Michelle Malkin

Michelle Malkin ( Maglalang; born October 20, 1970) is an American conservative political commentator.

Michelle Malkin was born October 20, 1970, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Philippine citizens Rafaela (née Perez), a teacher, and Apolo DeCastro Maglalang, who was then a physician-in-training.

Several months prior to Malkin's birth, her parents immigrated to the United States on an employer-sponsored visa.

After her father finished his medical training, the family moved to Absecon, New Jersey.

She has described her parents as Ronald Reagan Republicans who were "not incredibly politically active".

Malkin, a Roman Catholic, attended Holy Spirit High School, where she edited the school newspaper and aspired to become a concert pianist.

Following her graduation in 1988, she enrolled at Oberlin College.

Malkin had planned to pursue a bachelor's degree in music, but changed her major to English.

During her college years, she worked as a press inserter, tax preparation aide, and network news librarian.

At Oberlin, she wrote for a conservative student newspaper started by Jesse Malkin, who later became her husband.

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.

She graduated in 1992 and later described her alma mater as "radically left-wing".

Malkin began her journalism career at the Los Angeles Daily News, working as a columnist from 1992 to 1994.

In 1995, she worked in Washington, D.C. as a journalism fellow at the libertarian think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute.

In 1996, she moved to Seattle, Washington, where she became a columnist for The Seattle Times.

According to Goldsea, by the end of the year "Malkin was unleashing the no-holds-barred style of political spitballing that would ultimately make her a poster girl for the radical right".

Since 1999, Malkin has written a syndicated column for Creators Syndicate.

Her column is published by outlets including Townhall.

Malkin published her first book, Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces, in 2002.

It reached #14 on the New York Times bestseller list.

In 2004, she published In Defense of Internment: The Case for 'Racial Profiling' in World War II and the War on Terror, defending the U.S. government's internment of 112,000 Japanese Americans in prison camps during World War II, and arguing that racial profiling is acceptable in times of war.

The book drew harsh criticism from mainstream scholars, organizations, and individuals including the Japanese American Citizens League and Fred Korematsu.

The Historians' Committee for Fairness, an organization of scholars and professional researchers, published an open letter condemning the book for not having undergone peer review and arguing that its central thesis is false.

Some conservative scholars spoke out in support of the book, including Thomas Sowell and Daniel Pipes.

The Virginian-Pilot called her "an Asian Ann Coulter" and dropped her column in November 2004.

On April 24, 2006, Malkin launched the conservative blog Hot Air, where she remained CEO until she sold the website in 2010.

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.

The site's staff at launch included Allahpundit and Bryan Preston; Preston was later replaced by Ed Morrissey on February 25, 2008.

In February 2010, Salem Communications bought Hot Air from Malkin.

In March 2012, Malkin founded the website Twitchy, a Twitter content curation site.

She sold Twitchy, also to Salem Communications, the following year.

For years, Malkin was a frequent commentator for Fox News and a regular guest host of The O'Reilly Factor.

Malkin joined Conservative Review's online television network, CRTV, when it launched in 2016, to host the documentary-style show Michelle Malkin Investigates. Malkin left CRTV under unclear circumstances when it merged with TheBlaze in December 2018.

Around 2019, Malkin began to distance herself from conventional conservatism and instead publicly support members of the extreme right, including Nick Fuentes, as well as other white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and Groypers, including Identity Evropa leader Patrick Casey.

In November 2019, she was dropped by conservative organization Young America's Foundation (YAF), citing her support for individuals associated with antisemitism and white nationalism.

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.

She was a Fox News contributor and in May 2020 joined Newsmax TV.

Malkin has written seven books and founded the conservative websites Twitchy and Hot Air.

The white supremacist publication American Renaissance began publishing her column in 2020.

Malkin later joined competitor Newsmax TV in May 2020, where she began to host the show Sovereign Nation.