Media

Lara Logan’s Latest Anti-Semitic Comments Are “More Suited for a White Supremacist Chat Room”

From 60 Minutes correspondent to Fox Nation host to guest on a QAnon-adjacent online show, former war correspondent Logan now spends her days spewing anti-Semitic conspiracies.
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Lara Logan speaks prior to presenting Father Patrick Desbois with the Lantos Human Rights Prize during a ceremony in Washington, D.C. on October 26, 2017.By Saul Loeb/AFP

When Lara Logan, once a 60 Minutes correspondent, shared an openly anti-Semitic conspiracy theory on a QAnon-adjacent online show last Thursday, her remarks were swiftly condemned—but for her, at least lately, they weren’t shocking. “Does anyone know who employed Darwin, where Darwinism comes from? Look it up: the Rothschilds,” Logan said on And We Know, apparently blaming the theory of evolution on an anti-Semitic myth involving the Jewish banking family turned business dynasty. “It goes right back to 10 Downing Street, the same people who employed Darwin, and that’s when Darwin wrote his theory of evolution, and so on and so on. And I’m not saying that none of that is true. I’m just saying Darwin was hired by someone to come up with a theory,” she said. 

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a Jewish civil rights organization, unpacked Logan’s remarks in a statement to Vanity Fair on Tuesday. “It’s deeply disturbing, but not surprising, that Fox Nation host Lara Logan is promoting tired, age-old anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jews,” said ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt. “Journalists have a responsibility to report the news accurately and factually. There’s nothing accurate or factual about blaming Jewish financiers for financing Darwin or claiming that Jews are trying to form a world government. That’s the kind of messaging more suited for a white supremacist chat room than for a major news network.” (Logan, who did not respond to a request for comment, did not make the comments on Fox News, which she is not currently appearing on, or Fox Nation, which she has not released new content for since November.)

But in some ways, Logan’s latest remarks only show how far away she has moved from reality. Logan, once better known as a “single-minded, fearlessCBS war correspondent who faltered when her report about the Benghazi attack was subsequently retracted, was announced as a series host on Fox Nation in 2019. But last November, Logan’s frequent appearances on Fox News quietly came to a stop after she compared Dr. Anthony Fauci to the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele on Fox News Primetime, then subsequently got into an online fight with the Auschwitz Museum. Following that incident, Logan was dropped by United Talent Agency and has yet to see another minute of airtime on the network. But all episodes of her show, Lara Logan Has No Agenda, are still available on the network’s Fox Nation streaming platform. (A Fox News spokesperson declined to comment on the record.)

Since then, her remarks have only grown more bizarre: Two weeks ago, on the pro-Trump network Real America’s Voice, she portrayed the current Ukrainian military as the successor to Hitler’s “thousand-year Reich” and called Volodymyr Zelenskyy a “puppet.” The same day that she made those claims—which were literally promoted by the Kremlin—Logan appeared to embrace the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories spread by actual Nazis during World War II.

On Gettr, a right-wing social media platform, Logan promoted a wildly anti-Semitic article that included an image, according to a Media Matters report, that read: “What would Zionists do?” The image falsely claimed that a Jewish “banking cartel” invented communism and has instigated “war by way of deception.” It also accused Jews and the Rothschilds of spreading “anti-Christianity,” controlling the media, and running international terror operations. The visual included a bloodred Star of David in the center.

The post Logan shared mirrored the justification Nazi leadership cited for the final solution. Jeffrey Herf, a professor of modern German and European history at the University of Maryland, noted in his 2006 book, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust, that the Nazi belief in a global Jewish conspiracy was their primary motivation in launching the Holocaust.

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