Michelle Malkin's Big HustleThe Blogging of the President: 2004
http://malkin.blogspot.com/
... So, let us hail the diversity of everyday Democrat donors: The pardon-pushing socialite. The Communist-coddling corporate sellout. The reckless Asian-American rainmaker. And the nicotine-stained heiress/almost-felon who keeps on giving. - Michelle Malkin, July 7, 2004, Townhall.com On who is the average Democratic donor.
Conservative commentator Michelle Malkin just came out with a book called 'In Defense of Internment: The Case for 'Racial Profiling' in World War II and the War on Terror'. Asian American rights groups are already incensed and protesting, and she's sure to spark substantial debate when she goes on her book tour. As someone trained in the arts of how to get exposure, she'll have plenty of media time to give her point of view. Malkin is in fact already well-known as both a conservative columnist, and a moderate one. Her conservative self sits on Townhall.com, whereas her moderate demeanor as a simple and concerned 'security mom' comes out in Op-Eds in mainstream publications like USA Today.
When she goes on TV to promote her book, she'll be placed against people who will attempt to debunk her work. Maybe she'll come out on top, maybe not, but it's interesting how the blogosphere replicated those same dynamics, only faster and more completely. Her thesis, that the internment camps of Japanese Americans during WWII were essential to national security, sparked a mini-volcano online. Eric Muller, professor and guest on the well-respected Volokh Conspiracy led a rebuttal of the points in her book with an eleven part series (her response is on herblog). Muller, a credible academic, debated Malkin on the blog, and it was loose, unruly, and fascinating. Ed Cone thinks she lost, summing up the conflict as follows: "[Malkin's] contempt for people who disagree with her turned into hubris: she knows she's right, and they're wrong, so the facts will obey her commands. But facts are stubborn things." Cone seems to be right - even the right wing Instapundit backed away from Malkin. Cone goes even further than that, and discusses the institutional response to her book on the part of bloggers. "It's another fine moment for the blogosphere -- a scurrilous and potentially dangerous book by a well-known author pretty much discredited before it is officially released, because of the rapid deployment of intellectual firepower on the web."
Cone's point is interesting. Unlike TV debates, a passionate defender of the historiography of the time took her on without going through any media gatekeeper. One part of the story not yet told is the background on what Malkin materially gets out of having this debate. For it is not too hard to trace the links and find out that Malkin has built a profitable career out of hewing to a specific ideology. She does not just use sloppy and biased research methods in her academic work, it seems like she is actually just paid to update the right-wing isolationist ideology by those who helped propagate it from the 1930s to the 1960s.
But let's find out who this Malkin is.
Production of Ideas
Michelle Malkin began her career as a columnist in 1992, working for the Los Angeles Daily News until 1994. She made very little money, living on cheap food and cheaper bedding. In 1996, after a gap of two years, she moved to the Seattle Times, where she worked as a columnist until 1999. Both newspapers are mainstream papers, though her editorial stances were generally hard-right. In 1999, she quit mainstream editorial writing and started ranting about Clinton, HOV lanes, Britney Spears, taxes, and immorality. Her career as a right-wing pundit quickly took off.
Malkin's column is now syndicated by the Creators Syndicate, which mostly sells right-wing content (which is a reflection of editorial tastes of the papers who buy from them, not a specific ideological bent on the part of the Creators Syndicate). She writes for the Heritage Foundation's Townhall.com, comments for Fox News, and published her first book, "Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists Criminals & Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores", in 2002, courtesy of Regnery Publishing. Her books are distributed through the Conservative Book Club, membership 75,000 (a spinoff of the Goldwater candidacy of 1964 which sells conservative books to its member for $1 apiece). To promote her first book, she got interviews from Enter Stage Right, the National Review Online, C-SPAN, , Insight magazine, Right Wing News, and reviews from the American Conservative, VDare, Mark Krikorian, the National Review, Reason, David Limbaugh, James Edwards Jr., and Frank Gaffney at Fox News. Yes, her book was basically reviewed only by partisan sources.
