CNN's Don Lemon has defended himself against critics after he said that the "biggest terror threat in this country is white men," sparking a backlash.
Among Lemon's critics was Fox News host Gregg Jarrett, who called him a "racist, hypocrite and idiot all rolled into one" on Twitter.
Donald Trump Jr., the president's eldest son, also accused Lemon on Twitter of making a "racist statement" and said CNN had just "let it slide" in a way they would not for others.
Lemon made the comments to Chris Cuomo on Monday night during a discussion about a white suspect in the alleged racist shooting of two African Americans at a Kentucky grocery store, who moments before had failed to gain entry to a nearby black church.
Cuomo made the point that the news media "barely had time to cover it" because attention quickly switched to another alleged hate crime when a known anti-Semite shot and killed 11 Jews at a synagogue in Pittsburgh.
"I keep trying to point out to people not to demonize any one group or any one ethnicity," Lemon said during the segment.
"But we keep thinking that the biggest terror threat is something else... we have to stop demonizing people, and realize the biggest terror threat in this country is white men, most of them radicalized to the right, and we have to start doing something about them
"There is no travel ban on them, there is no ban—you know, they have the Muslim ban—there is no white guy ban, so what do we do about that?"
Lemon responded to his critics on his show Wednesday night, referring to an "uncomfortable truth, the truth about who really carries out domestic terror attacks in this country."
He said his comments "angered people, but let's put that emotion aside and look at the cold, hard facts. The evidence is overwhelming."
"A recent report from the Government Accountability Office shows that," Lemon said. "Even though more people died in attacks connected to Islamic extremists, the vast majority of deadly attacks in this country from 2001 to 2016 were carried out by far-right violent extremists."
Citing research into terror attacks in the U.S. after 9/11, Lemon noted that "for every 8 deadly attacks by right-wing extremists, there were 1 by left-wing extremists. Those are the facts. So people who were angered about what I said are missing the entire point."
"We don't need to worry about people who are thousands of miles away," Lemon said. "The biggest threats are homegrown. The facts prove that."
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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Shane Croucher is a Senior Editor based in London, UK. He oversees the My Turn team. He has previously overseen ... Read more
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