The Steve Sailer blog-commenter Jim Don Bob recently wrote:
“I was at a CIS [the immigration-restrictionist Center for Immigration Studies] function years ago and met Richwine [Jason Richwine, the man terminated from U.S. academia in 2013 for IQ research,] and Michelle Malkin, who has since retired from the fray.”
Someone responded:
“Yes, whatever happened to Michelle Malkin? I liked her.”
My response:
Michelle Malkin says she got tired of writing, tired of participating in the political-talk circuit. In October 2022, she announced she was, henceforth, “retired from the fray” (to use Jim Don Bob’s phrase). We’ve heard nothing from her since.
There is, however, more to the story.
Michelle Malkin had a public-facing career that spanned twenty years. An appraisal of her place in the politics of the (now-in-the-books) first quarter of the 21st century is in order. A more-definitive account would require more effort than I can give now. I offer this commentary in hopes to offer something. I hope it may spur more ideas from others.
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Mainstream Conservatism started moving towards shunning Michelle Malkin, hitherto a provocateur-darling of (at least some of) these same people, by some point in the early 2020s. And probably the shift begins in the late 2010s already.
Even the rightward-most gatekeepers of the Right, even the main controlling elements of the pro-Trump Right, turned against her. She was ushered outside the gate. Although shouting all the way, she was left outside the gate and began to seek solace from other outside-the-gate people. Malkin was deeply angry and hurt by this shunning. Given so many years of being treated so well by the same people, she felt the magic was over. Her retirement in late 2022 comes relatively soon after this shunning.
A real signal of this shift was Michelle Malkin’s entry-ban at CPAC 2020. That was late-February of 2020, to be precise. The entry-ban against her was a big, shining, bright-flashing signpost, towards the answer to our inquiry here, towards the question of how, when, and why she disappeared from the scene. A Rubicon had been crossed, with Malkin’s place within the “ecosystem” of the respectable Right altered.
(“CPAC,” or the Conservative Political Action Conference, is, I suppose, the biggest of the Big Conservative gatherings of any given year in Washington. The late-February 2020 CPAC gathering was one of the very-last large-scale, notable, in-person public events before the mania of Covid Lockdowns cruelly swept across our civilization. The emboldened Pro-Panic coalition of the time, in those closing days of February and first days of March 2020, attacked CPAC: Reckless! Inhuman! These conservative gatherers in their thousands, many from distant places, Spreading the Virus! Isn’t that just like right-wingers, no respect for the common good! This was early fuel for the later-overt politicization of the Covid Panic of the early 2020s. The supposed CPAC “superspreader-event” was soon forgotten, thoughl too much was happening for the politics to dig in too much yet; the Panic was a hungry, hungry beast.)
Michelle Malkin was outraged, and hurt, by the 2020 CPAC ban. And by similar experiences around these years (ca. 2020). There was something of a sense of entitlement, given year many unbroken years of being celebrated. She;d even been a celebrated speaker at the February 2019 CPAC, although perhaps already on somewhat-thin ice by that time.
I’m not sure when the shunning of Michelle Malkin began; and I cannot now recall exactly why it emerged and sustained. But it was definitely in place by early 2020. The shunning had begun. It’s likewise true that Michelle Malkin had been a darling of (at least large elements of) the Right or populistic-Right back ca.2005, and basically still so by ca.2015.
I think that gives us a handle on the outlines of the “when.” Now to touch on the “how” and “why” before revisiting the “when”:
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Michelle Malkin was born Michelle Maglalang in October 1970, to parents who had arrived in the U.S. from the Philippines the same year, 1970.
In the 2000s, when Michelle Malkin was making a name for herself, she repeatedly, regularly and easily scooped up lots of easy points for being an Asian woman. A well-spoken, more-or-less attractive, foreign woman making sorta-kinda pro-American, pro-White talking-points. This image was, I’d argue, her stock-in-trade. She used it effectively. She was a good writer, and courageous in a way. There are also plenty of signs of her leveraging her Asian-girl status to extract things from milieus in which she moved. (This is a central problem, challenge, or tendency with “women in politics”; I’ll return to this point below.)
Steve Sailer, among others, was shunned for saying things in a generally-tamer way, than did Malkin. Reliable word has it that Sailer is, and always has been, a White Male. He was also older than Malkin by a dozen years, and looked much older than that. Sailer was auto-shunned; Malkin succeeded.
Malkin was not only a favored-class — relatively-recent-immigrant-origin, female, Nonwhite, and even with an Israeli-citizenship-eligible husband (she has bragged of her husband’s Jewishness, and sought to continue to use it as a shield and for bonus connections, but in the process she perhaps became too-willing to criticize Jewish actions, political postures, and influence, as if she were an insider in their game; more on this below).
