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The Don Lemon Show

DL + DL 'Anything Goes' - No Filter, No Rules!

29 Mar 2026

Transcription

Chapter 1: What is the significance of the DL + DL tour?

9.262 - 60.915 Don Lemon

I'm at the City Winery. You ready? This is night two of DL&DL Anything Goes. It's the Black History Month, the February New York edition. Wow. Hi, everyone. I know my people. Hey. Hey, y'all. So a little bit different tonight because, you know, as you know, so usually let me tell you what we usually do, but I'm going to change it up a little bit.

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61.276 - 75.883 Don Lemon

Usually I sit here and I do, you know, sort of a report on what's happening in the world and what's happening in the news. Right. But who said that? You know it, you guys know me, but I am the news. And so, I think I only need one of these.

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76.603 - 77.364 Tim (Don Lemon's husband)

There we go.

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77.384 - 88.236 Don Lemon

I think I only need one of these. So what I'm gonna do is just sit here and talk to you. Usually I have something that's planned, right? And I write it out in my little monologue, and then I talk for a couple minutes.

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Chapter 2: How do Don Lemon and D.L. Hughley discuss their experiences with race?

89.297 - 97.306 Don Lemon

But I'm just gonna sit and talk to you guys. Is that okay? I feel like I should be like singing, like.

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98.507 - 103.137 Unknown

Close the door. Let me tell you what you've been waiting for.

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103.518 - 105.76 Don Lemon

Get a little Teddy Pendergrass.

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105.86 - 107.942 Tim (Don Lemon's husband)

Baby, I got so much love to give.

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108.263 - 139.609 Don Lemon

Anyways, so I'm trying to have a bit of humor because this is truly crazy. So I don't know what I'm going to say except just to talk to you and tell you guys that this is crazy. And I have never in a million years expected that I would be in this position, because I don't like being the news, contrary to what you see on Fox News and conservative news programs. I don't like being the news.

139.769 - 159.434 Don Lemon

Oh my gosh, look at, it's packed. It's packed. So let me just start by, thank you. Let me just start by saying thank you for for all of your love and your support. Everybody can see, right? I don't want to have my back to anybody. So I want to say thank you for all of your support.

Chapter 3: What insights do they share about the current political climate?

159.454 - 183.468 Don Lemon

And I feel your love. I'm going to tell you a little bit about what happened to me. And I cry if you look at me. So if I cry, you know. But I ain't going to lie to you. I'm not going to lie to you. This has really been tough. I'll start with the You know, people call nannies now, right? Everybody's so fancy, they have a nanny.

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184.769 - 219.046 Don Lemon

My nanny was my grandma, or mommy, that we called, we had mama, who's my mom, and then we had mommy, who was my grandmother. And so my grandmother taught me what insistence means. Not being resistant, but insistence, being insistent upon, having faith in the way you carry yourself, and all of those things, because she had gone through. My grandmother, look, can I just be real with y'all?

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220.749 - 255.296 Don Lemon

In the country that we live in, there aren't many, if you are African American in this country, who did not come from an unwanted relationship. It's the reason I'm light-skinned like this. And so my grandmother, my grandmother, well, my aunt is a product of rape for a white man. My grandmother, similar, the head of the plantation, Sinclair Plantation.

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255.596 - 258.961 Don Lemon

I did this when I did my ancestry in Louisiana for CNN.

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Chapter 4: How do they address the role of media in shaping public perception?

260.143 - 292.883 Don Lemon

My grandmother, same thing. So Those women in my life especially are the reason that I'm here because they know what we're up against in this country. They know the true origins of this country and they reared me up as they rear up so many black men and held me in their bosoms and carried me to where I am now. So I learned that insistence from my grandmother who, when I was a kid,

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293.808 - 311.784 Don Lemon

I would sit at the kitchen table and she would cook, you know, breakfast or lunch or dinner and she'd always be on the phone talking to somebody and she had this, y'all remember the old trim line phone that was on the thing hanging on the wall and the cord that could go from here all the way over there. And the cord would be wrapped around the dining room, the living room, the bedroom.

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311.824 - 339.028 Don Lemon

A couple of times we'd have to go around the house and then, you know, that was before you could just unplug a cord like that because it was attached. And she would be on the phone and then she'd get off the phone and she was always cleaning. And she would say, she would be singing, right? If you guys know it. Ain't gonna let nobody turn me around, turn me around, turn me around.

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339.068 - 376.903 Don Lemon

Ain't gonna let nobody turn me around. Keep on a walking, keep on a talking, marching up to freedom land. Right? And then the verses were, it's whatever you needed them to be. So if you needed that verse to be, ain't going to let nobody turn me around, no judge turn me around, you would say, ain't going to let no judge, ain't going to let no jailhouse turn me around, turn me around.

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377.356 - 383.424 Don Lemon

Turn me around. Ain't going to let no jailhouse. Turn me around.

Chapter 5: What personal stories do they share about their upbringing?

384.165 - 414.325 Don Lemon

Keep on walking. Keep on talking. Marching up to freedom land. And so that's where I am in this moment. And so I ran into a gentleman on the way over here. And he said that he works in the correction system. And he's there to give the young men encouragement. And he said to me, he goes, all of the noise out there, Mr. Lemon, don't listen to all that noise.

