Honestly, I didn’t read that far. I was on the way out the door to the gym when I read it and went off half-cocked. My bad. But the point still stands. Michelle Malkin was already pretty far to the right well before 9–11 even if she wasn’t so rabidly nativist. Working for the Seattle Times and the LA Daily News probably tempered that a bit.

A quick search in Newsbank turns up columns that could be fairly described as demonizing the poor. In an August 26, 1997 anti-corporate welfare piece titled “We have ourselves to blame for beggars in 3-piece suits” she uses the homeless as an analogy, drawing parallels between the beggars on the corner “asking for handouts in between free meals” and those lobbying for subsidies.

“Collectively, the nation’s wretched lot of spongers, leeches and scam artists undermine the battered pillars of a free society: honesty, responsibility and hard work.” You can say she’s being figurative or whatever, but she’s basically using “homeless” as a stand-in for “parasite.”

This is probably the most egregious example, but there’s an undercurrent of contempt for the poor in her writing. In terms of immigration, she basically had a milder version of her current position, i.e. that there are “good immigrants,” like say Filipino soldiers who fought in WWII and there are “bad immigrants” who defraud the welfare system

She was also habitually using anti-semitic dogwhistles like “liberal media elites” before it was cool.