Laura Logan, thank you for joining me again in the
Trenches. I'm very glad to be here Jeremy,
you're one of my favourite people.
Can I say still South African? Sure.
Of course, you know, in my heart, I mean, I'm an American
citizen now, but I'm born and raised and forged my soul,
forged in the fires of South Africa.
So without question, you know, I have a massive loyalty in
myself, you know, in my, in my heart.
For my UK column audience who might not know you, let's let's
go back to the start. You're from Durban.
Take me back. Well, I'm from Durban, South
Africa. I started as a journalist when I
was 17 years old in newspapers and then went from a Sunday
paper to a daily paper and worked all the way through
college. So by the time I graduated from
university, I had years of journalism behind me.
Then went into television to an international news agency,
Reuters in Johannesburg. South Africa was one of the
biggest stories in the world for a very long time.
And you know, sort of was at its zenith when I was working on
that. The was pretty bad and it was
gearing, you know, this was sort of in the late 80s and then the
early 90s going into the South African elections.
Then I went and worked in London, worked for NBC News, ABC
News, then got a job at CBS. Ended up being the foreign chief
foreign correspondent and chief foreign affairs correspondent
for CBS News was a full time correspondent at 60 minutes,
which was sort of the, the, the, the height right of American
media and known a lot for my reporting from the battlefields,
Iraq, Afghanistan. But way beyond that.
You know, when I was in Angola when I was 20 years old
reporting for Reuters television long before anyone really knew
my my name, I was doing a lot of war reporting and then of course
hit the roadblock with cancelled culture.
That's when you suddenly discover that following the
facts regardless, you know, of where they take you was not
popular. It wasn't popular in the
mainstream media because we had sort of very insidiously been
taken over by political interests.
And so when they discover that you're very talented, you know,
they prop you, they they support you.
I mean, it's still, it was still a fight for me because as a as a
woman, I really had to claw out my place on the battlefield
because that was sort of the domain of of man until Katie.
You know, Katie from the BBC was one of the very first women who
really distinguished themselves as a war correspondent.
And then, and then you had Christiane Amanpour at CNN and,
and then, you know, there were a few more that Alex Crawford from
Sky and Lindsay Hilson from Channel 4.
You know, they started to come into it.
But really in the United States, there wasn't anyone in network
news unless they were Canadian or American.
So I kind of shredded that glass ceiling and changed and changed
the way really, for everyone who came, all the women who came
after me. But I have this annoying habit
of not being controllable because I just wasn't born that
way. And I think it's an out South
African DNA when we're just not controllable.
You can't order me to do something because I have a
conscience. So you got to tell me I can't
report on something because I have a conscience.
I'm not going to not report on child trafficking because it
upsets people or I'm not going to, you know, be critical.
I'm not going to say the Steel Dossier as it was created is not
propaganda because it was obvious from the start it was
propaganda. If they wrote it about Obama, if
they wrote it about Biden, I would have said the same thing
because it was obvious that it wasn't true.
But with Donald Trump, suddenly we encountered something so
weird for me. I mean, it was unbelievable.
If you said, if you spoke up for the truth, you were instantly
branded as some right wing lunatic, some Trump Nazi.
And whether you supported Donald Trump or not was irrelevant.
And so, you know, then I went into kind of, it's almost like
it's a tsunami. I think of it like being in a
washing machine since the since 2016.
I mean, you know, I was there cheering for Obama in the
beginning because we were coming out of the Bush Cheney years,
which was so awful. These people were horrible.
We hated them as journalists. They lied about everything
happening on the battlefield. And I exposed them.
And when I exposed them, I was lifted up and everybody loved
me. So, you know, Obama gets into
office, I'm full of hope, right? That was his message of hope.
And I keep doing what I've always done and suddenly nobody
loves me anymore. In the media, you know, and in
the power, in the halls of power.
And I don't just mean Washington DCI mean the halls of power,
media organisations, institutions to support the
media, academic institutions. I mean, all these people, the
think tanks, the people that come crawling, you know, to your
door, hordes of them when you're, when you're a big voice
in the media that all want a piece of you, right?
And they all want you to tell their story.
They all want you to cover this and they all want to give you an
award and they all want to do that.
Suddenly, none of those people. When I said, when I kept doing
what I learned to do in South Africa as a newspaper
journalist, what I continued to do at CBS News as a radio,
television and newspaper journalist, when I worked at the
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel as a freelance writer.
And all that time I did the same thing.
I asked the obvious questions, I questioned everything and I
reported what I believe to be the truth.
And then suddenly they hated me. And then they start attacking
your reporting and you don't stand a chance because you're
going up against the CIA and, and these entire networks that
they have built. And they go throughout the
corporate world, they go throughout the academic world,
they go throughout the PR world, the legal world.
I mean, they're, they're, they're, they have lines of
operation into every part of your business.
And and then of course, there's human nature, you know, so if
you're if you're very successful, as I was, and if
you're one of the top people in television news in America,
which puts you at the top in the world and they can find
something to take you down. Oh boy, it's like sharks that
are feeding frenzy. They smell that blood in the
water. And it takes very little.
And then you place a few, you know, strategically placed
assets who are pretty much on your side.
They're either political operatives or they're, you know,
whatever they or they're just corrupt or they're just weak,
jealous, whatever. And then they start with the
anonymous, you know, articles and the hit pieces and all the
anonymous people that want to take you down.
