A Star Reporter's Break With Reality

Lara Logan was once a respected 60 Minutes correspondent. Now she trades in conspiracy theories that even farright media disavow. What happened?

- By Elaina Plott Calabro

The footage is shown before she takes the stage: Lara Logan in a headscarf, addressing the camera from the streets of Mogadishu. Logan ducking for cover as bullets crack overhead in Afghanistan. Logan interrogating a trophy hunter in Texas. Logan walking with Christine Lagarde, Justin Trudeau, Mark Wahlberg, Jane Goodall.

It is a tour through Logan’s past life as a journalist for CBS’s 60 Minutes, a glimpse at the various exchanges and explosions that earned her the awards and a “prominent spot,” as her former network once put it, “among the world’s best foreign correspondents.” Th en, three minutes and one second later, it is over. Cut to right now, February 27, 2023, in Fredericksburg, Texas: Logan looking out at 200 people gathered in a creaking church auditorium for the inaugural meeting of the Gillespie County chapter of Moms for Liberty.

“If you want to know why it’s called social media,” Logan says, “I’ll tell you why: Because Karl Marx was hired by Henry Rothschild, by the Rothschild family, to develop a system of social control. So when you see social, it is a form of control— that’s all it is. Social media is a form of controlling us all.”

She goes on, picking up on the title of a recent book by a friend of hers, retired General Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser and a far-right conspiracy theorist: “So what does fifthgeneration warfare really mean?” It means that “you’re meant to believe the narrative, regardless of the truth.”