He had to desecrate a house of worship to do it, but has-been “journalist” Don Lemon is relevant again.
Lemon, the disgraced former CNN host who makes Jim Acosta sound semi-sane, “covered” the anti-ICE mob that stormed into St. Paul’s Cities Church during services Sunday. Churchgoers were treated to a despicable show by the left’s protest machine, with radicals screaming “ICE out!” and “Justice for Renee Good,” as stunned congregants watched the invasion of their house of God.
Why the bedlam? The psychos allege one of the church’s pastors, David Easterwood, is the acting Immigration & Customs Enforcement director in St. Paul. So they grabbed their torches and pitchforks and played havoc on the church.
‘This is Shameful’
Petulant Lemon, whom Joseph Massey described as “the most deranged white liberal woman in Minneapolis,” just happened to be in the neighborhood when the disturbance began, or so he claims.
“Why are you not with the protesters? Why are you not standing up for the Latino and Somali communities?” a bearded man in a longshoreman’s hat and hatred in his eyes screamed at an old parishioner, the livestreamed video shows. “This is the house of the devil,” the creepy leftist yelled, perhaps deranged enough to believe that he was playing out the role of Jesus driving out the merchants and the money lenders from the temple. If so, he was very wrong.
There was plenty of indignation from the mob, none of it righteous. The agitators shut down church services to protest the enforcement of U.S. immigration laws.
And Lemon was there to bombard church officials with accusation-stained questions, sticking his tiny microphone in the faces of church members.
“What do you think of this?” Lemon smugly asked the church’s lead pastor, Jonathan Parnell, who delivered an answer that sums up today’s American left.
“I mean this is unacceptable. This is shameful. It’s shameful to interrupt a public gathering of Christians in worship,” Parnell said. The pastor’s words might just prove to be a rallying cry for reasonable voters in this year’s midterm elections.
The radical stunt was widely denounced. Not necessarily by Minnesota Democrats and their fellow leftists around the country, but by sane people who saw the anti-ICE chorus’ latest performance as a bridge too far.
‘You’re the Biggest Name’
But Lemon, who burned his bridge at CNN in 2023 and has been toiling in the shadow of his own obscurity, is relevant again. At least for the moment. And he’s loving every minute of it.
Always the attention whore, Lemon is now the talk of the town. He’s definitely drawn attention from the Justice Department. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon on Monday said the DOJ will “pursue charges,” singling out Lemon whose claims of being an independent “journalist” is one of his biggest crimes.
“Don Lemon himself has come out and said he knew exactly what was going to happen inside that facility,” Dhillon said on The Benny Show. “He went into the facility, and then he began — quote, unquote — ‘committing journalism,’ as if that’s sort of a shield from being a part, an embedded part, of a criminal conspiracy. It isn’t.”
The jury is still out on whether a DOJ with a lackluster record over the first year of Trump 2.0 will do more than launch investigations, hold press conferences and fire out tweets.
Lemon has backpeddled on previous claims of his involvement in the protest, telling The New York Post that he had no affiliation with the group that organized it.
“I didn’t even know they were going to this church until we followed them. We were there chronicling protests,” Lemon claimed, sounding as authentic as his idea of Christianity.
Ever eager to play the race card, the liberal provocateur, insisted that his critics are racists and homophobes for suggesting that his actions were reprehensible. The Jussie Smollett of media told TDS-suffering podcast host Jennifer Welch that church leaders in particular who have criticized him are “entitled, and that entitlement comes from a supremacy, a White supremacy.”
Lemon just can’t understand why he has become the “face” of the outrage.
“I said, ‘How did I become the face of this?’ And my producer said, ‘Don, you’re a gay, Black man in America and you have a platform, and you’re the biggest name. Of course, you’re going to be the person that they single out, and they’re going to make the headline because it plays to their base. And their base is full of racist, bigoted homophobes,’” Lemon said.
Wow! Desecration, denial, and delusion. Don is a triple threat.
Manufactured Outrage
Perhaps most audacious is Lemon’s assertion that it’s the people he and his BLM buddies terrorized who are “manufacturing outrage.” Manufactured outrage is exactly what Sunday’s storming of Cities Church was all about, as is the left’s martyr-making of Renee Good, a fellow ICE-hating traveler who was fatally shot after she appears to have struck and injured an ICE agent with her vehicle.
As columnist Chris Bray writes, the chaos in Minneapolis is performative — over and over again. And Lemon is nothing if not a performer.
“The footage almost always captures people taking footage. Nearly everyone having spontaneous eruptions of righteous rage has their phones out recording their descent into an emotional state of horror and fury. ’I’m going to sob uncontrollably as soon as I hit this ‘record’ button.’ Reminder of what this same phenomenon looked like in 2020, with a screen being recorded on a screen…”, Bray recently wrote in a column on his Substack, Tell Me How This Ends.
How it should end is with Don Lemon and his church-terrorizing friends facing charges on the FACE Act (It’s not just to protect abortion factories), enhanced under the Ku Klux Klan Act for their assaults on the civil liberties of the members of Cities Church.
Of course, doing so would keep Lemon in the news — which is exactly where the has-been, attention whore wants to be.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
