Lara Logan was once a rising star in network news.
She was an intrepid war reporter who filed harrowing dispatches from Iraq and Afghanistan. She ascended to “chief foreign affairs correspondent” at CBS News. Her name was often bandied about when execs pondered future superstars. Her career trajectory was a vertical line slicing into outer orbit.
Then she crashed and burned.
She has regressed from “60 Minutes” to 60 seconds of crazy per minute.
Ms. Logan traded her journalistic bona fides for a new life as a conspiracy theorist. She gives succour and razzle-dazzle to those who believe Joe Biden is not the legitimate U.S. president, mostly because he is a demented, shape-shifting lizard who is obeying whatever the ghost of Karl Marx whispers into the magical conch.
Showcasing her gusto for both anti-science and anti-Semitism, Logan claims Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was secretly funded by the Rothschild family. She talks about vaccines the way librarians warn of book burnings. She has compared Dr. Anthony Fauci to Nazi monster Josef Mengele. This proved a bridge too far for Fox News, which discreetly broke up with her this year.
Now Newsmax, an even nuttier far-right network, is cutting ties.
Note: two conservative outlets that decry “cancel culture” have cancelled her.
In an interview this week, Newsmax anchor Eric Bolling asked Logan a question you won’t hear on PBS: “Is God OK with a closed border?”
Hey, Lara, is God disgusted by refugees? Why God might have an opinion on immigration — or channel these thoughts to Logan — was not clear. But she was babbling about a “spiritual battle” and “end times,” so maybe Bolling was merely searching for a closing sound bite before the commercial break.
Logan grinned and obliged. Soon after, she lost another TV gig.
“God believes in sovereignty and national identity and the sanctity of family, and all the things that we’ve lived with from the beginning of time,” she said. “And he knows that the open border is Satan’s way of taking control of the world through all of these people who are his stooges and his servants.”
It was like hearing Walter Cronkite say the moon landing as fake.
Then Logan went full QAnon: “And they may think that they’re going to become gods. That’s what they tell us … You know, the ones who want us eating insects, cockroaches, and that while they dine on the blood of children? Those are the people, right? They’re not going to win.”
Bolling averted his gaze like a man leaving a Chuck E. Cheese with his kids who is suddenly accosted by a naked crackhead ranting about cannibalistic child killers.
He didn’t know what to say: “Well, yup, all right … well, let’s hope so.”
Yes, Eric, let’s hope the world leaders now guzzling kiddie blood smoothies and gnawing on toddler femurs do not win the epic war of good versus evil and impose a totalitarian New World Order. That would be a bummer.
Let us also hope Ms. Logan’s loved ones intervene and get her some help.
What’s most unsettling now is that we all know a Lara Logan.
Maybe it’s a colleague who says the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks were an inside job. Or an uncle who spams you with proof the Earth is flat. Back in the day, we could roll our eyes. We could laugh off the crazies because the lunatic fringe did not have critical mass. Now it does. Alex Jones remains more influential than CBS and not even a $1-billion defamation judgment will change that.
A Washington Post analysis this month found “a majority of Republican nominees on the ballot this November for the House, Senate and key statewide offices — 291 in all — have denied or questioned the outcome of the last presidential election.”
The politicos yearning for democratic control are hostile to democracy?
That’s like a dairy farm that only hires the lactose intolerant.
Is it not time to start seeing the conspiracy theorists among us as a threat to public health? Should private insurance not add “cult deprogramming” to employee benefits? Should medicine not try to save those who have plunged into the deep end of bonkers and are doing backstrokes in a pool of toxic misinformation?
If you have a drinking problem, you can go to rehab. If you have sleep apnea, you can buy a CPAP machine. Broken arm? Here, let’s put it in a cast.
But if you believe there is a global cabal of demonic liberals who use Wayfair to sex traffic grade-schoolers to pizza joints and the late John F. Kennedy Jr. is actively working to dismantle this pedophile ring, there is no Pfizer vaccine.
Your doctor can’t prescribe a pill that will safely return you to reality.
When she was on “60 Minutes,” Logan’s peepers flickered with a sweet and lively curiosity. Now they are as dead as shark eyes. There is no pilot light in that furnace. She says “dine on the blood of children” the way the rest of us might casually blurt out, “Hello, how are you today?”
Newsmax condemned and banned her from future interviews.
That won’t change the bigger problem: Lara Logan’s brain is broken. Too many brains are broken. We are surrounded by those inhabiting a parallel universe.
And we ignore them at our peril.
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