Former CNN talking head Don Lemon was taken into federal custody on January 29, 2026, in Los Angeles, by a team of FBI and Homeland Security agents in connection with a January 18 storming and occupation of Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, during religious services. Federal prosecutors indicted Lemon and others on charges including conspiracy to deprive religious freedom by violating worshippers’ First Amendment rights. Lemon was released the next day on his own recognizance. His next scheduled court appearance is February 9, 2026.
Lemon is charged with two federal felony counts. The first, 18 USC. § 241, Conspiracy Against Right of Religious Freedom at Place of Worship, makes it a federal crime for two or more people to conspire to injure, intimidate, oppress, or threaten someone in the free exercise of a right secured by the Constitution or federal law, including the right to religious freedom. The statute was originally enacted during Reconstruction to combat organized efforts to suppress civil rights, such as those by the Ku Klux Klan.
The second count, 18 USC § 248, Injuring and Interfering with the Right of Religious Freedom (the FACE Act), prohibits the use of force, threat of force, or physical obstruction to injure, intimidate, or interfere with individuals because of their religious exercise at a place of worship. The statute explicitly covers places of religious worship, ensuring that attacks or intimidation targeting churches, synagogues, mosques, and similar venues are federal crimes.
Even if we grant that any hack with a camera and a microphone is a “journalist,” the First Amendment is not a license for journalists to violate the civil rights of American citizens. Lemon documented the facts that condemn him: He was one of the organizers of the raid on the St. Paul church (he recorded himself in the planning process), as well as participating in harassing and intimidating congregants, actions not only violating the FACE Act (which the Biden regime vigorously pursued) but, more fundamentally, the foundational law of a republic explicitly protecting religious liberty. (See Manufacturing Their Own Christs: The Violence of Progressive Christianity.)
Predictably, progressives are out in force this weekend defending Lemon and others, squealing about Trump’s fascism. But isn’t government action in this case more accurately described as antifascist? Politically-motivated mobs storming churches and terrorizing congregants while their propagandists video and participate in harassment and intimidation—that’s the fascism analogue. The government is acting to hold those engaged in civil rights violations and other crimes accountable. The FBI and Homeland Security are upholding the liberal freedoms that lie at the foundation of the American Republic. That’s the opposite of fascism. (See The New Fascism of the Left: A Critical Analysis of Contemporary Antifascism; Would you know fascism if you saw it?)
We all know that progressives would, without hesitation, condemn such behavior if it were the KKK doing it. During Reconstruction, the Klan frequently attacked black churches, which were central to black community life. They beat congregants, burned churches, and murdered pastors and religious leaders to intimidate black communities and suppress political participation. After Reconstruction, the Klan’s focus expanded to include anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish violence. The Klan targeted religious institutions that were seen as politically or socially “threatening” to their vision of America. What reason did those who stormed Cities Church give for having done so? They claimed the pastor’s alleged ties to Immigration and Customs Enforcement as their motive. Their attack was explicitly politically motivated.
We must remember that the Klan engaged in arson, beatings, and intimidation of clergy and acknowledge that history in the present. We see the same thing in the actions of Antifa and Black Lives Matter. Recall in late May 2020 in Washington, DC, during rioting over the death of George Floyd, Antifa and BLM set on fire the historic St. John’s Episcopal Church—the “Church of the Presidents”—just across Lafayette Square from the White House. Remember the broken windows and graffiti the rioters visited upon the surrounding properties? Remember how the Secret Service had to evacuate President Trump and his family to a secure underground bunker beneath the White House when crowds gathered around the Executive Mansion and clashed with law enforcement? Remember how the media mocked Trump for standing in front of the church the next day, Bible in hand, the stench of tear gas still wafting through the air? Now they are entering churches and harassing and intimidating Christians in worship.
Have folks forgotten—or do they even know—that the Nazi Party had photographers or journalists embedded in their pogroms to publicize their naked power against designated enemies of the people in tandem with public intimidation by mobs and its paramilitary arm to spread fear among targeted communities? Photographers and journalists associated with the movement and party produced images and stories for party newspapers—Der Stürmer and Völkischer Beobachter. These were not independent reporters but loyal party propagandists. These visual records show the targeting of businesses, homes, synagogues, and universities.
Imagine if a MAGA mob with RAV (Real America’s Voice) reporters in tow stormed a mosque and terrorized Muslim women and children while berating the imam. Imagine a RAV journalist harassing congregants, interrogating them about their associations, their faith, and their politics, while those accompanying him block the exits so they cannot escape. What would be the reaction from Democrats and progressives, and the media that fronts their politics? Suppose such a thing occurred during the Biden regime. Would progressives object to the Biden Administration rounding up the mob and their propagandists? Not only would they not object—they would demand it. We all know they would. And Biden would accommodate them as he should.
But progressives have no problem with storming white churches. Where was the outrage among progressives when, in March 2023, Aiden Hale, aka Audrey Hale, a trans-identifying woman, entered the Covenant School, a private Christian elementary school affiliated with Covenant Presbyterian Church in Nashville, and, using multiple firearms, killed three nine-year-old children and three adult staff members? Where was the outrage when, in August 2025, Robin Westman, aka Robert Westman, a trans-identifying man, fired through the window of the Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during an all-school Mass attended by students from the adjacent Annunciation Catholic School, killing two children and injuring around 30 others (mostly children)? Progressives do not see the violation or even the murder of Christians as suggesting any urgency in protecting the rights and safety of members of that faith. (What is wrong with Minneapolis? Have you wondered?)
Lemon is a professed propagandist for the neoconfederate movement against the federal government (see The New Confederates and the Return of States’ Rights; On the Road to Civil War: The Democratic Party’s Regression into Neoconfederacy). He explicitly identifies himself as a movement propagandist—a propagandist for a movement that disdains Christianity and the American way of life. The actions that implicate him in federal crimes that he himself recorded are not protected by the First Amendment. He’s a criminal. The Justice Department should throw the book at him, as it should anybody who violates the civil rights of American citizens. Such behavior is intolerable and must be met with the full force of the state.
More than this incident, much of the behavior we see from progressives in the Twin Cities is intolerable. Minnesota is the epicenter of secessionist politics. The actions we see on the streets, and those by the elected officials of that state and the city of Minneapolis, constitute an insurrection against the Union. Our nation has been here many times before. And many times, the federal government has nationalized state militias and deployed military forces to put down the rebellions. Indeed, this is why the Founders replaced the Articles of Confederation with the Constitution. (See Quelling the Rebellion; Our Constitution and the Federal Authority to Quell Rebellion; Concerning the Powers of The US Constitution—And Those Defying Them.)
As I have documented in previous essays, throughout US history, the federal government has deployed military or federal forces to quell insurrections, riots, or enforce civil rights when state authorities failed to maintain order or hold the violators of rights accountable. In 1957, Eisenhower sent federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to enforce the integration of Central High School after the state resisted desegregation. Kennedy federalized the National Guard in 1962 in Mississippi to ensure James Meredith could enroll at the University of Mississippi despite violent white resistance. Kennedy also deployed federal forces to Alabama in 1963, including the National Guard, to protect civil rights marchers and enforce court orders during the Birmingham campaign, which confronted segregationist state officials and mobs. During the Civil War, Lincoln suppressed Southern insurrections. Grant deployed federal troops during Reconstruction to fight Klan violence in the South. In 1968, Johnson used force to quell the unrest following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.
Such actions date to the early days of the Republic. During the Whiskey Rebellion (the subject of an upcoming essay on Freedom and Reason), President Washington responded in 1794 by calling up a militia force of more than ten thousand men from several states, demonstrating that the federal government had both the authority and the will to enforce federal law. The show of force effectively ended the rebellion with minimal bloodshed; the insurgents dispersed, and those arrested were later pardoned, the point having been made that the federal government is the supreme law of the land. We need the 47th President to act with the gusto of our first President (A Man of Action Must Act to Be Such a Man).
