Michelle Malkin (/ˈmɔːlkɪn/; néeMaglalang; born October 20, 1970)[1] is an American conservative political commentator. She was a Fox News contributor and in May 2020 joined Newsmax TV. Malkin has written seven books and founded the conservative commentary website Twitchy and the conservative blogHot Air.[2]
Michelle Malkin was born October 20, 1970,[1] in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, to Philippine citizens Rafaela (née Perez), a teacher, and Apolo DeCastro Maglalang, who was then a physician-in-training.[1] Several months prior to Malkin's birth, her parents immigrated to the United States on an employer-sponsored visa.[1][7] After her father finished his medical training, the family moved to Absecon, New Jersey.[1] She has described her parents as Ronald ReaganRepublicans who were "not incredibly politically active".[1]
Malkin, a Roman Catholic,[1] attended Holy Spirit High School, where she edited the school newspaper and aspired to become a concert pianist.[1] Following her graduation in 1988, she enrolled at Oberlin College.[1] Malkin had planned to pursue a bachelor's degree in music, but changed her major to English.[1] During her college years, she worked as a press inserter, tax preparation aide, and network news librarian.[8] At Oberlin, she wrote for a conservative student newspaper started by Jesse Malkin, who later became her husband.[1][9] Her first article for the paper heavily criticized Oberlin's affirmative action program, and she said it received a "huge[ly] negative response" from other students on campus.[1] She graduated in 1992 and later described her alma mater as "radically left-wing".[10][11]
Since 1999, Malkin has written a syndicated column for Creators Syndicate.[13] Her column is published by outlets including Townhall. Some publications which previously carried her column, such as The Daily Wire and National Review, stopped doing so around 2019 when she began to espouse more extreme views.[3][14] The white supremacist publication American Renaissance began publishing her column in 2020.[15]
On April 24, 2006, Malkin launched the conservative blog Hot Air, where she remained CEO until she sold the website in 2010.[16][17] The site's staff at launch included Allahpundit and Bryan Preston; Preston was later replaced by Ed Morrissey on February 25, 2008.[16][18] In February 2010, Salem Communications bought Hot Air from Malkin.[17] In March 2012, Malkin founded the website Twitchy, a Twittercontent curation site. She sold Twitchy, also to Salem Communications, the following year.[19]
For years, Malkin was a frequent commentator for Fox News and a regular guest host of The O'Reilly Factor.[3][20][21] In 2007, she announced that she would not return to The O'Reilly Factor, alleging that Fox News had mishandled a dispute over derogatory statements made about her by Geraldo Rivera in a Boston Globe interview.[22][23] Malkin joined Conservative Review's online television network, CRTV, when it launched in 2016, to host the documentary-style show Michelle Malkin Investigates.[24][21] Malkin left CRTV under unclear circumstances when it merged with TheBlaze in December 2018.[25][26][27] Malkin later joined competitor Newsmax TV in May 2020, where she began to host the show Sovereign Nation.[20][28]
In June 2004, Malkin launched a political blog, MichelleMalkin.com. A 2007 memo from the National Republican Senatorial Committee described Malkin as one of the five "best-read national conservative bloggers".[48] In December 2008, Malkin's blog was the largest conservative blog,[49] and in 2011, the people search company PeekYou reported that Malkin had the largest digital footprint of any political blogger.[50] In April 2020, Malkin moved her blog and its archives to The Unz Review, a far-right website run by former publisher of The American Conservative, Ron Unz.[51][52] According to the Anti-Defamation League, The Unz Review is "a site that features numerous white supremacists and antisemites and is run by Ron Unz, who has written a number of antisemitic tracts."[4]
Malkin has also been a contributor to the far-right anti-immigration website VDARE, writing a weekly column since 2002.[53]
In late 2006 and early 2007, Malkin was a leading voice among several right-wing bloggers who questioned both the credibility and the existence of Iraqi police captain Jamil Hussein, who had been used as a source by the Associated Press in over 60 stories about the Iraq war.[54][55][56] The controversy began in November 2006 when the AP reported that six Iraqis had been burned alive as they left a mosque and that four mosques had been destroyed, citing Hussein as one of its sources. The Iraqi Ministry of the Interior and the United States military initially denied Hussein existed, leading Malkin and others to dispute the AP's reporting.
