The Radical Right's Asian Pitbull
Is Michelle Malkin a political thinker with a weakness for namecalling or an ambitious showoman selling righteous bitchery to sexually repressed right-wingers?
by William Nakayama
It would be easy to make mean jokes about a Filipino American immigrants' daughter who authors a book arguing that the internment of Japanese Americans was justified by national security. Not to mention a best-seller arguing for a much tighter immigration policy. And countless weekly columns sniping at affirmative action, environmentalists, sexy pop stars, scandalous journalists, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Gary Locke, John Kerry, Teresa Heinz Kerry, and just about anything and anyone that offends radical right wing sensibilities.
To do so would only be giving Malkin what she gives others. But most readers would find that kind of adolescent vitriole less interesting than a serious effort at understanding who Michelle Malkin is, how she became that way and what she really wants.
On the level of plain, undisputed facts, Michelle Maglalang was born to Filipino immigrants in Philadelphia on October 20, 1970. Her parents had arrived in the U.S. earlier that year. Her father was a doctor in training with a visa sponsored by an employer. Her mother was a schoolteacher. After Michelle's father completed his training, the family moved to New Jersey. Michelle spent most of her childhood in the tiny town of Absecon in southern New Jersey. Like most Filipinos her family was Roman Catholic, an affiliation Michelle retains to this day. Her parents were Reagan republicans but “not incredibly politically active,” Michelle told CSPAN's Brian Lamb. “I just think that there's always been an eighth sense of gratitude toward this country and trying to give back to it.” She edited the school paper at Holy Spirit High School but without evidencing a pronounced right-wing perspective. “[I was] not really politically energized yet.”
Her first ambition was to become a concert pianist. Michelle enrolled in Oberlin, a small Ohio college with a respected performing music department. The town of Oberlin (pop 8,560) is located about 35 miles southwest of Cleveland, near the heart of a once mighty industrial region going to rust.
“I soon realized that I couldn't cut it with piano,” she told the National Review Online. Michelle Maglalang changed her major to English and, as she had in high school, began writing for the student newspaper.
Toward the end of her Oberlin career she signed on with an independent campus newspaper that was being started by a Jewish student named Jesse Malkin. Malkin would later become Maglalang's husband. He also had an immediate and lasting impact on Michelle's political views. Jesse Malkin had attended Berkeley High on Martin Luther King Boulevard in the town his future wife would later label “The People's Republic of Berkeley”. In addition to being a top student, Malkin was a distance runner who captained Oberlin's cross-country team. That combination, as well as his strong political views, helped him win a Rhodes scholarship to study for a year at Oxford University in England.
By the time Jesse Malkin started the newspaper, his conservative leanings had been well enough established for him to receive funding from an organization calling itself the Collegiate Network. The Network had formed in 1980 as a union of college newspapers funded by a neo-conservative group called the Institute for Educational Affairs (IEA). IEA had been founded in 1978 by Irving Kristol and William Simon, a leader of the modern neo-conservative movement. As Nixon's Treasury Secretary, Simon had shaped the administration's tax policy.
IEA was dedicated to “seek out promising Ph.D. candidates and undergraduate leaders, help them establish themselves through grants and fellowships and then help them get jobs with activist organizations, research projects, student publications, federal agencies or leading periodicals.” It was, in essence, an affirmative action program to help restore right wing influence on college campuses.
In 1990 the IEA was merged into the Madison Center for Educational Affairs, another neo-conservative foundation started in 1988 by, among others, William Bennett, Reagan's Education Secretary. Madison continued to fund the Collegiate Network until 1995 when its headquarters was moved to Wilmington, Delaware and placed under the financial support of another neo-conservative organization called the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI). Today ISI funds about 80 right wing college newspapers.
In any event, when Jesse Malkin founded his newspaper in 1989 he became one of IEA's most academically impressive recruits. When Michelle Maglalang began working for that paper, she was on the road to becoming one of the IEA's most notorious.
Oberlin was a liberal stronghold, a college that prided itself on a history of affirmative action leadership. In 1841 it had become the first U.S. college to award A.B. degrees to women. As of 1900 Oberlin had graduated half of all African Americans with college degrees. Jesse Malkin and Michelle Maglalang were among very few students who didn't hold liberal views. “For the most part, it was an incredibly politically correct culture,” recalled Michelle Malkin.
Jesse Malkin's first assignment for his new Filipino American reporter was collaborating on an article denouncing Oberlin's affirmative action program. Fellow students found the article offensive and showed their displeasure to Malkin & Company.