And so I've just, you know, I've kept fighting because I don't
know how to I'm a fighter and I don't know how to do or be
anything other than who I am and a journalist.
Those are that's, you know, what I was born to do.
Never done anything else and don't know how to do anything
else, never will do anything else.
Although I thought about it a couple times and I why am I
still doing this to myself? But you know, people come to you
all the time. They say thank you for being our
voice. Thank you for standing up.
Thank you for not, you know, falling on your knees and
crawling in the dirt like the others.
Thank you for not taking the hand and becoming corrupt.
Thank you for being so brave, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But you know what they don't do, Jeremy?
They want you to take all the risk and they want, you know, to
prop you up, but they don't want to take any risk.
So you're left. It's a, it's a, you're left
fighting this battle, which is, which is an endurance marathon.
But it's OK because it is what it is.
When you're talking about meeting cancel culture, were you
referring to the Benghazi 60 Minutes thing?
Yes, that's when I really, you know, got my first full blown
encounter. I mean, it was it.
There were sort of hints of it just leading into that.
Like I did a story about Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
So at the time, Obama and his CIA chief were out telling the
world that al Qaeda was decimated, they were on the run,
There was less than 200 al Qaeda operatives left in the world,
blah, blah, blah. And so I collected for 2 1/2
years the battlefield reports from Afghanistan.
And I showed that they were capturing and killing and
wounding more al Qaeda people in a month, in any given month, in
2 1/2 years than they said existed.
So they were a lot. So what was the first thing the
Obama administration did when my story came out?
They they stopped all battlefield reporting to the
media. They cut it off.
So you had people like when I was sitting, you know, in, in
bars in Washington, DC watching Obama speak on television and
cheering him on, right? Because we, he said it was going
to be the most transparent administration ever.
And we, we all thought, OK, finally, here's someone who's
not going to lie, who's going to tell the truth about what's
happening on the ground in the war, who's going to stand for
principle, blah, blah, blah. So you believe those things.
I mean, I had no reason to doubt him.
I interviewed Obama when I was six months pregnant with my son.
I flew to Afghanistan to interview him in Kabul,
Afghanistan. They chose me, Jeremy.
They chose me for their only interview during foreign
interview during Obama's campaign for the presidency in
2008. Why did they choose me?
Because I had the most credibility of any journalist in
the United States of America when it came to Afghanistan,
Pakistan and that region. And how And what did Obama lack
at the time? He had no foreign policy
credentials. And he was being criticised
because he had so called, you know, barely left the United
States. So they did a foreign trip to
Afghanistan. And who did they use?
I didn't know at the time I was being used.
You know, you're blown away. Oh, the president's guy, David
Axelrod is calling you. And he's like, you want an
exclusive with the boss? And you know, you never get
those kind of exclusives, right? There's no that hardly ever
happened. So you think, wow, you're blown
away. OK, I've got this exclusive.
CBS is happy. You know, everybody's excited.
You're flying over there, you're doing the logistics.
And you don't stop and think, why, Why me?
Why am I being? Nobody gives you exclusives.
They don't fall in your lap. So when someone does, actually,
what I've learned now is that the first thing that should
happen is all the hackles on your neck should rise.
And you should ask yourself why they're giving this to me.
Because they've selected you to use you for a reason.
Because most stories that are worth reporting, that means
something. You've got to claw them out of
stone. You know, it's hard.
They don't just fall in your lap.
So when something falls in your lap, that's a sure sign that you
need to be extra careful. How do you navigate the the the
fog of propaganda? Well, part of it is experience,
right? I mean, because when I think
back to myself as a young reporter, I was sure I was
really naive. Like I remember the first time I
I was assigned a story that involved it was a criminal story
and I had to call the police. And I remember as I was a
newspaper reporter, I remember calling the police and having
this conversation with them and the police officers telling me
all of this, you know, and part of me, I'm a 17 year old kid.
I can't believe I'm interviewing the police chief, right?
And so I'm kind of, you know, sort of blown away by this whole
thing. Get off the phone and I'm like a
little puppy, right? Go bounding up to the news
editor who's been in this game a long time gone cigarette hanging
out the corner of his mouth got popped mocked skin, wild hair
that into the absolute the absolute embodiment of a
hardened news guy, right? He's been doing this forever.
Every second word is, you know, F this and F that, blah blah,
blah. But he knows the news.
And so I come and report. This is what I found out about
the story. And he looks at me and he's
like, he said, what? Did you ask him this?
Oh, he's foolish.
You know, he's full of crap. He's lying to you.
This isn't true. That's not true.
What about this, this, this,
this and this? And I'm like, OK, that's how you
learn, Jeremy. But we are getting rid of
newsrooms. We are getting rid of the
reporters that learn over time, that know, that can smell a lie
a mile away because they've been doing this for a long time and
they question everything and they stay true to the
principles. We've blended the lines between
activists and journalists, you know, And sure, you can report
on something, you know, like you can.
You can be a reporter in your report, like I did on the mass
graves in Kosovo. And you can become very
passionate and emotional about what you're reporting on.
But there are, you know, a reporter is supposed to follow
the facts wherever they take them and an activist will bury
inconvenient facts if they hurt the 'cause that's the definition
of being an activist is that you put the cause before everything
else. So now that does that mean that
you won't find an activist that discovers something, you know,
like corruption within their organisation and and comes out
about it and is honest about it? Sure.