She was also willing to fight on “culture war” points and draw attention to herself with provocative or incendiary rhetoric. Her various layers of identity and connections were effective shields in her long foray into politics. The juxtaposition with white-male Jason Richwine, eliminated from society in 2013 at age thirty-one, is stark.
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Something changed, seemingly in the latter few years of the 2010s, with Michelle Malkin’s place in the U.S. right-wing “ecosystem.” If I try to come up with a conventional explanation, it’d be: her provocateur tendencies went into overdrive in the Trump era, she “went too far,” and became shunned. But remember this centrally important part of her whole political persona: her cute-Asian-female status. The ca.2020 “turn” may relate, at least in part, to Malkin (b.1970) growing older.
Malkin’s provocateur-cute-Asian-girl days were effective when she was in her 30s and not much altered well into her 40s. And even into her 50s, it remained. This part of her persona was a big part of her success, and she knew it. By 2020, the year she turned 50, she may have felt things starting to have “run their course.”
By the late 2010s, much-younger ‘girls’ had entered the fray in large numbers. By the late 2010s, the new crop of b.1980s and b.1990s politics-girls were achieving lucrative results, doing similar acts.
I do not mean necessarily that Malkin, or any other specific individual, is not or was not genuine, in any given professed belief at any given time. I do mean there was more to these girls’ appeal — their following(s), their attention, their star-power — than their arguments.
I am here using the term “girl,” by the way, quite deliberately: To refer to the nominally-politics-oriented, social-media-based “e-girl” phenomenon, as it’s been called, and by extension also to Michelle Malkin, despite Malkin’s considerably predating the e-girls on the scene by the late 2010s. They all traded on their role as “girls,” in no small part.
The new “girls” on the scene were far-less-good writers than Michelle Malkin. The typical exemplar of the new wave, by the close of the 2010s, was not a writer at all, not primarily. Most of them traded in video format and so forth, and attention-seeking or outrage politics, and (of course) social-media far preferable to the older model of writing (as in this essay-like form; or the shorter column form, which Malkin wrote for so many years).
Social media is a decidedly lower form of written communication; video-based and Instagram-style communication is another level entirely. Michelle Malkin was already in this world as the 2010s opened. She successfully navigated it, to a degree. The new competition was considerable; and in many ways the discourse continued to be degraded.
(Incidentally, few or none of the 2010-era, politics-talking, large-following “e-girls” have ever amounted to much, and most have disappeared or renounced their quasi-ethnonationalist, so-called Alt-Lite views of the 2010s, revealing themselves as a species of fraud. Even though I wouldn’t say this is true of Michelle Malkin, it was true of her “direct competition” for views and likes, ca.2020. It’s hard to know what to make of some one of these people, the Lauren Southern-like people out there; too many to name, most social-media platforms inundated with them. It’s one of the many disappointments of Trump that many of us have that he apparently takes advice from one of them named Laura Loomer, a typical case of the 2010s-era e-girls.)
A clue that I’m right about “aging out” being a factor is that Michelle Malkin (born Oct. 1970) wrote her “signing off” column the very week of her 52nd birthday. (“‘-30-‘: An Ending, But Not the End.”) Yes, that is her final-ever published column, as of this writing in mid-2025. Late-October 2022, within days of her birthday. The sign-off column being the same week as the birthday is a 1-in-52 coincidence. The good bet (a 51/52 chance) is it was intentional.
Twenty years earlier, in 2002, Michelle Malkin has entered the fray in a big way. She was clearly energized by the attention given towards her polemic Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores (published Aug 2002). That pro-War on Terror, White-ethnonationalistic-, immigration-restrictionist-, dog-whistle-style polemic reached its height around Malkin’s 32nd birthday (late 2002).
The first Trump campaign (June 2015 to Nov 2016) occurred spanning Malkin’s 45th and 46th birthdays. She he was still “passing” as being a cute-attractive girl of a maybe-around-age-30 foreign girl with the Courage to Stand Up to Political Correctness. In other words, the same persona she had used to such effect throughout the 2000s. (East-Asians can successively deceive Western audiences in all manner of ways. This is one. It is one reason they like operating within Western societies.)
By the end of her 40s, though, Michelle Malkin had started to be shunned. Perhaps especially in calendar-year 2019 (her 49th birthday was in Oct 2019). The storm surely gathering in the preceding few years. What I assess happened is that Malkin assumed the protective ring around her, that she’d known in the 2000s and most of the 2010s, would last forever.