The intent of her book is not to right history, but to advance a right-wing agenda. Read the bullets on the review of her book from the Conservative Book Club, and you'll see very quickly that her claims that Japanese Americans needed to be imprisoned is actually an unsubtle general attack on 'leftists' who advocate for civil liberties. In fact, the owner of her publishing house has a long history of rewriting history in favor of reactionary ideas, specifically those surrounding the legacy of WWII and its modern impact. But we'll get into that in a moment.The important part is to note that Michelle Malkin is being gradually inserted into the mainstream press, through Fox News, the Heritage Foundation, and now USA Today. Muller shows that in the debate in the blogosphere, she essentially concedes that her thesis is untenable. Still, whether she believes her own stuff at this point is irrelevant, because her career and livelihood is entirely tied up in the right-wing superstructure of financial and media support. While real thinkers are able to change their minds (and sometimes do), Malkin doesn't have that luxury, not if she wants to keep her career (one could say she has 'right-wing tenure'). Regardless of whether she is debunked, she can't relent, because the right-wing superstructure won't let her, and it is those people who are selling her books and making her career.
The Backers
So if Malkin is doing bad history to advance an extreme and partisan political agenda, who is paying for her to make a controversial and easily debunked splash? All I have to say is, well, get ready for crazy city.
Regnery Publishing is the publisher of her books. The publishing house has John Birch society ties, the Birch society of course being the 1950s group so extreme in their right-wing ideology that they thought Eisenhower was a communist stooge. Alfred Regnery, the owner of the publishing house, is close friends with both Ken Starr and Lucianne Goldberg. There are rumors the CIA helped subsidize the publishing house, which would not be surprising considering the strongly pro-German interests of the founders of the CIA (documented extensively by Kevin Phillips in American Dynasty) and their ties to the right-wing. The following passage is the best summary of Regnery I have found, though the details are quite freely available around the web elsewhere:
William Regnery was also one of the founders of the American Security Council - he was later replaced by his son Henry. Regnery and two other isolationists began broadcasting Human Events and in 1947 started the Regnery publishing business. Interestingly enough, the first two titles published by Regnery were critical of the Nuremberg Trials.
The third book Regnery published was another pro-Nazi book attacking the allied air campaign. In 1954, Regnery published two books for the John Birch Society. He was also the publisher behind Buckley's God and Man at Yale. In light of the publishing of the pro-Nazi books it is interesting to note that Regnery Publishing was subsidized by the CIA, according to Howard Hunt. The reader is reminded to remember this point in a later chapter concerning the CIA and its involvement with Nazi war criminals. Henry Regnery along with Bunker Hunt funded Western Goals, an organization that is now dead.
Western Goals was another group that reportedly compiled list of people they deemed subversive. In 1986, Reagan appointed Alfred Regnery to help dismantle the Justice Department's Office of Juvenile Justice. In the 1990s, the Regnery publishing house has been the publisher of numerous venomous smears attacking President Clinton.
One of the first books published by Regnery was The Nuremberg Trials, a 'detailed critical examination of trials by the U.S., including problems with procedure, jurisdiction, punishability, substantive law, etc.'. The publishing house also put out books stating that Clinton would put a blanket over himself and drive downtown while President to go whoring, and that Clinton was a cocaine addict. Regnery's appointment by Reagan, the vicious anti-Clinton tracts, and his family's ties to right-wing extremism and WWII era pro-Nazi isolationism lead naturally to the institutional support of Malkin's 'In Defense of Internment'. She literally couldn't have found a better publisher, and Regnery couldn't have found a more fitting book to put out.
Ok, so we have a CIA-subsidized Nazi-apologist right-wing extremist publishing house on tap - what's next? Ah, the Heritage Foundation, the publisher of Townhall.com and employer of Malkin (as a columnist). Heritage is an extraordinary institution, dedicated as much to selling its policies as creating policies that make sense. They have enormously useful content and training, such as how to plan an event in eight weeks, and how to work with the media to get effective placement of ideas. The primary goal of the Heritage Foundation is to serve as the armory for the war of ideas, building relationships with media personnel and using those relationships to further policy goals. Much of this work requires pseudo-academic experts, and media friendly pundits like Michelle Malkin.
Townhall is one of their fastest growing outlets. Just how important is Townhall.com, and how important is Malkin to Townhall? Good question. Let's read Heritage's Annual Report to find out.