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414.925 - 437.367 Don Lemon

He said, because God is in the background editing everything. And when you're caught up in the middle of all that, he's in the background just editing and taking care of it. So no matter what happens, your legacy is set. Your future is set. And you are going to be OK. Mark my words. And I've heard that from so many people. So again, thank you.

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438.207 - 458.959 Don Lemon

Now let me tell you a little bit about, there are some things, there's a lot that I cannot say, but in time I will. Because what I have to do is win right now, right? So there's a lot that I cannot say, but again. There will be a time when I can say.

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Chapter 6: How do they view the intersection of comedy and social issues?

458.979 - 478.259 Don Lemon

But what I can tell you is what happened to me. So if you guys have been out there, you know that they started banning my name about saying, oh, we're going to get Don Lemon. We want to arrest him. He should go to jail. President said I should go to jail for 40 years or whatever. So my attorney reached out to the Justice Department saying, we're hearing this.

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478.459 - 501.992 Don Lemon

If you're serious, he's perfectly willing to self-report, turn himself in. Let's do this the right way. We don't have to go through all of this. Never heard back. You know why? Because they want to embarrass you. They want to instill fear in you, right? They want to make you afraid. They want it to be a spectacle. They want pictures. They want a mug shot. They want to see you in handcuffs.

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502.012 - 515.464 Don Lemon

They want all of those things. And as I was sitting there, proud as I didn't care, in the handcuffs, it made me think about our history of slavery in this country and how they lock up black men, especially in black people, and that we have a pipeline to prison

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Chapter 7: What reflections do they have on the impact of their careers?

515.663 - 544.607 Don Lemon

in a for-profit prison system where you see a lot of black men going to jail unfairly. And so I thought about all those things and it also made me think, obviously I said, it made me think about slavery, about being in shackles. And so that's why I believe that we have to teach everything. We shouldn't allow people, we've gotta stop this before it's almost gone too far now.

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544.925 - 570.358 Don Lemon

where they are removing books from schools because they don't want you to know the history of the country because we don't want kids to feel sad. How do you think it made me feel to learn about my enslaved ancestors as a kid? But as an adult, that's why I'm a fully rounded,

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570.878 - 595.367 Don Lemon

woke, meaning aware of the original meaning of the word woke, that's because I was taught all of those things about this country. And guess what? Even still, I love this country. Listening to the national anthem makes me so proud to be an American, and I get chills, especially when it's Whitney. I mean, land of the free. When she does that, I'm gone.

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596.512 - 626.32 Don Lemon

And when those jets fly over, I'm like, oh my God, there will never be another Whitney Houston, huh? Woo, Lord have mercy. So I'm still proud to be an American, and this is not a country that I recognize, but this is America right now. And so what I will say to you is that what little we have left of our democracy We have got to hang on to it. And we have to be together to do that.

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628.423 - 632.991 Don Lemon

We've got to let go of the little things, of the I don't like this person and I don't know.

Chapter 8: How do they envision the future of activism and journalism?

633.012 - 645.639 Don Lemon

We've got to be together. And that's all like-minded people I'm talking about, black folks, white folks. But we've got to be together because we are stronger together. They want us to be divided. They want us arguing amongst each other.

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645.9 - 669.617 Don Lemon

They don't want us thinking about the oligarchs and the wealthy people and the consolidation of conservative media and all of those things that puts money in their pockets and that affords them the power to be able to unfairly and unjustly arrest a reporter, a journalist, for doing their job. Journalists for doing their jobs.

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670.188 - 694.288 Don Lemon

Now, I know some people probably thought, oh, that's never going to happen. This is not a game anymore. This is not a test. This is not folly. This is real. So remember where we came from and all of the shoulders that we stand on. There were people who died so I could be able to sit here, so you could be able to sit here.

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696.563 - 702.871 Don Lemon

There are people who got in good trouble, as John Lewis said, to fight for the civil rights of all people.

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702.891 - 735.112 Don Lemon

And let me just say to you, let me be very clear to everyone in this room, I don't know what your ethnicities are, whether you are Latino or Indian or any kind of immigrant, even as a white person, what black people endured for your civil rights should be applauded and lauded every single day. It is so insulting to me when I hear someone who's an immigrant talking shit about black people.

735.793 - 765.706 Don Lemon

And for some reason, I don't know what is up with Indian Americans right now. Indian Americans like Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley and J.D. Vance's wife, they should be sending flowers to a black person every day because... It allowed them the rights to be here, to live in this country, and to be afforded many of the freedoms that they have now. So I want, and I mean that.

767.008 - 795.03 Don Lemon

So, look, I happen to be in a place where I have a lot of people around me who love me, who support me, I have agency, and the reason that I feel, Not that I feel strongly about this, and it's not a dire situation for me. It's very serious. These are criminal federal charges that I'm facing. It's because I have agency.

795.37 - 812.715 Don Lemon

And I think about all the people who are out there, many of them are American citizens, who are being rounded up off the streets without due process. And their family members don't know where they are. They don't know if they've been deported. They don't know if they're in jail. They have no idea. And they have no agency.

813.015 - 833.913 Don Lemon

And they can't call an attorney and say, tell them I'm going to self-report because they don't have the means to be able to do it. So I say every single day pretty much on my show, you have to be willing to sacrifice something. I can't tell you what you can do. You do what you can do. I do what I can do. Mine is to bring light to dark places. You have to be willing to sacrifice something.

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