Many East-Asian-origin people assume this kind of amulet-like protection simply exists for them in the West by default (which they like, as they benefit from it; even if concurrently seeing it as naive and over-trusting, at least viewed by standards anything near their own cultures’ standards). By around 2018-19, she was increasingly positioning herself in actually-correct positions but positions over which the ADL, AIPAC, and others were willing to toss her overboard.
The turn against the long-self-confident Michelle Malkin wounded her. Especially so when she knew well her positions were right, and on the majority side, and that she still had all the checkbox-layers of protection. She had traded in controversy, successfully shielding herself with her various places in the U.S.-administered quasi-imperial system’s racial-spoils system.
By the 2010s, however, Malkin’s fame, her public profile, meant she couldn’t quite be fully Cancelled (meaning fired from a prestige-perch; life-banned from respectful employment; shunned). Much in the same way, Ann Coulter was never destroyed, despite emerging as a defacto White-ethnonationalist by the mid-2010s (and, at times, as an outright Israel critic).
For Malkin, year after year of negative pressure, I think, got to her. Being “turned against” would hurt for anyone. But especially for one who’d done so well for so long in a self-made (or self-made-seeming) writing and speaking career, a kind of miniature political-nexus in her own right. Impressive, in its way.
She retreated to Newsmax, the right-wing TV channel, where she hosted a right-wing talk-show called “Sovereign Nation” (aired: August 2020 to May 2021).
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By November 2021, the SPLC and ADL and others were condemning Michelle Malkin as an Enemy of the People, over her appearance at a conference held by American Renaissance, the white-ethnonationalist organization. By this time she had turned against Israel, to some extent (the “extent” being that troublesome country’s complete stranglehold-control over U.S. foreign policy).
By 2019, Malkin was questioning central precepts of Jewish power in the West. She likely knew well she was walking on increasingly thin ice with this, more-so than her previous provocative posturings about other groups.
Remember, though, this is an East-Asian woman with a Jewish husband and half-Jewish children! Those facts, as I already say above, probably helped her career early on (and could not have hurt it, not in the ca.2000 USA); and shielded her throughout. But, by some time about the turn of the decade, ca.2020, she’d gone too far. The shield broke.
Going in the direction of American Renaissance by late 2021. I’d say that was in line with her long-successful instincts of siding with the right side of things. (I mean both “right” as in correct on arguments; and also concurrently “the Right.”) Probably the more-important inducement towards that direction, though, was her now-ongoing shunning by Big Conservatism. That had started in earnest by/around 2019, as I say. She was hurt and angry, and reacted accordingly.
If these people, the gatekeepers, had sometimes or often viewed Malkin with a wary eye in earlier eras, off-and-on in the 2000s and most of the 2010s, she’d always been seen as an okay exception, and maybe often useful. But then, in or by around late 2019, the “gate” was shut on her. By mid-2021, she was being outright villified. She made appearances on the SPLC/ADL’s “Public Enemies” lists! That, I assume, is also the reason that her highly rated Newsmax show was pulled off the air in May 2021.
The winter of 2021-22 — the third and final winter of the enforced and policed Corona-Panic’s full might in the West — may have been the hardest for Michelle Malkin in her public-facing career, which was by then nearing its twenty-year mark. Along came the 20th-anniversary milestone of her first book (mid-2002). Then her 52nd birthday (October 2022). The birthday was seemingly good-enough place to take her exit, as a kind of new life-year’s resolution to avoid the ongoing heartache of being shunned by your own community, as it were. We haven’t heard from her since.
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To return briefly yo the 2013 crucifixion of Jason Richwine (b.1982, NW-European Christian origin).
The connection with Michelle Malkin was that longtime Sailer-blog commenter Jim Don Bob reported an encounter with the then-internally-exiled Jason Richwine at a ca. 2017 immigration-restrictionist event in or near Washington. At this same event Michelle Malkin was circulating among the attendees and he met him two; maybe not at the same exact time.
Jason Richwine’s life-ban from working in academia is a classic 2010s political moment. A strange decade it was, the 2010s, in many ways. It reached its climax, inconveniently for our historical-period numbering system, in the early 2020s…
The ostracization of Michelle Malkin in or by the early 2020s, provides a point of comparison with Jason Richwine, the latter life-banned from academia, for Racism, in early 2013, a few years after his Harvard PhD. The Richwine case was a major warning-signal to similar White-male figures on the scene. There would good, solid, talented, sharp people who’d done everything right, and so forth, who could be destroyed with the push of one button by these people.
Malkin’s ostracization was many years later, longer-feeling, maybe, than the seven or so calendar-years that elapsed between the turn against Richwine and the turn against Malkin. Only towards the end of the 2010s-to-early-2020s political cycle did Malkin come into problems; Richwine was an “early” victim (although not really; the Wokeness system, I argue, long predates the 2010s).
