Michelle Malkin on Being Banned from AirB&B

Has former Fox News pundit Michelle Malkin taken the red pill? Last year she moved her blog (the biggest political blog in America?) and its massive archives to the Unz Review, home of notorious  dissidents and “conspiracy theorists” like yours truly. Since then Malkin has come under increasing fire by the usual suspects, culminating in last week’s banning from AirBNB.

Banned from lodging for harboring politically-incorrect views? What’s next, “disagree with us and you won’t be allowed to purchase food”? (Maybe I shouldn’t give them any ideas…)

Twenty years ago, when I was a witch and Malkin a witch-hunter, I never thought we’d be playing on the same team. But now we’re both witches, and the witch-hunting team is coming after us with torches blazing. I salute Michelle Malkin’s courageous decision to step outside the mainstream (she had more to lose than I did) and appreciate her willingness to engage in fearless and uncensored conversation—and to apologize for her mistakes in the wake of 9/11, including joining other Fox News personalities in attacking me for seeking the truth about 9/11.

Below is a lightly-edited transcript of the interview.

Kevin Barrett Interviews Michelle Malkin, 2/11/22

Kevin Barrett: This is Truth Jihad Radio, questioning official stories since 2006. Please subscribe by way of the Substack button at TruthJihad.com.

Welcome back to this live radio show broadcasting every Saturday evening from 7 to 9 p.m. Central where I am and whatever time it is, wherever you are, it's always time to talk to the most interesting folks who have something outside the box to say.

My second, hour guest is brand new to Truth Jihad Radio. She recently moved to the Unz Review, which is one of my homes on the internet. I'm talking about Michelle Malkin. You may have seen her on Fox News or elsewhere. And she is now in the news for having been banned from Airbnb for her political views.

Wait a minute, they can ban you from lodging? You try to check into the motel and you find out that you said something political that somebody didn't like and you can't stay there anymore? Are we all going to be homeless? Are they going to ban us from eating? Things are really getting strange in America today. Let's try and make some sense of it. Hey, welcome Michelle Malkin, how are you?

Michelle Malkin: Good. Thanks for having me.

Kevin Barrett: So what's with Airbnb? I can't believe it. Since when did people start getting banned from accessing these kinds of basic services in America due to their political stances?

Michelle Malkin: Well, it's been happening for a while, but with particular regard to the dissident right. A lot of young activists and journalists and independent citizens, researchers that identify themselves as truly America First, as opposed to the appropriated generic brand that we're now seeing from the Republican Party. It's been happening for quite a while, and I'm certainly not the first canary in the cancel culture coal mine on this. In fact, in 2019, when I came out with my latest book called Open Borders Inc., I dedicated it to many of the patriots who have already been suffering de-housing, de-platforming, de-banking and now, most recently, a twist of de-planing. There are a number of individuals, and I'm trying to get a complete list of them through a Freedom of Information Act request, who've been either put on the no fly list or designated by the TSA as heightened security risks, and either stopped and swabbed for bomb-making materials, prevented from booking tickets online, this type of thing. The designation is SSSS. And I identified at least two individuals who had been classified as such. So the idea that I could be retaliated against by a service provider of public accommodations like Airbnb is certainly in keeping with that trend. The new twist or new wrinkle, at least to my mind, is the fact that not only was I punished specifically for speaking at the annual American Renaissance conference last November, but my husband's account was also deleted. And he is not a public figure. He's not a journalist. He wasn't at the conference. But it doesn't matter. And the idea that it was my speech was also pretextual, because Airbnb didn't bother to obtain a transcript or a video of the speech before they made this decision.

Kevin Barrett: So this wasn't really about anything you said. It was about associating with the wrong people. It's guilt by association. And I guess they're saying that American Renaissance is, quote unquote, a hate group. So whatever you say at their convention, it's equally bad. Which strikes me as very strange. If I were invited by any group to talk to their convention, I'd probably go. And if I disagreed with them, I would explain why. And then I guess I would get banned by Airbnb just for having been to their convention if it's a convention that Airbnb doesn't like. I really don't understand that logic.