"Online since 1995, townhall.com gained its 100th member organization in 2003. It ended the year with more than 110 partners, ranging from National Review to the Federalist Society to the Young America’s Foundation.
Townhall.com also delivers daily, via e-mail, one of the Web’s best opinion pages, Opinion Alert. With a lineup of more than 70 conservative ommentators—including Mona Charen, Charles Krauthammer, Michelle Malkin and Cal Thomas—it provides the context and conservative insight often missing in the news."
As you can see from the chart (linked here), Townhall is the Heritage's most direct channel to the public, with 25 million visits last year (and an ambitious community building strategy through Meetup,which so far has 27,000 members). Townhall.com, with its extremist rantings defending the Confederate flag, Japanese internment, neo-eugenic pseudo-science, racist behavior, attacks on liberals, and anti-Muslims propaganda, is often fodder for the even more extremist right-leaning community site, the Free Republic.
Here are a few highlights from Townhall.com:
From Kathleen Parker on Falluja:
I suppose it would be considered lacking in nuance to nuke the Sunni Triangle.
From Sam Francis on South Carolina's flying of the Confederate Flag:
The state's Democratic Senate has already passed a bill that would take the flag down and put it in "a place of honor" on the capitol grounds. But the NAACP's race warriors will have none of that; they want the flag not only taken off the capitol but consigned to oblivion. "Your heritage is our slavery," they and their followers like to rant at demonstrations against the flag.
Of course, in saying that, they are actually saying that American blacks are not really part of American civilization, which is defined in large part by the heritage its past created. If all black Americans can see in the American past is their own slavery, oppression and exploitation, how can they claim to be part of the nation? And why would they want to be? ...
As for the "treason" of the Confederacy, someone needs to explain to Thompson and his 27 co-sponsors (mostly members of the Black Caucus) that the states of the Confederacy voted to secede from the Union peacefully and legally. You can believe in the right of secession or not, but a lot more people in North and South in the 1850s believed in it than they do today, and it's not even in the same solar system as "treason."
And then there's Malkin herself, whose attitude towards Islam nicely dovetails with her support of Japanese internment:
Sgt. Asan Akbar, a Muslim American soldier with the 326th Engineer Battalion, had an "attitude problem." According to his superiors and acquaintances, Akbar's attitude was bitterly anti-American and staunchly pro-Muslim. So how did this devout follower of the so-called Religion of Peace work out his attitudinal problems last weekend?
By lobbing hand grenades and aiming his M-4 automatic rifle into three tents filled with sleeping commanding officers at the 101st Airborne Division's 1st Brigade operations center in Kuwait.
Akbar is the lone suspect being detained in the despicable attack, which left more than a dozen wounded and one dead. Surviving soldiers say Akbar, found cowering in a bunker with shrapnel injuries, was overheard ranting after the assault: "You guys are coming into our countries, and you're going to rape our women and kill our children."
"Our"? At least there's no doubt about where this Religion of Peace practitioner's true loyalties lie.
Naturally, apologists for Islam-gone-awry are hard at work dismissing this traitorous act of murder as an "isolated, individual act and not an expression of faith." But such sentiments are willfully blind and recklessly p.c.
Sgt. Akbar is not the only MSWA -- Muslim soldier with attitude -- suspected of infiltrating our military, endangering our troops and undermining national security.
I've been to a Townhall.com Meetup, and this attitude underlying these Op-Eds is the norm. From anti-gay zealots who want to 'cure the gay disease' to liberal haters who just like protesting and harrassing (and a few who told me they were just waiting for someone to give the order to put on the brownshirts), they are a very real face of the far right-wing. These are the people the Heritage Foundation touches most directly through a web channel controlled exclusively by Foundation itself. While Heritage also houses media friendly experts, it puts on a moderate face to journalists because it must. Here's a clip from its guide to media relations:
Maintain your own stable of credible and reliable experts to whom you can refer journalists. Remember, if they know that a call to you always nets them a snappy sound bite or an angle on a story that they hadn’t considered, or an expert contact that they might otherwise spend hours digging up, they will come back again and again for their purposes. And that is crucial when you remember that what you are after is to make your self-interest and theirs coincide.As an aside, I should say that it will be very helpful, I’d even say essential, that you treat with respect people and ideas that you disagree with. Treat them as intelligent people whose only failing is intellectual error. When journalists call, be sure that you understand what the other side is liable to say about your position, report it respectfully, and offer them names of experts on the other side.
