Michelle Malkin quits

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Why now? The professional and personal reasons are myriad. In this modern age of oversharing, I’m not going to get into every last one. Suffice to say, the American media landscape has changed dramatically since I entered this industry as a 22-year-old idealist who truly believed the “pen is mightier than the sword.” (Side note: Eagle-eyed readers who followed my blog writing in the early 2000s might recall that my original website logo was a pen/knife with the phrase “the pen became a clarion” from a Longfellow poem.)

It’s not just “fake news” that plagues us. It’s sold-out, skewed “news” that serves corporate and global special interests, not the truth. It’s lazy, soulless, dumbed-down opinion writing from hacks who care nothing about the craft. It’s shady influence operations masquerading as “journalism.” It’s information-suppression disguised as “misinformation” monitoring.

The homogenization of American journalism on both sides of the ideological spectrum has led to its collective deterioration. My colleagues at the Daily News were an eclectic bunch — including a Korean War Navy vet in his 60s, a former college math professor in her 50s who had taught English in Shanghai, and a hotshot New England politico in his 30s who had worked in D.C. as a press secretary.

Now the liberal media is dominated by endless supplies of smug, usually very pale-faced millennial J-school grads spouting about “diversity” while parroting the same worn set of views on whites as evil, America as oppressor, nuclear families as abnormal, and liberal democracy as sacrosanct.

“Conservative” media is not much better. It’s dominated by snot-nosed D.C. libertarian elites from overpriced universities who slavishly promote “free-market capitalism” and cast “big government” as our greatest enemy, while private Silicon Valley corporations and their nonprofit allies crush nationalist dissent, handcuff free speech and deplatform free thinkers through censorship (hard and soft) and lawfare (systematic abuse of the courts to harm political critics).

Because of my peacefully expressed reporting, opinions and speeches, my family has been punished and stigmatized, my reputation tarnished and my voice squelched. It’s not “big government” that waged this war on my career. It’s a constellation of vindictive wrongthink police in the private sector, from the Southern Poverty Law Center and Anti-Defamation League, to foreign newspapers and moneyed interests that have no business influencing American politics, to “conservative” swamp creatures and profiteers such as Bill Kristol, Jonah Goldberg, Mona Charen and Ben Shapiro, and even to former colleagues at the Fox News Channel, which blacklisted me several years ago and told a friend of mine who was a guest on Tucker Carlson’s show not to say my name after antifa rioters had attacked me and others on stage at a Back the Blue rally in Denver a few years ago. (My friend ignored the warning. God bless him.)

I have no regrets. As Paul wrote in 2 Timothy 4:7, “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.” I remain thankful to every single reader over the last three decades, and I will be eternally inspired by all the patriots I’ve profiled over the years — especially the ordinary parents, whistleblowers, citizen journalists and activists who have sacrificed far more than I for their truth-seeking and truth-telling.

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