Former CNN anchor Don Lemon said white men in the United States are “broken” and the “real issue” behind recurrent mass violence, remarks in his latest podcast that drew immediate backlash and revived scrutiny of his previous on-air comments about race and extremism. In a monologue posted at the start of the week, Lemon framed two high-profile shootings over the weekend as further evidence of a pattern and told listeners, “This is just the truth,” adding that he did not care if critics were angered by the claim.
The comments appeared in an episode of The Don Lemon Show titled “White Men… Are You Okay?!” published on Monday, which opened with references to a deadly attack at a Latter-day Saint chapel near Flint, Michigan, and a separate mass shooting at a waterfront bar in Southport, North Carolina. In the segment, Lemon argued that the “faces behind the trigger” in such incidents “looks the same nearly every single time,” positioning the weekend’s events as part of a broader narrative about perpetrators and the country’s political climate. The episode title and posting were visible on major podcast platforms by Tuesday.
“What I want to know is, white men, are you okay? Because that is the real issue here,” Lemon said early in the monologue, before asserting: “This country keeps waking up to bodies in the pews, blood on the floor, gunfire in public places and the faces behind the trigger looks the same nearly every single time.” He punctuated the segment with, “This is just the truth, I don’t care if you get mad about it.”
In other passages, he appealed to white women to intervene, saying, “White ladies, come get your men, like, I don’t know what’s going on. Maybe you can help us out here,” and concluded that “white men, something is broken, something is cracked deep inside when so many of you believe the answer to fear, to loss, to change is violence.” Those lines, included in published write-ups of the episode, were presented as direct quotes from the podcast.