Factsheet: Michelle Malkin

IMPACT: Michelle Malkin is an American political commentator who has used her multiple media platforms, including as a Fox News contributor and columnist, to propagate anti-Muslim and anti-immigration conspiracy theories. Malkin has advocated the racial profiling and internment of Muslims for national security. She also associates with white nationalist, anti-Muslim, and anti-immigration individuals and organizations.

Michelle Malkin is a Fox News contributor, a Creators Syndicate columnist, and the author of several books. In 2012, Malkin founded a social media website geared towards conservatives, Twitchy, which aggregates tweets into stories. The daughter of two immigrants from the Philippines, Malkin has stated, “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.” 

Malkin published her first book in 2002, titled Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores. In an October 2002 interview about her book on the CSPAN show Booknotes, Malkin stated, “A great theme of the book … is our continued vulnerability at our borders,” for which she blamed  “bureaucratic inertia” and “lobbies that put profits over national security.” The term “invasion” is a mainstay in white nationalist conspiracy theories, such as that of “white genocide” and “the great replacement.” 

In 2004, Malkin published another book titled In Defense of Internment: The Case for ‘Racial Profiling’ in World War II and the War on Terror. In the book, she “offers a defense of … the evacuation, relocation, and internment of people of Japanese descent during World War II” by the U.S. military and government. At a lecture at the University of California in Berkeley in 2004, Malkin stated, “Bigotry … is not what motivated … and compelled the evacuation and relocation” of ethnic Japanese in the U.S. The book also offers a “defense of racial, ethnic, religious, and nationality profiling policies” during the ‘War on Terror.’ The book’s page on Amazon claims that Malkin “tells the truth about … how both Japanese American and Arab/Muslim American leaders have united to undermine America’s safety.” In Defense of Internment has been criticized by Fred Korematsu, a Japanese-American survivor of a WWII Japanese concentration camp in the U.S. who challenged the constitutionality of Japanese internment in the Supreme Court case Korematsu v. United States. 

Malkin was the host of Michelle Malkin Investigates on CRTV from 2016 to 2018. Episodes featured anti-Muslim topics such as “The Muslim Refugee Rape Epidemic,” “Honor Killings: The Real War on Women,” and “The Hoax Crime Epidemic,” in addition to anti-immigration and racist topics. The show also featured the anti-Muslim “Jihad Watch” blogger Robert Spencer as a guest. In December 2018, CRTV LLC (which operated CRTV) merged with TheBlaze, a conservative television network founded by Glenn Beck, to establish conservative media company Blaze Media. Malkin left CRTV one day after the merge.

Malkin has defended U.S. human rights abuses, including the Guantánamo Bay U.S. military prison, in which 779 Muslims (including 21 children) have been tortured and held in indefinite detention. In June 2006, on Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News show, Malkin mocked the deaths by suicide of those imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay. There have been seven deaths by suicide at the prison, including 21-year-old Yassser Talal Al Zahrani, who was imprisoned as a child at 16 years old. Malkin stated, “The reaction to the suicides should be, ‘Boo-freakin-hoo.’” 

Malkin has promoted anti-Semitic and anti-immigration conspiracy theories about George Soros on several Fox News shows and on videos posted to her social media. As a guest on the show America First with Sebastian Gorka in September 2019, Malkin said that “[George] Soros-subsidized or Soros-allied organizations” support “demographic conquest.” In September 2019, as a guest on Fox & Friends, Malkin said that “global financiers,” including but not limited to George Soros, “fund … illegal alien groups” which are “basically human smugglers and human traffickers that pose as charities.” While on the show, she also promoted her 2019 book Open Borders Inc.: Who’s Funding America’s Destruction? which she says discusses these “global financiers.” 

In a video posted to her Facebook page in August 2019, Malkin promoted her book Open Borders Inc. alongside Gavin McInnes, founder of Proud Boys, a white nationalist organization. In the video, Malkin agreed with McInnes when he said that Soros is “not a Holocaust survivor” but a “Holocaust facilitator,” an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that has been debunked by Snopes. Malkin also promoted her book at the anti-Muslim David Horowitz Freedom Center, where she claimed that Soros subsidizes the “illegal alien lobby.”

Malkin regularly employs anti-immigration, white nationalist conspiracy theories. In December 2018, during an interview with Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro, Malkin said that the construction of the wall at the U.S.-Mexico border is “one of the most fundamental duties of this government to protect the states against invasion.” She went on to say that “these migrant invasions … are coordinated globally … by menaces inside and outside” the U.S.

