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What Michelle Malkin’s Disturbing Statements Could Mean for the Conservative Movement
At Stanford University last week the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro laid waste to the alt-right. Shapiro is a popular speaker on college campuses, and almost always follows basically the same script about the Left and the idiocy of progressive ideology. But of late an alt-right brigade has coordinated a campaign to target Daily Wire staff giving speeches on college campuses across the country, and in response, Shapiro decided to spend a significant portion of his speech hitting at them directly. It’s one of the best speeches he’s ever given and is deserving of an hour of your time:
One of the alt-right figures targeting Shapiro is this guy, Nick Fuentes:
Here's Nick Fuentes denying that the Holocaust happened.
Him and his followers are scum of the earth and their bad faith, anti-Semitic attacks should be shot down by the entire conservative movement. pic.twitter.com/7wJ9S7Q6zv
— Caleb Hull 🎅🏻🎁 (@CalebJHull) October 30, 2019
Which is what makes these statements by Michelle Malkin so deeply disturbing:
Ethno-nationalist, Fox News contributor, and regular writer for the Daily Wire Michelle Malkin says Ben Shapiro targeted one of the "new right leaders," warns the Right to not denigrate white supremacists and to answer their questions to "win the culture war." pic.twitter.com/1EYgMDpILt
— Matthew Dimitri (@themattdimitri) November 12, 2019
Shapiro’s issues with Fuentes don’t stop at Holocaust denial (though that would certainly be enough). Malkin wonders what Shapiro might have against Fuentes? Well, these videos could explain a few things.
This is Fuentes playing a video game, targeting an Orthodox Jew with his car, running him over after shooting him down, and laughing that he just took down Ben Shapiro:
Or here, where he flashes a switchblade while live streaming a Shapiro event:
Malkin is aware of all of these things; it’s no secret what Fuentes is.
What is disturbing about her comments is the fact that she is running cover for him anyway. There are many who have said she’s “lost it.” But Malkin isn’t stupid, and she isn’t crazy, and therein lies the problem. Malkin is smart and has made a calculated and conscious effort to make herself a thought leader in a faction of the conservative movement that she sees on the ascent. This is disturbing for any conservative who does not want to rub shoulders with racists and Jew-haters. Here’s hoping the conservative political marketplace signals to Malkin loud and clear that partnering with anyone on the alt-right, especially Fuentes, is bad for business.
Published in General
Boy, no kidding.
I want to comment further, on this part of the OP.
I am quite interested in rubbing shoulders with racists and Jew-haters. I don’t know any. I wish that I did, as it might give me an opportunity to explain why they are wrong about these issues. Based on the limited information presented in the OP, this appears to be what Malkin is trying to do, and it strikes me as a good thing, not a problem.
I do worry that a great many people who aren’t racists, and aren’t Jew-haters, are smeared with these labels for taking reasonable positions and making reasonable arguments. I find that the accusation of anti-Semitism is deployed too often, including by Shapiro himself.
Some Republicans are worried out of their skulls about “nationalism”. I think it’s nuts.
I am not going to support purging either Ben Shapiro or Michelle Malkin from the Conservative movement on the basis of complaints recently made, and I’m getting annoyed at people demanding that I do so.
Also, it doesn’t help one’s case to use a tweet claiming that Michelle Malkin is an ‘ethno-nationalist’. This is the Candace Owens article all over again, except this time against a long-respected columnist.
I want to add something further. I actually have some sympathy for the alt-right types, including white separatists, and even some for white supremacists. Let me explain.
The Left has been playing identity politics for as long as I can remember. And I’m no spring chicken, though my personal political memory only stretches back to the 1980s. From studying recent history, however, it is clear that identity politics — especially based on race and ethnicity — has been the heart of the Leftist playbook since the 1960s.
The Wokeist Left explicitly rejects a morality of common humanity. They explicitly reject MLK’s vision of judging people by what they do, not by how they look.
If that’s the game for every other group, why can’t white folks play? If the point of politics is to join with your tribe, your ethno-sexual identity group, and advocate for special privileges and special treatment for your group, why doesn’t this apply to every group?
It’s an ugly game, but it’s the game that the opposition wants to play. Thus, I have some sympathy for fed-up white folks who say fine, I’ll play by the same rules, and play to win. Doing so would be fairly characterized as something like white supremacist, or white separatist, though they wouldn’t necessarily have to believe in either some hypothetical superiority of the white race, or have a desire to separate the various races and ethnic groups.
I think that they are wrong. But I suspect that many people loosely classified as alt-right are simply exasperated by the identity politics of the Wokeists, and have decided that turnabout is fair play. Which doesn’t seem entirely unreasonable, in my estimation.
The solution is for reasonable folks on the Left to reject the Wokeist ideology. Not that I expect them to listen to me.
This makes me sad. Come on Michelle, you’re better than this.
Excellent! Can you help me out by giving me the problematic quote? I want to know what terrible thing she said.
It’s understandable that you could arrive where you are. What you see today on the issue of racism is not even close to the general conditions regarding the major moves of the 1960’s largely led by Martin Luther King, Jr. Most of the work done then was positive and most of the people involved were freedom loving Americans who were working to level the playing field for those who were technically as free as any American but in practice that was not the experience. I grew up in the South in the forties and fifties so I witnessed much of this process. The Communist Progressives have been with us since the twenties and they are always present to take advantage of the situation and certainly did that in the sixties. Following the turmoil of the sixties and the federal social legislation pushed through during the Kennedy/Johnson period, those Communist Progressives went into our university system to build a major propaganda mechanism.
I could say more but I’ve used up my limit.
Global warming “watermelon strategy”. Ever subdividing intersectionality.
Endless graft and propaganda including K-12.
