On this episode of the podcast, I sit down with Michelle Malkin to discuss her life and career as a journalist, author, and public speaker. Michelle talks about her upbringing in a tough neighborhood in the late 60s and early 70s in the shadow of Confederate flags and Confederate flags, and how she came to America as an immigrant from the Philippines.
Transcript
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00:00:10.000Michelle, thank you for coming on the show.
00:00:44.000And I think of late, over the last several years that I've had an opportunity to use my platform to delve into the stories of people who have been wronged by the government, by the media, that I've been forging common ground with people I never thought I'd work with.
00:01:08.000So, I don't know, you could do the pop psychology thing on me.
00:01:17.000I think I've occupied a unique position in my professional life, and that a lot of it can be explained by my upbringing, by my experiences.
00:01:27.000And I think a lot of people who despise and hate and mock what I do would be perhaps enlightened to know about where I came from and what drives me.
00:01:55.000And I do, of course, often mention that they came here legally because that is very important to the fabric of my being and the principles which I have espoused in my work for the last 25 years, whether it was my newspaper columns or my books that I've written or the brief fleeting appearances that I make where I try to make some kind of impact rather than just warm a seat and regurgitate talking points on cable TV.
00:02:25.000And having grown up in rural South Jersey, in a small town, Ebseekin, New Jersey, in the shadow of a lot of the casinos, many of them built by Donald Trump.
00:02:39.000And that juxtaposition is interesting because you've got the gritty urban environment of and supposed redevelopment of Atlantic City.
00:02:48.000And in the shadow of it, and I said rural, and I mean rural, there were Confederate flags hung around Absekin because people really did feel that they were more part of the South.
00:03:01.000Yeah, you see that in upstate New York, too.
00:03:37.000And internalizing that very early on and detesting identity politics before I even knew the phrase.
00:03:46.000That's an interesting reaction because a lot of people would go the other way and be a victim.
00:03:51.000And so this I attribute to my tiger mom, who I would say is worse than a tiger mom, better than a tiger mom, a mountain lion mom, who immediately ingrained in both of her children the hostility towards a victimhood mentality.
00:05:05.000Well, you know, I think maybe that that exists, but it's the silent majority.
00:05:09.000And it's really the elevation of this creature, this tool of the progressive left, of the immigrate dreamer, who certainly doesn't represent the masses of people who recede into the background on purpose by the media, that will not reflect their voices.
00:05:36.000So that was a huge part of rejecting identity politics, but then also understanding the need to speak out.
00:05:51.000And then, of course, I had my entire Oberlin college experience.
00:06:21.000But I felt in a way that I had to make a choice in college because I had a lot of condescending, especially liberal white women and of course the militant students of color.
00:06:36.000Well at Oberlin you also had the staff oppressing the left.
00:06:41.000And I've told the story many times to young college audiences of how I was ignited by Dinesh D'Souza, who we had invited to come to campus.
00:06:52.000My husband and I ran a student monthly publication, conservative publication.
00:06:59.000He had just written Illiberal Education, and he came to speak at this beautiful chapel at the Oberlin College campus, Finney Chapel.
00:07:06.000And it was administrators and faculty who stood up, turned their backs, and chanted, Dinesh Dinesh, Dinesh DeSouza.
00:07:17.000So that's always been a theme of my work.
00:07:20.000But in terms of justice, what I've been doing lately is highlighting the cases of individuals who were wrongly accused and wrongly convicted of the worst kind of heinous crimes.
00:07:36.000And my problem with so much of the progressive left in the media is that some individuals who have been wrongfully convicted are more equal than others.
00:07:49.000Not because people actually care consistently about justice, but because these are tools for some people in the media and they serve a purpose, a political and ideological purpose.
00:07:59.000There's a lot of social status in freeing, say, the Central Park five.
00:08:07.000I haven't looked at the specifics of the case, but what my new reaction is to any of these cases that come forward is I need to know all the facts before I decide.
00:08:19.000And I don't think that there's enough intellectual humility, certainly on cable TV, where you have to have insta opinion.
00:08:28.000And having taken the time to look into individual cases and understand how much effort is needed to get to the bottom of the truth, I've rethought a lot of things.
