Lemon LIVE at 5: This MAGA Candidate’s Racist And Vile Posts Are Beyond Disturbing

Well, now I do.

Bo knows nothing. I mean, just hot, hot garbage, Don. Just hot garbage. I mean, the man has been stoking racism and racist rhetoric for years, for decades. And, you know, I have held out higher hopes for Texas, especially in the 21st century. But as we can see, either some voters don't know, which I'll give that to some voters, and other voters know and they don't care. But certainly as we can see from some of the comments from his fellow Republicans, that even the ones who know and even some of those who have admonished him are still going to vote for him. It is empty if there are not repercussions and consequences. So this is the type of leadership that Texas wants, or some Texans want.

I can't hear Don. I don't... Yeah, you're muted, Don. Let's...

Yeah. I mean, it's not enough. I mean, more of them should, and they just should say that, you know, this man... we don't want this man to win on our watch. We don't want to win that badly. But see, there's an iteration going on, and it's called power. And what we're seeing from some, not the Karl Roves and some of the others who've had the courage to stand up more boldly, but from the vast majority of Republican leadership, is that even though they know this man is hot fire dumpster garbage, they would rather the Republican Party have the power. And so they'll still vote for an out-and-out overt racist like Bo French.

Well, Don, you know, the historian in me is in my ear. And we got to remember this is who this country has always been. I think for a certain generation, I would say Gen X and younger, we never thought we would live to see the repeat of this type of in-your-face, blatant racism in all forms. So, it's all up in our face. But if we were to talk to our parents in their younger days, and then our grandparents, and then our great-grandparents, and then our great-great-greats, you know where I'm going with this, they've seen this out in the open.

Not only have they seen this out in the open, they had to live under the degradation and the shaming and what came from being a Black American in particular, the type of anti-Black racism. And where there is anti-Black racism, which this country was founded on, then the other racisms, the other isms follow, because usually you don't have anybody that's anti-Black racist who believes in women, who believes in Muslims, who believes in gays or transgender, etc., etc. So the foundation of this level of vitriol and hatred stems from the anti-Black nature of the United States of America. So for us, we're in shock, as I said, Gen X and younger. But if you talk to older people who understand the colored and the white water fountain, I mean, D, they might as well just go ahead and bring back the colored and the white water fountain. That's the only thing they haven't done yet.

Well, I hope it's popular. I'd like for it to be more so. I just fired it up. It's called Dispatches from the Race War, which is also the name of my last essay collection several years back. So, I'd love to have people over there and checking that out. Yeah, as far as the Bo French thing, I think... and I got in on the tail end of Nina's comments. Good to see you again, Nina, as well.

You know, I think this is one of those rare moments when I think we almost have to, and I hate to say this because I never say this, we almost have to thank Donald Trump for something. And just stick with me. What we have to thank him for is his ability to peel back the veil of denial that so many people in this country had been behind for years. When, you know, for years folks would hide their racism, right? There was this need to front, right? There was this dog whistle thing that folks would do when they wanted to do racist stuff. So when they wanted to say something racist, they felt compelled to pretend that that wasn't what they were saying.

When I got started, you know my background because you're a Louisiana guy. You know that I got started doing the anti-David Duke work in 1990 and '91. And even David Duke, an actual Klansman, an actual Nazi, a lifelong white supremacist, even he was like, 'Yeah, I gotta pretend that I'm not that guy. I gotta pretend that I'm not like that anymore.' So when they would catch him saying crazy racist [__] like this guy, he'd be like, 'Oh, that was a long time ago. You're taking that out of context.' And now you got this guy just like, 'Yeah, that's the context, man. I just... I don't like these brown people up in my university. I don't like Barack Obama. I think they ought to hang him from a tree.' Like, this is the kind of stuff that 35 years ago, Nazis were even denying that they said.

And the Republican Party, if you recall, the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush were condemning David Duke. They were distancing. And it's not like they didn't do racist stuff. I mean, Ronald Reagan did the welfare queen stuff in 1976 and 1980 when he ran for president, right? He talked about that stuff. But even he was like, 'Yeah, this is too far.' Now, here we are 36 years later and the party's like, 'Forget all that, man. We're just going to take the hood off, right? We're just going to let y'all know exactly who we are.' And in a way, I'm not saying that I like that, but I'm saying at least we sort of understand we're not playing games anymore. Folks are not pretending anymore. And we can actually acknowledge that that is who these folks have always been.

And I know the folks over at The Bulwark, they're all shocked, right? They're all shocked and amazed to learn that this is what their party always was. This is what their movement always was. They cannot believe that it wasn't about tax cuts and deregulation. They cannot believe that it was not about supply-side economics, that it was about racism the whole time. But welcome to your party. Welcome to your movement. Welcome to your country. Now we know what it was always about with people like French.

Well, we're going to see, right? We're going to see. I think that they are at the point of no return now where they know as a party and a movement they have to double down as the party of white nationalism. They are at the point... they had a moment there where they might have gone a different direction. They could have potentially thought twice about it, but now they have gone over the edge when their number one fundraiser and booster is an Afrikaner baby from South Africa and the richest man on the planet, a guy who wants to do for the United States what used to be the place he came from in South Africa.