I say this because journalists are extremely attuned to what I call "personal energies." You want to project an image of yourself as self-confident, respectful and evenhanded, but with firm ideas of your own, thoughtfully expressed. Then, when the other guys try to trash your ideas, they look belligerent and defensive.
This is especially true if you’ve politely steered the journalist to this opposing expert. Never forget that the journalist is automatically going to seek out someone to give a different point of view whatever you do, so jump in and try to shape how the journalist is liable to receive the opposing point of view. How you handle these personal questions will affect the tone of the stories that they write.
So while it must compromise on the channels it must work through indirectly, the reality of what the Heritage Foundation is really pushing comes through the channel that it builds directly. But what is the Heritage Foundation?
Well, it was founded by Paul Weyrich, conservative organizer extraordinaire. Surprise surprise, it's also well funded. On the board of Heritage is Jay Van Andel, the founder of Amway, who along with Richard Mellon Scaife and the Coors family helped fund much of the modern right-wing. The Heritage Foundation is also in bed with Reverend Moon, the holocaust apologist who allegedly sold submarines to North Korean crazy dictator Kim Jong-Il.
There's more. A lot more. David Brock's new book is on the case, as is Dave Johnson at Seeing the Forest. But the key points are simple. Right-wing institutional support, with places to house people to create ideas, outlets to distribute and promote them, and the tactics and relationships to turn these ideas into the mainstream, is breathtaking. It's not that the media is tilted to the right-wing because of ideology, but because the right has worked to make themselves useful sources to lots of journalists. At the same time, they provide care and feeding and an enormously powerful incentive to toe the line for people like Michelle Malkin, and a whole demand side for propagandizing. All people like Malkin have to do to succeed is draw attention to themselves.
In other words, this book was never about influencing the marketplace of ideas through effective logic or discourse, but through slick marketing and a host of well-oiled right-wing and mainstream channels. And the defeat in the debate in the blogosphere notwithstanding, all those channels and outlets remain standing and functioning. Because she picked a topic that got a bunch of people riled up, Malkin is just a bit better known. Maybe she lost some credibility among academics, if she had some any the first place. But the founder of Amway didn't suffer for the propagandizing he funded, even though he and his ilk are the one who paid for all the free marketing. And because of that, he's just going to to buy more.
Link to original story posted on BOP News.com by Matt Stoller
posted by Malkin Watch at 6:46 PM | 3 comments
posted by Malkin Watch at 3:15 PM | 0 comments
Michelle Malkin BioFrom One People's Project:
NAME:Michelle Malkin
A/K/A:Michelle Maglalang (maiden name)
Get to know this one because it won't be long before she takes up the Ann Coulter/Pat Buchanan mantle as one of the most rabid hatemongers in the country today. Of course, that will also make her a laughing stock as well. The jokes should start coming soon enough, because as you can see from her picture, she is not exactly someone who one would think would have articles appearing in VDARE, a anti-immigration, white nationalist website. She actually has that kind of dirt on her, however. It never ceases to amaze us how many times we keep running into these idiots of color who want to pretend that they can be just as racist towards everyone as their white racist comrades, but we hope they are not stupid enough to think that we will extend any kind of respect to them.
A nationally known journalist, Michelle Malkin has appeared on national news programs like NBC Nightly News, The Lehrer Report, The McLaughlin Group, 20/20, and Faux News. Born in Philidelphia, she is the daughter of Filipino immigrants that were in her words, "rock-ribbed Reagan Republicans." In 1992, she graduated from Oberlin College (which was once an underground railroad location), and is currently living in Montgomery County, Maryland with her white, Jewish husband Jesse and two children in an upper middle class suburban neighborhood in Montgomery County, Maryland. We make these points because she has written many articles and commentaries on minority issues in America - none of them favorable to minorities or their presence in America. Can you say, "confused?"
