You Remind Me Of a Girl That I Once Knew🪞
Remember when journalists stood behind velvet ropes, observing history instead of making it? Don Lemon didn't get the memo. Or maybe he did, crumpled it up, and threw it at an ICE vehicle.
The former CNN anchor—now a YouTuber with a press pass and a loose grip on his own objectivity—has been showing up at ICE protests like he's auditioning for a reality show called Make America Calm Down. And on this Martin Luther King Jr. Day, watching Lemon transform from news reporter to news subject feels like some twisted commentary on how far we've fallen from the measured moral authority of the Civil Rights era.
Dr. King understood optics. He understood that the movement was bigger than any individual, that cameras were weapons of truth when wielded with precision and purpose. Fast forward sixty years, and we've got Don Lemon—press credentials swaying—not just covering protests but becoming the story itself. He's getting shoved by security. He's arguing with officials. He's less Edward R. Murrow, more guy-who-definitely-shouldn't-have-had-that-third-espresso.
The chaos is the point, apparently. We're living in an era where the line between journalist and activist has been bulldozed, paved over, and turned into a parking lot for hot takes. Lemon's YouTube channel has become a fever dream of confrontational coverage; where the medium really is the message, and the message is: everything is on fire, including professional standards.
But here's where it gets messy, like protest-in-the-rain messy. MLK Day asks us to reflect on organized resistance, on strategic nonviolence, on movements built with architectural precision. What we're getting instead is performative chaos, where the journalist's presence overshadows the very people he's supposedly amplifying. When Don Lemon becomes the headline about an ICE protest, we're not talking about immigration policy anymore. We're talking about Don Lemon.
Is this what journalism looks like now? A press pass as a license for main character syndrome? YouTube has democratized media, sure, but it's also turned everyone into their own unreliable narrator. Lemon still carries institutional credibility from his CNN days, but he's wielding it like a sledgehammer in a china shop, and the shop is American journalism, and we're all just standing here watching pieces shatter.
Maybe the chaos is honest, though. Maybe traditional journalism's pretense of objectivity was always a lie we told ourselves while the world burned at a carefully moderated temperature. Maybe Dr. King would understand that desperate times call for desperate coverage, that sometimes you have to be willing to become the story to force people to pay attention.
Or maybe we're just watching the dissolution of the fourth estate in real-time, one viral confrontation at a time, with a former cable news anchor leading the charge armed with nothing but a smartphone and the unshakeable belief that someone needs to bear witness—even if that someone keeps photobombing their own reporting.