00:08:39.000You know, one of the most important epiphanies that I've had over the last two years is rethinking my position on the death penalty and feeling shame about having spoken up about cases that I knew very little about.
00:08:54.000Well, there's a real dehumanization of prisoners.
00:08:58.000And I think with freeing wrongfully convicted, there's a hierarchy there where it's cool to have black guys and stuff.
00:09:06.000But a cop convicted of rape, that doesn't have the same kind of excitement for some reason.
00:09:16.000And that was my reaction when Daniel Holtclaw, the former Oklahoma City police officer who we spotlighted in the debut for Michelle Malkin Investigates two years ago in December 2016, that's the reaction I had when I saw him as the verdict was announced and he broke out into tears.
00:09:36.000And I just knee-jerk, felt the same way that everybody did who was flooding Twitter with their glee about the case.
00:09:47.000And it was celebrities who knew nothing, nothing, not a single fact.
00:09:52.000If you asked them, tell me one fact about the case, would just sit there silently.
00:10:16.000And you know, just to go back a little bit, and I know we're zigzagging back and forth here.
00:10:20.000I should have had you had Drama mean before we started.
00:10:24.000But I've had a very interesting journalism career.
00:10:28.000And there will be a lot of people on the left that will snicker at my calling myself a journalist when none of them, you look at the leading lights on cable TV on the left.
00:10:48.000And whereas I can have, have, have worked for two major metropolitan newspapers, have sustained a syndicated newspaper column for 24 years, started up my own companies, you the same, who will never be considered journalists.
00:11:05.000And yes, you have to put all 20 O's and O's in it.
00:11:09.000But along my journey, especially the experiences that I had doing the shoe leather work on investigative stories in local communities, this is my epiphany.
00:11:21.000This is what has led me to this moment of this weekend debuting and screening this episode, Railroaded, Surviving Wrongful Convictions, in front of the Manhattan Film Festival, looking at these stories and questioning, always questioning, isn't it the left who always says, question authority, right?
00:11:41.000They put it on a bumper sticker and they're so proud of themselves.
00:11:45.000And yet, at the newspapers that I worked for, so many of the reporters and editors were in bed proudly with the authority that they were supposed to be questioning.
00:11:56.000And it had nothing to do with whether they had a D or an R by their name.
00:12:01.000And it wasn't just on these justice issues, it was on corporate welfare issues.
00:12:06.000Wait a minute, you're always slamming Republicans for doing the bidding of the suits.
00:12:12.000And yet you're the ones that are collaborating because it's in your interest for advertising dollars from all of the department stores and certainly with the sports palaces, that they used hardworking people's taxpayers' dollars to subsidize those massive stadiums.
00:12:30.000And every year the sports teams would come and demand new stadiums every 10 years.
00:12:38.000And there was your editorial page crusading for stealing people's money and redistributing it to the crony fat cats that you say only Republicans serve.
00:12:49.000So many of them, I think they saw, this is a crazy theory, but I think they saw the Dustin Hoffman Robert Redford movie about Watergate.
00:12:58.000So now being a journalist is a fashion to them, and they want to blog at Huff Poe and Slate and Salon and Village Voice.
00:13:07.000They don't care about the truth and they don't do the work, they just follow the trends.
00:13:11.000And you realize if you're to do the nitty-gritty of journalism, it is co cold calling.
00:13:17.000It is like there in Bill McGowan's book, Coloring the News, he talks about third trimester abortions and how there was only it happens very, very rarely.
00:13:27.000And some woman just sat on the phone calling all the clinics in America, thousands, not thousands, hundreds of clinics, and she got a crazy number of like it happens once a month.
00:13:40.000And then she realized there's thousands and thousands of third trimester abortions going on.
00:13:45.000And they went back to the doctor that said it's rare, and he said, I just thought it was for the greater good that I say that.
00:13:51.000And we're seeing less and less of that these days.
00:13:54.000And it's this culture that we have now of witch hunts.
00:14:01.000So when I was working at the Seattle Times in the mid to late 1990s, there was a rash of these witch hunt prosecutions.
00:14:11.000There was hysteria over alleged abuse of children at daycare centers.
00:14:16.000Do you remember the McMartin daycare center case?
00:14:20.000That was in California, and it has set off this wave of hysteria.