I mean, when that's your guy, and when Peter Thiel, you know, who grew up, who spent a significant part of his formative years in a part of South Africa that was so racist it was worse even than the apartheid system. It was like a little town where they used to throw up Heil Hitler salutes and worship Adolf Hitler. When those are your guys, you pretty much have to double down as the white supremacist, white nationalist party. I don't know if that's going to work in Bo French's case. It may, it may not. But the very fact that they've come to the place where they're like, 'We don't apologize anymore. We don't run from it anymore.' I think this is where that party's headed.

And that means that everybody of goodwill, including people whose politics are probably not mine and Nina's, but they're going to have to decide: is that who you want to throw down with? Or do you want to sit down with some of us who you might disagree with on some stuff, but at least you recognize that that path of racial fascism is not the path that you want to go down, that you still believe in multiracial democracy? And we can figure out the other stuff. We can hash that out. We can debate that out. But for God's sake, the racial fascism is something that you can't be down with.

No, it's real. And just amen to what brother Tim said. In some ways, you know, it is better to know. You know, we've been living under an illusion for far too long. I like it like this. Not that I like what's happening in this country, but baby, I want to know that you're about to stab me in the chest, because stabbing me in the back, you know, I might not be able to survive it. But you coming at me full frontal, then we might be able to survive. So Tim's point about people have to make a decision. And I want, you know, Lemon Nation, the Lemonheads to kind of picture it this way. This is a tug-of-war. And most of us have played a tug-of-war game a time or two in our life. And you got to just figure out what side you pulling on. Now, the side of black liberation is one side, and the side of ruling class white racism that divides and conquers everybody is the other side. People who are not black have to decide what side of this rope you pulling on. Because if you don't pull on the black liberation side, then that means that you're pulling on the other side, which also means that at some point they coming for you. They coming for you poor white folks. They coming for you white women. They coming for you non-black people. They coming for you. And so this is what this is about. And the reason why I am centering and always will center black liberation is because the hierarchy in this nation, the makeup in this nation is as such that when black people are able to fully thrive, quoting my grandmother here, 'Liy and everybody else is going to be all right.' So you got to pick a side. Which side you pulling on?

Yeah. And let me give you a great example of that because that's such a critical point. And you know I work, Don, with Kimberlé Crenshaw at the African-American Policy Forum. That's my full-time day gig. And at AAPF what we talk about all the time that so many folks even in the civil rights community sometimes and certainly among white progressive folks oftentimes miss is the centrality of anti-blackness and white supremacy to the assault on democracy. They'll talk about anything else. They'll talk about every other topic under the sun, but do not forget every attack on democracy going back to the overthrow of Reconstruction has started with black folks, but it never ends with black folks. And I think about in a real recent context, you know, I live in Tennessee, and right now we've got a crisis where the state of Tennessee has created this ridiculous assault on public education with this voucher scheme that is not working. It's undermining public education for all children, including lots of white children where like 70, a ridiculous number of the schools are failing all the kids. They're performing under, the choice schools are performing under the average school in the state of Tennessee. So they're just going to take away all the data collection so nobody will see that. What most people forget is that the whole idea of vouchers, the whole idea of school choice came from the 1950s in the immediate aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education. That was when Milton Friedman, the economist, wrote a piece calling for school choice, saying that, you know, we ought to let parents choose where to send their kids. Now, why did that become popular in the 1950s? Why all of a sudden did we need to start talking about school choice? The reason it got popular was because that was a way for white parents to pull their kids out of schools that black folks were going to attend. So it started with anti-blackness, but now it has metastasized and is actively undermining public education that white children depend on as well. So Nina's point is well taken. You can start with anti-blackness, but the folks who want to undermine public schools, the folks who want to undermine public health care, the folks that want to undermine public everything will start by doing it with black folks, but they will always come back around and get everybody else at the end of the day. And that's why we have to center fighting anti-blackness and center racial justice in all pro-democracy work because they're never going to stop just with black. And that's what's happening in Texas because remember years ago when they attacked affirmative action in Texas, they started there. Remember back in the 90s, they were talking about we got to get rid of affirmative action because there's too many black folks getting into UT Austin. And now Bo French is yelling about South Asian folks. Now, these South Asian folks presumably, you know, we always were hearing, 'Oh, these are folks are getting high SAT scores. Oh, these are the folks that meritocracy says ought to be going to the University of Texas.' I thought y'all believed in meritocracy. These are the folks with the high SAT. Now, they don't like them either. And I remember debating Dinesh D'Souza. Now, he's South Asian. He is subcontinental Indian. And he was always talking about, 'Yeah, we don't need these black folks are getting all this preferential treatment.' And it's reverse discrimination against Asian folks and white folks and now they're coming for people like him. Right? So see it all comes back around. You start with black folks, they'll come for all the other brown folk and then eventually they'll come for the poor white folks. That's been the history of this entire country. And if people don't see it now, just stick around, wait another six months, wait another six years, and see what happens. Or you can get on board the justice train right now and decide that you're going to fight anti-black and anti-Black racism and maybe we can get somewhere together.

