Heather Lynn Mac Donald (born November 23, 1956) is an American conservative political commentator, essayist, attorney, and author. She is known for her pro-police views and opposition to criminal justice reform. She is a fellow of the Manhattan Institute think tank and a contributing editor of its City Journal.
Early life and education
Heather Mac Donald grew up in Los Angeles, California. Her family name was MacDonald; she later added the space to her surname, although she has said it was a "bad idea".
In 1978, she graduated from Yale University with a B.A., summa cum laude, in English. After receiving a Mellon Fellowship from Yale, she attended Clare College, Cambridge, earning an M.A. in English. While at Cambridge she also studied in Italy through a Cambridge study grant. In 1985, she graduated with a Juris Doctor degree from Stanford Law School.
Employment
After graduating from Stanford, Mac Donald clerked for Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and was subsequently an attorney-advisor in the Office of the General Counsel of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and a volunteer with the Natural Resources Defense Council.
She is a Thomas W. Smith Fellow of the Manhattan Institute think tank and a contributing editor of the institute's City Journal.
Views
Mac Donald refers to herself as a secular conservative. She has argued that conservatism is superior to liberalism by virtue of the ideas alone, and that religion should not affect the argument and is unnecessary for conservatism. Mac Donald maintains that conservative values like small government, self-reliance and liberty can be defended without "recourse to invisible deities or the religions that exalt them."
She has testified on criminal justice and the decarceration movement before the US Senate Judiciary Committee, has testified before the Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights of the US House Committee on the Judiciary, and has advocated positions on numerous subjects including victimization, philanthropy, immigration reform, crime prevention, racism, racial profiling, black incarceration, rape, effect of two parents on crime, politics, welfare, and matters pertaining to cities and academia.
Mac Donald has criticized welfare and philanthropic institutions such as the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation for suggesting that welfare is a right; in particular, she has criticized welfare because "generations have grown up fatherless and dependent". She has written that welfare programs serve as a "dysfunction enabler" and that food stamps cause an "unhealthy dependence". According to Mac Donald, under American immigration policies, the United States has been "importing another underclass", one with the "potential to expand indefinitely."
In a 2019 op-ed titled, "Trump Isn’t the One Dividing Us by Race", she argued that Democrats and the media are at fault for racial divisions in the United States. She argued that it is those on the left who have emboldened white supremacists. She argued that Donald Trump is not racially divisive because he "rarely uses racial categories in his speech or his tweets."
During the COVID-19 pandemic, she criticized March 2020 shelter-in-place policies as "unbridled panic". She argued in March 2020 that COVID-19 would have a similar casualty rate as the flu, despite public health experts saying otherwise.
Policing and national security
Mac Donald has been described as "pro-police". She has rejected descriptions of racism in policing, calling them a "false narrative" and "phantom police racism". She has called for a return to Terry stop and frisk tactics and "zero-tolerance" policing. She has argued that too much criticism of police brutality has made police fearful of engaging in proactive policing, and that this has caused more crime. She has been a vocal critic of Black Lives Matter. While talking to the conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, she accused President Barack Obama of "attacking the very foundation of civilization" by giving credibility to Black Lives Matter.
During the 2016 presidential election, she described a speech by Donald Trump on criminal justice as "a radical, bold, and important change of course in the prevailing discourse about policing and crime."