I mean, you can find the one in a million activists is willing
to do that and you can find the reporter that is reporters can
be very passionate about what they're working on, stories that
they tell without becoming, you know, a full blown activist.
But if you don't, if you're not very careful about separating
those things, then you you get into a very bad space.
And I, years ago, I met a young girl who was dying to meet me
because I was a, you know, experienced journalist and she
was studying journalism. And I was one of her, you know,
idols. And so and I said, So what are
you studying? And she said, I am a human
rights journalist. And I looked at her and I said,
what does that mean? What do you mean you're a human
rights journalist? And she looked at me like,
what's wrong with her? Why is she asking me such a
stupid question? What does she mean?
What does it mean? And I said to her, you know, I
said, you didn't tell me you're a sports journalist.
Like, if you're a sports journalist, I know you cover
sport, but you. But you technically take the
principles and the craft of journalism and you apply them to
a subject matter. But when you tell me you're a
human rights journalist, I said, so when I say you go to Egypt,
cover a human rights issue, you're going to find out what
the, the government of Egypt has been the victim of the the
previous regime, right? And so now you're going to cover
the new regime and the all the human rights violations of the
past. And what if you find out that
the people that you're interviewing have committed
human rights violations? What's your job then?
What if Amnesty International, what if you discover that
they're trafficking children? What if Human Rights Watch you
discover that they're burying murders because it doesn't
they're they're waiting the research to benefit one side
because they're invested in that side or they get money from
them. Like what do you mean you're a
human rights journalist? There is no such thing, you
know, are you a human rights activist?
Because then you need to go join Human Rights Watch or Amnesty.
But if you're a journalist, I don't even understand what kind
of college programme is training you to be a human rights
journalist. I mean, it's nonsense.
So when you say how do I do it, well, I have the benefit number
one of, of having been in this for more than 35 years.
So I'm as cynical as it gets. I question everything and I
question everyone. I've also had enough time to
make mistakes. And so I have learned to, I've
learned the importance of being as sceptical about the people I
like or the people I agree with as the people I disagree with.
I've also always understood that journalism is not objective.
It's highly subjective. The stories you choose, the
characters you focus on, whatever it happens to be.
We're we're human. Of course we have our own bias,
but the craft of journalism, the professionalism of it, is what's
supposed to protect us from our own bias, right?
So if you, if you're diligent about your craft, it can
insulate you to a degree. Not always, nothing is 100%, but
at least by going through the process you you begin to
separate yourself from your opinions and your emotions and
things like that. That's, that's a very
interesting point, Laura. I've often wondered where that
line is between getting personally involved in the story
or, you know, observing it from a distance.
Yeah, well, there and how much distance, right, is the
question. Because, you know, some people
will say, well, why is this woman commenting on South Africa
when she's thousands of miles away in America?
And even though she's South African, it's been, I don't know
how many years it is since I lived in South Africa.
So, you know, what does she know versus I'm an American
journalist. I've never been to South Africa,
couldn't find it on a map. But I'm commenting because I
cover the White House and that's my beat.
You know, I mean, how much distance is good and how much
distance is blinds you to certain realities?
I think the truth is that when you're close to something,
there's a certain perspective that you get and a knowledge, a
depth of knowledge and a detail, hopefully, and substance, right?
Because that depth means substance versus when you're
further removed from it, you are without question more
superficial. So for example, I can go to
Mexico, which I have done, I've reported extensively on the
cartels, but I've always, but I've lived to fight another day.
Whereas in Mexico, they kill journalists all the time because
who's more threatening to a member of the cartel?
It's the local journalist who's digging into the details of
exactly who's doing what on this street corner or in this big
deal or what, right? They're the real threat.
So if you look at the DuPont Awards, which is the highest
award for television journalism in the United States, most of
the Dupont's go to the batons, go to local news reporters,
because who's really exposing the details of corruption?
When I lived in Baghdad for five years, I knew that place
backwards. But who did they want to talk
to? Most of the time they wanted to
bring in the journalists from the United States who were
famous, who had big reach and very little.
Quite often, not always, but most of them didn't know a whole
lot. Because it's easier to sell
someone a narrative when they don't have a depth of knowledge.
So you have this balance between beat reporting, because when a
reporter has a beat, they really learn their subjects.
So it used to be you were the crime reporter, you were the
sports reporter, you were the entertainment reporter, right?
And now if you're a journalist, you should be able to move
between those different beats. You know, maybe here you're
doing local government, now you're doing politics, now
you're covering the White House, now you're a general reporter.
So, right. So you can have specialists and
generalists and you learn in each of those functions.
The benefit of having beat reporters like say you have the
BBC Asia correspondent is there for years because they really
learn and understand Asia first hand, you know.
So on the one hand, proximity and closeness can be very
helpful. Of course, you can get blinded
by your own emotion. You can get too close to it, you
can become corrupted or you can just become, you know, so
biassed that you forget to do your job.
And that's when, that's why I've always liked being part of a
team in journalism, right? Because inevitably we have our
own perspectives. But what we would do at 60
minutes, my team, we would argue with each other all the time.
But then what you discover is when you step back from that,
you see, wait a minute. So now what happens?
Because every team sees certain things the same way.
Certain issues like Roe V Wade in the United States, the right
to have an abortion, my body, my choice.
I never heard anyone I ever worked with at ABCNBCCBS or any
of the other places I worked in the American media.
