When I first started writing newspaper editorials and columns for the Los Angeles Daily News in November 1992, I learned that “-30-” (pronounced “dash thirty dash”) was the journalist’s code for letting an editor know where your copy ended. Most media historians believe the typesetting mark originated when news was filed by telegraph. Western Union’s famous mid-19th-century 92 Code of numerical shorthand signals lists the meaning of “-30-” as:

“No more — the end.”

I prefer the definition in Webster’s Dictionary:

“A sign of completion.”

From 1992-1999, I wrote an estimated 300 bylined newspaper columns and nearly 1,000 unsigned editorials combined for the Los Angeles Daily News and Seattle Times. Since Creators Syndicate started carrying my column nationally in 1999, I’ve penned nearly 2,000 weekly or bi-weekly columns over 1,177 weeks, for hundreds of print and website clients, totaling more than 1.1 million words. It has been a blessing to work in a career that I have loved, getting paid by the line to opine, as a proud “ink-stained wretch” whose first high-school job was as a press inserter for my hometown newspaper, the Atlantic City Press, back in the late 1980s.

The sentimental English major in me finds it altogether fitting to bring my column-writing to close after “dash thirty dash” years.

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.

I am indebted to my early writing mentors, the late Father Edward Lyons and Debbie Collins at Holy Spirit High School in Absecon, New Jersey; my late Oberlin College English professor Dewey Ganzel; my husband and co-conspirator in all things, Jesse; my first newspaper boss, Tom Gray; Creators Syndicate founder Rick Newcombe and his staff; and stalwart supporters JewishWorldReview.com founder Binyamin Jolkovsky, VDARE founder Peter Brimelow, Wendy McCaw of the Santa Barbara News-Press, WRKO radio host extraordinaire Jeff Kuhner, and the late KFAQ host Pat Campbell.

Most of all, I wish to thank my teacher Mom (who taught me to express myself with passion and flair) and my doctor Dad (who gave me a bedrock foundation in science, logic and facts). From both of them, I inherited the zeal to speak up for what is right and true without fear — but always with humility — which I will continue to do in new ways for myself, my family and my country.

This is an ending, but not the end. The next chapter awaits to be written.

-30-

Michelle Malkin’s email address is [email�protected].

Don’t believe the pervert media. Reuters, NBC News, entertainer John Oliver and Denver 9News zealot Kyle Clark all want you to believe that parents nationwide are simply imagining an infestation of “furries” (children dressing up and identifying as animals) in their public schools. The gaslighting campaign is so toxically incandescent that you can see the glow from a SpaceX rocket.

Let me assure you: You are not crazy. They are.

First, let’s review the headlines over the past week.

Here’s Reuters on Oct. 18:

“Fact Check — No evidence of schools accommodating ‘furries’ with litter boxes.”

Here’s NBC News on Oct. 14 in a piece by whopping four-reporter “misinformation” police squad:

“How an urban myth about litter boxes in schools became a GOP talking point.”

Over the weekend, comedian John Oliver dismissed the parental sound and fury over furries as “humiliating nonsense” and mocked conservative state legislators as “heartbreakingly stupid” for amplifying constituents’ concerns.

Denver 9News conservative-bashing zealot Kyle Clark two weeks ago purported to debunk the furry frenzy by simply regurgitating several Colorado school districts’ blanket denials, including Jefferson County, which told the news station: “There is absolutely no truth to this claim. There are no litter boxes in our buildings and students are not allowed to come to school in costume.”

That deceitful stock answer was authored by communications executive director Kimberly Eloe; shared with district leaders for “awareness and alignment” (translation: marching orders and echo chamber formation); and sent to multiple news outlets inquiring about the anthropomorphic animal contagion. 9News executive producer Nathan Higgins revealed his intentions to neuter the controversy when he accused parents of spreading a “conspiracy theory” in his inquiry to the Jeffco schools’ PR team seeking any “substantiated or specific instances or claims of furries in schools.”