Michelle Malkin: Yes, and your family members. And here's what concerns me as a mom of two young adult children who are just embarking on their lives, just forming their own identities, professional, personal, political. The idea that my children could be held responsible for the alleged sins, which they are not, of their parents, of course, is of a piece with the basic fundamental notions of the types of people who plied critical race theory, woke politics and guilt by association and convicting every last white person of the sin of slavery in America. It's all of the same thinking, it's all of the same piece. And I think there's particular retaliation against me, not just by woke corporations, not just by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League. A lot of these are our common enemies, but (there are also) so many (pro-censorship) people on the right. And I think that's what makes this particular case and circumstances interesting for a lot of reasons. Because there is a long, deep history of establishment conservatives and influencers and swamp creatures who've been doing this, all the way back to when Sam Francis appeared at the American Renaissance conference and then was drummed out of his job as an award winning columnist at The Washington Times, at the hands of somebody who actually helped inspire my career in the first place, Dinesh D'Souza, who had spoken at my college campus in the late 1980s / early 1990s. When he came out with his first book — and I have to tell you that it was a weird experience. Because he invited me on his podcast to talk about being cancelled by Airbnb and sort of sticking to the conventional criticism of this being a manifestation of left-wing tyranny. When, as I pointed out as politely as I could in the interview, that it wouldn't have happened without the collusion and the conspiracy of so many of these people on the right who actually cringe in fear when you dare to talk about (controversial) issues, particularly of of race and immigration and culture, in exactly the kind of candid manner that they pretend they're doing and of course, make livings at, they fashion themselves at the forefront of fighting cancel culture when so many of them have been at the forefront of helping enact and impose it in the first place.

Kevin Barrett: And it seems like you've made a transition from being very mainstream-acceptable and probably doing quite well socially and financially in that mainstream, and now you're with me at the Unz Review. I think it's the most interesting webzine out there. Did you make a conscious decision to change, or did it just kind of happen that way?

Michelle Malkin: I did make many conscious choices along my path from Fox News pundit mainstream Con Inc figure to where I am now, and I've never been more comfortable and felt more edified — and I hate to use a pop psychology term, but self-actualized, in the sense that I'd always felt on the outside, even when I was in the swamp. And the core issue that helped launch my career in the first place (was) the vehemence with which I beat the drum over immigration issues and the importance of systematic, unapologetic enforcement. My evolution over the years (was) from merely critiquing illegal immigration to understanding the horrible impact that mass immigration had demographically on the United States and what the Hart Celler Act meant for the ability of this country to preserve its historic roots and demography. And, of course, the electoral impact that that had on Republican politics. I started my journalism career in Los Angeles in 1992 (covering) the impact not just of 1965, but of the Reagan amnesty and what that presaged for decades and decades afterwards.

It was curious to me that my colleagues in Con Inc whether it was L.A.or D.C. or New York were somehow not connecting the dots, following the money to find the truth about why all my friends were rather silent about it, or taken aback or even offended. Once I started expanding my critiques and attacks and investigative work from the southern border to our entire legal immigration system, and especially with H1B, OPT, programs like this that you'll never hear most of the mainstream conservatives critiquing—well, at least until Trump and some of his best immigration thinkers came along, Jeff Sessions deserves a lot of credit for that as well—that's just one area where I started evolving. And the thing about my own career and my work is I'm an open book. I mean, I wrote seven of them. I established my first beachhead on the internet with my eponymous blog in 1999. I actually built it with Microsoft Front Page. It would take a day to update a single page. And I've written thousands upon thousands of blog posts and syndicated columns...

Kevin Barrett: That's all moved over to Unz.com now.

Michelle Malkin: Yes. I was going to get to that. So after I wrote Open Borders Inc., I was very concerned about San Francisco based tech companies like WordPress, which was my blogging platform and software and had been for more than a decade. A friend of mine Ann Corcoran, who runs an incredible website called Refugee Resettlement Watch and did and still does a lot of great citizen investigative research on the resettlement program, had her blog just completely torpedoed. WordPress just pulled the rug out from under her. And it was only through some small miracle that she was able to recover 10 or 15 years' worth of work. So I thought, wow, I need a steady, independent platform that will accept me for who I am and have the technical know-how and ability to support everything and be able to withstand spam attacks, DDoS attacks, which my website had been under and targeted by over the years.