Cognitive science is crucial to understanding the deep mass psychological problem that crowds out reason in this moment. The objection from progressives over the arrest of Lemon is a paradigm of what cognitive scientists describe as motivated reasoning, where information is evaluated in a way that protects or advances what one wants to believe and instantiate, rather than what evidence shows and reason dictates. It’s a cognitive error—specifically a systematic bias in how people process information, in which desire or identity steers judgment away from objective evaluation of evidence and towards conclusions that advance movement goals and objectives. (See When Thinking Becomes Unthinkable: Motivated Reasoning and the Memory Hole.)
Motivated reasoning is expected because progressives put partisan ideology and politics over principle. Any means that achieve the ends sought are acceptable. Raiding churches and terrorizing children, obstructing and assaulting law enforcement, harassment and intimidation of citizens, even assassination of conservative leaders—all these are acceptable in light of the end sought: rendering impotent constitutional republicanism. Progressives depend on the assumption that their actions are morally righteous to sustain popular support (see The Manufactured Perception of Moral High Ground). In truth, their actions issue from a profoundly immoral standpoint antithetical to the American way of life.
As I have explained in several essays on this platform, there is no morality governing progressive actions because the praxis of progressivism is rooted in and justified by pathological utilitarianism (see Epistemic Foundations, Deontological Liberalism, and the Grounding of Rights; Moral Authority Without Foundations: Progressivism, Utilitarianism, and the Eclipse of Argument). Utilitarianism is a species of consequentialism, a pseudo-ethical theory that holds that the moral righteousness of any action depends entirely on its outcomes (or consequences). Here, actions are judged by the results they produce, not by moral inherent properties or moral rules. This attitude lay at the heart of Nazi terror, and before it, the Great Terror inflicted by the Jacobins on revolutionary France (see Year Zero: Democrats Walk the Path of Radical Jacobins).
Fascist action is euphemized as “antifascism” and “social justice” to obscure the history that progressive street-level actions repeat: the use of mobs and paramilitary forces to defy the federal government and terrorize a population (see The Politics of Grievance: Primitive Rebellion and Rhetoric of Social Justice; Deviance as Doctrine: The Post-Liberal Moral Revolution; The Problem of Empathy and the Pathology of “Be Kind”). The quote that begins my essay Send in the Troops—“ICE is made up of white males who were similar to Hitler’s brown shirts of the 30’s. They were disaffected by the results of the reparations of WWI, and felt powerless. 47 has given them purpose, which is extremely dangerous.”—captures the inverted world progressive ideologues routinely project in their utterances. Factually untrue, the function of such utterances is to turn fascists into antifascists—and antifascists into fascists.
In the Freudian sense, projection is a primitive defense mechanism in which an individual unconsciously attributes their own unacceptable desires, feelings, impulses, thoughts, or traits—aggressive or shameful things that threaten the ego—to another person or external entity, thereby externalizing internal conflict and avoiding direct confrontation with it. They project to displace what cannot be accepted—or must be denied—as part of the self onto the outside world, thereby reducing the anxiety or guilt they experience in the deepest recesses of their psyche to prevent them from being consciously acknowledged. Put simply, progressives are basketcases, and the amplification of the madness presents a very real threat to democracy and tranquility. (See The Rule of Law and Unlawful Protest: The Madness of Mobs; The Phenomenon of Progressive Brain-Locking and Its Role in the Madness of Crowds.)
That’s the purpose behind their derangement: the madness of crowds. I have written extensively on this matter, and it would behoove populists and nationalists to review my analyses and urge the Trump Administration to stop the neoconfederate movement before it turns to full-blown civil war. (See The Politics of Disaster Capitalism; Understanding Antifa: Eric Hoffer, the True Believer, and the Footsoldiers of the Authoritarian Left; A Fact-Proof Screen: Black Lives Matter and Hoffer’s True Believer; “Assault Me, Motherfucker!” Suicidal Altruism and the Politics of Suicide Contagion; Wokedom and the Problem of Lethal Altruism; Zombie Politics: the Corporatist Ideology of Antiracism; “Hey, Ma. The Zombies are Marching Again”.)
I am often highly critical of Lindsey Graham, the Senior Senator from South Carolina, but here Graham has the right idea.
freedom and reason 