School districts in the Denver metro area strongly disputed @heidiganahl claim that kids in schools across Colorado are identifying as animals. Here are their statement to 9NEWS last week: pic.twitter.com/cuoJpqAF30

— Kyle Clark (@KyleClark) October 3, 2022

Here is the whole truth, which the pervert media labels “misinformation” because truly informed nuclear families threaten The Great Parental Replacement agenda:

A vigilant group of parents and kids in Jefferson County have been hounding school officials about the bizarre presence of “furries” in Colorado middle schools and high schools since February 2022. This is not a “GOP talking point” or an election-season ploy. This is not a joke or satire. It’s real, it’s disruptive, and it’s sick. Lindsay Datko and a team of eight citizen activists with Jeffco Kids First file Colorado Open Records Act requests to expose the lies and secrets driving wedges between parents and their children — not just on curriculum indoctrination, but on all matters pertaining to family autonomy, health and safety.

“We leave no stone unturned,” Datko told me. And that’s why the pervert media and their fellow travelers believe she and her group must be smeared and destroyed.

On Oct. 13, the county school district’s records custodian coughed up a 36-page document filled with emails between parents, school officials and other parties chronicling the need for costumed critter control. I obtained and verified the hair-raising trove. Back in February, a parent had informed JeffCo’s “chief student success officer” Matt Palaoro about rabid furries at Wayne Carle Middle School who wore “cat/dog ears, tails, fur gloves, collars, and leashes” while threatening peers who objected. The parent’s son reported that the costumed students would “hiss, bark, scratch, and meow” at students who objected to the behavior.

Another child reported that the herd of furries would “walk on all 4s in the hallway” and “also eat with their face in their food.”

Back in March, parents at Drake Middle School in Jeffco met with principal Melinda Feir to alert her of the classroom disruptions caused by the human pet parade.

In April, another parent reported furry sightings at Dakota Ridge High School.

In August, Drake Middle School updated its dress code specifically to ban animal ears and tails. (The public records show that litter boxes were never mentioned; it was Datko’s group that discovered they were being used during lockdowns.)

Despite the long electronic trail of complaints and alarms, left-wing activist and Colorado Times Recorder propagandist Heidi Beedle slammed GOP gubernatorial candidate Heidi Ganahl in a hit piece titled “Ganahl Falsely Claims that Kids Are ‘Identifying as Cats … All Over Colorado; Schools Are Tolerating It.'” What Beedle and the publication fail to disclose is that Beedle is — not making this up — an apologist for furries who penned a 2,000-plus word celebration of the “oft-misunderstood community” in 2018 for the Colorado Springs Independent. She highlighted a 16-year-old “wolfdog” named “Avedis” whose parents drive him to “all-ages meetups” and quoted “Chip,” a “DenFur” convention staffer who explained that “(w)hile furry is not an exclusively LGBTQ phenomenon, it skews pretty gay due to its obvious LGBTQ appeal.”

Next week, a young college student will face a federal judge in Washington, D.C., at a sentencing hearing over his nonviolent participation in the Jan. 6 Capitol rally. UCLA undergrad Christian Secor was arrested last February and spent more than a month in solitary confinement. Think about that.

Unlike the weekly parade of repeat violent criminal rapists, robbers, pedophiles and murderers across the country with massive rap sheets who enjoy a no-bail revolving door, Christian had never, ever been in trouble with the law before his arrest.

The un-American Department of Injustice has made life hell for hundreds of peaceful Trump rally participants — locking them up, throwing away the key, harassing their families, withholding evidence and obliterating their constitutional rights to stifle dissent, punish the Democrats’ political enemies and weaponize J6 till kingdom come. Don’t take my word for it. A D.C. magistrate overseeing some of the cases, Zia Faruqui, decried the gargantuan prosecutions of nearly 900 defendants, including at least two Americans who were left to languish in custody after being “lost” for weeks without scheduled hearings.

“It feels like the government has bitten off more than it can chew here,” Faruqui complained in March.

Yes, the vengeful federal beast has an insatiable appetite and bottomless resources to ruin lives. The D.C. witch-hunt prosecutors threw a pile of charges at Christian that made sensational headlines, including “assaulting, resisting or impeding officers,” as liberal National Public Radio reported. Christian pleaded not guilty to all charges in March 2021 but, 14 wearying months later, entered an agreement to plead guilty to a single felony charge of “obstructing a federal proceeding.”