Cnni never heard someone say they were pro life or, you know,
against abortion. Never if they, if they existed,
they didn't speak up because they were outnumbered.
So within your, what you learn is that within your organisation
where you feel very noble because you have these lofty
goals of bringing truth to power, shining a light, blah,
blah, blah. Democracy dies in darkness,
right? This is our job.
We are the light bearers because we are, we are bringing light
and exposing things that people need to know about.
Why am I going to live in Baghdad for five years?
Why am I going to Afghanistan in the middle of the war?
Because I really believe that if people know the truth, why did I
do it? Risk my life in South Africa?
Because if people know the truth, when there's a major
injustice happening, they're going to do the right thing.
But now we live in a time where people don't want you to believe
it, even don't believe your lying eyes.
Someone can stand in front of a riot with the the flames burning
and say this is a mostly peaceful protest.
Don't worry about the flames behind me, right?
So now we've got into a crazy situation where, for example,
Donald Trump has to show a video because some people deny that
people that white farmers are even being murdered.
Some, I've heard lots of people deny it.
They say, oh, that's not happening.
Or oh, it's it's happening in such small numbers, it doesn't
matter. Or it's miniscule numbers in
comparison to all of the mostly black people being murdered
every day in the crime ridden South Africa.
Therefore, it doesn't matter. And so you can't even you're not
even starting the conversation in an honest place.
It's not even starting there. So, so like people, it's like
having a story, you know, having a conversation with someone
about the Holocaust when you're talking to someone says the
Holocaust didn't happen because there are a lot of Holocaust
deniers out there. No, it didn't happen.
That's a lie. 6,000,000 Jews didn't die or some people say,
well, they killed them, they did it to themselves or they did it
for this reason or whatever. You know, I mean, there's a
there's a million different arguments, but you can't even
have an honest conversation. Like we can have an honest
conversation about the so called race based laws in South Africa.
These 140 laws that were that were, you know, written about, I
think was by Afriforum or someone connected to Afriforum.
And now that you know, someone else from the Guardian and from
another paper, they said these are not race based laws.
But then when you look at the laws, they're all talk about,
you know, either things like equity, diversity, inclusion and
righting the wrongs of the past. Well, if the wrongs of the past
were racial injustice, how do you right the wrongs of the past
without being the centre of that?
Sorry, Laura, but hang on, hang on, hang on.
When people say, when people say there aren't any race based laws
in South Africa, it's so absurd. Let me give you an example.
Everybody knows that Elon Musk has got Starlink.
Starlink hasn't been able to launch.
It hasn't been able to launch in South Africa.
Because of B EE black economic empowerment because Elon doesn't
want to give 30% of his company to some random black person to
in order to meet the legal requirements.
I don't I. Understand this.
But the law doesn't. But but the law, that's the case
where the law actually says it has to be a black person.
Yes, that's race based. Right.
But what they argue about is, well, of this 140 laws, this 140
number is not accurate, right? Because at least half of these
140 laws, when you actually look at each law, you don't see the
word race or you don't see the word black or whatever it is,
right? But we all know that when you
see the word that you know equity, that that's a Marxist
term. When you strive for equity, that
is literally, that is literally one of the, the sort of
foundations of Marxism. So what does that mean when you
see righting the wrongs of the past, that means taking from
white people to give to black people.
That's what it means. Or, you know, it means that you
have to give preference to black people because white people got
preference in the past. That's what it means.
So one person says this is a race based law.
The other person says there's no mention of race in this law, you
know, And so it's, you're, it's a ridiculous conversation.
It's a ridiculous conversation. And, and, and then if you talk
about it, then the other part that's ridiculous.
Now I'm accused, you know, I've had people say to me, did you
feel persecuted in South Africa? No, of course they didn't feel
persecuted, you know, and are there many other white people
who don't feel persecuted? Absolutely.
Is there great unity and love and, you know, a, a shared
identity and togetherness among most black and white people in
South Africa? 100% But does that mean that
it's OK to say that slit the throat of whiteness and then
pretend that that has that that's doesn't have any impact?
Kill the bull. Well, I mean, look, we know what
they we know what the arguments are with kill the bull.
So I grew up in the days of kill a farmer, kill a bull when it
was actually a cry, a battle cry of the resistance.
Then came Pizza Mokaba and he wasn't he wasn't of the time,
you know, he wasn't there in the 80s, OK, Peter Macabre came
later in the in the 90s, in the early 90s.
So this this for me even was a new was new generation.
So this is they inherit these songs that are seeped in the
romantic ideal of the revolution, which by the way, is
a Marxist communist revolution. But we all know that what
happened to the ANC when they actually came to power, they
were not Marxist. They did not install a Marxist
government in South Africa. Why?
Because they nobody would have signed off on that.
None of the power brokers that were involved in those
negotiations were arguing for Marxism.
And why were they really Marxist?
Well, some people were Marxist at heart, but most people were
Marxist because those are the people who gave them the money.
Because who funded the revolution?
The Russians and the Cubans? Why?
Because it was a proxy war. South Africa was one of the many
proxies of the Cold War. So you had in Angola, in
Namibia, in Mozambique, in South Africa you had the Cubans and
the Russians and the Marxist communist countries versus the
United States and the UK. But then what did you have in
South Africa? Well, you had this little
problem of this thing called apartheid, which no one in good
conscience could actually agree was a good system.
OK, in the you know, it, it was pushed and really in the wake by
Hendrik provoked and the Afrikaans in the wake of the
Second World War because because it was the what was that?
