talking about race - but just this week debuted a podcast called “Silence is Not an Option” in which he talks about nothing else.
Many blamed Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Others expected his cancellation to arrive at any moment.
Earlier this week, Lemon suggested Mount Rushmore could be “fixed” by chiseling former President Barack Obama next to founding fathers George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, Civil War liberator Abraham Lincoln, and trust-buster Theodore Roosevelt on the iconic mountainside monument.
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