Stephen Colbert’s epically long farewell tour is (mercifully) coming to a close, which has led to absurd whining from the likes of Jimmy Kimmel, Jon Stewart, Bruce Springsteen, OG Late Show host David Letterman, and even Colbert himself.
But Don Lemon decided to enter the chat this week with a lengthy Substack post that reframed the entire cancellation saga as a story about… himself. Lemon recounted – in painstaking detail – his own cycle of failing up at CNN before eventually being fired, while also calling out the white male executive who has a connection to both him and Colbert.
Confused? You’re not alone. On Thursday’s show, Megyn was joined by Stu Burguiere, host of Predictable with Stu, to try to make sense of Lemon’s post and break down what actually led to his cable news demise.
Lemon’s Lies
In a post titled “Don’t Cry for Stephen Colbert. Cry for the First Amendment,” Lemon asserts that both late-night television and the First Amendment are dying and the blame belongs to white men who “call themselves patriots.”
According to Lemon, Colbert’s previous shtick mocking conservative broadcasters on The Colbert Report made him the “canary in the coal mine.” Who else is a canary in the coal mine? None other than Lemon himself – at least as he tells it.
The former CNN primetime host recounted his experience as an “independent journalist” covering the anti-ICE agitators who stormed Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, in January. Weeks later, Lemon’s time reporting on the glitz and glamour of the Grammys was cut short when he was arrested and charged with two federal crimes.
The first, conspiracy against rights, also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, is a felony. He was also charged with violating the FACE Act, which makes it a crime to “by force or threat of force or by physical obstruction, intentionally injures, intimidates or interferes with or attempts to injure, intimidate or interfere with any person lawfully exercising or seeking to exercise the First Amendment right of religious freedom at a place of religious worship.”
“Shortly after, I appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live. Jimmy gave me a platform when a lot of people were watching to see who would. I told him I was doing okay. I told him I wasn’t going to let them steal my joy. And I meant it. But I also said this is very serious. Because it is,” Lemon recalled. “And I said something else that night that I keep coming back to. I was the canary in the coal mine. Not just for what happened to me personally, but for what was coming for all of us.”
All About Race
And then things really went off the rails. Lemon claimed that he lost his corporate media job because “the networks didn’t like me asking conservatives hard questions. CNN didn’t like the mirror I was holding up every night. So they pushed me out. And I thought: if it happened to me it will happen to others. It will trickle down. Or up. Depending on how you look at it.”
“Now,” Lemon claimed, “it has trickled all the way to late night television.”
Lemon acknowledged that Colbert’s show was losing CBS a lot of money, but he rejected the premise that the financials had anything to do with his cancellation. “The cancellation was announced two days after Colbert publicly criticized Trump’s settlement with Paramount, CBS’s parent company, over a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris,” he wrote. “Colbert called himself, on air, ‘a martyr of free speech.’ He was not performing. He believed it. And I believe him.”
In a leap that only makes sense in Lemon’s mind, the allegedly politically motivated decision CBS made is also somehow tied to… racism. He wrote:
“The world that produced The Late Show, the world of legacy media, cable news, and network television, has long had a problem nobody wanted to name out loud. It is a world that has been extraordinarily good to a very specific kind of person. White men who fail spectacularly and are promoted for it. White men who make catastrophic decisions and are handed bigger offices for it. White men who are visibly, demonstrably unqualified and are given more power anyway. I have watched it for thirty years. I have been managed by it. I have been undone by it.”
Lemon then took a *very* thinly veiled swipe at Chris Licht, who was the executive producer of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert before becoming CEO of CNN (he has since left the role). It was during Licht’s tenure that Lemon lost his poorly rated primetime program before being fired from his poorly rated morning program amid a series of controversies. Here is how Lemon described him:
“The executive producer who ran The Late Show for years eventually left. And somehow landed in my world. That same person, from that same television orbit, eventually became my boss at CNN. And fired me. I won’t name him. I don’t need to. But I will say this: it was one of the most spectacular examples of a white man failing up that I have witnessed in this industry. Profoundly unqualified. Visibly incompetent. Elevated anyway. Because that is how that world protects certain people and discards others. And the people it discards are almost always the ones making the powerful uncomfortable.”
Megyn and Burguiere joked that Lemon might as well have been talking about himself as it relates to “failing up,” but he didn’t stop there. It continued:
“I don’t blame Stephen Colbert for any of that. Colbert is a brilliant man and I believe he operated with integrity until the very last night. But I do wonder whether the man I just described, the one who failed up from that world into my professional life and eventually fired me, had more to do with the end of that show than anyone wants to say out loud. Maybe losing tens of millions of dollars a year wasn’t just about the economics of late night. Maybe it was about who was running the building.”
As Lemon sees, he “was a warning” to the world. “My arrest was a warning. Colbert’s cancellation is a warning,” he claimed. “The question is whether anyone is paying attention to what all of these silences have in common.”
The ‘Truth’ About Lemon
Much like how Colbert has handled his firing, Megyn said what is lacking from Lemon’s revisionist history is any self-awareness. “There was a time where CNN was okay and it was tolerable, but that changed and Don Lemon is one of the main people who changed it for the worse. He now wants you to think that it’s because he was black, I guess, that he got fired by a white man,” she said. “He hates white men, [but] he is married to a white man. I don’t understand it. Are they all bad? Is it just the one you are married to?”
Megyn offered “the truth” about where things stood when Lemon was terminated in April 2023. “Remember, he got booted from the [primetime] show because it was in the basement when it came to ratings… He was averaging 600,000 viewers in primetime… [and] averaging 150,000 in the demo,” she explained. “Just to give the audience a feel for where that is. When I left my primetime job at Fox, which was January of 2017, we were averaging about 3 million viewers a night… [and] had between 300,000 and 600,000 in the key demo.”
“That’s why they booted him out of [primetime],” Megyn said. “He couldn’t put any points on the board. It was pathetic.”
Rather than fire him, Licht moved Lemon to CNN This Morning alongside Poppy Harlow and Kaitlan Collins in November 2022. “Remember, they tried to spin it as a big promotion to go from a solo primetime position to a three-person morning show,” Megyn recalled. “And it became the lowest-rated program in a decade for CNN.”
Burguiere said the fact that Lemon got another chance despite his ratings woes undermines his claims. “That was a Chris Licht move, right? Like, he actually saved Don Lemon and put him in the morning show,” he noted. “He tried not to fire him, which was seemingly the central focus of this entire media organization for years and years and years and years… Figure out a way to not fire Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon.”
But eventually it all became too much for CNN to bear. In February 2023, Lemon made his ill-fated comments about Nikki Haley and women in their fifties being past their “prime.” He was out of a job by April.
“Don Lemon, you were fired because you failed. You failed in every role they ever gave to you, and then you became offensive on top of it. A failure and offensive. That’s what happened,” Megyn explained. “You found a niche. You’re making it in the independent lane in a decent way… Good for you, but there is no reason to rewrite history here. Your firing had nothing to do with whitey; it had to do with you, the lack of talent, and the offensive [and dumb] comments that you made repeatedly. Everyone knew you were dumb, which was one of your major sins.”
The Takeaway?
With all that in mind, Megyn said it is Lemon and those like him who “remain outraged about Stephen Colbert getting his proverbial head chopped off by, I guess, the white men in the C-suite.”
Burguiere was left similarly perplexed. “Those evil white men, and their vendettas against other white men,” he quipped. “That’s what happens, I suppose.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Burguiere by tuning in to episode 1,322 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s The Megyn Kelly Channel (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.