It gets better. Oberlin College, known for its progressive campus was where she decided to be politically active - but it seems like it was as a form of rebellion. Apparently it was all that concern for people of color rising up and being a intergral part of this society that made her mad, as this excerpt from a CSPAN transcript shows:
MALKIN: Well, I was editor of my high school newspaper, but not really politically energized yet. That happened at Oberlin. And that's where I first really encountered the vicious response you can get when you stand up to a political orthodoxy. It's an extremely liberal campus. And even if -- 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 in campus don't speak for me.
And I think that's a theme that I've carried throughout my journalism career, and it's certainly something that's central to this book because I talk about -- in a section of the book, I talk about hate crime howlers, and these are a number of these ethnic grievance groups and pro-illegal-alien lobbying groups who -- you know, who claim to speak for all minorities and immigrants and their families in this country, with an agenda of keeping our borders as loose and open as possible. And I certainly don't believe in that, and I know there are so many naturalized Americans and their families who embrace the rule of law, and that includes immigration laws. And we don't accept that we ought to maintain a state of immigration anarchy in a post-September 11 world.
And somebody needs to stand up to all of those groups and say, No, this is not right. It's not right, first of all, to invite so many millions of illegal line-jumpers into the country ahead of all the millions of people around the world who are waiting to do it the right way. That's just a matter of fairness. But also, it's now, more than ever, a matter of life and death. You cannot have open borders and win a war on terror at the same time. It's incompatible.
BRIAN LAMB: Were you controversial at Oberlin because of your stance?
MALKIN: Well, 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 come to D.C. and started, you know, writing on my own and -- I mean, it was really more social conservatism than economic conservatism that I started with my -- with my column-writing. So no, I would say I was not, you know, a huge lightning rod until the -- you know, the end of my career -- I mean, end of my tenure at Oberlin.
Okay, having an adversity towards racial hustlers, fine. Hooking up with white racial hustlers and adopting their viewpoints does not exactly solve the problem though. Read her writings and viewpoints, and take a look at the organizations she affiliates with, and you will see a racist who literally trashes on every non-white race in America.
The type of news and political organizations she works for are typically extreme right-wing organizations who preach racism, xenophobia, and white superiority. Among the worst racist right-wing organizations she works for are the National Review, the aforementioned VDARE, and Townhall. In countless articles written for them, Michelle typically bashes and encourages racism against Muslims, Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and especially immigrants.
Her first major publication was a book she wrote, called, Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists Criminals & Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores, first published in 2002. Attempting to copy Peter Brimelow's hateful bashing of immigrants when he wrote Alien Nation several years earlier, Malkin produces similar hate-mongering garbage against immigrants. Like Alien Nation, Malkin book Invasion is just another xenophobic, right-wing racist propaganda, filled with lies, bogus statistics, fallacies of logic, and references to right-wing racists and organizations.
Being an immigrant basher, she naturally attempts to associate all immigrants to the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, using illogical arguments to label all immigrants as terrorists and to justify ending immigration. Filled with more hateful diatribe, she concludes immigration must end, a wall must be built between America and Mexico, and border patrol must be increased. Being illogical and dimwitted, she trashes on every U.S. agency responsible for border patrol as incompetent, then she declares we must increase our border patrol by 50,000 - trained by the same agency she calls incompetent! A statement in the book summarizing her views on immigration, "It's time that we give immigrants to this country a swift kick to the seats of their pants and show them the exit door."
Immigrant bashing is only the tip of the iceberg of her racism. Her countless writings trashing on minorities reveal Malkin's hateful side, and if you didn't see her picture, you would think she's a white-supremacist racist.
Her most hateful writings come from VDARE, however. She trashes on Blacks, publishing her filtered hate crimes. She likes to publish marginal hate crime stories of blacks attacking whites, and hate crime hoaxes, but she deliberately omits the reality of hate crimes, that Blacks are the most frequent victims of hate crimes. When the Washington D.C. beltway sniper was active in 2002, Malkin openly attacked police chief Charles Moose, a Black man, as incompetent and greedy, although she had no credible evidence. It turned out to be a personal attack based on her racist views and references to right-wing racists. When the sniper was caught by Charles Moose and the Montgomery County, Maryland police department, she continued trashing on Mr. Moose anyway, largely based on her brainwashed racism against Blacks.