“That's where I first really encountered the vicious response you can get when you stand up to a political orthodoxy,” recalled Michelle Malkin. ”It's an extremely liberal campus. Even if you tread very lightly on political sacred cows, there was a huge negative response, especially from somebody who was a minority, standing up and saying, ‘Well, all these self-appointed minority groups on campus don't speak for me.’
“It was seeing the violent paroxysms it caused on the Left that really put me on my way to a career in opinion journalism,” she stated in her chracteristically defiant and sneering tone. “I really just came into being as a political journalist towards the end of my campus experience, and it was really after I had left and started, you know, writing on my own. It was really more social conservatism than economic conservatism that I started with for my column-writing. So I was not a huge lightning rod until the end of my tenure at Oberlin.”
Whatever her inspiration, by the time Michelle Maglalang graduated in 1992, she was committed to a career in journalism. Her first choice was of the broadcast variety. She headed to Washington D.C. to intern at NBC while Jesse Malkin went to Santa Monica to continue his conservative education by working on a PhD in economic policy analysis at the Rand Graduate School (RGS). RGS was a small, little-known adjunct to RAND Corporation, a conservative think tank founded in 1948 to promote freewheeling capitalist ideals and conduct secretive research for the federal government. It gained notoriety during the Vietnam War by its involvement with some of the more sinister aspects of the war effort.
Maglalang's NBC stint ended without significant on-air experience. In late 1992 she moved to Los Angeles where she was reunited with Jesse Malkin and landed a job with the struggling San Fernando Valley-based Los Angeles Daily News as a reporter-cum-editorial writer. That job gave her the opportunity to learn a skill that would prove useful in her later career — producing quick-turnaround copy that provokes strong reader reactions.
“We would go out and report on school-board meetings,” she recalled, “and then turn around and editorialize about it.”
While Michelle Maglalang was churning out petulant columns voicing the anger and bewilderment of the older, less educated, more conservative subscribers of The Daily News who felt alienated by the influx of immigrants into Southern California, Jesse Malkin was working on white papers that came down on the side of a medical profession feeling increasinlgy besieged by health care reform. His PhD thesis was The Postpartum Mandate: Estimated Costs and Benefits. That subject would be reprised in a paper Malkin later co-authored as a RAND consultant with three others titled Postpartum Length of Stay and Newborn Health: A Cost-Effectiveness Analysis. Essentially, it finds medical benefit in extended hospital stays for women who had given birth. Another of his co-authored papers is titled How Much Does Global Warming Matter? and subtitled, “What the world's population needs most are more lavatories and better sewage systems.” Despite the papers' scholarly tone, Jesse Malkin's political leanings were as unmistakeable as his new wife's.
The couple married in 1993. Michelle changed Maglalang to Malkin. In 1996 when Jesse's RAND consulting career took him to Seattle, Michelle landed a job at The Seattle Times. Before the year was out the more famous Malkin was unleashing the no-holds-barred style of political spitballing that would ultimately make her a poster girl for the radical right. She railed against the University of Washington's affirmative action policy, popular Governor Gary Locke's alleged “Asian Money Ties”, measures to provide more protection against drive-by shootings in public places, the dangers of &;dquo;diversity do-goodism”, and incongruously enough, the failure to make good on FDR's promise of welfare benefits to foreign Filipino veterans. This last was a jarring inversion of Malkin's usual positions on government spending and the rights of non-U.S.-citizens — she actually seemed to be arguing that able-bodied foreign nationals were more deserving of government largesse than the wounded and disabled.
The birth of daughter Veronica and the launch of her syndicated column coincided with Michelle Malkin's decision to quit her Seattle Times job in late 1999. The family followed Jesse's RAND consulting job to Maryland. He worked in a Gaithersburg highrise while Michelle worked out of the house, first in Germantown, then North Bethesda. Freed from the restraints of staff writing, Malkin's tone became cattier and more bombastic. A column entitled “Sluts and nuts — and our daughters” (Feb. 28, 2000) called Britney Spears “a paragon -- of adolescent American insipidity and shamelessness... the teen pop star with a tinny-thin voice, shiny blonde tresses, chronically exposed navel, and an IQ that roughly equals her much-discussed chest size.”
In a column entitled “The Truth about Erin Brockovich” (Apr. 14, 2000), Malkin takes swipes at the claim that pollutants contributed to the unusually high cancer rates in Hinkley, California but directs her real venom at the attractive environmentalist and her portrayal by Julia Roberts.
“Audiences and critics are falling hard for Julia Roberts' low-cut, high-heeled portrayal of the real-life Brockovich,” Malkin groused. “She's a foul-mouthed file clerk who took on an evil utility company that allegedly poisoned residents in the desert town of Hinkley, Calif. Brockovich scored $2 million in legal bonuses. Roberts made $20 million playing Pretty Woman meets A Civil Action. Over the past four weeks, the box-office smash grossed nearly $90 million.” The column sums up with another swipe at Brockovich/Roberts's sex appeal: “Alas, the cold, hard facts are no match for a warm smile, dazzling cleavage, and a blinding Hollywood spotlight.”