00:14:24.000And so a lot of these daycare workers came from white working class backgrounds or had limited mental capacity.
00:14:33.000And they were manipulated and exploited by rogue police detectives who worked in cahoots with prosecutors who wanted to make a name for themselves.
00:14:44.000So in the mid-1990s, one of these supposed sex rings was identified in Wenatchee, Washington, so in the state of Washington in eastern Washington.
00:14:58.000The conflicts of interest would have been clear to anyone whose eyes were opened because the lead detective who was accusing what he called a cult of Christians, there was a daycare center that was led by a pastor, Pastor Roby Roberson,
00:15:15.000what happened was the detective took his own stepdaughter, and it was modern-day Salem, Massachusetts, and he took her on a ride around town, and she would just point to which houses were responsible for alleged abuse.
00:15:32.000And the entire phenomenon of implanted memories came out.
00:15:37.000There was a fantastic psychologist who spoke up against what was happening.
00:15:45.000She wrote a book about this and exposed it.
00:15:48.000But not until after many innocent people had been thrown behind bars, their lives and reputations destroyed.
00:15:55.000What could be, there are few things that could be worse than being accused of being part of a sex ring molesting child, children in a disease.
00:17:29.000Because I saw there was crazy conflicting stories about descriptions.
00:17:34.000They were saying he was small and he's like six foot two or something.
00:17:38.000Yes, people can watch the two-part series.
00:17:41.000We made it available for free on CRTV.
00:17:44.000And it's also on the CR-TV and Michelle Malkin YouTube channels.
00:17:48.000So you can get a taste of not just the conflicting stories, but the manner in which two police detectives massaged the stories of accusers who came forward.
00:18:03.000It's almost unfathomable to get your arms around how 13 women, prompted initially by one woman who made her story public, shopped it around after she had been stopped by Daniel in June 2014, late at the end of his shift.
00:19:38.000And in fact, we were at the prison when there was a woman and a child who had just finished up a visit, and it turned out that she had tried to smuggle drugs into the prison.
00:19:49.000And so, anyway, you can see where he shines the light to make sure that nothing falls onto the ground, but you can't see that any kind of illicit activity happened.
00:19:58.000And this woman claimed that Daniel demanded that she give him a 10-second blowjob.
00:20:39.000And in fact, because of the interrogation video that he sat through, of his interrogation that he sat through with the detectives, they show him having to take his shirt off.
00:21:41.000So this was a, I think the stop was a total of about 15 minutes.
00:21:46.000But his actual time that he would have been able to spend with this woman, he would not have been able to get all of that stuff off.
00:21:54.000I don't need to trivialize it with humor, but even if they were two people madly in love, and she had suggested that, he'd say, leave me tonight at the hotel.
00:22:04.000I love you too, honey, but we don't have time.
00:22:07.000Yes, I mean, all of it is so absurd, but this first stop, of course, is what set the table for everything that came after.
00:22:17.000Because a lead detective, a woman who clearly had an agenda, Kim Davis, and we show the extended interview that I had with him.
00:22:27.000By the way, the last interview that they have ever granted to a member of the media because it was a disaster for them.
00:22:35.000Because I simply asked innocent questions.
00:22:37.000And at that point, I had done as much homework as I could to prepare, but I did not know everything.
00:22:42.000But I was not supposed to ask questions.
00:22:46.000Questions like, well, why didn't you interview the accuser?
00:22:51.000Why didn't you record the interview of the accuser at the hospital?
00:22:56.000It's supposed to be standard practice.
00:22:59.000And in fact, they recorded selectively the interviews with other accusers after they had properly massaged the stories to match up with the so-called evidence that they had about where Daniel was and when.
00:23:15.000A lot of these accusers came forward, manufactured stories, came up with specific locations where Daniel had never been.
00:23:25.000So what happened was these stories would morph over time until finally they matched the prefabricated evidence against him.
00:23:35.000And so the initial accuser was not recorded by either audio or video.
00:23:41.000And we have around tape and we show this.
00:23:42.000And when I have done screenings across the country, people audibly gasp when Kim Davis, the detective, says, well, I only use a recorder when we are dealing with cases involving a police officer.
00:24:21.000There was a perfect storm that led to Daniel's conviction.