In January 2007 the AP reported that the Ministry had acknowledged Hussein's existence, and that authorities were seeking his arrest for having spoken to the press.[55][56][57] Malkin reported the Iraqi government's confirmation. According to The Washington Post, Malkin also "expressed regret", though media scholar Arthur S. Hayes wrote in his 2008 book Press Critics are the Fifth Estate that her post "contains no apology or words of regret from her".[58][56]
Malkin has spoken at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). She was a featured speaker in 2019, and her anti-immigration speech, in which she condemned the "ghost" of John McCain, drew controversy.[60] In 2020, Malkin spoke at the America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC), an event organized by Nick Fuentes that was described by Rolling Stone as the "right-wing extremist answer to CPAC".[3][61] She also received press credentials to attend CPAC 2020, but did not speak at the conference.[62] She spoke again at AFPAC 2021.[63]
Malkin has written about Daniel Holtzclaw, a former Oklahoma City Police Department patrol officer who was convicted in December 2015 of multiple counts of rape, sexual battery, forcible oral sodomy, and other sexual charges.[72] She has repeatedly argued that she believes Holtzclaw is innocent, saying that the forensic evidence backs his version of events, not the accusers' versions, and also that the investigators chose not to perform several tests she characterized as routine.[73][74] Malkin debuted her first and second episodes of CRTV.com's Daniel in the Den on December 12, 2016, in Enid.[75] Malkin released her film about the case, entitled Railroaded: Surviving Wrongful Convictions in 2017.[76]
Immigration
Malkin supports stricter immigration laws in the United States. She was a featured speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in 2019, where she said levels of immigration into the United States amount to an "invasion" and "endanger our general welfare and the blessings of liberty".[66] She also condemned politicians, including the "ghost" of recently deceased Senator John McCain, for failing to enact stricter immigration regulation.[77][78]
In a 2002 appearance on Hannity & Colmes, Malkin called for militarization of the Canadian border, comparing Canada to conflict zones where United States troops were deployed and saying, "Canada bears a lot of responsibility for making us as vulnerable as we are to terrorism".[79]
In 2017, Malkin endorsed alt-right candidate Paul Nehlen in his ultimately unsuccessful primary challenge against Paul Ryan for Wisconsin's 1st congressional district, citing Nehlen's opposition to "elites" who support open borders as the reason for her endorsement.[14][70]
Muslims
Malkin has advocated for interning Muslims on national security grounds.[33]
Amanda Carpenter wrote in March 2020 that Malkin had begun to "link arms with the most vocal elements of the white nationalist movement".[3] In August 2020, the Anti-Defamation League wrote, "in the past year ... she has publicly and explicitly allied herself with white supremacists" and that she herself was "echoing" white supremacist views.[4] The Southern Poverty Law Center described her in January 2021 as a "former conservative-pundit-gone-white-nationalist-apologist".[80]
YAF dismissed Malkin in November 2019 after she gave a YAF-sponsored speech at UCLA titled "America First: the Torch Is Being Passed". In her speech, she praised Nick Fuentes as "one of the New Right leaders", and also spoke supportively of the Proud Boys, Laura Loomer, and Steve King.[3] In 2020, Malkin faced criticism for speaking at the America First Political Action Conference, which is hosted by white nationalist Nick Fuentes and also featured Patrick Casey, the founder of the neo-Nazi group Identity Evropa.[3][5] She has described herself as the "mommy" of the Groypers, a loose collection of white nationalists who follow Nick Fuentes.[81][82]
In 2020, Malkin appeared on Red Ice, a white supremacist radio program, and cautioned listeners about changing demographics and "multicultural rot".[15]
In November 2021, Malkin delivered a speech at the annual American Renaissance Conference, hosted by the white nationalist New Century Foundation.[83][84] Malkin and her family were subsequently banned from using Airbnb in reaction to her having appeared at the event.[85][86]
Accusations of antisemitism
According to Bridge Initiative, a Georgetown University research project on Islamophobia,[87] In 2019, Malkin joined far-right commentator Gavin McInnes for a Facebook Live event to promote her book, and agreed with him when he claimed that Soros was "not a Holocaust survivor" but a "Holocaust facilitator": Malkin has denied accusations of anti-semitism, saying that she is "the proud wife of a grandson of Ukrainian Jews who came to this country to escape pogroms [and is] a proud supporter of Israel, but more importantly, a proud supporter of American sovereignty."[88] At the 2020 America First Political Action Conference, Malkin said it was "not anti-semitic" to question "whatever the precise number of people is who perished in World War II."[6]
While in college at Oberlin, she began dating Jesse Malkin.[21] They married in 1993 and have two children.[13] Jesse Malkin worked as a healthcare consultant for RAND Corporation.[1] Jesse is a retired health economist, who now works on his wife's speaking engagements and helps her run her business.[21]
^Malkin, Michelle (December 8, 2002). "Invasion". Booknotes (Interview). Interviewed by Brian Lamb. Archived from the original on October 13, 2007. Retrieved March 7, 2021.
^Malkin, Michelle (January 3, 2010). "Michelle Malkin". In Depth (Interview). Interviewed by Peter Slen. C-SPAN. Archived from the original on April 14, 2019. Retrieved August 4, 2020.
^Joyner, James (February 25, 2008). "Captain's Quarters Closing". Outside the Beltway. Archived from the original on June 7, 2017. Retrieved March 7, 2021.
^"Trump retweets right-wing activist associated with Holocaust denier". Haaretz. Archived from the original on May 27, 2020. Retrieved May 28, 2020. Malkin has been ostracized by mainstream conservatism after supporting a Holocaust denier earlier this year. She recently dubbed herself the "mommy" of the so-called groyper army – a movement of white nationalists vying to replace the alt-right.