To me, the Malkin case is instructive in how much later it came, and so forth. How generously she had been treated for so many years, by the system; how much leeway she had gotten, to say things that people were s often “Richwine’d” over, or (more commonly) “Richwine’d” themselves over. This taboos grew into place already decades ago, and have been in place throughout the lifetimes of people like Richwine.
If someone reading this can identify specific cross-over points for the shunning of Michelle Malkin, let us know.
One lesson of Michelle Malkin’s early-2000s to early-2020s career is that she was expendable. Any individual. When they found her no longer of use, they got rid of her despite her popularity and years and years of apparent high status within the right-wing pop-discourse sphere.
People have liked to talk of the rise of a multicultural, multiracial, “anti-Woke” neo-coalition for Trump, which they identify especially as having emerged in the early 2020s.
I argued in November 2024 (“Revisiting the Sailer Strategy“) that the Multiracial Trump Coalition idea was, as usual, both exaggerated and shallow. It rested in part on the Based Brown Guy political-archetype that was fundamentally both hollow, phantom-like, and so ripe for obviously-demagogic exploitation (see also: Vivek Ramaswamy).
To the extent the multiracial-rainbow-MAGA was true by the mid-2020s, it had been people fitting Michelle Malkin’s profile (if not her herself) who had laid groundwork for it, who were key “vectors” for it. For, I mean, the conversion of Trump-MAGA into what its leadings lights had always sought to portray it as: a multiracialized, populist(-in-a-negative-sense), hooting-and-hollering dumbed down, demagogic, pro-LEGAL-immigration, anti-“racist”-if-he’s-anti-Woke, pro-Israel movement; one which Trump embraced, and which embraced Trump, as a king. Or at least a petty, rule-by-decree, rule-by-emotion caudillo.
Inserting Malkin into a role of facilitator of that turn highly decontextualizes her from her own work; and removes nuance from her work. It is simply one lingering image of her place in politics that I think will stand the test of time. That holds even if she herself were too rambunctious for these people to allow to stay on board the train (or strayed too close to violating some taboos especially relating to her husband’s ethnopolitical group).
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Jim Don Bob responded at the SteveSailer.net discussion:
“[When] I met [Michelle Malkin] and [Jason] Richwine at a CIS event in 2017 or so[, Malkin] looked like she was in her late 20s.”
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ADDENDUM:
Some Sailer-blog commenter I’d never heard of suggested that Michelle Malkin “still writes for TakiMag.” That is verifiably false.
She was published at Taki Magazine, way back between September 2010 and May 2011, before moving on to bigger things. In verifying this, I discovered something of great interest, given my own anti-Trump position today (see: Evaluating Trump-II at its six-month mark and The Trump-as-Caudillo theory revisited).
Michelle Malkin’s second-to-last monthly Taki column, published in late-April 2011, was:
“Donald Trump’s Eminent-Domain Empire.”
At the time, Trump had entered politics in a quasi-formal way by questioning the Obama birth-certificate, a controversy bouncing around some corners at the time. He claimed to have secret proof the birth certificate was fake. In those few days, the course towards Trump’s 2015-16 run was laid. The ultimate course was set towards (what I now see as) this man’s shambolic and embarrassing 2.125 terms-so-far as president (4 years, 6 months and counting). In 2011, with no polarization whatsoever yet over Trump, Michelle Malkin laid out a frankly accurate portrait of Trump-as-Con-Man that holds up really well fourteen years later.
Malkin wrote at the time (April 2011):
“Don’t be fooled by The Donald. Take it from one who knows: I’m a South Jersey gal who was raised on the outskirts of Atlantic City in the looming shadow of Trump’s towers. […] America, it’s time you wised up to Donald Trump[…]
Trump has been wooing conservative activists for months and flirting with a GOP presidential run—first at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington and most recently at a tea party event in South Florida. He touts his business experience, “high aptitude” and “bragadocious” deal-making abilities. But he’s no more a standard-bearer of conservative values, limited government and constitutional principles than the cast of ‘Jersey Shore’. […]
While casting himself as America’s new constitutional savior, Trump has shown reckless disregard for fundamental private property rights. […]
Donald Trump’s career-long willingness to trample [private property rights] tells you everything you need to know about his bogus tea party sideshow. [End quote, Michelle Malkin, April 2011]
Interesting.
I never followed Michelle Malkin closely enough to know when exactly she became pro-Trump and when (if ever) she turned against Trump. But this April 2011 warning (“America, it’s time you wised up to Donald Trump”) was really prescient.
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Hail To You 