Yes, lots of other areas like K-12, a nationwide labor organization for teachers and a Department of Education devoted to them. The setup for minorities in the urban centers that are looking like disasters today. Rule of law is deteriorating-some things we have always thought were crimes are being removed from the list.
I realize that Impeachment Circus! is on, but has anyone found “Michele Malkin’s Disturbing Statements” yet?
Still waiting.
She thrust herself into a tussle between Shapiro and some group led by a Holocaust denier/Charlottesville marcher….and she didn’t side with Ben. Evidently, she’s always for whatever side is maximalist on immigration, even if its alt-right. She spent today building all her little immigration strawmen defenses (nobody’s as pure as her and Trump, ya know)…….which will be her garbage defense to anti-Jew hater posts like Bethany’s.
I watched the Shapiro lecture at Stanford – I skipped the rest. He is worth watch and thank goodness Stanford gave him the forum. The rest is of no concern if kids can grasp his message.
Still no actual quote.
Dude, I linked the speech above. Give it a listen and then tell me what terrible thing she said. Because all we have here is Bethany saying that someone else said that she said something that should cause us to throw her on the burn pile with the other witches. And I need more than double hearsay if I’m to judge her guilty or innocent. I want the actual thing, not some anonymous Tweeter’s quote-free accusation.
So . . . anyone else?
The speech is undecipherable….and long. Just check out the excerpts that Bethany provided and Malkin’s tweets/website. Its clear which side Malkin is on.
Too bad. If you’re going to level a charge based on something Malkin said, it is incumbent on you to tell us what that is. If you can’t be bothered to find out what it is, then why should we engage with this at all? Why shouldn’t we just dismiss it as slander?
Bethany did not provide any quotes. The closest we’ve come to getting the exact thing that is giving you the screaming oopazootics is Bethany linking to someone else’s Tweet which reads:
Starts with some scary words, calling her an “Ethno-nationalist,” and “Fox News contributor” so his followers understand that she is evil. But the only direct quotes there are “new right leaders” and “win the culture war.”
Excuse me if I don’t exactly drop to the fainting couch.
I see nothing to cause such pearl-clutching in the clip provided, so there must be something else. The longer you guys avoid telling us what terrible thing Malkin said, the more I believe this is all performative nonsense.
Bethany herself says in this piece “We need to start befriending Nazis.”
Read the whole piece to get the context. It’s a good bit.
Now Michelle Malkin says in the brief clip provided that we need to actually “address the questions that these young people have, not shut them down or denigrate them.”
You know, talk to them. Change their minds. Dare I use the term “befriend” them?
What’s the difference here? Both these ladies are saying the same thing.
And thats enough. The tweet says she cited Ben Shapiro and “new right leaders”. Thats all I need to know.
I won’t post the link, but theres also a story on Daily Stormer about Michelle Malkin going “all in” for their cause. They admit that 2/3rd of their questions are about Israel….and they are tickled to death that Malkin is running interference for them with her BS “Queen immigration” routine.
I’m sorry, but it’s not.
Because it confirms what you want to believe.
I’ll keep an open mind, thanks. It’s always served me well.
I make it a practice to disregard any opinion or statement by neo-Nazis when forming my opinion on a subject. Otherwise you’re kind of empowering them……in more ways than one.
The Speech:
http://michellemalkin.com/2019/11/15/america-first-the-torch-is-being-passed/
Thank you. This is a different speech than the one Bethany spoke of, and . . . I have problems with some of the stuff she says here.
Specifically:
I agree that we shouldn’t be joining in deplatforming or demanding disavowals if we are truly in favor of free speech. But I think she needs to strongly separate herself from Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites. Yes, reach out to them. Talk to them. Try to bring them onto our side with reason. But be specific about your disagreements. Take a cue from the President who made it very clear in Charlottesville that while there were good people on both sides, there were also some very bad people.
(I’m sure I triggered some of my fellow members when I used the President as an example of what to do.)
Especially in the context of Charlottsville (which was the point in which I jettisoned my last vestiges of Trump hatred). Using guilt by association to undermine the concerns and beliefs of millions of good conservatives is what the usual suspects tried to do then, and its what they are doing now.
Not really. It just shows how bad Malkin is doing, when she can’t even meet the Trump moral standard. Not one word in her screed about anti-semitism. I guess she feels good having fairly similar views as Ben and Kirk…..but not having a Jewish target on her back.
You realize this is a completely different speech than the one that you were complaining about before. Did you find the terrible thing in that one yet? I’m still curious what it was that caused all the tsuris.
Yes, I realize that. This latest one was even worse, since she had a chance to clean up her previous remarks…and doubled down instead.
And now, Young America’s Foundation just fired her for it, after a 17 year run. So, no more Malkin college speeches
https://www.thedailybeast.com/conservative-group-yaf-fires-michelle-malkin-over-support-for-holocaust-denier
What was the bad thing she said in the first speech? Thanks, I keep asking for a quote, but nobody’s been able to provide it.
When issues will not be addressed by “legitimate” people, the only voices will be “illegitimate” ones.
“Right thinking” people on the right won’t speak on race and immigration and nationalism. It is funny that Rich Lowery is being treated as *illegitimate”.
Some topics can’t be discussed.
Yeah, that’s a subtext here, too.
It’s a shame that she won’t draw that clear line of separation from actual anti-Semites, but immigration reform has been Malkin’s pet issue since the early Bush administration. And I agree with her on it. But now she’s going to be spending her energy knocking back attacks from the right because of this unforced error. And you know that the French Davidians are going to lap this up like chocolate sauce while trying to tie her to Trump.
Maybe it’s best if we all just avert our eyes for a few months.
That’s because his critics have been well-trained to assert that “Nationalism” is always preceded by the invisible word “White.”
Seb Gorka just criticized Malkin’s position.