00:24:24.000And remembering that we had under the last years of the Obama administration this violent anti-cop movement, not just stoked by Black Lives Matters, but a lot of their sort of satellite groups across the country.
00:25:58.000Or robbing a drug Dealer or turf fights over drugs, drugs, drugs.
00:26:03.000He said, I looked around me in prison.
00:26:06.000There's a guy talking that was an excon and he had robbed a drug dealer.
00:26:09.000And he goes, everyone I looked at was there for some sort of drug-related thing.
00:26:14.000And it scared me because you think, is this entire prison industry just built on the drug war or, you know, someone being thrown in jail because it's culturally convenient?
00:27:21.000And he had enlisted a professor and doctor at the University of Washington who was trying to help him to be able to have medical marijuana.
00:27:42.000And he just talked about the waste of billions of dollars on the futile war on drugs and how people who considered them constitutional conservatives should see this in the same light that they saw the Second Amendment as a right that should be protected and exercised to choose the form of treatment that works best for you.
00:28:08.000Anyway, on a related matter, I became very interested in civil asset forfeiture and the abuse of drug abatement laws to shut down law-abiding businesses in the eastern part of Seattle, which was being gentrified by big money developers in cahoots with the district attorney and the police department.
00:28:28.000And I did an investigative series for my op-ed column.
00:28:31.000This was not on the news pages of the Seattle Times, but yes, even op-ed columnists can commit journalism.
00:28:39.000And I crusaded on the behalf of a soul food restaurant, a couple that owned a soul food restaurant called Oscars.
00:28:47.000And what happened was the police department was sending in paid undercover informants who would just go secretly smoke crack in the bathroom and then would come out and tell the police department, oh, hey, I just smoked crack in the bathroom.
00:29:03.000And then they would punish and ticket Oscar McCoy and his wife Barbara for not stopping illicit drug use in the bathroom.
00:29:11.000They used this because the McCoy's would not sell their restaurant to them at the low bid price that the developers wanted from them.
00:29:21.000So they were trying to criminalize their conduct as business owners in the district.
00:29:26.000And they weren't the only ones that this was happening to.
00:29:30.000So I wrote about their case, and they had a young crusading ACLU lawyer in Seattle, David Oddsgood, and he challenged the constitutionality of the law and went all the way to the state Supreme Court and they repealed the law as unconstitutional, as an unconstitutional taking.
00:29:50.000And so now fast forward, just to make it relevant.
00:29:55.000I am a big cheerleader of Jeff Sessions' enforcement of immigration laws.
00:30:03.000But on all things related to whether it's medical marijuana or the empowerment of these overzealous prosecutors to collect civil asset forfeiture, I think it's horrific.
00:30:19.000You know, we talk about, everyone talks about the deep state, right?
00:30:25.000Well, I'm glad that we brought it all together here because what I appreciate so much about your work is people using prisons as weapons.
00:30:34.000And we initially made them from the Magna Carta to get murderers, rapists, and pedophiles off the street and ideally rehabilitated, but at least protect the citizens.
00:30:44.000And now we're seeing it as a tool that people use.
00:30:47.000You can lie about rape, get revenge on a cop, you can just sweep up.
00:33:20.000And I think maybe it's the catalyst of having immediate social media response to it so we can see how crazy the left is responding to it, which is edifying.
00:33:34.000Like I look at the cases that I've highlighted of people who wouldn't have gotten the time of day if not for CRTV and the ability to work outside of these traditional media.
00:33:49.000And there's so much laziness and complacency and fear and fecklessness.
00:34:00.000I mean, I wake up every day and it's not just Daniel's case that I worry about.
00:34:05.000In the last several media appearances that I have done, I've gotten three dozen emails now from people begging me to look into their cases.
00:34:15.000And I don't have the time and it's almost a guilt of knowing that I see and I can't help everybody.
00:34:25.000And I want to go get a law degree so I can work a law firm so I can do more.
00:34:31.000And I've done everything in my power, blessed as I have been after 25 years, to be able to pull strings or make connections or steer people in the right direction or even just to mention, even if I can just do a tweet or a retweet about somebody else's case, even if I can't plunge into it for the next six months.
00:34:54.000And there's this, you know, when we did the Enid screening in Enid, Oklahoma, of this railroad roaded episode that we're screening at the Manhattan Film Festival, I likened it to going to an eye doctor.
