Don Lemon listens silently as actor calls Charlie Kirk ‘horrible human being’

Former CNN host Don Lemon listened quietly on “The Don Lemon Show” Thursday while comedian D.L. Hughley cast aspersions on assassinated Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk.

Kirk was assassinated on Wednesday while speaking to a large crowd of students at Utah Valley University (UVU) about mass shootings; his last words were questioning a crowd member about whether he was categorizing “gang violence” as mass shootings. Hughley falsely claimed on Lemon’s YouTube show that Kirk’s murder did not qualify as an assassination because he was not a politician and characterized him as a despicable person.

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“[T]he thing that makes me the angriest about this is I always swore that I would never cede my humanity to anybody or any other situation. But that’s getting more and more difficult to do because I certainly don’t believe a young man, 31 years old, should have lost his life,” Hughley said. “But Charlie Kirk was a horrible human being. He said horribly incendiary things … the very last words he spoke were basically putting the onus of gun violence on gangs, which is synonymous with black people. The very way he died was lying about black people with his last breath.”

“I just think the best thing I can say is that I hope he believed what he was saying,” he added. “I hope he believed that lives being lost were worth it so the Second Amendment could persevere … I hope he believed all the rhetoric he espoused because if not, that was certainly an empty, vacant way to live and certainly a horrible way to die.”

Then-MSNBC political analyst Matthew Dowd also suggested on “Katy Tur Reports” on Wednesday that Kirk’s rhetoric inevitably led to him being shot.

“[H]e’s been one of the most divisive, especially divisive younger figures in this, who is constantly sort of pushing this sort of hate speech or sort of aimed at certain groups,” Dowd said. “And I always go back to: hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions.”

MSNBC announced it had fired Dowd on Wednesday after his comments, describing them as “inappropriate, insensitive and unacceptable” and apologizing. Dowd also apologized in a Wednesday Bluesky post.

Some people also rejoiced over Kirk’s assassination, even though he left behind two young children and a wife.

SiriusXM’s Stephen A. Smith on “The Stephen A. Smith Show” Thursday excoriated those individuals.

“I don’t care what his political beliefs were! I don’t care what he felt! I care about the fact that a man was gunned down in front of two of his children who are 5 years of age or less,” Smith said. “That he’s dead at the age of 31. That his wife is a widow. That his children are fatherless because his ideas and his beliefs differed from somebody else, apparently.”

“And then I’m going online and I’m seeing people celebrating it!” he continued. “Shame! Shame on you!”

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