The first election after the Second World War, the Black
peril election, right? That was what this idea that you
as a minority, the only way you're really going to survive
being a minority in this country is if you, you band together and
you create a system of control, which is really what apartheid
was, separate people control them, right?
And so and do it based on race and then use fear, intimidation,
tyranny, force, censorship, all the tools that come with every
system that isn't, that isn't free, that isn't based on
honesty and liberty and justice and equality.
I mean, what do you have to do whenever you create a system
like that? Put whatever name you want on
it. You can call it a dictatorship,
like in Iraq and Saddam Hussein, which I witnessed personally.
You can call it a democracy, a fake one under Hosni Mubarak in
Egypt, right. You can call it a communism in
Russia or in China. Call it whatever you want.
But when you create a system that isn't founded in the in
things that are true and honest and enduring, you always need
the tools of tyranny of darkness to prop it up.
It's like telling a lie. What happens to your lie?
Oh, shit, it starts to crumble. OK, ask anybody who's ever
cheated on their spouse or their their partner.
Tell one lie and what do you got to do?
You got to keep telling more lies to keep it up.
So what happens is you build these systems based on that and
they crumble. Marxism always crumbles because
what do you have to do in the end to ensure equity over
equality? You have?
You've got some animals are more equal than others because the
ones ensuring the system are always more equal, right,
because, because this runs counter to everything that's
true in of human nature. And what happened?
So what happened? The Marxist recognised that
these openings to dominate society with things like
religion, things like race, these are natural openings in
free societies where you can exploit people's emotions, you
can exploit their misfortune, You can you can find a foothold
for your ideology to grow. Because I call them the good
idea fairies, right? They come to you when you're
young and they say, isn't it terrible that people starve to
death? Yes.
Wouldn't you prefer a system? Capitalism is responsible for
this because you live in a capitalist society.
Wouldn't it be better to have a system where people, nobody
starved, nobody was homeless, nobody had to die because they
couldn't afford medical care? Like, what person?
If we're basically good in our hearts as human beings, who's
going to say no to that? You know who says no to that?
The person who says who's going to pay for it, how are you going
to pay for it? Like my father taught me when I
would go to Musgrave Centre in Durban.
Remember Musgrave Centre in Durban for all the Durbanites in
your audience in South Africa, the shopping mall.
And we would go off to school to the welcome chair.
I don't even know if it's still there.
And I love to order a budded scone.
And it was toasted. And my dad would say to me, he
said, you know, how much does that cost?
And, you know, look on the menu. And I looked at the price and
then he said, how much does that really cost?
And I said, well, I mean, you know, this SCON doesn't cost
more than a few cents and they're charging this amount of
money for it. My dad said that's a RIP off,
right? And I said, yeah, it's a RIP
off. And he said, well, who who paid
for this? Who paid for the that brought it
to your table? Who's paying to clean these
tables? Who paid for the furniture?
Who's keeping the lights on? How far was it transported?
Where is it cooked? Where did the ingredients come
from? And you start to break down the
supply chain and then you start to understand what the real cost
is, right. And so these are the tools that
no, these are, these are more complex things that you have to
understand. What's the easy thing to do is
to take people who are poor, take people who are
disenfranchised, take people who are suffering and play on their
emotions and then blame somebody else.
You find the bad guy. So let's find the bad guy.
So, you know, I, I, I raised all of this because I, I want there
to be no misunderstanding. I love my country and I love my
people very, very, very much. And I recognise fully that South
Africa has come through a difficult history and a dark
past, and people gave up everything during the
revolution. And those who are using this
kind of song today, they're trading on that.
All those sacrifices that were made, they didn't earn it.
Peter Macabre wasn't even alive in that time, OK?
And I mean, not Julius Malema, sorry.
It wasn't even alive during that time.
They're trading on all those sacrifices that were made, all
that suffering and injustice that happened.
They're taking that, the romantic side of the revolution,
and they're using that. But it's very obvious when you
look at their policies. I mean, Malema is a Marxist
because he's funded by the Marxists.
I swear, if Malema was funded by capitalists, he would be the
biggest capitalist there was. These are not people who truly
carry in their hearts like Nelson Mandela said.
No, time and time again, I was there.
I lived through those days when they would offer him his
freedom. And because it was conditional,
he didn't take it. You think Julius Malema would
stay in prison for the sake of his people?
You think Julius Malema is ever going to live like the people
that keep him propped up or the people that he speaks to?
You think he no, he's not going to live like that.
Neither, by the way, does Jacob Zuma and neither, by the way,
does Cyril Ramaphosa. Look at these people, at the
money that they have amassed. And I don't understand why This
is one thing that I've encountered is very hard for a
lot of South Africans, especially a lot of the white S
Africans that I've talked to. There's there's a there's
something where they have where they go blind, Jeremy, and it's
at this point where they can't recognise that you can be honest
about apartheid. You can be honest about how this
has benefited white people. You can be honest about all of
this stuff and where we are today.
But they still think that taking away commercial farmland from
white farmers and giving it to people who are never going to
farm it and are never going to turn that land into something
productive is a real solution. And, and somehow if you
acknowledge that white farmers are being murdered in what is
which, what can be argued is a genocide, that somehow that
means that you're blind to everything else.
And also, why do they not, Why can they not recognise that
there are globalist forces that are at work in South Africa?