00:35:07.000You know that machine that they put in front of you, it's called a faux ropter, right?
00:35:11.000And they, and I always dreaded this test because I was like, am I doing the right answer?
00:35:17.000Because they say, is this better or worse?
00:35:19.000And it looks blurry and you're like looking and you're trying to see something.
00:35:23.000Is it better or worse or is it the same?
00:35:25.000And sometimes I feel like I'm guessing.
00:35:27.000But then there's a moment where both eyes align and you can see clearly.
00:35:32.000And I always remember that phrase, is it better or worse?
00:35:35.000Because I feel that way when you do finally come to an epiphany and learn the truth about a particular case that you thought you had the right answer to or that you thought you knew the truth.
00:36:12.000Like, I honestly believe we don't see what's going on in South Africa on TV because it's too horrific and people are eating dinner and they just cannot handle the carnage.
00:36:22.000Maybe our brains just shut down and we go, you know what, that Nikula Basley guy, he's probably just bad.
00:36:46.000And that's why we dehumanize prisoners, because the thought of millions of men in cages, like a giant farm, like a mass slaughterhouse, just destroys us.
00:37:17.000Because you know who it doesn't include?
00:37:19.000All of the people who were executed who were innocent.
00:37:23.000And so, and I have been focusing particularly on Oklahoma because I believe that there is something uniquely wrong with Oklahoma.
00:37:32.000Remember that Thomas Frank book from several years ago?
00:37:34.000It was called What's the Matter with Kansas?
00:37:36.000I think, and I'm not saying this, please publishers do not call me, but What's the Matter with Oklahoma?
00:37:42.000Okay, they're going to be reinstituting, there was a moratorium on the death penalty because one of these gruesome death penalty botched events happened where they got the combination of the injection drugs wrong.
00:38:00.000And the man suffered for hours before they finally got it right.
00:38:07.000Well, they're resuming the executions in 2019.
00:38:10.000And this is at a time when I know that every institution in that state has been corrupted by this zeal to just put people behind bars, put notches on a belt.
00:38:25.000And it is unclear to me how many people have been executed who were innocent, in large part because of collusion between rogue forensic chemists and DAs who are trying to get re-elected.
00:39:33.000So two of the exoneres that I highlight in Railroaded are law enforcement officers, one Ray Spencer in Washington State, whose ex-wife was having an affair with the internal affairs detective who launched this case against Ray Spencer.
00:39:51.000The ex-wife claimed that Ray had molested his own children.
00:39:56.000They were both very young, and very much like the Wenatchee case that I told you about and the McMartin case, these kids had memories falsely implanted in them.
00:40:44.000And he was pardoned by the then governor of Washington State, Gary Locke.
00:40:49.000He sued a conspiracy civil rights lawsuit, won a $9 million jury settlement that was then blocked by a corrupt local judge.
00:41:03.000He had to go to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to get that jury settlement reinstated.
00:41:10.000His lawyer, Kathleen Zellner, is the most winningest exoneration lawyer in the country.
00:41:17.000Also now represents Daniel Holzclaw as he is fighting civil suits by all of these lying accusers who are trying to collect.
00:41:24.000They're represented by Benjamin Crump, the lawyer who represented Trayvon Martin's family and Michael Brown's family, is trying to fashion himself as the Al Sharpton of 2018.
00:41:38.000And it shows you that, and by the way, that jury resettlement, even though it was restored by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, by the time it went to arbitration for the county to pay up, was slashed to a fraction of what had been originally awarded by the jury.
00:42:33.000But if you're just mad at him because you guys are breaking up or something, you've got to understand that not only will he go to prison, but you will be punished.
00:42:41.000If we find out you're lying, that's a crime.
00:42:44.000So what you're doing here has serious consequences.
00:43:05.000Now, I'm not saying that 90% of rapes are lies by any means.
00:43:09.000I'm just telling you an anecdotal story from a cop, but it scares me when I think about it.
00:43:13.000So I can offer some more background on that as well.
00:43:17.000Brent Turvey is a leading forensic scientist, and he is one of six scientists that signed a report decimating the forensic evidence and the way that the police conducted the investigation of Daniel Holzklaw.