And I knew Ron Unz from my earliest days in Los Angeles. He had spearheaded an initiative to repeal bilingual education. I had met him in the 90s. I hadn't had much contact with him since then, but of course knew that Unz.com was a safe haven for the whole gamut of free speech and free thought. And so, yes, I've been incredibly honored to be among so many dissidents of all kinds and incredibly brilliant people, including you.

Kevin Barrett: Well, thank you so much. And I wonder to what extent you've explored some of the edgy issues at Unz.com, such as Ron's American Pravda series. I think that's the best go-to source looking at the kinds of issues that are often classified as conspiracy theories and thinking them through and trying to figure out which ones are true. And he's focused on the ones that turned out to be probably true. Have you looked at that stuff and are you willing to talk about it?

Michelle Malkin: I certainly am. I haven't read the entire series. It’s on my to-do list for the summer to be able to just sit down sort of uninterrupted and uncluttered and concentrate on that. But I have other family members and friends who have delved deeper into it. And I think my move to Unz.com has exposed a lot of people to unorthodox and quote-unquote "dangerous" thoughts and articles. And certainly Ron has been one of the bravest voices, the beacon in opening up a lot of those things.

There are a lot of third rails that you can't talk about. When I defended a lot of young men known as Groypers in 2019 for raising many of these issues, whether it was the USS Liberty or unfettered and unlimited foreign aid to Israel,a and a lot of the other conspiracy theories that may turn out to be conspiracy truths, I was once again in the news and labeled all sorts of things. And what happened to Sam Francis essentially happened to me at the hands of Ben Shapiro, The Daily Wire and then the liberal Daily Beast, once again illustrating that it was the alliance of those two types of forces that squelch exactly the kind of free thought in the daily content that's represented at Unz.com.

Kevin Barrett: I got involved in this political work...I had read about the JFK assassination when I was in high school in the 70s, and I knocked on doors for the nuclear freeze for a year in the mid-80s. But I never thought of myself as a full-time political person. I thought I'd be teaching about medieval Sufism somewhere. But then after 9/11, I looked into that issue, and the next thing you know I was on Fox News debating with Hannity and O'Reilly. And at that time, of course, I perceived your work as being kind of on the wrong side of this issue, to say the least. And I was part of a community where Muslims in America virtually unanimously understood that 9/11 was just obviously a false flag. I was the last one in Madison, Wisconsin, of every Muslim I ever talked to (to figure it out) — I said, Let's hold off and look at the facts. And after a few years, I ended up looking and agreeing with them. So from that perspective...I was on the no fly list or the slow fly list getting the kind of harassment that you're talking about. And of course, I've also been kicked off of various platforms here and there. So from my perspective, it looks almost ironic that folks who got misled by 9/11 in that decade are now being scapegoated in the way that me and my Muslim friends were getting scapegoated back at that time. And so maybe you could reflect on that.

Michelle Malkin: I just Googled Kevin Barrett, Michelle Malkin, and I assume this is you that I wrote about all those years ago.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah, I kind of vaguely remember something like that. A lot of people wrote about me for about, you know, my 15 minutes of fame, which stretched out into six months.

Michelle Malkin: I'm just seeing it now, and I guess it was 2006. I have to go look and see what I said, but I—I can guess. And so, you know, it's rare that one has an opportunity to do this. And here it is on the radio. I apologize. I apologize if what I said led to exactly the type of ostracization and depersoning. And yes, it's an interesting sort of confluence of events, similar to the idea of Sam Francis being a cast out by Dinesh D'Souza and now Dinesh D'Souza having me on his show to talk about being canceled by Airbnb. And I have talked about this in in the last couple of years on some smaller podcasts, so you might not have seen this. There was a libertarian named Dave Smith, who is some sort of comedian but also did shows where he welcomed all sorts of people. And we talked about my evolution since 9/11. And there's a lot of investigative reporting and analysis on Unz.com that raises a lot of very deeply troubling unanswered questions about who knew what on 9/11. That's not to say that I am disavowing all of the reporting that I did in the immediate wake of 9/11, and certainly the work that I did on the internment book that I wrote that upset a lot of people in a lot of different circles.