I mean, one of the biggest, most vocal people, the first time the
land expropriation thing came up years ago, one of the most vocal
people who was outspoken on this issue was Patrick Gaspard, who
was the US ambassador to South Africa at the time under Obama.
Why was Patrick Gaspard out there encouraging land
expropriation? We all know land expropriation
does not lead to a better place. It doesn't.
I mean, you could say it rights the wrongs of the past, OK.
And maybe it'll it maybe it'll make people feel better.
But the reality is 30,000 commercial farms in South
Africa, most of them farmed by white people.
You take will people will starve to death.
And as I I tell people all the time, millions will starve and
most of them will be black. But you know who won't starve?
Julius Malamba, head of the Economic freedom frontier.
So Ramaphosa, head of the ANC, right?
Jacob Zuma, head of MK, All the big leaders in South Africa,
none of them will suffer. None of them, not one.
And what have they done? You know, a woman who was very
close to me, Florence Meduna, who was, I knew all my life
until she died. She lived in my mother's
apartment for years before she finally died.
And that was because I'm, when she got sick, I, I insisted she
move out of her shack and live in my mom's place.
And I was always asking her, Florrie, please, can I get you a
house? And she used to say, no, I say,
why not? She said, because the ANC
promised me a house and they're going to keep their promise.
They're going to keep their word.
How many people did they let down?
How many people? Millions.
And it's not getting better. It's getting worse.
And people say, you know, certain people say, oh, well, it
was, it was fine until Jacob Zuma got into power.
No, it wasn't. It wasn't fine.
They were, they were not investing in infrastructure in
that time from day one. One of the first things that
happened is they stopped investing in infrastructure in
the roads, in the grid, in the in the water systems from day
one. I mean, it didn't drop off 100%,
but it started to go down. It was going downhill from the
beginning. Laura, why did you leave South
Africa? Now it was so long ago, you
know, I've even forgotten why I left.
I'll never get, you know, honestly, when I left, I never
left. I thought I was gone for a time.
I always believed I would come. I had a vision of a little house
on the water. I always loved Glendeno.
So expensive, I couldn't afford it, but I always thought that I
would come home. And I love Durban, you know,
That's where I was born and raised, but I never left.
I went to follow my instinct, which was I understood that
South Africa's place in the world.
I think one of the things that makes us interesting as S
Africans is that we've always understood that we're not the
centre of the universe. We just know that, right?
We're not in Europe, we're not in the United States.
We're not the centre of the universe.
We don't drive the global agenda and we're OK with that.
I mean, you know, I don't, I don't know about you, but a lot
of us are. We're OK with that.
But what we, what we have is, you know, we have something else
like we were born in this place that was truly blessed by God.
I mean, look at South Africa, look how we grew up.
I mean, I go to beaches. I've been to beaches all over
the world. I've been to the South of
France. I've been all up the Gold Coast
in Australia. I have been to beautiful beaches
in Florida. I have been, you know, to
beaches all over Europe. I've been to the best beaches in
the UK where people will say, oh, the UK beaches are terrible,
but there's some great beaches here.
And you go there and you look at it and you're like.
What is this? You know this.
What is this this? You call this a beach.
Let me tell you about this place called South Africa, right?
So, so you're, you're blessed. I mean, we are there in the the
centre of life. We may not be the centre of the
world or the centre of geopolitics, but in this place
where life began on earth, where every inch of ground is teeming
with life of some kind, where you you really get to experience
life in all kinds of extremes. Right, you're, and that's why I
said forged in the fires of Africa, right?
So I, you know, I was born in this incredibly beautiful place.
But then you do start to realise, wait a minute, I'm
still going to fundraisers where people are raising money to
build wells in Africa. I'm doing this for 30-40 years
now. How come there's nowhere in
Africa where you can point to and say they don't have a water
problem anymore? All these people that are
Building Schools and yet there's nowhere where you can say they
have a great functioning school system.
Or all these organisations? That have been raising money to
save animals. What animals have they saved?
Jeremy? What?
I can't hear you, you know what
I mean? So you start out as this
idealistic person and you're, you know, I'm in with the world,
you know, Wildlife Foundation. Oh, look at this great work
they're doing in Africa. And here's look, look at these
great people who are doing work in Africa.
And you start to realise, wait, all these people are just
stealing. They're just.
Stealing they created. So you have this continent that
was not to say that, you know, African politicians and
corruption and you know, and all kinds of things and, and that
the continent is very different, Southern Africa versus East
versus West versus the north. And you know, we all know Egypt
is nothing, you know, like Angola, right?
So, so I know I'm not meaning to put it all together the way a
lot of people do when they don't know that the place, but I just
mean that you you have a you have country after country,
whether it's former Democratic Republic of Congo.
There, there is arguably not a single piece of ground on earth
that is richer and more blessed in mineral wealth than the
former Democratic Republic of Congo.
And yet 80% of the population lives on a dollar or less a day.
How? How would?
How did that happen? So you have to start looking at
that, well, how did that happen, right.
And so there's individual responsibility and then there's,
you know, the, the sort of the external forces that are part of
that. And you start to look at all
that. So I just understood that being
in this place called South Africa, I was on the one hand
incredibly blessed, but on the other hand I had, I was.
Given. What were my blessings from God?
My blessings were that I had a near photographic memory in many
respects. I had the ability to grasp
strategic things and tactical things.
I could see through things and I could see through people.
