Things have gotten a lot crazier over the past few years for award-winning former CBS News war correspondent Lara Logan.
Now reinvented as a far-right commentator, she was most recently kicked off Newsmax after appearing on Eric Bolling’s primetime program and launching into a QAnon-themed rant on air, claiming world leaders drank children’s blood and made people eat insects, among other notable wild conspiracies.
Newsmax subsequently told The Daily Beast that it will not be bringing her back on the air. She had already been kicked to the curb by Fox News for comparing Dr. Anthony Fauci to a Nazi war criminal.
Now, according to Fever Dreams podcast hosts Will Sommer and Kelly Weill, there are few places she can turn to from here.
“Over the past few years she’s really gotten into it [right-wing conspiracies],” Sommer says, referring to the voter fraud movie written by Logan this year, Selection Code, which is bankrolled by Trump ally and MyPillow maven Mike Lindell.
The Logan saga is fascinating, Weill says, because “very often it’s like once you get on the conspiracy train it’s really hard to get off. You just need to be finding something more and more potent, just the real, pure, uncut stuff.
“As people do that, it distances them from family, from friends, from a more reality-grounded world. I think Lara Logan is someone who’s experiencing this, kind of professionally. She ousted herself from the mainstream and now she can’t even really fit within the well-financed fringes. She’s too weird even for them.”
According to Sommer, Logan is now “really headed towards the world of Rumble videos” and warns the “outlook is not great. I don’t think 60 Minutes is going to be calling again.”
Elsewhere in the episode, Maurice Chammah, reporter at The Marshall Project and author of Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty, talks American sheriffs and their far-right tendencies.
Chammah recently surveyed more than 500 sheriffs, whose responses, he says, suggested that the “constitutional sheriff movement is actually much bigger” than previously thought and includes “extremely negative views” of the 2020 racial justice protests.
“Our survey found overall the sheriffs had extremely negative views of the protests in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd,” Chammah says.
“Many of them said that those protests were motivated by a bias against law enforcement as opposed to a good-faith interest in accountability. And many of them thought that deaths like George Floyd were isolated incidents as opposed to signs of a broader problem.
“It gives you this picture of law enforcement where they don’t believe that they’re really doing anything wrong or that that much needs to change. They don’t really have an incentive to change.”
In the podcast’s “Fresh Hell” segment, the hosts discuss reports of intimidation at early ballot drop boxes, particularly in Arizona from those who are hyped up by Dinesh D’Souza’s debunked conspiracy film, 2000 Mules.
“There are people literally with armor platelets on their shirts. They’ve got guns in the back of their trucks and they are sitting literally firing distance from these ballot drop boxes. If you saw it someplace else, you would really fear for the integrity of their elections,” Weill says.
Sommer sums it up nicely: “It’s very grim.”
Listen, and subscribe, to Fever Dreams on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.