But I would say that the larger evolution of my thinking, Kevin, has been in sort of putting Islamic terrorism in the larger geopolitical context of how worrisome it should be compared to the other evils and the other foreign influences and the other types of terrorism that occur in the world. My evolution on the weapons that were created by the government with 9/11 as a pretext is also open. And I mean, I guess you could call it politically expedient after I had championed the Patriot Act, which of course, many civil liberties folks, whether it was left or libertarian, warned would be used against American citizens. It was followed up by the Obama administration's expansion of that. And so, yes, it became clearer to those of us who had, I would say, at least in my case, in good faith, backed some of these tools thinking that they would help mitigate acts of Islamic terrorism in the country. And the other thing that that I had rethought was — well, two things — the inducements by the FBI going undercover and using  agents to instigate acts of terrorism that wouldn't have otherwise occurred. And then, of course, the massive toll, the sacrifice of so many American men, mostly men, sent to to fight other people's wars. And I will tell you that weighs incredibly heavy on my conscience and my soul.

Kevin Barrett: I appreciate you're saying that, and I hope you're part of a kind of a mass awakening. And I actually see something like that happening, surprisingly, on the political right these days. I did an event recently with a local Republican Party organizer here in Wisconsin, and he brought a bunch of candidates for local office. I think there were six or seven. I did my little talk, which was pretty rip roaring 9/11 truth stuff. And all except one were totally on board and already aware of it, and the other one was open to it. And this is a complete flip from how things were in 2006, when it was only sort of the extreme leftist fringe of Democrats, or  at least that side of the aisle, that was open to the notion that, oh, Bush and Cheney did it, that sort of thing, which of course, is oversimplified. And so now it seems that as my friend, the Republican organizer in Madison, Rolf Lindgren says, Republicans are getting red pilled. And you seem to be maybe a couple of steps out ahead of the group. And I wonder: If that process continues, what kinds of ramifications we might see?

Michelle Malkin: I give credit to these young people. That really was a huge light switch for me. And not to take away from all of the work that's been done, for example, on places like Unz.com. But it was a revelation to me to see these young men not be shackled by the mainstream or establishment handcuffs. They're invisible handcuffs because you don't—you're just so conditioned. I mean, so conditioned to, you know, stand with Israel at all costs and under all circumstances, no matter what, lest you be labeled all the wrong things. And it was their bravery. It was challenging the (?) of the world. And it really caught my attention and jolted me in a way that I hadn't been before. And that just sort of opened all sorts of dangerous doors. And even the the speeches that I've given at the America First Political Action Conference—I think that they are playing a bridge role. And I guess I would dial it back even before then, because like I said, the mass migration and great replacement theories—if you want to talk about conspiracy theories that are conspiracy truths—were what led me to sort of throw down the gauntlet at CPAC. It was the last time they ever invited me, caused a huge splash in 2019. And I think that's when a lot of the young people who are sort of working on their own plane or on their own lane, on the same superhighway that we were all traveling just didn't know each other or see each other…

Kevin Barrett: Mm hmm. And so regarding the the great replacement theory and the work of groups like American Renaissance, it strikes me that a reasonable observer would have to grant that they do have some valid points, such as that most nations would not tolerate an extremely rapid demographic shift like we're seeing in the United States. It's just normal that a lot of people are going to be upset. And it's actually kind of surprising that there aren't enough people who would be upset enough ahead of the fact to make sure it didn't happen. Right? If you tried to move, say, Middle Easterners or Africans or Europeans or whatever into Japan at such a rate that they would become the majority and the Japanese would be the minority, the Japanese probably would stop that. And so one has to grant that there is a kind of a basic argument there that is reasonable. And yet it seems that the other side doesn't even want to engage with that and have a reasonable discussion. They just want to shut you down and anybody who even goes to give a speech at American Renaissance has to be canceled from everything. Why is that?

Michelle Malkin: Well, you can't be allowed to question precious narratives. I don't have to tell you that.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah, that's right.