I had the ability to go like I saw everybody.
We're raised in South Africa. Everybody was equal to me.
You know, whether I'm I'm sitting down with street kids,
sleeping with street kids on the streets of Luanda in Angola, or
whether I'm sitting down with the Secretary of Defence or.
I'm at the White House OR. I'm being honoured by the Queen
of England, you know, by her son and his wife, you know, who are
having dinner with me in my honour to give me an award from
the Queen, right? It doesn't.
Or, you know, I'm meeting Obama for the first time in the, in
the Afghan embassy when I'm six months pregnant or whatever.
It is like is, is I think in South Africa to me.
I was raised to see all people as equally deserving of respect,
kindness, love, and protection under the law.
And then you discover, wait a minute, there's a country called
the United States where these things are enshrined in this
covenant with God and built into the Constitution and the
Declaration of Independence and so on.
Like they actually founded a country like that.
It's not to say that the United States is better than every
country on earth. I'm not saying that.
But if you look at how other nations were founded, they don't
have that. We didn't have that in South
Africa. God is not important to us in
South Africa. I mean, most of the South
Africans that I know are very secular.
We, we looked at religion as whites, English speaking South
Africans, we looked down on religion.
You know what I mean? I mean, sure that my mother was
a in a convent and you know, she was a lapsed Catholic.
And so I had some grounding in Catholicism and religion.
But I mean, mostly South Africa is very secular.
I mean, unless you're talking about in the black community
where you still have of course, traditional religions, right.
But but look at it, what's the fastest growing religion in
South Africa? I mean, I don't know the
statistics, but it's pretty obvious it'll be Islam, right?
I mean. That's that's a good question.
It's, I mean, you know. Because look at what's growing
all over the world. So I mean, there's places where
pockets where Christianity is growing, but everywhere that
Islam is, it's growing everywhere, right?
It's not declining in Saudi Arabia and it's certainly not
declining in London or by the way, the United States.
But what is declining all over the world?
Christianity, What is being rejected by people all over the
world? Christianity.
So anyway, I say this to you because my instincts were always
to go to the heart of the story. And it would, you know, when I
was growing up under apartheid, I was in the heart, living in
the heart of one of the biggest stories in the world.
And then I went to Angola during the war and Mozambique during
the war. So in my region and in my
sphere, I went to the heart of all those big stories.
And then I, it was just natural for me to keep doing that.
So I did that going across the world and I went to Iraq and I
went to Afghanistan and stayed there for years and years.
And, you know, it was very obvious that America was kind of
the epicentre of this. I wasn't really British in
nature. Like I worked for a British
company and I, I didn't really identify with the British kind
of passive aggressive thing. I was more my fiery South
African, Irish, Sicilian roots found more, I identified more
with the, the, the new world of the United States where if you
could demonstrate real skill if, and you could work your way up,
that wasn't, you know, there's limits.
There's more limits to that in the British sort of system.
And in America, I knew there would be no limits for me.
I knew that as far as I could go, I just believed I could.
I could do it. And so I did that.
And then something happened to me.
And I know I'm giving you a very long answer to a simple
question, but I'll tell you. Then this happened.
I had babies. Ha ha ha, yes.
And it was over my. My African dream was, was over.
My, and I mean my dream of returning to South Africa to
live out the rest of my life in the place you know that I, that
I love so much. That was it.
Because once you have kids, everything changes.
Not for sure. Well, I mean, the most important
question, Laura, of all the questions I have to ask you is
Kanye and N Africans the claim Bikifistan Yohat me, Scott?
Yeah, take a look. What's OK with me?
Do you miss Durban? Oh yeah.
Of course, of course I do. I mean, I love, you know, I love
what I love about the South African people.
Like the, I don't know, there's, there's just a, a genuineness to
your relationships and interactions with everybody,
right? I mean, they're just, it's, and
there's so much love. And in spite of all the
suffering of the vast majority of, of people there, of course,
most of whom were black, but there were many of us that were
in the trenches with them and there was such joy.
I have so much respect. Like I just have so much
respect. I mean, I knew Mandela nuts, you
know, wasn't like we were best buddies on first name terms.
But I was a journalist and in his time and his every move and
we were always around him and you know, and so and I, he would
host a breakfast with us and we would go and have breakfast with
him. Bunch of journalists.
And I actually had one interaction with him where the
Queen of England came to South Africa on her first official
visit after he was elected. I remember that.
Do you remember that? Yeah, so that was crazy covering
that. And we had a pool coverage and
all the rest of it. And I was one of the main people
in that because I was part of Reuters news agency and, you
know, the agencies always have to do everything.
And we would deal with the correspondence and they had
other jobs to do, you know, they had to write their scripts and
all that. So we were, you know, like the
gatherers of all the news and information and we had to put it
out, but not, you know, the way they did.
And so we were right at the centre of this and it was just
those royal visits are just insane.
And so we get to the end the very last day and the Queen
hosted a reception for the media on the HMS.
You know, her, her ship that was in the port there in Cape Town.
And you know, we had to go and courtesy for the Queen and shake
hands with Prince Philip and so on and so on.
And I'm leaving the ship with all the journalists and I scrape
my Achilles on the back of a of a step, which is just pure
metal. So it's OK And I'm bleeding
everywhere. And the Queen says take her, you
know, take care of her. So there's some say, like
carries me. I'm not kidding you, Jeremy.