They don't know what it is because it doesn't exist. Black folks have only always, and there was a quote, and Tim, I can't take credit for it. I don't even know who said it. I just read it on social media a few years ago and it went something like, 'This country better be glad that black people want justice and not revenge.' Word up. If you look at black people, the history of black Americans in this country, never have we as a group, an entire like black nation tried to rise up against this nation. We have fought in every war. We have nursed and nurtured babies by force. We have cleaned and built this country without being compensated for generations. We have had wealth stolen from us. Our bodies broken and beaten and battered. But yet we created the rhythm and the blues and the rock and the roll and the rap and the poetry that knocks your socks off. And nobody sings the Star-Spangled Banner like black people. Everything we do, even in the midst of all of the agony and the pressure that this United States has put us in from its inception. But yet, we love it as a group like no other.

And that's the secret as to why white folks are so angry. That's why. That's why. Because, see, this is the thing about white supremacy. White supremacy isn't rooted in a real belief in supremacy. White supremacy is rooted in an anger at the realization that we are not in fact supreme. Right. Because if we weren't...

No, well, you know, I gave up on that a long time ago. It's a recognition that we're not because when you try to destroy people for generations and you cannot do it and they continue to rise in spite of everything that you have done to them, you have demonstrated that you are not superior. You're clearly not superior ethically or morally and you cannot defeat them intellectually or in any other capacity. And so in some sense there is a resentment that folks will not die. There is an anger. Understand the argument used to be that if after freedom, after emancipation, the racist said, well, the black folks we can emancipate because black folks will die off because they can't support themselves. They cannot survive without our loving care as enslavers and owners. That was the argument. And then when black folks survived that, challenged that orthodoxy and it was like, well, how the hell did they do that, right? And so then there becomes this resentment, this anger at the fact that people can still manage not only to survive but to thrive and the fact that black folks came from that oppression and said, you know what, in spite of that we're going to come back and we're going to create your country for you. We're going to create the country that you promised but did not deliver. We're going to create that. We're going to be that. We're going to make you live up to your promises because you don't know how to do it. So, we're going to show you how to do it. And the best way that you can make white folks angry is to show them that you know how to do democracy when we don't know how to do democracy. And that was what made us angry. And as far as preferential treatment, go back. This whole line about black preferential treatment goes back to Andrew Johnson. When Andrew Johnson vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which was in the immediate aftermath of Lincoln's assassination, he vetoed it. All that law said was that there was going to be no more discrimination against black people. And he vetoed it, calling it preferential treatment, saying that it did more for black people than had ever been done for the white race. All it did was call for equal treatment. So this argument about reverse discrimination literally goes back to the time when Lincoln's body wasn't even cold yet. That's how long this argument and that's how ridiculous the argument is. But it's what you do when you realize that the people you have tried to destroy, the people you have tried to beat, the people you have tried to diminish refuse to give up and refuse to die. And that is when you realize that you are not the superior one. If anything, you might be the opposite of that.

And that's what I think has people so angry. It's not superiority because superior people just go out and do superior things. Superior people don't need cheerleaders. Superior people don't need to write books about how superior they are. Superior people don't need to have people on X talking about how superior they are, right? They just go out and do superior [ __ ]. Inferior people run around talking about how superior they are. And that's why white supremacists go around talking about their superiority while doing absolutely nothing. You ever notice the people that talk about how superior they are have done nothing. Have done nothing. Albert Einstein didn't go around talking about, 'Look at me, I'm a [ __ ] genius.' Like he didn't do that, right? Like he just went out and did genius [ __ ]. That's what he did. Elon Musk goes around talking about what a genius he is cuz he's not. His [ __ ] blows up when it takes off from the launchpad. His cars kill people when you put him in autopilot. He's not a genius. So, he has to pretend and have people on X fluff him. I need to calm down. I'm getting...

Me too. I'm like...

Hey, let him, Tim and Tim. Hey, we make a good team. Don Lemon bringing me out, baby. Bring the thunder. Bring...

When you say Don and Tim, it kind of freaks me out because you know my husband is Tim. I'm like, wait, what? What? What are you talking about?

Right now, but right now, we are wedded in our thoughts, Tim. That's all I had to say. I'm ready at the other Tim.

Well, you know, ain't nobody but the law. You know, I'm one of these, you know, strong independent black woman. I don't need no man. And I'm going to get Whitey. I'm going to get Whitey and I'm going to lock Donald Trump up just like Letitia James, right? And she goes, now you're going to elect me and I'm going to lock him up. We're going to get Trump. Like the way they talk and their little DEI Sheniqua voices and it's just very piercing, very irritating sound. They all have the same voice. I'm talking about Kamala Harris, Letitia James, and Fani Willis. Like all of the like meritless DEI Sheniquas talk the same way. It's very obnoxious the way that they talk.

I was like, which muppet is she?

Don't insult the muppets, please.

Bats.