In her 2019 speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Malkin claimed that the U.S. immigration system lets “tens of thousands of people … [pour] in from terrorism breeding grounds.” She also stated, “The Feds have proved themselves serially unwilling and incapable of handling the … invasion.” She later implied that those who defend the immigration system are “dastardly people who want to bring America to its knees.” Furthermore, when promoting Open Borders Inc. on The Sean Hannity Show in September 2019, Malkin said that the increasing number of districts “with foreign-born populations above the national average” is “existential suicide” for the “rest of the country.” 

In June 2017, Malkin defended President Trump’s Muslim ban on Fox & Friends. She said that accepting and tolerating Muslim immigrants “is the exploitation of our western liberties and tolerance that have spelled the demise.” She then quoted Arnold Toynbee, a British historian whose ideas have been criticized for being unempirical and dogmatic, stating, “Civilizations die by suicide, not by outside forces.” On Fox & Friends Weekend in August 2018, Malkin called for a “moratorium” on accepting refugees, saying that refugees haven’t shown “a sense of assimilation, attachment to western and American principles.”

Malkin has ties with several anti-Muslim and anti-immigration figures. She has occasionally written for the Center for Security Policy, an anti-Muslim think-tank, on Republican activist Grover Norquist and what she claims to be his “dangerous Islamist alliances.” Additionally, in 2013, she defended Pamela Geller, an anti-Muslim American activist and blogger, who was disinvited from CPAC for accusing Norquist of being “very active in ‘Muslim outreach.’”

ACT for America, described by the New York Times as the “largest anti-Muslim organization in the U.S.,” was planning to host a gala in November 2019 at President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort with Malkin as the keynote speaker. Following backlash from civil rights groups, the Trump Organization cancelled the event. Malkin responded to the cancellation in an op-ed for Rasmussen Reports, a conservative-leaning polling company, criticizing the Trump Organization for its “capitulation” to the “SPLC and its open borders media handmaidens.” She wrote that she had planned to talk about the “ongoing national security threat that jihad-coddling Muslim grievance groups and other identity politics agitators … pose to our country’s very existence.”

Malkin also has ties to the Federation for American Immigrant Reform (FAIR), an anti-immigration organization founded in 1979 by white nationalist John Tanton. On the FAIR YouTube page, she appears in a July 2017 video professing her “support to the work that’s being done” at FAIR to “defend our sovereignty.” In June 2017, Malkin joined Tom Roten of FAIR on his radio show, “The Tom Roten Morning Show,” where they discussed President Trump’s immigration policies. In July 2017, Malkin attended FAIR’s event “Hold their Feet to the Fire,” along with anti-Muslim American figures Robert Spencer and Sebastian Gorka. 

Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the anti-immigration organization Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), honored Malkin in June 2016 with the Eugene Katz Award for “Excellence in the Coverage of Immigration.” Malkin also appeared on a CIS panel in March 2019, where she described the issue of immigration as “the most important existential policy issue in America.” Malkin also co-authored her 2015 book Sold Out: How High-Tech Billionaires & Bipartisan Beltway Crapweasels Are Screwing America’s Best & Brightest Workers with CIS fellow John Miano.

Malkin has been a guest on the shows of several anti-Muslim Fox News hosts. In September 2019, Malkin spoke on Laura Ingraham’s The Ingraham Angle. Malkin and Ingraham discussed “illegal immigrant[s] charged with sex crimes,” invoking a racist trope predominantly about Latinx immigrant men and sexual predation on white women. Malkin has also been a guest on Ingraham’s podcast, and has made appearances on Justice with Judge Jeanine, Tucker Carlson Tonight, and The Sean Hannity Show.

In her 2019 CPAC speech, Malkin defended several far-right figures who had been de-platformed from social media sites for violating terms of service related to hate speech. She cited her “friend Laura [Loomer] and Gavin [McInnes] and the people like the Center for Immigration Studies, David Horowitz’s Freedom Center.” Laura Loomer is a white nationalist and anti-Muslim figures activist who is running for U.S. Congress in 2020.

At CPAC 2019, Malkin was also interviewed by Faith Goldy of VDare, a white nationalist organization. Goldy is a Canadian white nationalist who has publicly recited the white nationalist slogan, Fourteen Words. In the interview, Malkin described those who support immigration, including high-skilled immigration, as the “enemies within.” Malkin has also been a weekly columnist for VDare since 2002.

Updated November 1, 2019