Some say like, carries me. A few, you know, below deck into
the bowels of this ship. And they patch it up and I go
back. But now I'm late for the
official banquet to which is mocking the end of the Queen's
visit. So I.
Come running into the. Hotel like a bat out of hell and
I'm. It's a Cape Sun and I go to the
elevator and I'm, you know, on the elevator, elevator button
because I'm frantic now to change for the for the dinner
and get down there. And I just hear this voice and
it's hello, Lara, how are you? And I turn around and it's like
there's the president of South Africa waiting to receive the
Queen of England. And as always, you know, Mandela
has his security, but he never let them cut them off from the
people. And so I'm just like Madiba
Howie and you and I stood there for like 20 minutes chatting to
him until the Queen got there and like you said earlier.
It's part of you. You'll always be a journalist at
heart and a journalist in reality.
The word has got such a tainted meaning these days, doesn't it
it? Does, yeah.
And. It's the thing I worry about,
Jeremy, is that I'm all for embracing new forms of media and
I, and I understand that, you know, we're in a new era of
technology and people are breaking away from the formal
media structures of the past. And I, I understand why.
I mean, you know, hell, I've been targeted, falsely labelled
as extreme right wing and all the rest of it.
And but at the same time, you know, the infrastructure that
allowed me to go all over the world and witness things first
hand is breaking down and nothing is replacing it yet.
Now, that doesn't mean something won't happen.
But where is the there? Where's The Newsroom?
Where is there? Like, if you, it's great that
anyone with a microphone can be a podcaster, OK, but how are
they going to survive financially?
How much? Where are they investing in the
next generation of journalists? Who's coming in there and
learning first hand from them? Who's who are the mentors?
Who are, who's, who are you handing over?
Like there's tonnes of journalists that I know, very
experienced, very knowledgeable. Where is their?
Knowledge going. If they're taking it to the
grave with them because, because you, you know what I mean.
And so journalists have stopped being journalists.
So you get a lot of people in mainstream media that have a lot
of skill and experience, but they've lost their moral courage
or they're ideologically blinded, or some of them have
political operatives, or some of them are corrupted, you know,
and paid off. Or some of them are so bored and
entrenched. And they're, you know, in the,
the, the role that they've played in the many false
narratives that that have been around for the last 10 years or
so. So they don't want to, you know,
they don't want to break out of that.
It's like people that don't want to admit that the vaccine has
killed more people than COVID in in many places, because then
they have to admit that maybe they're at risk, right?
Or they vaccinated their kids and put their kids at risk.
They didn't know any better, but they'd rather not believe it.
It's, it's harder to face that reality than it is to go on
believing the lot. So you have part of that is at
play in the media world. But as long as the media
remains. Unwilling.
Or unable is that formal corporate infrastructure to
acknowledge the the truth and to correct it, to invest in
correcting it. Then you can pretty much write
that off, right. And then what, when you look at
well, new media, well, so a lot of people define themselves as
conservative media. I get it.
That's sort of the that's not how I define myself.
And, and I don't like as a journalist, that kind of goes
against the grain for me. But I do recognise that there
are people, you know, and, and especially the way social media
is today, that there are people sort of who are, who are defined
by their, their political view. And there's room for that, no
question. The opinion pages in a
newspaper, you know, speak to that.
So there's always been room for analysis and opinion.
The, the problem is that there isn't really a home for people
who don't belong to the left and they don't belong to the right.
Nobody wants us. And as long as there's no money
in it, you will not know what's happening right on your
doorstep. Like a good example is in the
United States in North Carolina right before the election.
You know, they had that absolute catastrophic flood.
Well, what what's happening in North Carolina now?
What's happened to those people? Where's the first hand
reporting? No one's investing in that.
You know, you have an entire state of California, which is
coming apart at the seams and how many people are reporting on
on that issue first hand and showing the growing number of
homeless tents that line the Pacific Coast Highway, You know,
and what does that mean And challenging you, You know,
you're not it's not happening. There's no investment in
reporting. And and it's partly because we
as journalists, as an industry have yet to own our failures.
We're still basically, we're still in the front lines of an
ideological war. How can I follow?
You. Well, I have my show.
Going Rogue with Lara Logan, which is a podcast that's on
it's on X, it's on YouTube until they sits or until they kick us
off. It's on rumble.
You can find it on laralogan.com and sub stack and you know,
basically any platform out there that we can be on, we're on
we're on Spotify. So if, if people, you know, we
tried going on TikTok, by the way, we got a couple strikes
straight out of the box. So I don't know how long we'll
survive on TikTok, but I would, I would really love people to
watch my show because, you know, I'm taking on some very
significant topics, everything from satanic accelerationist
cults, which are these people who believe that by committing
evil, they can accelerate the decline of humanity and the role
that they have to these mass shootings in America,
trafficking, high level trafficking in the music
industry, you know, low fare in the United States, which effects
everything the Trump administration is doing right
now. So I mean, you know, we're,
we're the people love the show very much.
And I think it's, it's sort of because people are starved of
substantial information, right? They want substance.
They don't want just the the headlines.
There's room for just the headlines.
We all need that. Sometimes in the morning, you
just want to know what the news is, right?
But but there's a lot of people that want to go beyond the
headlines. And that's kind of the nature of
the show. Well, on that note.
My favourite African American journalist, Laura Logan, thank
you for joining me in the trenches.
Thank you SO. Much, Jeremy.
We'll talk soon, OK?