Tying every issue to a leering swipe at the physical appearance, personal style or intimate life of a prominent figure — especially those with a high sex-appeal quotient — was becoming Malkin's trademark. It didn't matter that the subject had done nothing to invite focus on her personal life. Even Elizabeth Dole didn't escape Malkin's radar. In “Is Bush a Liddy Dole Republican?” (Mar. 17, 2000) Malkin snipes, “She's baaaack. Elizabeth Dole has been buffed, polished, and pulled off the Republican trophy shelf by Texas Gov. George W. Bush in a lame attempt to attract liberal women voters,”. Malkin even seemed to hint at a bit of sexual chemistry between Dole and Bush. “She cooed that Bush was ‘my kind of conservative.’” She sexualizes Dole with the gratuitous observation: “The woman nicknamed ‘Sugar Lips’ has been wading inside the Beltway for decades, like a giddy queen bee in a bottomless pot of taxpayer-subsidized honey.”
Malkin was becoming skilled at supplying back-door titillation to those who liked to heap righteous indignation on supposed immorality while leering at its sexiest exponents. Some observers thought Malkin was out to make herself an object of right-wing titillation. For her column's headshot she cultivated a put-together look that included parted lips coated with red lipstick, big wind-blown hair and a red blouse unbuttoned to expose a prominent V of flesh. “Malkin is a true Cundit,” observed one anonymous poster. “A highly paid media ‘ho’ getting richer by throwing red meat to the loons.” Malkin made frequent references to the background and credentials of her obviously non-Asian husband. To complete the picture of exotic flesh in bed with the right wing, she made a point of distancing herself from the perspective normally associated with her Asian ethnicity.
In “Asian American Pity Party” (May 2, 2001), she writes, “Here are some of the racial epithets I've been called in my lifetime: Chink. Gook. Jap. Nigger. Slant eyes. Dog-eater. Those are just the printable ones. I'm an American of Filipino descent, but have been mistaken for everything from native Hawaiian to Caribbean. I've been blamed for the Vietnam War, attacked for stealing jobs and told countless times to "go back home" -- which usually means Bangkok or Beijing or some other exotic locale I've only seen on a map.”
Despite having suffered racial slurs, Malkin asserts, she has risen above “self-pity.”, thereby shifting the onus for slurs from those who sling them to their victims — a familiar right-wing tactic. She then blasts a Chinese American organization called the Committee of 100 for commissioning a survey on American perceptions of Chinese Americans. She goes on to paint the Committee as being pro-China, a rightwing shorthand for “traitors”.
“The Committee of 100, an elite pro-China engagement public affairs group, has a vested interest in playing the victim card to shield its allies from criticism. Not a single newspaper that covered the survey reported that until recently, one prominent member of the Committee of 100 was none other than convicted campaign finance felon and suspected foreign agent John Huang. As Huang himself once warned: “There is a Chinese saying: ‘When you drink water, always think about the source.’”
The most remarkable thing about Malkin's bi-weekly columns is how consistently they strike a single note: the American way of life under attack. Apparently the American way of life comprises values that were cast in stone around the turn of the last century and is threatened by those who represent the forces of change. Foremost among them are foreigners entering the U.S. The rights granted illegal immigrants became a Malkin pet peeve. In a bit of serendipitous timing, on the day before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack, her column (“The end of American citizenship”, Sep. 10, 2001) lashed out at the ease with which some illegal immigrants were allowed to become legal residents and citizens. It was criticizing the federal government's amnesty program for illegal migrant workers from Mexico, but its dire tone seemed borne out the very next day by the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Once it was learned that the attacks had been carried out in part by foreigners who had entered the U.S. illegally, Malkin quickly saw that she had in hand a golden opportunity to turn herself into a right-wing prophet.
“September 11 was obviously a galvanizing event for me,” she told CSPAN, “seeing the lapses in our immigration system that allowed the September 11 hijackers to come in, exploit our weak enforcement, work underground and live here comfortably.” She didn't miss the chance to connect the recent horrors to her earlier cries of wolf. “And that is a theme that I've been talking a lot about over my career in journalism, for more than a decade. I started out in Los Angeles, and it's hard to ignore the negative consequences of lax immigration enforcement when you're in the middle of it in Los Angeles. So over the years, you know, I've written a number of stories about so many aspects of the immigration system from top to bottom -- the front door, the back door, the side door.”