Here is what I wrote to the judge in Christian’s case, the Honorable Trevor McFadden, to share what I know about this bright young man as he faces up to 20 years in prison next week.

Dear Judge McFadden,

My name is Michelle Malkin and I am writing on behalf of Christian Secor, whom you will sentence on October 19, 2022. I am a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist, investigative journalist, author of 7 books, campus speaker, and mentor to countless young conservative activists across the country for the past 30 years.

In November 2019, I first met Christian before giving a speech at UCLA sponsored by the Bruin Republicans. I instantly found him to be polite, witty, and highly intelligent. He demonstrated broad and deep knowledge of world affairs. We share similar perspectives as passionate defenders of American sovereignty and unapologetic nationalism. I saw or communicated with Christian several times between the fall of 2019 and the fall of 2020. He was constructively engaged in student activism on campus locally and in helping to unite conservative students nationally on immigration and public health and safety issues as the pandemic era erupted.

Knowing my love of the outdoors, Christian sent me a beautiful mountain and rainbow photo from his summer 2020 vacation in flyover country. He thoughtfully messaged to wish me happy birthday in October 2020. Four months later, I learned of his arrest and the shocking 40 days he spent in solitary confinement.

A non-violent college kid with zero criminal record held in isolation for 40 days? This isn’t the America my immigrant parents from the Philippines thought they were getting when they left an authoritarian regime that jailed political opponents and punished student activists.

Never in any of my conversations or interactions with Christian did he ever express support for violence.

Never in any of my conversations or interactions with Christian did he ever express any sentiments of “racism,” “Nazism,” “white supremacy,” “fascism,” or “insurrection.”

As a veteran journalist who has worked in newspapers and on TV for the past three decades, as well as an Internet entrepreneur who founded two influential political news and opinion websites, I am deeply disturbed by the distorted media profiles of Christian that have baselessly savaged his character and transformed him from a peacefully provocative student activist into some sort of dangerous agent provocateur. This is patently untrue and unjust.

I understand Christian has pled guilty to one felony charge of “obstructing a federal proceeding.”

I also understand that Christian did not bring any weapons, touch an officer, or ignore any police requests. I understand he walked in a door that Capitol police opened and then stepped aside. I understand that after entering the main Senate floor, he was told by a police officer to leave — and he dutifully complied.

Judge McFadden, I ask that justice be served in Christian’s case by granting him probation and allowing this 24-year-old to continue his educational pursuits in freedom instead of continuing to serve as a political scapegoat behind bars. Thank you for considering this letter of support.

Pray for sanity and justice to prevail in this case and so many others still suffering in solitude and silence. End-stage America’s victims are legion.

Michelle Malkin’s email address is [email�protected].

It’s happening. It’s been happening. Parents, you are being replaced.

Where? Right under your noses, in your neighborhoods, in your public and private schools, and in your local children’s hospitals.

How? Under the guise of health, safety, compassion, tolerance, diversity, intellectual superiority and, of course, the public good.

By whom? Woke educators, radical school counselors, gender queer-promoting librarians, meddling school-based health clinic staffers, Big Pharma drug and jab peddlers, and medical establishment “experts” like the ones at the American Medical Association, who, as investigative researcher and City Journal writer Christopher Rufo reported this week, are “asking Big Tech and the Department of Justice to censor, deplatform, investigate, and prosecute journalists who question the orthodoxy of radical gender surgeries for minors, arguing that public criticism is ‘disinformation.'”

It’s not just journalists that the AMA is targeting, but outspoken parents on social media who dare to question State Science and who fearlessly assert and defend their family sovereignty. As usual, questioning the authority of the elites is tantamount to threatening “violence, intimidation, and physical harm” — even as these control freaks oversee the mass poisoning of vulnerable children’s minds and bodies across the country.

Why? Newly elected Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni summarized it well in a viral 2019 speech at the World Congress of Families that Big Tech has tried to suppress.

“Why is the family the enemy?” she asked. “Why is the family so frightening?”

