The Right-Wing Terror-Sphere

By Evan Derkacz, AlterNet. Posted April 24, 2006.

Fox commentator and popular right-wing blogger Michelle Malkin "has crossed a line." The "line" journalist Don Surber refers to is Malkin's having pulled the names and contact information of three UC Santa Cruz students from a press release and published them on her blog, while calling the protesters "unhinged" and bleating that "[t]his used to be called sedition."

Surber's comments are notable because he's an avowed conservative editorial writer for the Charleston Daily Mail.

"She knows better," Surber continues, referring to the fact that Malkin is a syndicated columnist and pens the second-most-linked-to right-wing blog in the nation. "Only a mean person would be so crass as to put that information in mass circulation."

This latest Malkin-related controversy began last week, when UC Santa Cruz's Student's Against War organized a peaceful protest against the presence of military recruiters at the campus' annual career fair. Blogger Ezra Klein explains with a flourish:

Right now, the dark-haired, lashy Ann Coulter understudy is happily wrapped in one of her typical controversies: A crew of students at UC Santa Cruz, my alma mater, protested some military recruiters, and Malkin got hold of a press release with their personal contact information -- a poorly conceived inclusion on the students' part, but then these are undergraduates, not trained media flacks. Rather than calling and speaking to them herself, which is what members of the press are supposed to use such releases for, Malkin published their personal information on her website, prompting her hordes of orcish mouth-breathers to brandish their pitchforks and inundate the unsuspecting students with death threats (some of which you can read here). When the students frantically called on Malkin to remove their numbers, she posted their contact information again.

Blogger Jon Swift, in a tongue-in-cheek letter to Malkin, put it best: "If [the students] didn't want to broadcast their private numbers to the whole world, they shouldn't have sent letters addressed to members of the press, which as anyone knows, will print just about anything except the names of the people who leaked Valerie Plame's identity."

The hate and vitriol unleashed on the students by Malkin's readers justifiably earned her Keith Olbermann's World's Worst Person Award. Here's just one creepy example of the harsh rhetoric the students were subject to:

"My sincere hope is that a couple hundred of the local patriots take a day off work for your next anarchist event, and come down with some axe handles and bust your fucking heads."

In an update to her original post, and after receiving criticism from across the blogs for the hate that followed, Malkin added the disclaimer: "I do not condone death threats or foul language." Following that disclaimer (and the republication of the students' information), Malkin's updated contact information was posted on a small political website out of New Jersey called One People's Project.

The predictably overwrought response from Malkin would be amusing were it not so delusional: "The anti-troops brigade at UC Santa Cruz has now called in the left-wing blogosphere's kings of hate to attack me."

Unfortunately, although Malkin published the sickening emails she's received as a result of the disclosure, she doesn't link to the call to left-wing blogs supposedly put out by the Students Against War nor does she name or link to the blog post with her contact information.

Evan Derkacz is AlterNet's associate editor and writer of Peek, the blog of blogs.

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