Michelle Malkin: And the thing about the great replacement is that when we start talking about who's really pulling the strings of our immigration policy and what's in it for them... So Open Borders Inc. was this painstaking and I'm sure, painful to read compendium of so many of the globalist groups that are responsible for everything from buying off congressmen to set the limits higher and higher for things like H1B visas, to imposing refugees on Middle America in localities that are supposed to have local control. And all of the billions of dollars that are going to nonprofit charities of faith who are tax exempt, whether they're Catholic or Jewish or evangelical Christian. So that's the immigration part of it. But then of course it touches on that other third rail of the types of people we want to let into the country in the first place. And there are numerous academics and think tank types (such as) Amy Wax at the University of Pennsylvania, who's been under fire: I met her when I was on a book tour three years ago for bluntly stating that there are certain countries we should not have people come in from and that we should favor others. And I believe that there was a conservative establishment think tank type in Minnesota who was fired from her job for plainly and very strongly stating that a place like Minnesota might want to consider putting Norwegians ahead of Somalians. And there are any number of reasons why that might be a good policy to embrace.

So the race realism that American Renaissance has talked about and written about for years and years and years now is becoming more acceptable. Because as I said in my speech, which is available for now at YouTube on both American Renaissance Channel as well as mine: I was in L.A. as a young editorial writer in the aftermath of the 1992 riots and Rodney King asked, "Can't we all get along?" And over time, at least for me, over the last 30 years, chronicling all the things I've chronicled with all the pathologies and flaws in our country, unfortunately, the answer is no.

Kevin Barrett: But then what's the answer to that answer? Philosophically, I'm interested in having rational discussions with the strong anti-immigration position people. I would happily accept an invitation to go talk with American Renaissance. But I always ask them, what could be the solution here? Because so often we we see that the people who get really excited about this—and you see them sometimes in the comment section at Unz.com and other places—are sort of dreaming of some kind of mono-ethnic paradise that they'll get after they like, expel or, God forbid, kill all the people that are of the wrong ethnicity. And obviously, that's kind of a non-starter for anybody who wants a decent future for themselves and their kids. So it would be rational to try to slow the demographic transition, certainly. But precisely how would we do that? And how could that be done in such a way that it wouldn't just exacerbate all of the tensions that have already grown up so much? We're on that path already to such rapid demographic change that trying to get off of it would be a little bit like trying to turn around the ship headed for the iceberg. Except the problem is you're going to hit the iceberg a lot worse if you try to turn it around. So what is the practical, real world solution to this problem?

Michelle Malkin: Well, there's a very immediate one. I would think that there are a lot of Americans who come from different sides of the political spectrum who might agree that an immigration moratorium, a full immigration pause, immediately would help.

I am an advocate of peace. I just want to make that clear. You mentioned something about people wanting to kill other people. I don't. I've never in my 30 years come across anybody who's ever advocated such a thing. And I certainly don't, just to make that clear. But I think that especially with all of the disruption and upheaval and hardship and adversity that people have faced over the last two years under this COVID tyranny that this would provide a lot of relief, demographically, economically, educationally. There are a lot of good reasons to put a pause on it. And one thing that hasn't changed since the beginning of my career is looking systemically at why there's such a failure to enforce immigration laws that are intended to protect our sovereignty and our safety. And it's by design. It's designed to fail. Well, if you turn off the spigot that provides a lot of relief for the people on the ground and a lot of relief for the people and many of these cities where the schools and the health care system and social services are all completely overwhelmed... You and I might disagree on a lot of things, but I think it's important for elected officials to take care of the people who are already here first. And that's impossible to do when you've got uncontrolled amounts of people coming in both illegally and legally.

Kevin Barrett: And of course the mainstream people are going to tell us that this is a terrible, extremely radical proposal, to freeze all immigration. And even someone like Trump focuses almost entirely on illegal immigration and building the wall and so on. As I recall, looking at some work—I think Ron Unz actually has done some of it—(regarding) the demographic issue it seems that slowing illegal immigration wouldn't really help very much because that's actually more of a revolving door, and that the demographic change is mostly happening due to legal immigration. And so if that's the issue that one wanted to address, then one would indeed want to to freeze the legal as well as the illegal immigration. And there certainly are good arguments for that.

