Heather Mac Donald

Heather Lynn Mac Donald (a space in "Mac Donald") (1956—) is an American conservative commentator and fellow at the Manhattan Institute. 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 you, but not hold him responsible when one experiences misfortunes.[1] Her writing is distinctive in its reliance on misleading and distorted statistics, and its very calm and straightforward presentation of outrageous and inflammatory statements. 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 work-force participation rate since the Great Depression, opioid abuse, and high illegitimacy rates."[2]
  • "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."[3] This quote is additionally noteworthy because it 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."[4]
Parroting squawkbox
Pundits
And a dirty dozen more
v - t - e

Ye olde battleaxe

Mac Donald is known for her hard-line right-wing stances on pretty much every issue in American politics: immigration,[5] police brutality and Black Lives Matter,[6] criminal justice reform,[7] racism in the criminal justice system,[8] 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[9] and re-iterated it in her 2016 book The War on Cops.

Dark money's effect on her

Heather Mac Donald is the US' premier promoter of racist justifications for police brutality. 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.

gollark: PotatOS Tau will be autoupdated to Hypercycle once some final fixes complete.
gollark: PotatOS Tau is deprecated, so I'm being just like those other very excellent projects which deprecate something without providing a stable alternative! Although Hypercycle is pretty okay.
gollark: It's compiled from the repo at git.osmarks.tk.
gollark: That's PotatOS Hypercycle. It is somewhat experimental.
gollark: `pastebin run 7HSiHybr`

References
  1. A Place on the Right for a Few Godless Conservatives
  2. Scandal Erupts over the Promotion of ‘Bourgeois’ Behavior
  3. Conjuring Disrespect
  4. All that kneeling ignores the real cause of soaring black homicides
  5. One of many examples: "Poverty and other grounds for victim status do not, in the conservative worldview, create a license for lawbreaking."
  6. Assessing Heather Mac Donald's counter-narrative about blacks and police
  7. Telling the Truth About Crime and Policing
  8. The Myth of Criminal-Justice Racism
  9. The New Nationwide Crime Wave
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