Days after he took part in viciously attacking Trump supporters for supposedly not being able to read, CNN anchor Don Lemon finally addressed the controversy on-air, but only after it blew up across social media. During his opening monologue for Tuesday’s CNN Tonight, Lemon refuses to apologize, instead claiming he doesn't belittle people and was only laughing at the joke and didn't hear everything.

“And one final note that I have for you. Because this is personally important to me to address this,” he claimed. “Anyone, ask anyone who knows me. They’ll tell you. I don't believe in belittling people. Belittling anyone for who they are, for what they believe, or where they're from.”

Good thing he told viewers to go ask people who know him because they can’t reasonably do that. If he was really against belittling people, he would have taken command of his show and stopped his guests.

In his explanation for his laughter, Lemon suggested he was only laughing at the disparaging joke and not the people the joke was targeting:

During an interview on Saturday night, one of my guests said something that made me laugh. And while in the moment, I found the joke humorous and I didn't catch everything that said. Just to make this perfectly clear, I was laughing at the joke. And not at any group of people.

CNN is a network that purports to be “facts first.” So, what do the facts say about Lemon’s assertion that he “doesn’t believe in belittling people?” Hint: they’re not on his side.

As NewsBusters had previously documented, Lemon has a laundry list of instances of being uncivil and viciously lashing out at Trump supporters. He has claimed they support racism, described them as “people who will lie, steal, and cheat, lie to their mother,” and even smeared Trump’s bases as racists “worse than him.”

Almost 30 minutes after his empty comments, Lemon showed off how little self-awareness he had when he tried to chide Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for his feud with an NPR reporter. “We're not perfect. When we get it wrong, we say we got it wrong, we apologize and we move on.”

Perhaps Lemon should take his own advice. This is CNN.

The transcript is below: