Lara Logan spoke at Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson’s roundtable discussion on ‘Federal Health Agencies and the COVID Cartel’ on 26 February. This is about a 13-minute video. It’s also available at Logan’s Twitter page.
I made a transcript:
Senator Ron Johnson: Our next presenter is Miss Lara Logan. Lara Logan is an award-winning investigative journalist, former 60 Minutes correspondent and chief foreign correspondent and chief foreign affairs correspondent for 60 Minutes and host of The Rest of The Story with Lara Logan. Miss Logan…
Lara Logan: Thank you Senator Johnson. Hello everybody I was asked to testify on media censorship and the First Amendment, the importance of free speech, and I do want to say that it is an honor and a privilege to be here with all of you and with you Senator Johnson. Thank you for hosting this rogue committee. It’s important to all of us because of everything discussed today that we address the vital principles and values that exist really only in the United States of America and, that said, these are the worst of times for the media in this country. We live in the age of information warfare, where propaganda is not simply a weapon; it is the entire field of battle. This is a war for our minds that is aided by advanced technology, and we have never been here in all of human history. It is a moment when we as journalists should stand together united in, regardless of politics. We should fight for the truth and we should fight for freedom. Yet not very long ago we allowed one of our own, Tucker Carlson, to be branded as a traitor simply for doing his job. In fact there were many so-called journalists who were leading the charge against Tucker, accusing him of treason for the simple fact of interviewing the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, and to my knowledge there was not a single legacy media institution that spoke up. This was more than a politically motivated attack on one man. It was a betrayal of the most sacred principles of a free press, and my media colleagues know this to be true no matter what they say. My fear is that they either no longer care or that they lack the moral courage to be honest, including with themselves. I have worked at the highest levels of the media as a fulltime correspondent for 60 Minutes Chief foreign correspondent for CBS News Chief Foreign Affairs correspondent for for CBS news. That was my home for 16 years, and as a journalist I have sat down with world leaders, mass murderers and terrorists, and I have held people on both sides of the aisle accountable. I have seen suffering and I have faced evil, and I have walked through the fires of hell on distant battlefields. I faced my own death at the hands of a mob of some 200 men in Egypt when I was gang raped and sodomized and beaten almost to death while on assignment for 60 minutes. And yet for almost a decade I have been targeted and falsely branded and accused of many things that I did not do. They have attacked my work, my character, my sanity and my marriage, and I am not alone. We are many. And we will not give up and we will not give in to those who wish to censor the idea of free speech in America and all over the world. Media companies, institutions and journalism schools have failed all of us, and for too long we have allowed nonprofit organizations to masquerade as nonpartisan media watchdogs when in fact they are little more than highly paid political propagandists and assassins whose entire reason for being is to crush anyone who stands in their way. And along with them the long held and cherished ideas of free speech, free thinking and free minds. This is a blood sport for them. They are political allies and they are puppet masters. They know how to kill a journalist without murdering them. We call it cancel culture. In truth it is a death sentence and they get away with it because they have information dominance. Some are strong enough to survive but only a few like Glenn Greenwald, Tucker Carlson, Matt Taibbi. Only a few like them are able to reach greater heights and thrive. These nonprofits that I’m talking about are part of a vast censorship network that includes government agencies. They use deception to mask their actions, with lofty goals like preventing the spread of misinformation, disinformation, hate speech. They use phrases like “protecting democracy”. And make no mistake - words matter. The media is collaborating with government agencies and operatives to censor and shape the information battlefield to justify certain actions. For example, when the president of the United States threatens the unvaccinated, saying “Our patience is wearing thin” and accuses them of putting communities at risk, his words are designed to justify hatred, censorship and intimidation. And when the vice president compares January 6 to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor, it is a predicate to silence the opposition and justify the weaponization of the justice system. We are already witnessing another shaping operation to influence the outcome of the 2024 election, this time with the false claim that if one side wins it will be the end of democracy. This lie contrived to ensure a particular outcome and to sabotage free speech yet again. Overseas taxpayer funds from hard working Americans are being doled out by contractors under the Office of Transition Initiatives