Michelle Malkin isn’t melting down. Rather, her recent embrace of the dregs of humanity — bitter little boys screaming Holocaust denials in front of a green screen in their mother’s basement — is a calculated choice in her mission to navigate what comes after President Trump’s tenure comes to an end. And it’s a very bad choice.
Malkin has been a power player in conservative media since before Trump starred on reality television. She spent a decade churning out New York Times bestsellers and reinventing the conservative blogosphere. All throughout, she sustained the hallmarks of the establishment, a nationally-syndicated newspaper column, and regular prime-time cable appearances. Given that radical immigration restrictionism has been her main cause throughout, one might have expected her to become an even more important player in the era of Trump.
Instead, she quietly departed from Blaze Media a year ago. Now she has been fired by the Young Americas Foundation and is hobnobbing with alt-right white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes.
Malkin’s ouster from YAF comes after she celebrated Fuentes — most famous for denying the Holocaust by equating victims to cookies in an oven — as “one of the New Right leaders.” She also smeared Ben Shapiro for disavowing Fuentes and his ilk. (That Shapiro did this should not be shocking, considering that he’s an Orthodox Jew and an actually decent human being.)
Malkin hasn’t made any attempt to cushion the blow with walk-backs or equivocations. Instead, she’s railed against the “Keepers of the Gate” — in this case, a modestly successful nonprofit that spent years paying her to speak at events — and “Conservative, Inc.,” whatever that means.
The Keepers of the Gate have spoken. #AmericaFirst is not “mainstream.” My defense of unjustly prosecuted Proud Boys, patriotic young nationalists/groypers & demographic truth-tellers must not be tolerated. SPLC is cheering. https://t.co/yYyqocx1T5
— Michelle Malkin (@michellemalkin) November 17, 2019
It would be easy to mistake Malkin’s pivot for a meltdown. After all, she has peddled the lethal pseudoscience of anti-vaxxing amid a global health crisis spurred by that very movement. But Malkin knows exactly what she’s doing. She’s a single-issue pundit, willing to get in the mud with “race-realists,” even if they deny the Holocaust and support segregation because she sees them as the most potent allies available to back a militantly xenophobic agenda.
It’s not racist or anti-American to question our ability to assimilate legal immigrants at their current rate of influx. Nor is it racist to admit that immigration, legal and illegal, strains our welfare system and ability to artificially maintain wages for people already here. These are policy questions that we can debate without mentioning for one moment the race of the people involved. But getting in bed with folks such as Faith Goldy, the anti-Semite caught smirking in Charlottesville a second before one of her basement-dwelling buddies murdered a peaceful protester, Fuentes isn’t putting America First. It’s throwing every principle of liberty and equality that made this nation great in the first place in the trash to advance white nationalism.
By her own standards, Malkin is unworthy of America. She’s spent years railing against employer-sponsored visas, yet without an employer-sponsored visa bringing her parents here and the Fourteenth Amendment, she wouldn’t even be American. Moreover, I’m guessing that the Hitlerian hierarchy of white supremacists holds Filipinos in low regard.
Malkin must know this, yet she apparently believes that a white supremacist constituency secretly comprises a significant portion of the American Right. And yes, given the recent spate of right-wingers colluding with racists or embracing their ideology outright, her bet ought to scare the rest of us into cleaning house and purging conservatism.
In the coming weeks, see who calls things for what they are and who refuses to disavow Holocaust denialism and white supremacy. The latter are the ones who will, if allowed to hang around, kill off whatever future conservatism has in this country.
