Muller v Malkin FM 101.1

These are notes, not a complete transcript, but pretty much how things went.

Brad intros Malkin with sympathetic mocking tone on "saddest" story taught in school, internment.

Intro Muller. Brad and Britt joke about M&Ms' cool "good mornings" to each other. . they fake less cool ones, but they still sound cool.

She cites Lowman in first segment. Raises parallel to present day, talks about “profiling” now…

Brad jumps in, say's not either/or, lack of profiling or internment.

Malkin talks about a “common sense program.” Says FDR era internment “not soley or primarly motviated by wartime racism and hysteria.”

Muller: Now she’s saying that she wasn’t saying that racism had nothing to do with it…but the book makes clear it’s out to shatter “myth” peddled by leftwing academics. There was incredible racism.

Britt asks for clear example of racism.

Muller: report from commanding general re “racial strains undiluted” in descendants of Japanese immigrants. Says Michelle doesn’t suggest military reason to put Americans on trains into badlands behind barbed wire, you can’t wring racism, hysteria, and panic out of this era.

Brad: What about actual military reasons?

Malkin, I have not been modifying my position. “read the flap of my book,” the decisions made were not based primarily on racism and wartime hysteria. She cites lots of concerns about operation of espionage network. “The other side” argues this doesn't matter or exist.

Muller breaks in with a "whoa whoa whoa no michelle." No evidence at all that American citizens of Japanese ancestry who had not spent time in Japan were involved in espionage, yet they were shipped to camps.

Britt, did they search houses of Japanese?

Muller: Yes, on Dec 8, grabbed everything they could find in sweeping Japanese neighborhoods, and looked in Japanese records in Tokyo after war, no such evidence found.

Break.

Malkin. Cites example that purports to show that Japanese immigrants and their offspring were potentially disloyal.

Brad. Is it a point on her side that we can’t begin to imagine 12/7/41? Did they have the right to overreact?

Muller. That’s human nature. That doesn’t make it correct or just, or mean we should look back and say because they were right to be scared, they were right about what to be scared of.

Malkin: We’ve been taught they only did it because animated by anti-Japanese animus.

Muller. Nobody disputes that military planners on 12/8/41 and the next 2 months were doing what they thought they had to do to protect the US. Nobody says they rubbed their hands gleefully and said now we can stick it to Japanese. But the evidence shows that the scope and devastating enormity of what was done was not supported by concerns, but driven by hysteria and political pressure, rampant prejudice.

Britt. what about other intelligence beyond MAGIC?

Muller: all monitored. We arrested japanese aliens, 1,800, it was grossly overinclusive, we immediately locked up all suspicious characters. Four months later, the decision was made to take old peolple and children out of their homes, then after Midway consign them to 3.5 years behind barbed wire.

Malkin: memos show that Japanese espionage still functioned along west coast well into war.

Muller talks over her: No evidence those people were American citizens of Japanese ancestry.

break, 9:30 news

bumper music Pearl Jam. Nice.

Malkin. Eric suggesting that not one sent to the interior camps was a potential threat. She cites a wartime opponent of internment who advocated locking up 8-9,000 Kibei. Hoover felt same. Liberals in FDR administration argued it was Constitutional.

Britt, what about other, non-Japanese internees? That’s not taught in history.

Malkin. There was internment of 31,000 enemy aliens and their families, about one-half were of European descent. We don’t hear about that. We only hear that the Japanese suffered.

Muller. Right, 31,000 aliens interned, including some Japanese. They all got hearings, were interned on suspicion they had or would engage in something treacherous. The internment was part of a separate sytem of placing people in camps, without a hearing, charges; solely and entirely because of Japanese ancestry they couldn’t be trusted. Mentions German-American Gehrig and Italian-American DiMaggio who were free.

Malkin. Dimaggio’s dad not allowed to fish in SF...

Muller, but that was his dad, an alien…US has power to take action against aliens in wartime…Joe's dad could have become citizen, didn’t. Joe Japanese-American Guy in a camp's father wasn't allowed by law to become a citizen.

Malkin. If you did’nt live on west coast, if you were in Ohio NY Florida, you were not forced into camp. People were evacuated, then released with security clearances. Thousands left for east or inland. It was militarily necessary. Yes, that was a civil liberties sacrifice.

Britt brings up to today and racial profiling.

Malkin: people invoke internment as reason not to do things now. If we say the State Department list of possible sponsors of terror is a good reason to have scrutiny of those people, say students from Syria seeking visas...

Brad. That’s a straw man, who’s really for not allowing that? Whackos.

Malkin. I don’t think it’s a straw man. Objections from the left have killed common sense meaurses. Not just hypothetical, pre 9/11 FBI didn’t take suggestion to look at flight schools training Arabs.

Brad. Eric is it true that the federal govt is handcuffed in winnowing down the list of suspects, looking at Arab and Middle East origins…are we race neutral?

Muller. No.

Britt. Should we be?

Muller: No.

Britt. Is that profiling?

Muller. Here we agree, Michelle and I. There are on left academics who have said race not relevant to consider. There is a security debate, yes, but that's not to say a case for the incarceration of those people. She couldn’t written a book, "In Defense of Reasonable Pragmatic Security Measures," but she didn’t. The book reads like a brief for interning Arabs and Muslims today. Llist in book of how Muslim threats now like Japanese threat then.

Malkin. I am not advocating any kind of internment, relocation on order of WWII. It doesn’t make sense. We're fighting stateless enemies. I’m trying to suggest common sense threat profiling. The same people who invoke internment are the same people who oppose reasonable security. It's still happening.

break

Brad to Muller: Are authorities handcuffed in dealing with stateless threat because of collective memory of what happened in WWII?

Muller. That’s an important debate, but don’t do it by smearing entire group. You can defend president’s right to executive privilege without writing a book called "In Defense of Watergate." But the book doesn’t sell if you do it carefully.

Brad: "He’s saying you’re a marketing genius, Michelle."

They reference each other's websites, IsThatLegal and MichelleMalkin.com. Happy talk follows.

Malkin: I am not smearing their reputations, I am sensitive to their suffereing.

Brad: Reagan, what was he thinking with reparations for internment? Did we owe them money? Just being PC?

Malkin. We started compensation for internees in 1948. This was political. The way it was conducted, a kangaroo court omitted evidence. It was a mistake for Reagan to do, one of few.

Muller: 1948 compensation paid for documentable specific property losses, 25 cents on dollar.

Britt: that's not fair.

Brad wraps up. ‘Thank goodness we’ve been able to settle it."

They plug their blogs again.

Britt: Is that the best thing we’ve had on our show so far?

Brad. "No."