The arguments against it, of course, are that, one, economically were better off with the immigrants. They tend to be younger and help solve our age stratification problem, that is, the inverse pyramid, with too many old folks like me heading for retirement age and not enough young workers to support us. So to solve that problem, we import people because our birth rates are too low. That's the most common argument we hear.

And then we also hear that the immigrants really aren't so bad. And we hear this from Ron Unz, too. There is the whole Trumpian notion that the Hispanic demographic and especially the illegals are so crime ridden and so on. It turns out to not be true. In fact, their crime rates are about the same as white Americans'. And then we look at the legal immigrants. They tend to be disproportionately productive members of society. There may be some exceptions, but there wouldn't be any doctors in the smaller towns, or there wouldn't be enough anyway, if you, for example, banned Muslim immigrants. If you're in a place like the rural Wisconsin town where I live, you're likely to run into a Muslim doctor somewhere. So these are the kinds of arguments you hear that it's a rational policy to to keep immigration going. And then with the illegals, there's the issue of who's going to pick the crops if they don’t, because the the natives aren't interested. So how do you answer those arguments?

Michelle Malkin: Well, I just want to talk about legal immigration first.  I've encountered this response a lot when I critique legal immigration policy. I'm not saying that you say this, but it comes off up often enough that I like to sort of address that head on, which is, well, your parents came here post-1965. My father and mother came in 1970. My dad was a neonatologist and my mom was a public school teacher. They came here from the Philippines and built the American dream and enjoyed it, and were honored to enjoy all the privileges of becoming American citizens, and wanted to pass that on to their children. And that animates so much of the work I've done. Three of my books are dedicated to immigration enforcement and reform.

But just because I benefited from stupid policies doesn't mean that I should then continue to advocate for them for time immemorial. It doesn't make me a hypocrite. I think it actually makes me a good American to examine a policy and conclude after looking at all of the data and evidence that we shouldn't continue it, even if I benefited from it for myself and others in my family might have done so as well. The idea that there's no harm in bringing large or unlimited numbers of young foreigners from other countries because they're the best and brightest and they have something to give this country that doesn't already exist here is just not true. And I would recommend that, Ron, maybe I should send him Sold Out, the book I wrote about all of the legal immigration programs that were harming the best and brightest American workers.

Maybe I should send him a copy of that. One statistic that sticks out of it was looking at U.S. Census Bureau data and it showed that 74 percent of the people in America who had bachelor's degrees in all the STEM fields, which of course all of the kids are always encouraged to pursue in order to get good jobs and good lives, were not employed in STEM occupations. And it is all tied to replacement of those workers as they become liabilities financially for the big business corporations who could replace them with much cheaper foreign labor from China and India. And I think that there are a lot of people on the other side of the aisle who were also very concerned about this until it was sort of politically inconvenient to find themselves on the same side as people that they disagreed with on other issues.

One of the heroes in trying to limit the damage of H-1B was Bernie Sanders. And then he stopped talking about it once Trump came to power. And that's a shame, because not a lot of liberals in corporate media seem to care about the plight of the Disney workers or the Northeast utility workers or the Edison workers or the Harley Davidson workers. Because it's not just tech jobs, it's I.T. workers in pretty much every industry who were facing the prospect of not getting their severance pay unless they trained the foreign H1-B workers who were about to take away their livelihoods. After investing all of this time and energy in education and obtaining the degrees that were supposed to help secure the American dream for them, right?

Kevin Barrett: That's a great point. And actually, I think Ron Unz is on your side on that. I think where he departed from at least some of the conventional anti-immigration wisdom was in using facts, figures and statistics to show that in fact, the Hispanic demographic and immigrant demographic in general and specifically the illegal immigrant demographic did not add to American crime rates at all, really. But I think he agrees with you on the economic side of it, as as I do actually. And I think we could even add that it's good for the countries where these immigrants are coming from to not allow them to come here, because the brain drain is one of the biggest problems these countries face.

