Heather Mac Donald

Heather Lynn Mac Donald (born November 23, 1956) is an American conservative political commentator, essayist, lawyer, and author. She is known for her pro-police views and opposition to criminal justice reform. 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.

Career

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. 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 such as small government, self-reliance and liberty can be defended without "recourse to invisible deities or the religions that exalt them." 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, and matters pertaining to cities

In 2008, Mac Donald accepted the Eugene Katz Award for Excellence in the Coverage of Immigration from the Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigration think tank. According to Mac Donald, under American immigration policies, the United States has been "importing another underclass", one with the "potential to expand indefinitely."

In another private correspondence with Claremont Institute affiliates, Mac Donald criticized Peter Thiel's gay marriage (placing 'marriage' in sneer quotes), mocking Thiel's husband and saying that Thiel's outside boyfriend who had recently committed suicide showed that gay men “are much more prone” to extramarital affairs “on the empirical basis of testosterone unchecked by female modesty.”

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.

Heather Mac Donald is a believer in the Great Replacement Theory, stating in 2024 that the “Great Replacement theory is real,” and in 2025 that the Great Replacement theory is "just a reality."

Policing and national security Mac Donald has been described as "pro-police". She has been a vocal critic of 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."

She is an outspoken critic of criminal justice reform, such as the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, which she testified against in October 2015. She has spoken out against no-racial-profiling programs for the police, calling them a "politically correct ignoring" of what is known to be the "logical necessity of Islamic terrorism." She has criticized efforts to instate no-racial-profiling policies, calling these efforts an "illogical tautology" because "you cannot be an Islamic terrorist unless you're a member of the Muslim faith".

In September 2019 congressional testimony, Mac Donald cited a July 2019 PNAS study on the races of police officers and civilians who are shot, which purported to show that there was no racial bias in police shootings. However, the study that she cited has been corrected, and the editors of the journal wrote that the study was unable to support any conclusions about racial bias in police shootings.

Reviews of her books Writing in The New York Times in 2000, Robin Finn described Mac Donald as an "influential institute thinker who risks being stereotyped as a right-leaning academic curmudgeon". Columnist George F. Will wrote a blurb for Mac Donald's book The Burden of Bad Ideas (2000).

Steven Pinker, Charles Murray and Shelby Steele provided blurbs for Mac Donald's 2018 book The Diversity Delusion.

2017 protest

In the spring of 2017, a protest group announced plans to "shut down" Mac Donald's speech on the Black Lives Matter movement at a college campus in California, calling her racist, fascist, and anti-black. On April 7, around 250 protesters surrounded audience members and prevented them from entering the building where she was speaking at Claremont McKenna College, whose president, Hiram Chodosh, afterward said, "Based on the judgment of the Claremont Police Department, we jointly concluded that any forced interventions or arrests would have created unsafe conditions for students, faculty, staff, and guests." Mac Donald ultimately gave the talk to a small audience in the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum that was live-streamed on Claremont McKenna's website. Chodosh said that "the effort to silence her voice effectively amplified it to a much larger audience." The college subsequently suspended seven students.

Books

The Illegal-Alien Crime Wave , "City Journal" Winter 2004 The Immigration Solution (co-authored with Victor Davis Hanson and Steven Malanga). Ivan R. Dee. 2006.

Personal life Mac Donald is an atheist. She lives in New York City.