Now you know that with this, she has to have some diatribe in her resume against hip-hop. Indeed, she got a lot of play on Faux News Channel (and nowhere else, mind you) about a column that appeared in June 2004 that attacked the Worchester, Mass. school system for including on their summer reading list for children "The Rose That Grew From Concrete" by Tupac Shakur. The column was simply a juvenile diatribe against Tupac and his poems, which she referred to as "tripe" and ridiculing the late rapper's penchant for using numbers in place of words in some areas, a common form of artistic expression, but a sign of stupidity to Malkin. She particularly aimed not only at Tupac, but also at the school board for even considering him, and in doing so leveled a shot at multiculturalism. "The Western literary canon has been flushed down the cultural toilet in favor of shallow ramblings by celebrity thugs whose thoughts are best left on bathroom walls," she wrote. "As 2Pac might have responded: 3 Cheers 4 Diversity."
For the next week we were treated to this kind of vitriol and more from Ms. Malkin as she did the rounds on the Faux News Channel. When she appeared on former US Rep. John Kasich's program on July 3, 2004, it was a different story. She ditched the vitriol and the hatemongering (but still managed to take a quick shot a multiculturalism), and made an even-tempered case against the decision to include not only Tupac's book, but also folk singer Jewel's book of poems that was published a few years ago. Jewel was never brought up until this point, not even being noted in the original column. When she was mentioned, it was only as a footnote. The difference? Malkin appeared on the program with a black community leader who was there as a counterpoint and probably not too familiar with Malkin's hate routine.
Michelle Malkin loves to trash on Muslims as well. After the 9-11 attacks, she was swift to trash on Muslims, attempting to associate all Muslims to that event. Like a instigative hate-monger, she will find any news event as an excuse to trash on all Muslims (or any non-white race). When the media revealed the two estranged Washington D.C. beltway snipers were Muslim, she naturally took the opportunity to associate all Muslims to the two snipers, to carry out her racist propaganda.
Finally, although an Asian American herself, she sure doesn't have any love for her own race, either. Malkin has written a few times on Asian American issues, but see writes more like a white supremacist. When the Pearl Harbor movie by Disney came out in 2001, some Asian American civil rights group were concerned about possible anti-Japanese/Asian sentiment which may erupt. Malkin as usual attacks any attempt to relieve racism and hatred. No Michelle, the Asian American groups were not trying to rewrite or suppress American history. They, as most Asian Americans, were concerned about possible racism that may emerge, and finding ways to move above such racism, rather than letting the racism repeat itself. Of course, like how hate-mongers like Malkin trash and lie about all immigrants and Muslims being connected to the 9-11 attacks, it doesn't come as a surprise she would play a similar tactic against Asian Americans.
During the Abercrombie Fitch incident in 2001, where A&F sold racist shirts with anti-Asian caricatures and later pulled off the shelf after a massive protest by the Asian American community, Malkin immediately attacked the Asian American protesters as greedy money-grubbers and downplayed the whole incident. A year later, when A&F was facing a major civil rights lawsuit for discriminating against Asians, Blacks, and Hispanics in the employment process, she makes no mention of this. Of course, any major news stories where minorities may advance and become more equal in America is unacceptable for racists like Michelle Malkin.
Michelle Malkin is indeed a pathological racist who doesn't seem to know her own color. Surely many white supremacist and right-wing groups have use for her outside appearance, although her inside is filled with hatred and racism. Some have suggested her husband has been somewhat of an influence with the anti-Arab sentiments plus mad support for the so-called "War on Terror" being a constant thread (Jesse Malkin works for the RAND Corporation, which has been called out as war profiteers). Like Black sellout racists like Ezola Foster and Star Parker, the white supremacist groups have found a sellout to recruit to the Asian community and to spread their racism, and that is Michelle Malkin. Oh, one more thing. She has a new book out now: In Defense of Internment: The Case for "Racial Profiling". As we did not read the book yet, we will hold back an opinion, but a review of the book says that it "offers a ringing justification for the most reviled wartime policies in American history: the evacuation, relocation, and internment of people of Japanese descent during World War II. It also defends racial, ethnic, religious, and nationality profiling as effective defensive measures in today's War on Terror."