Answer: “Because family is our identity. Because everything that defines us is now the enemy for those who would like us to have no identity and simply be perfect consumer slaves. That’s why they attack national identity, that’s why they attack religious identity, attack sexual identity, attack family identity. I cannot define myself as Christian, Italian, wife, mother, no. I have to be citizen X, gender X, parent 1, parent 2. I have to be a number … That’s why we cause so much fear … Because we don’t want to be numbers. We will defend the value of the human being … We will defend God, country and family.”

Yes. We are more than just automatons and QR codes. Our children are more than just advertising-coveted eyeballs and addicted mouse-clickers, more than data-mining sitting ducks and docile worker cogs in the globalist machine. Our children are more than just bottomless receptacles for the next government-subsidized, billion-dollar experimental drugs from cradle to grave — be they puberty-blocking hormones, lifestyle vaccines (Gardasil, PrEP), ineffective and natural immunity-undermining flu shots, anti-anxiety and anti-depressant pills, or experimental bivalent COVID booster jabs that have only been tested on a handful of mice.

Moms and dads, you are more than a pesky nuisance to the architects and engineers of the Great Parental Replacement.

You are a hindrance.

At Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, the Daily Caller’s Chrissy Clark reported, a “Gender and Sexuality Development Clinic” has held 33 trainings in 15 schools over the past five years on “trans-inclusive policies” in which attendees are advised to “keep gender identity secret from parents.”

You are abusers.

At Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri, an academic “expert” claimed that parents “refusing puberty-blocking treatment” amounted to “psychological harm,” which she equated with physical abuse that should be subject to criminal prosecution.

You are nosybodies.

In the U.S., 17 children’s hospitals have now hidden information about their gender transmogrification programs after parents exposed their practices. Most prominent among them: Boston Children’s Hospital and its demented program, HOTT (Health Outreach to Teens), which advises boys on how to “tuck” and tape up their penises to make them look like vaginas.

To distract from this perversity, Boston Children’s is playing the victim, decrying alleged threats of “violence” (cue the Southern Poverty Law Center smear machine). We’ve seen this playbook before. Remember: In 2013, young Justina Pelletier was ripped from her parents’ custody by Boston Children’s Hospital. The teen, who lives with mitochondrial disease and postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, had gone to BCH after coming down with a severe case of the flu. Instead of receiving top-notch care and attention at BCH, however, Justina was medically kidnapped and recklessly re-diagnosed with a psychological condition, “somatoform disorder.”

Justina was dragged from BCH’s neurology department to its infamous psych ward, where she was reprimanded for being unable to move her bowels or walk unassisted in her weakened state. At the Wayside Youth and Family Support Network residential treatment center, where she was confined, she and her family recounted to me in my 2018 documentary on the case, she was harassed by a staffer while taking a shower. The physical and mental torture lasted 16 months.

Doctors at BCH dubbed their evil practice a “parentectomy” — and this savage removal of parental rights has been repeated nationwide. The Pelletier family sued BCH and lost in early 2020, at exactly the time the World Economic Forum was ushering in the Great Reset and its replacement of sovereign nations and sovereign parents with drug-pushing, gender-destroying, child-kidnapping, surveillance-state managers of the “global commons.”

It’s time for nuclear families to go nuclear on their enemies. That’s not a call to violence, but a call to protect your children’s minds, hearts, bodies and souls from those who seek to obliterate our identity, bonds and God-given rights.

Michelle Malkin’s email address is [email�protected].

Not all open-borders subversives hide behind black bandanas and hurl Molotov cocktails. Sometimes, they wear three-piece suits or silk dresses. Most insidiously, the saboteurs of American justice wear black robes, wield gavels and enlist other officers of the court to help them perpetrate crimes instead of punish them.

Nothing shocks me anymore after 30 years of covering immigration anarchy, but my disgust with American apathy toward the erosion of this once-sovereign nation deepens every day. Take the case of United States v. Shelley M. Richmond Joseph and Wesley MacGregor. She’s the Massachusetts state court judge and he’s the former court deputy who collaborated to hide and free an illegal alien criminal being sought by a federal U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Joseph’s Newton, Massachusetts, courthouse in 2018.