at USAID or the State Department Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. These contractors, many of them ideological zealots who are not even US government officials, often make over a quarter million dollars a year and are outside the reach, senator, of yourself and committees like this. They hand out taxpayer dollars to programs that are shaped by highly partisan NGOs who hide behind terms like “interreligious dialogue”, when in fact they are funding Muslim schools that train Islamic terrorists like they did in Malaysia. Another example is Humanist International. Through them the State Department is funding atheism grants that actively cultivate an atheist advocacy network in Nepal. This is not just to attack religion and manipulate foreign politics. It is an attack on free speech, faith, and God. While propaganda and censorship are not new, technology means unprecedented power and reach in the hands of a few. Companies like Facebook, Instagram and Google, as you have heard many times today, have been allowed to amass monopoly power, and as a result they not only reach billions of people across the world every second of the day - they have absolute control over what we see and what we hear. Imagine those tools in the hands of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hitler. When I became a journalist more than 35 years ago we were under emergency restrictions in Apartheid South Africa, and I was 17 years old. Public safety and security were the weapons of state censors. Ours was the truth. We had no Bill of Rights, no Constitution, no First Amendment, no Declaration of Independence, and journalists would have to hide their footage from the security police, sometimes sewing the tape into their mattresses at home so they could not be seized and used to identify and target the protesters that we had filmed. The light of freedom that set fire to our hearts in South Africa was lit thousands of miles away. It was lit right here where we sit today in the United States of America. When the founding fathers put freedom of speech first, it was not by chance - it was by design. The rights that followed were in part created to protect the First Amendment. Without it they knew that freedom itself would perish. I am reminded today of the words spoken by the British foreign secretary Sir Edward Gray in 1914 at the beginning of the First World War. He said “The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” We are once again watching the lights of freedom - they’re going out here and all over the world, and it is up to us to determine if they will be lit again ever. Thank you Senator Johnson. I’m ready to take your questions.
Senator Ron Johnson: Thank you Miss Logan. We only have a few seconds. Can - you said you’ve been targeted over the last 10 years - can you describe what precipitated your targeting?
Lara Logan: Yes. I’m reporting the truth about Benghazi. I was attacked by one of those NGOs that masquerades as a nonpartisan watchdog in violation of its 501(c)(3) status it occupies, a highly partisan position. I’m talking about Media Matters for America. I’m sure there’s many doctors in this room, scientists who’ve been attacked by the same people, the same people that run that, David Brock, for example. Another political assassin now runs an organization called Facts First USA, which is designed to make sure that your research, Dr. Hazan, never reaches, never reaches the people or the public. There are other organizations like Defeat Disinfo which claims to be a PAC that goes after disinformation, particularly set up to target covid and throughout covid with General Stanley McChrystal and the other people that advise that organization. But what, you know Senator Johnson, it’s not a secret that these organizations exist. What is not widely known and talked about is that it’s paid for by us. It’s paid for by the taxpayers in your omnibus spending bills that get shoved through the house and the Senate against the will of the people of this country. They are, there are cutouts for these NGOs and what they do is they launder this money. They pass it from one NGO to the next and in the name of preventing the spread of disinformation they censor, silence, intimidate and punish. I said that this is a death sentence for journalists. It’s how you murder a journalist without killing them. It’s how you murder a scientist without killing them. It’s how you you murder a doctor without killing them. It’s how you murder the vaccine injured when they haven’t died yet. It’s how you finish them off and everybody else in their family and it’s time for people in this building who come to work every day here who to serve us. This is the only country where we the people are the government. This is a government for the people, of the people and by the people, and the same is said for so-called journalists. Del Bigtree - This man has been targeted for simply going to the FDA hearings and filming them when they approve vaccines just filming them not doing a thing and putting that putting that out and showing people there is no real approval process They didn’t actually do their jobs and for that he’s been targeted for years long before Co ever hit so it’s time now for us to stop taking taxpayer funds to slit our own throats.
Senator Ron Johnson: Well thank you. One of the many reasons I generally vote no on those but thank you Miss Logan.