Newsmax bans Lara Logan after QAnon-tinged on-air tirade

The rightwing US TV network Newsmax said it had no plans to interview Lara Logan again, after the award-winning war correspondent turned rightwing pundit launched a QAnon-tinged tirade on air.

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Speaking to host Eric Bolling, Logan said “the open border is Satan’s way of taking control of the world” and claimed world leaders drank children’s blood.

QAnon is a pro-Trump conspiracy theory which holds that leading liberal figures in US and world politics are, among other things, secretly murderous pedophiles.

Logan told Bolling: “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.

“And he knows that the open [southern US] border is Satan’s way of taking control of the world through all of these people who are his stooges and his servants.

“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. They’re not going to win.”

Newsmax said in a statement it “condemns in the strongest terms the reprehensible statements made by Lara Logan” and had “no plans to interview her again”.

Logan, who is South African by birth, rose to prominence with CBS during the Iraq war and the Arab spring. Covering events in Egypt in 2011, she suffered a serious sexual assault. She left CBS in 2013, amid a scandal over errors in a report about the deadly attack on a US facility in Benghazi, Libya the previous year.

Moving into conservative media, Logan has spread QAnon-style conspiracy theories in appearances on conservative networks including Fox News. She has also downplayed the January 6 attack on the US Capitol by Trump supporters and echoed Russian talking points about the war in Ukraine.

Last year, Logan compared a leading public health official combating the Covid pandemic, Dr Anthony Fauci, to Josef Mengele, a Nazi doctor who performed human experiments in concentration camps during the Holocaust.

Since those comments, Logan has not appeared on Fox News. Episodes of Lara Logan Has No Agenda, a series made for the Fox Nation streaming service, remain available online.

In April this year, she claimed to have been “pushed out” by the network, saying: “They don’t want independent thinkers. They don’t want people who follow the facts regardless of the politics.”

In May, Ira Rosen, a former CBS producer, told the New York Times: “I want to remember the Lara who put her life on the line reporting for CBS News in Afghanistan and Egypt. The one now I almost don’t even want to know about.”