00:43:32.000He's written numerous textbooks that are considered the gold standard on many investigative issues.
00:43:38.000And one of his most recent books, in fact, is the most recent book, I have a copy of it that I want to give to you, is called False Allegations.
00:43:45.000And he actually looked at the statistics that have been used by feminist advocates.
00:44:20.000Anyway, and so they had pulled it out of their asses, basically, or whatever, other buddy part, and cited bogusly some random judge in a New York district here, state judge, who had said something at a, it was at a convention, and he was just sort of surmising.
00:44:51.000There was no data collected, and then it just became ingrained the same way that wage gap statistics are ingrained.
00:44:59.000And they just kept repeating it, repeating it, and repeating it.
00:45:02.000Well, Rem Turvey actually has a chapter in his book, and he's published scholarly articles about this as well, in peer-reviewed journals, on what data does exist.
00:47:26.000I wouldn't have imagined two years ago when we debuted this show that there would be people across the political spectrum who would be willing to put their necks out and their reputations on the line to speak about his innocence.
00:47:40.000And that includes fellow law enforcement officers, retired, active duty, who are volunteering for his case.
00:47:48.000It includes eminent people in the legal community like Kathleen Zellner, who are, she's representing him on the civil side.
00:47:58.000People from across the aisle, like I said, there's an Innocence Project veteran, Craig Cooley, who is now also helping out on potential post-processing.
00:48:13.000You know, the arc bends, and that's where we are at this singular point.
00:48:18.000And I think that it has reached this tipping point.
00:48:21.000And the problem is that he's behind bars.
00:48:25.000And this is just, I am very privileged and have the opportunity to be able to visit him on a regular basis in an undisclosed location for his protection.
00:49:18.000Everyone wants innocent people exonerated, but you found a hole where some were more There was a hole with right-wing people that were wrongly, or seemingly right-wing people that were wrongly accused.
00:49:35.000But I really hope people see you doing this and get inspired to do it themselves.
00:50:07.000I mean, not you being a lawyer, but this being a trend, because if there's one thing that should bond us all right and left, it's that we don't like the idea of people in cages.
00:50:53.000I don't think there's any better way to inculcate this value of justice, which is where we started in this conversation, than to show my children that the only shame there is in knowing the truth and not doing a damn thing about it.
00:51:09.000I want my children to be the kind who will be the whistleblower, the people who go against the grain, the people who are mavericks.
00:51:16.000And what I have always detested most, and this is a completely separate but related area, is education policy, is that you have government schools that preen and preach about how they alone know best how to teach critical thinking skills.
00:51:34.000This is the educraties, and it wasn't just Common Core where this idea was born that we must trust these licensed, professional, credentialed educators to teach critical thinking skills.
00:51:50.000Because those laboratories of the government schools have been at the heart of why we are so screwed with witch hunts and social justice mobs.
00:51:59.000Because they are Factories for brainwashing and the most stultifying orthodox thinking and mediocrity.
00:52:47.000His son got called into the principal's office because Ken Bone himself published a photo on Twitter of his son at the gun range with Ken Bone standing behind him in his red sweater.
00:53:02.000Because there's something menacing and wrong with that.
00:53:09.000It seems like there's more now of a groundswell of people.
00:53:12.000I mean, Ken Bone, I mean, he was chumming it up with liberal journalists.
00:53:17.000Yeah, the school moms of the left have made themselves so unappealing with all their rules and all their scolding that they've accidentally red-pilled an entire generation.
00:53:26.000And there's a real groundswell where they don't watch MSM, they don't watch TV even, and they're getting all their information from the people.
00:53:35.000It's almost like the beginning of the American Revolution all over again.
00:53:39.000And again, it is so much easier to pick the path of not knowing or the path of not knowing and not doing anything about it.
00:53:49.000And I try to teach my children by example every day that life is worth living and these battles are worth engaging.
00:54:01.000And I know that there are a lot of people who are my followers and readers over the last quarter of century that have given up, that have written it off.
00:54:09.000I mean, they're ready to move to Japan or New Zealand.
00:54:13.000And I think that the American experiment is, and again, because of our shared immigrant experience, we know this, I'm not ready to give up.
00:54:23.000I mean, I will go down till the last day.
00:54:27.000You're more active now than you've ever been.