And she didn't overlook the obvious advantages — from the political perspective — of having the threat being decried by someone of her immigrant background.
“I often talk about how I myself am the child of legal immigrants who came here from the Philippines. And one of the themes that I've always talked about is something that they've reminded me... that entry into this country and residence in this country, and ultimately, citizenship in this country is an absolute privilege, and it ought not to be treated as some sort of natural right or entitlement. But over the years, our immigration system has abandoned that principle. And that's how we find ourselves with so many problems that we're dealing today.”
She lost no time pounding out a book called Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores (Regnery, September 2002).
“It took seven months and no sleep and I don't know when I'm going to do it again,” she sighed in December of 2002, just months before beginning work on her second book.
Invasion was released around the anniversary of the 9/11 attack. Despite the total absence of reviews from major newspaper or magazines, it reached number 14 on The New York Times non-fiction best-seller list. The book secured Malkin's credentials as a right-wing prophet — no longer was she just a raving maniac, she was now a topical raving maniac with sexy hair and a book credential. Fox Network put her under exclusive contract as a guest commentator for the right-wing gabfests The O'Reilly Factor and Hannity & Colmes. By 2003 Malkin's bi-weekly column was syndicated in over 100 newspapers. She was even beginning to enjoy a bit of demand as a paid speaker at $10,000 a pop.
Malkin's success wasn't unprecedented. She had been following dogggedly in the footsteps of another female columnist who had become wealthy as a rightwing attack dog. Since the mid-1990s the radical right's top poster girl had been the forty-something Ann Coulter, a onetime corporate lawyer with a cruel eye, firm grasp of wingnut psychology and enough vampish blonde hair to pass for telegenic among older, more conservative audiences. Coulter had cut her teeth on the Clintons and terrorized politicians with names like “pimp”, “gigolo” and “poodle”. Her columns were studies in hyperbole. “Eight More Thomases!”, “Attack France!” and “Affirmative Action for Osama” are typical titles. Her major appeal for the far right is revealed by the photos covering the dust jackets of her four best-selling books: big blonde hair, little black leather outfits, pancake makeup. Coulter's restraint was diminishing in inverse proportion to her success. Recently, even publishers and networks positioned for right-wing audiences have been forced to ban her from time to time to keep from losing advertisers.
Until the summer of 2004 Michelle Malkin might have been considered Ann Coulter's understudy, learning to sneer, snarl, attack and blow-dry hair. That changed with the publication of Malkin's second book In Defense of Internment: The Case for Racial Profiling in World War II and the War on Terror (Regnery, August 2004) The book's central argument did more than voice a belief that even the most rabid right-winger didn't like to utter on record. It turned Malkin into a sociological phenomenon.
Had Internment been written by a white woman, it would have been studiously ignored as racist extremism — even if it offered up stronger evidence than does Malkin. But the titillation and political cover offered by an Asian female author was too good to ignore, even though the evidence Malkin offers had long been dismissed, by military as well as civilian experts, as too inchoate to justify the mass incarceration of 110,000 west-coast Japanese Americans. The decoded military intelligence intercepts (MAGIC) cited by Malkin's book proves that the Japanese military hoped to turn a number of connections with Japanese American business and cultural societies into espionage links. In fact, however, they never amounted to the basis for even one concrete espionage prosecution. The strongest evidence Malkin provides is the account of the help rendered a downed Zero pilot by a Japanese couple on the remote Hawaiian island of Niihau. None of it was new, but it was just enough fodder with which Malkin could make a publishing splash. The real attraction was the sideshow factor: why is this Asian American woman trying to justify Japanese American internment?
Whatever may be the ultimate judgment passed on Malkin's motives, as of late September of 2004 Internment seemed unlikely to reprise the success of her first. The book's media tour accomplished something that may be just as profitable — qudruple the traffic to Malkin's website, catapulting it past Ann Coulter's. No doubt part of that jump is from curiosity seekers who are aghast at Malkin's political views. Yet they will be surprised to find that Malkin's output shows a hard-working writer who makes more than occasional sense but undercuts herself with the unrelenting quality of her free-floating hatred and scorn. To hear Malkin tell it, the world swarms with evil people out to do in the American way of life and, what's more, Americans are too dumb to see it.
The rest of her new visitors will find in Malkin's columns a gleeful sort of pleasure in seeing their distate for liberal weenies and pushy minorities shared by a hot little Asian woman full of bitchy putdowns worth repeating over beers. They may well find strength in seeing the principles of their eroding way of life being shored up by a woman who looks like the enemy. Some may accuse Malkin of dispensing phony outrage, but her core audience will find it all the more gratifying that an Asian woman has found them worth catering to at a time when they've been pushed to the margins of society by members of their own race.
