Heather Mac Donald

♫ Old Mac Donald held a speech... ♫

Parroting squawkbox Pundits

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Heather Lynn Mac Donald (a space in "Mac Donald") (1956–) is an American conservative commentator and fellow at the Manhattan Institute think tank. She is an unusual breed — a conservative who is also an atheist and who has criticized the Christian instinct to credit God when something good happens to someone but not hold him responsible when they experience misfortunes.^[2] Her writing is distinctive in its reliance on misleading and distorted statistics and its very calm and straightforward presentation of outrageous and inflammatory statements.^[3] For instance:

• "Today, the consequences of that cultural revolution [i.e. the revolution of the 1960s] are all around us: lagging education levels, the lowest male workforce participation rate since the Great Depression, opioid abuse, and high illegitimacy rates."^[4]
• "The most cutting-edge research designs, computer algorithms, and statistical tools, such as Fisher’s exact tests, Cronbach’s alpha, and Kernel density estimates, are now deployed in the increasingly desperate hunt for crippling white racism, while a more pressing problem, inner-city dysfunction, gets minimal academic attention."^[5] This quote contains an excellent example of the misleading use of jargon as bullshit, to make someone seem like they understand something far better than they really do.
• "Contrary to the Black Lives Matter narrative, the police have much more to fear from black males than black males have to fear from the police. In 2015, a police officer was 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male was to be killed by a police officer."^[6]

Succinctly, Mother Jones summarized her as "the thinking bigot's Ann Coulter".^[7] Mac Donald generally writes in an emotional polemic style, one heavy on sweeping hyperbole and light on actual well-formed arguments.^[8] Often her arguments are rooted in shallow racial and gender stereotypes; as an example, in the 9 October 2019 edition of the Daily Wire's Ben Shapiro Show, she argued against racial based socio-economic disparities by cherry-picking some random statistics to contrast a black brute stereotype with the "high academic achiever" stereotype of Asians.^[9]

Mac Donald's articles tend to particularly focus on two topics in particular. The first is the bullshit notion that "anti-white racism" is a far more serious problem in America than racism against minorities.^[10] The second is a police apologist stance, to the point where in her view, not only is criminal justice reform unnecessary, but there has actually been a "war on cops" going on for the last two decades led by pesky criminal justice reform activists like Al Sharpton.^[8]

Ye olde battleaxe[edit]

Mac Donald is known for her hard-line right-wing stances on pretty much every issue in American politics: immigration,^[11] police brutality and Black Lives Matter,^[12] criminal justice reform,^[13] racism in the criminal justice system,^[14] and much, much more.

She is particularly well-known for being one of the first and most persistent pushers of the "Ferguson effect" narrative. She first argued for it in a May 2015 Wall Street Journal op-ed^[15] and re-iterated it in her 2016 book The War on Cops.

Unsurprisingly, Mac Donald is against affirmative action, arguing (with her usual shallow understanding of statistics) that the reason colleges aren't proportionally diverse are due to "large racial differences in academic skills" alone.^[16] Also unsurprisingly, her Horatio Alger-style "merit" based college based admission arguments gloss over the college admission preference that tends to favor the white and the wealthy: legacy admissions.^[17] While she claims not to support legacy admissions, she spends far more ink on racial preferences. In one article (ironically as a red herring "argument" concerning the Varsity Blues scandal, where well-off college applicants spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to bribe their way in) she brushed aside the hypocrisy, claiming, without supporting data, that "legacies are better candidates on average than other students".^[18]

Ye olde bigot[edit]

In early 2024, as part of an investigation into the political efforts to abolish diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in Texas's universities in late 2022, the New York Times published multiple bigoted emails between Mac Donald and allies of the Claremont Institute, who were spearheading the anti-DEI efforts. In the emails, Mac Donald mocked the suicide of Peter Thiel's husband and opinioned that gay men "are much more prone" to extramarital affairs "on the empirical basis of testosterone unchecked by female modesty." Mac Donald also reflected on what she thought of as a "curse of feminism" in another email: the "bizarreness of females deciding that their comparative advantages is in being an associate in a law firm" and entrusting their children to caregivers from "the low IQ 3rd world". In another email, Mac Donald railed against a libertarian podcast that praised former president George W. Bush for selecting Black people for his cabinet. ("As if there is any talent required to make quota appointments.")^[19]

Police brutality apologist[edit]

Heather Mac Donald is the US's premier promoter of racist justifications for police brutality, hand-waving away complaints of racial bias, and advocating that infamous un-Constitutional policing techniques like stop and frisk be brought back into practice.^[8] Well-documented instances of police brutality are hand-waved away; for instance, in the killing of Eric Garner, Mac Donald expressed skepticism that the prohibited chokehold inflicted on Garner by NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo actually caused Garner's death, and in the killing of Michael Brown, Mac Donald believed that Brown was shot by police officer Darren Wilson in self-defense, and thus believed that the whole Black Lives Matter movement was based on a myth.^[8]

As with many think-tankers (including Christina Hoff Sommers), her affiliation with the Manhattan Institute and their donors might be the reason for this. Most police unions and private prison corporations donate to the right, and they need justifications for their heinous behavior.

Unsurprisingly, she was also an apologist for the torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay during the Gulf War. In articles written in the Manhattan Institute's City Journal, she defended the polices of the George W. Bush administration, dismissing the notion that they could have contributed to the horrific scenes at Abu Ghraib in particular. She also supported George W. Bush's assertion that those captured were "terrorists" and therefore did not qualify for Geneva protections, and she defended some of the torture tactics such as "stress techniques".^[20][21]

Rape apologist[edit]

Mac Donald has been dismissive of any rape culture claims. For instance, in a February 2008 Los Angeles Times editorial, using her usual shallow analysis of cherry-picked statistics, Mac Donald hand-waved away the notion prominent at the time that college campuses had a rape problem. In the article, she claimed that rape culture actually represented a "booze-fueled hookup culture of one-night, or sometimes just partial-night, stands" that catered to "libidinal impulses released in the 1960s". She then blamed the victim by suggesting that rapes happen on campus because of the way women dress.^[22] As guest speaker at Emory University in January 2020, Mac Donald claimed that "the vast majority of what is called campus rape are voluntary hook-ups", sparking outrage.^[23]

Mac Donald has also used her rape apologist stance as a bizarre way to argue that women shouldn't serve in combat. In this case, Mac Donald was responding to a New York Times story concerning how the military was failing to help military members who were raped while on their tour of duty. Not only did she blame the victim again ("Some of these women come from environments that made their descent into street life overdetermined"), she also insinuated that the fact that women could be traumatized by a rape in the military was reason enough to not put women in combat..^[24][25]

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