A year later, federal prosecutors charged these two government human traffickers with obstruction of justice after they conspired to let Dominican national Oscar Manuel Peguero a.k.a. Jose Medina-Perez — a fugitive who had been wanted on narcotics possession and drunk driving, had been deported twice before and had been barred from reentering under federal law — out a back door when ICE issued a detainer and warrant of removal.

Judge Joseph’s lawyers admitted the truth of prosecutors’ allegations on how she “purposefully” helped Peguero/Medina-Perez “evade” the ICE agent by “concocting a ruse.” While informing the federal agent that the illegal alien would be sent to the courthouse lobby, she cooked up an excuse for him to head “downstairs to lockup” and “then exit the courthouse through a rear sally-port exit.” Joseph directed MacGregor to “go off the record while she devised” the scheme with the illegal alien’s counsel. “After the recorder was turned back on and the alleged plan was set in motion, Deputy MacGregor used his access card to swipe” Peguero/Medina-Perez out the back portal.

Although he was captured a few weeks after the catch-and-release ruse in Newton, Peguero/Medina-Perez was granted bond by an immigration judge in May 2018. The previous double deportee was entrusted to return for a hearing in July 2019. I asked ICE this week about the status of that deportation hearing and Peguero/Medina-Perez’s whereabouts. Cue the sound of crickets.

Once again, the woke joke’s on us. Last week, three years after their illegal alien jailbreak conspiracy, Joseph and MacGregor learned they are getting off scot-free. U.S. Attorney Zachary Cunha announced that the U.S. Department of Injustice is dropping its charges against the scheming judge and deferring prosecution on the single perjury charge against her co-conspirator deputy. Joseph’s transgressions will now undergo “review” by a state judicial conduct commission. As a Reuters investigation reported, such toothless panels nationwide tend to “err on the side of protecting the rights and reputations of judges while overlooking the impact courtroom wrongdoing has on those most affected by it.”

Translation: If you’re an American citizen whose loved one gets mowed down by a drunken Peguero/Medina-Perez or whose child overdoses on drugs sold by him, good luck. The law is on the side of the illegal alien criminal and his judicial coddlers, not you and yours. Oh, and don’t bother protesting to the Newton City Council. Its members declared the city an open-borders sanctuary city on a 16-1 vote in 2017. In fact, the following cities in Massachusetts are all official sanctuaries that hinder and obstruct ICE from enforcing federal immigration laws inside our borders: Amherst, Boston, Cambridge, Chelsea, Concord, Newton, Northampton, Somerville and Lawrence.

So, citizens, who can you turn to in the Bay State for equal justice under the law? Ha. I remind you that in May 2018, Obama-appointed federal judge Indira Talwani attacked ICE agents in Massachusetts when they took an alien into custody who had received probation for visa fraud. “I see no reason for places of redress and justice to become places that people are afraid to show up,” Talwani argued on behalf of a Chinese national sentenced to probation for using a fake passport and visa to take a graduate school entrance exam for another person.

Have no fear, drunken Dominicans and Chinese cheats. American judges are here to help!

And so are other tax-subsidized DAs.

In March 2019, notorious Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins ordered her employees to monitor and snitch on ICE officers around any courthouse while trying to do their jobs. Rollins’ election was part of a wave of successful campaign bids to install “progressive prosecutors” to carry out left-wing billionaire George Soros’ plan of undermining the criminal justice system from within. A week after Joseph and MacGregor conspired to free their illegal alien poster child from ICE, Rollins and fellow subversive Middlesex County DA Marian Ryan sued ICE for doing its job. It was rendered moot and dropped after the anti-American Biden DOJ cut ICE off at the knees on its own.

I’d like to blame only leftists, Soros and Biden for the mess we’re in. But, as usual, I can’t. Judge Shelley “Jailbreak” Joseph is on the bench today thanks to the nomination of a Republican governor, retiring RINO Charlie Baker. Immigration anarchy is what you get when “bipartisanship,” “centrism,” “pragmatism” and “diversity” matter more than protecting an American judicial system that puts Americans first.

Michelle Malkin’s email address is [email�protected].