Would someone tell this idiot that if anything she believes in was to be put into wide practice, she would suffer the same fate as the rest of us dark-skinned folks?
posted by Malkin Watch at 2:01 AM | 9 comments
Historians' Committee for Fairness - Open Letter
Ladies and Gentlemen,
We represent the Historians' Committee for Fairness, an organization of scholars and professional researchers. Michelle Malkin's appearance on numerous television and radio shows and her comments during these appearances regarding her book IN DEFENSE OF INTERNMENT represent a blatant violation of professional standards of objectivity and fairness. Malkin is not a historian, and she states that she relied almost exclusively on research conducted or collected by others. Her book, which purports to defend the wartime treatment of Japanese Americans, did not go through peer review before publication. This work presents a version of history that is contradicted by several decades of scholarly research, including works by the official historian of the United States Army and an official U.S. government commission. In fact, the author's presentation of events is so distorted and historically inaccurate that, when challenged by reputable historians, she has herself conceded that her main thesis in incorrect, namely that the MAGIC intercepts of prewar Japanese diplomatic cable traffic, explain and justify the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans. As Malkin states, her critics have noted that "once the decision was made to evacuate ethnic Japanese from the West Coast, many ancillary decisions were made--and MAGIC doesn't explain all or even most of them. True...." (see her website, www.michellemalkin.com, August 6, 2004)
It is irresponsible of your producers to permit Michelle Malkin’s biased presentation of events to go unchallenged as a factual historical presentation. We therefore respectfully demand that you formally apologize to the Japanese Americans who have been slandered by Ms. Malkin's reckless presentation and invite a reputable historian to present a more even-handed view of the evidence. Sincerely yours, (list incomplete, institutions for identification only)
Allan Austin, Misericordia College
Eiichiro Azuma, University of Pennsylvania
Allida M. Black, George Washington University
Matthew Manuel Briones, Harvard University
Laura Card, University of Utah
Elena Tajima Creef, Wellesley College
Louis Fiset, University of Washington
Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Stanford University
Heather Fryer, Creighton University
Stephen Fugita, University of Washington
Thomas Fujita-Rony, California State University, Fullerton
James Gatewood, Brown University
Neil Gotanda, California School of Law
Arthur W. Hansen, California State University, Fullerton
Michiko Hase, University of Colorado
John Howard, King’s College, University of London
Moon-Ho Jung, University of Washington
Scott Kurashige, University of Michigan
Tom Ikeda, DENSHO
Tetsuden Kashima, University of Washington
Eileen Kurahashi, National Center for the Preservation of Democracy
Karl Kwong-Liem Kwan, Purdue University
Kevin Leonard, Western Washington University
Daryl J. Maeda, Oberlin College
Robert Maeda, Brandeis University
Takeya Mizuno, Bunkyo University
Mitchell Maki, California State University, Los Angeles
Eric R. Muller, University of North Carolina Law School
Don T.Nakanishi, University of California Los Angeles
Franklin Ng, California State University, Fresno
Setsuko Matsunaga Nishi, Brooklyn College, CUNY
Gail M. Nomura, University of Washington
Greg Robinson, Université du Québec À Montréal
George Sanchez, University of Southern California
Mitziko Sawada, Hampshire College
Robert Shaffer, Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania
Stephen H. Sumida, University of Washington
Andrew B. Wertheimer, University of Hawaii
Yuh Ji-Yeon, Northwestern University
[reprinted]
Welcome to Malkin Watch
A new "pundit" has emerged from the many in these past three years after 9/11.
Michelle Malkin is a loud and respected voice in conservative circles.
Malkin's noteriety is based on simple-logic, black & white, conservative backed diatribes against liberals, people of color and immigrants.
Many have viewed her increasing popularity of late with alarm.
This blog has been created as a repository for information about Malkin and commentary on her published works.
Anyone who shares our concerns about Michelle Malkin is welcome to contribute to this blog.
Email malkinwatch@gmail.com