Michelle Malkin: Yes, it really would be the most compassionate means of bootstrapping all of these Third World countries instead of sending them billions of dollars in foreign aid. When you look at countries like India or the Philippines—and it always puzzled me when I've been back to the Philippines, three or four times now, all of the incredible natural resources they have, and a really hard-working population, a majority of them Catholic, English speaking, high levels of education. And it's a basket case.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah, I've had some personal experiences along those lines with Morocco. My wife is Moroccan, and she came to the U.S. after placing at the very top of a national English language exam, leading her to be recruited by the Disney Corporation to ostensibly come and further her education while working at the Cultural Center in the Epcot Pavilion in Orlando, Florida. So she was brought over here and it turned out then when I went back to Morocco with her after we were married with a child on the Fulbright program, the Fulbright Program head at the U.S. Embassy in Rabat, Morocco, who I later learned was allegedly also the CIA station chief though I didn't know that at the time, was the guy who had essentially stamped her whatever it was or recruited her and sent her to the United States. And he was actually under pressure, apparently from the Moroccan side, to try to avoid having the Moroccans who were sent over on this kind of program to marry somebody like my wife did in the United States and stay in the U.S., because the brain drain issue is a huge problem for Morocco. And so he kind of gave us a bit of a look when he first saw us when we came back there for the Fulbright program. "Don't I know you? Oh, yes, you know you were one of those runaways who got me in trouble..."

So, Michelle, it's interesting that actually Bernie Sanders and me and Ron Unz and probably a lot of other people who think about it actually kind of tend to agree with this, that American workers are getting royally screwed over by this policy of replacing them for the benefit of big corporations. And I wonder if this is ever going to catch on among the Bernie Sanders demographic, or if being skunked by Trump has permanently put the left in bed with the corporate exploiters?

Michelle Malkin: Well, that's what it seems like, because Bernie was rather chastened and AWOL on the issue. And I understand their distrust, certainly. But it would be nice if there could be some reaching out across the aisle.

Kevin Barrett: Your work on the immigration issue sounds pretty reasonable, rational and certainly far from anything that would be called hate. And yet that hate moniker is what was used to ban you from Airbn and ban your husband, who has nothing to do with this, from Airbnb. This term "hate" has been used to shut down a lot of speech, along with COVID stuff and questioning any election results. We can never admit that any American presidential election could possibly not be 100 percent honest or we will be deplatformed. So what are your thoughts about how we deal with the notion of hate as a category that allows reasonable discussions to be shut down?

Michelle Malkin: Well, the Southern Poverty Law Center and all of its satellite minions, all of these arbiters of what is left, what is right, what is far right, what's unacceptable, what constitutes incitement to violence... Essentially, the existence of the America First movement is an incitement to violence to these people. And there was some glimmer of hope when insiders at SPLC were blowing the whistle on everything from financial shenanigans within—it's liberals who call them the poverty palace, that wasn't a label that came from the right—to allegations of racial discrimination within its headquarters. I believe there were allegations of sexual harassment as well. And so there was an outside auditor that was called in, some former Obama official, and they laid low for awhile. But it doesn't really matter because the blueprint of organizing boycotts and doing everything possible to deperson and deplatform anyone who threatens authority and threatens narratives is already well-ensconced in the media-political-entertainment complex. They all work together. And I referenced Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire and the liberal Daily Beast as having colluded on these types of things. Most mainstream newspapers will still just regurgitate slime from SPLC. And that was on display on the front page of the Idaho Statesman, which went after the lieutenant governor who gladly accepted my endorsement for her gubernatorial campaign.

I can't remember the exact wording of the headline, but essentially "far right commenter with white supremacy ties endorses lieutenant governor." And there's just a lot of regurgitation of either the SPLC, or another one of these groups at Georgetown University—it's just this big echo chamber. But just to sort of end on a white pill, there's always overreaching, and all of these phrases that are hurled around incessantly have become completely meaningless and a joke. And I think most mainstream people who pay even an iota of attention are just numb to it. Now, OK, these people still hold sway with Airbnb and most newsrooms. But you know, I live in Colorado. I've lived here 14 years in my daily life. It's not something that has an impact on me much, to the chagrin of these types of people. And if I'm not able to get on a plane next week, I won't mourn all that much because being on a plane is rather miserable these days.

