On Thursday the talking heads at Fox News’ ‘Outnumbered’ were discussing a Florida diner owner. Specifically, her refusal to serve Biden supporters, because of the President’s Afghanistan withdrawal and her belief he had stolen the election. The conversation was the usual boilerplate conservative outrage at a Democratic President, featuring a ‘real American’ putting her principles before profit — until it was Lara Logan’s turn.
She went to a dark place that exists only in her fevered imagination. A place where a Gestapo-like FBI arrests conservatives for criticizing the President and supporting the troops. Where patriots are purged from positions in the national security apparatus and held incommunicado and indefinitely in a DC Gulag without trial,
“In the time that we live in, for people to stand up and openly say something against the Democratic president or something in favor of the troops, I mean, in this country today that puts you at risk of being arrested and jailed by the FBI.”
“Because anyone who believes in patriotism is being purged from the U.S. Military, they’re being purged from DHS and the other agencies. And people are being — they’re sitting in prison in solitary confinement in an offsite correctional facility in Washington, D.C., without trial. They have not been convicted of anything. So, and you know they have been there for a long time now, almost a year. And no one is saying a word.”
“So we live, really, in a state of fear in America today. We don’t live as a free people, as a free nation.“
No doubt it went down well with the paranoid, conspiracy-theorist viewer, Fox’s bread and butter. But it stunned Logan’s fellow Foxers. And it is was offered by a woman who had once been an internationally respected journalist. And for a decade was regarded as a worthy heir to WWII’s famed war correspondent Ernie Pyle and the intrepid reporters who covered Vietnam “in-country”.
Logan started with Reuters in Africa. Then as a freelance journalist, she reported on incidents such as the 1998 US embassy bombings in Nairobi and Tanzania, the conflict in Northern Ireland, and the War in Kosovo. In November 2001, when she was working for GMTV in London, she finagled a visa to Afghanistan from the Russian Embassy. She infiltrated the American-British-backed Northern Alliance and scored an interview with their leader, General Babajan.
In 2002, CBS News offered her a correspondent position. She spent most of the next four years reporting from Afghanistan and Iraq. In February 2006, Logan was promoted to “chief foreign affairs correspondent". She worked at CBS until 2018.
In 2011, while reporting on the Arab Spring she was sexually assaulted by a mob of Egyptian men in Tahrir Square, Cairo. I mention it because it was a traumatic event, but with the proviso that I have no idea what the residual effects were. And I have no expertise to comment.
After her early years of top-notch work, there was a decline in her journalistic standards, including a discredited “60 Minutes” piece on Benghazi, in which she based her reporting on an unreliable source.
And, in contravention of journalistic ethics, she started injecting opinion - increasingly right-wing - into her work. She criticized President Obama for his handling of Afghanistan and called his claim that the Taliban was weakened “a major lie”.
In November 2013, Logan was forced to take a leave of absence due to the errors in the Benghazi report. Al Ortiz, Executive Director of Standards and Practices for CBS News, wrote in a memo, "Logan made a speech in which she took a strong public position arguing that the U.S. Government was misrepresenting the threat from Al Qaeda, and urging actions that the U.S. should take in response to the Benghazi attack. From a CBS News Standards perspective, there is a conflict in taking a public position on the government’s handling of Benghazi and Al Qaeda, while continuing to report on the story."
In 2018 Logan left CBS and in 2019 she joined the conservative media outfit Sinclair. She was also hired by Fox News to do a series of independent style shows called "Lara Logan has No Agenda.” She was vocal in supporting Trump, nurtured an antipathy to liberals, with a particular loathing of an Antifa organization that lived only in her imagination.
Here’s an example from a conversation Logan had with Sean Hannity in June 2020.
“I stumbled across something today and I am telling you this for the first time, and that is on one of the verified Antifa websites. They are using a source who is publishing the Department of Homeland Security’s flights, they are putting out the height that they are flying at, flight patterns, surveillance, aircraft being used by different agencies, putting out personal records of police officers, they know their addresses.
These people have a very significant organization and every time we say I don’t want to talk about this, I want to talk about these other issues, look at the history of these groups. They go back to Ferguson and all the others. The head of the police of Minneapolis is black. The attorney general there is black. The person in charge of state security is black. So saying that this is a race issue is allowing these groups to proliferate, infiltrate law enforcement, and attempt to burn this country to the ground, which is their ultimate goal. They want to kill everyone.”
It’s insane, racist, and completely unmoored to any truth.
Sadly, there are many others whose lives have followed a similar arc to Logan’s. As younger people they are centrist, perhaps liberal, maybe apolitical. And then something happens. They start watching Fox, forwarding chain emails, sharing conspiracy theories, and expressing antipathy for groups of people. Perhaps you know one, or worse, have one in your family.