Michelle Malkin

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Michelle Malkin on Fox News discussing her book Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild

Michelle Malkin (born October 20, 1970) is a prominent American columnist, blogger, author and political commentator. She is a social and political conservative.

She makes frequent guest appearances on national syndicated radio programs and on television networks such as MSNBC, The Fox News Channel, and C-SPAN.

Background

Malkin was born Michelle Maglalang in Philadelphia to Filipino parents, Dr. Apolo and Rafaela Maglalang, in the United States on a work visa. She grew up in Absecon, New Jersey, and graduated from Oberlin College. In 1993, she married Rhodes Scholar and RAND Corporation economist Jesse Malkin with whom she has two children. Her husband now looks after their children, as well as helping her with her work for a few hours each week.

Career

She began her career at the Los Angeles Daily News, working as a columnist from 1992 to 1994. In her column, she once described her early career thusly:

"How can anybody live on $25K/year?? When I was 24 and making less than that, I did it by eating Spaghetti-O's, Ramen noodles and Swanson pot pies for dinner; driving a Toyota Tercel with no air conditioning; and sleeping on a $30 futon."

In 1996, she moved to The Seattle Times before becoming a nationally syndicated columnist in 1999.

Malkin's column, syndicated by Creators Syndicate, appears in over 200 newspapers nationwide as of 2005. She is also a frequent commentator for FOX News Channel and occasional contributor to the VDARE.com editorial collective. In June 2004 she launched a political blog which quickly became highly popular, at most times residing among the top five conservative political blogs.

Her first book, Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces, was published in 2002 and was a New York Times bestseller. In 2004, she wrote In Defense of Internment, defending Japanese American internment by the United States Government during World War II and relating this theme to the contemporary War on Terrorism. The book provoked strong reactions, including an unsuccessful attempt to ban the book from the Manzanar relocation center National Historic Site. A group of professors calling themselves the "The Historians' Committee for Fairness" condemned the book for not having undergone peer review and containing a central thesis which they argued was false. In response, Malkin posted a letter from a Manzanar and National Park Service representative, Alisa Lynch, on her website which stated that while no former detainees or scholars could be found to substantially agree with Malkin's scholarship or conclusions, Lynch did not feel it was the place of Manzanar or the NPS to censor such views outright. Malkin's third book, Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild was released in October 2005.

Malkin's blog occasionally highlights investigative reports from other sites, most notably an investigation into financial irregularities at Air America Radio. She is frequently used as an example of the blurred line between bloggers and reporters, given such investigations and her widely distributed columns and appearances on multiple media outlets.

On April 24, 2006, Hot Air, a "conservative Internet broadcast network" went into operation, with Malkin as founder and CEO. She has a daily newscast on Hot Air called "Vent With Michelle Malkin".

Beliefs and controversies (a selection)

After the arrest of alleged spy Leandro Aragoncillo was announced, Malkin wrote, "If it means now that the White House will be applying extra scrutiny to naturalized Americans of Filipino descent working at the top levels of government and in the military, well, yes, I support that. It's obviously overdue."

Malkin has criticised the media for being preoccupied with cases in which attractive white girls go missing, and referred to this phenomenon as "Missing Pretty Girl Syndrome" or "Damsel in Distress" Syndrome.

In 2004, Malkin and several other bloggers accused blogger and columnist Andrew Sullivan of making bogus fund-raising claims. Shortly thereafter, Sullivan created a parody Malkin Award for "cliché-ridden writing from the left and right intended to insult."

Malkin occasionally posts hate mail she received, which often consists of racist or sexist epithets. According to Malkin, she has been labelled an "Aunt Thomasina and a sellout and a race traitor" by some Asian-American liberals. Others have accused her of "bleaching her skin," or trading in her Asian ethnicity for acceptance by Caucasians.

In November of 2004, the Norfolk, Virginia-based Virginian-Pilot ceased running Malkin's nationally syndicated column. Fellow columnist Bronwyn Lance Chester explained, "I think [Malkin] habitually mistakes shrill for thought-provoking and substitutes screaming for discussion. She's an Asian Ann Coulter." Malkin responded "I'm not Asian, I'm American, for goodness' sake. I would take the comparison to Ann Coulter as somewhat of a compliment. I have a lot of respect for Ann Coulter."

When University of Kansas religion professor Paul Mirecki claimed to have been beaten up by two male attackers because of his criticism of creationism and "intelligent design", after linking to a newspaper report with a photo showing Mirecki's injuries, Malkin (along with others) raised the possibility that the claimed attack was a hoax.

In April 2006, Students Against War, a campus group at University of California, Santa Cruz, staged a protest against the presence of military recruiters on campus, and sent out a press release containing contact details (names, phone numbers and e-mail addresses) of their three-person "ad-hoc press team" for use by reporters. However they also posted the complete press release on their website where anyone could read it. Malkin included these contact details in her coverage of the incident. SAW claims that they "politely asked" her to remove the contact details; Malkin claimed that none of the three students contacted her with that request, and pointed out that the complete press release was still available from multiple Indymedia websites. After Malkin's post, the three SAW contacts claim they received abusive emails and phone calls, including death threats. Malkin also received hostile e-mails. Subsequently, Malkin's opponents published her private home address, phone number, photos of her neighborhood and maps to her house on several websites, mainly as blog comments. Malkin has stated that this forced her to remove one of her children from school and move her family.

Despite being born in the US to parents visiting on a work visa, Malkin is outspoken in opposition to the granting of automatic U.S. citizenship to babies born to tourists and temporary workers (so-called "anchor babies"), saying, "Citizenship is too precious to squander on accidental Americans in Name Only." Malkin articulated her position on "anchor babies" with regards to the case of Yaser Esam Hamdi, an American citizen born to Saudi parents who were working in the United States on temporary work visas.

Malkin has expressed support for Joshua Belile, the Marine who has been investigated for composing and performing his controversial song Hadji Girl.

Books

• Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild Regnery Publishing,2005, ISBN 0895260301
• In Defense of Internment: The Case for "Racial Profiling" in World War II and the War On Terror, Regnery Publishing, 2004, ISBN 0895260514
• Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces, Regnery Publishing, 2002, ISBN 0895260751

External links

• Malkin's official site, which hosts The Immigration Blog
• Malkin's columns on Townhall.com
• The Hot Air site

• MalkinWatch, a blog mostly devoted to criticising Malkin
• A series of blog posts by professors Eric Muller and Greg Robinson critiquing In Defense of Internment
• Michelle Malkin: The Radical Right's Asian Pitbull, at a website for Asian Americans
• Know Your Right-Wing Speakers: Michelle Malkin, from a Center for American Progress website
• Michelle Malkin at IMDb
• A blog post asserting that Michelle Malkin's blog is ghostwritten by her husband
• Is Michelle Malkin a Journalist? - journalist David Neiwert