Kevin Barrett: That's for sure. Well, I wonder if the establishment has maybe bitten off a little more than it can chew with this collapsing COVID narrative. I was talking in the first hour with James Howard Kunstler, a terrific writer who has predicted that this crumbling of the establishment COVID narrative—they're backtracking very rapidly, just in this past week we've seen them admitting all sorts of things, and country after country is lifting restrictions and saying we're all going to just have to live with COVID, and it turns out that the COVID dissidents were right about a bunch of these things. (Kunstler predicts that) when people wake up and realize how their businesses were destroyed and their lives were wiped out and their kids were harmed psychologically through all of these insane COVID policies, it is going to contribute to a kind of populist disgust with the same powers that be that are pulling off the kind of immigration policies that you don't like, and we could see a coalescing of popular anger. Jim Kunstler is worried it could get out of control and cause damage to the country. But it also probably has a positive side. Do you see that happening in the coming months or years?

Michelle Malkin: Well, I want to. I would love to have a deeper conversation about vaccines because it's been one of my other core issues since 2004. My son was born in November 2003. In 2004 I wrote a syndicated column that was widely published about this theme. My family was banished from our pediatric practice, we were completely ostracized and shunned, merely for requesting that we delay administration of the Hep B vaccine when he was a newborn. And then when he came in for his first baby visit, unlike with my first born child, my daughter, we had a little bit more time to think before they started jabbing him with an untold numbers of jabs, which we had not researched and had no clue what was in them or what they were supposed to do. So we were sort of original—I mean, talk about canaries in the countercultural coal mine, we were canceled from our pediatrician simply for asking to delay that vaccine.

And then when...I can't remember which presidential campaign it was, maybe it was 2008 or 2012, whenever Rick Perry was an early and then failed GOP contender, I brought up the fact that his entire staff, which had left the governor's mansion, cashed in and all become Merck lobbyists, succeeded in getting him to issue an executive order mandating that no middle school Texan child would be allowed to have access to education unless they got the Gardasil vaccine, which had been completely in its experimental phases and which is purportedly intended to prevent cervical cancer. He was mandating it for not only girls, but boys. And it wasn't until there was a grassroots parental revolt of vaccine hesitant and vaccine resistant parents that he rescinded that order in 2019 before anybody knew what COVID or Wuhan was.

I wrote a column warning about how the W.H.O., along with Big Pharma, was stamping out vaccine hesitancy on Facebook and Twitter, and what that meant in the future for any dissidence when it came to questioning Big Pharma or talking publicly about children who had been vaccine injured. Well, now more people know all about that stuff, and all I have to say Kevin is better late than never.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah, it's been too late for a lot of people. And who knows where this is all going to go with with the COVID stuff? But there is that official narrative on everything from vaccines and masking and distancing and so on to the need for all the lockdowns that destroyed the economy. And the complete failure of those policies is very likely to bolster a kind of populist revolt against these managerial types who have made such a screw up of so many of these things. Well, you know, Michelle, I'd love to talk to you longer about other issues. We are getting pretty close to the end of the show, though, so maybe you could quickly send people to your column and mention your latest book. What is the latest book you published by the way?

Michelle Malkin: It was 2019. Open Borders Inc..  And people can find me at MichelleMalkin.com. And I'm still on the normal Big Tech channels, although greatly suppressed. And if people want to communicate with me, my email is Michelle Malkin investigates at Proton Mail, and I am also active on Telegram.

Kevin Barrett: Fantastic. Well, thank you so much, Michelle, and I do really appreciate your apology about the post-9/11 war on terror syndrome that afflicted so many people. And I wonder if I'll ever get that kind of apology from Sean Hannity or Bill O'Reilly, who are the people who yelled at me on their shows at that time?

Michelle Malkin: Don't hold your breath. You know, once I reached middle age, I reexamined a lot of things, and one of the things I try to do in my daily life is to make things right and also to have a lot of gratitude. And people who listen to my speech or watch it from my American Renaissance conference will notice that paying a lot of tribute to many people who came before me in realizing the things that I realize now and paid much higher prices.

Kevin Barrett: Hear hear. Amen to all of that, and God bless you. Keep doing the terrific work and continue, you know, to learn. We all have to keep learning throughout life and figure out what's really going on in this world of deception. So thank you so much. Michelle Malkin, keep it up and I hope to talk again sometime.

Michelle Malkin: Thanks for the chat.

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