Heather Mac Donald may be the most fearless journalist in America. She is relentless in her reporting, bracing in her truth-telling, and ferocious in arguing her case. Her new book, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives, explores how the current attack on meritocracy in the name of “equity” is rampaging through almost all American institutions, in particular arts and culture, but also higher education and corporate America.

Her bleak inventory includes the degredation of the sciences as well, which will if continued will exact a high cost. But our conversation also takes some unusual twists and turns, delving into some of the deeper aspects of the issues of race and merit that are typically neglected. We conclude our conversation with a discussion of Heather’s recommendations for remedies, which will require some serious backbone on the part of the nation’s political leadership that appears to be in short supply just now.

Inez Stepman speaks with Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute, who almost certainly has more police community meetings under her belt than any reporter at The New York Times, about rising crime in America’s cities.

Stepman and MacDonald discuss the reality of who is most often victimized by high crime rates, lay out a defense of meritocracy, and address critiques of the Enlightenment from the left and right.

This special year-end episode of 10 Blocks features highlights from some of our favorite interviews this year, and City Journal editor Brian Anderson extends holiday wishes to listeners.

If you’re interested in supporting the Manhattan Institute and City Journal, please visit our website.

Heather Mac Donald joins Brian Anderson to discuss how academic institutions responded to the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis and how academia’s monolithic belief in systemic racism has fueled recent riots across the United States. She also answers questions from a livestream audience.

Audio for this episode is excerpted and edited from a Manhattan Institute eventcast, “Fearless Thinking in an Age of Conformity.” Find out more and register for future events by visiting our website, and subscribe to MI’s YouTube channel.

Heather Mac Donald joins Seth Barron to discuss YouTube’s restriction of her livestreamed speech on policing, allegations of widespread racial bias in the criminal-justice system, and the ongoing reversal of public-safety gains in New York City.

We’re back after our 4th of July break (well, most of us are back — we have Ricochet Editor Bethany Mandel sitting in for the vacationing Peter Robinson) and we’ve got another super-sized episode to make up for our time off. First up, the always great Heather Mac Donald, who speaks truth to protestors like nobody else. Then, meet Shermichael Singleton, former political strategist, a former Deputy Chief of Staff at HUD, and a former member of the GOP.  Shermichael tells us why he’s left the latter two organizations and it should be required listening at the RNC.  Luckily for us, Shermichael is a current Ricochet podcaster and if you have not listened to the Speak-Easy podcast he co-hosts with Antonia Okafor, we highly recommend it. Also, a bit on the Harper’s free speech letter, the triumphant return of the Lileks Post of The Week, and Bethany has a new Twitter friend.

Music from this week’s show: Everything Is Broken by Bob Dylan

Bill spoke with Heather MacDonald about the current state of policing in America according to the numbers.

Heather is the Thomas W Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor of City Journal and a New York Times bestselling author. Her most recent book is “The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture”.

Heather Mac Donald joins the podcast to talk about why she thinks America is in a crisis. She discusses her new book “The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture” and shares the backlash she’s received by speaking against the belief that human beings should be defined by their skin color, gender, and sexual preferences.

Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and a New York Times bestselling author. Mac Donald’s work at City Journal has covered a range of topics, including higher education, immigration, and race relations. Her writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, among others and her newest book, The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture (2018).

On this episode of The Big Show® we take you back to last night’s 74th Annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner where Rob offers a first hand report. The guest of honor was former Defense Secretary (and Marine Corps legend) James Mattis and, of course, the main topic in the hall was the current situation in Syria with Turkey and the Kurds. (The General’s full remarks can be watched on the Fox News Facebook page.)

Then it’s off to the City by the Bay with Heather Mac Donald, where she recounts buying fentanyl on the streets and how a great American city has fallen hostage to its homeless population.

To wrap things we cover the current state of the 2020 race for the White House, including Elizabeth Warren’s “zinger” on gay marriage.

Heather Mac Donald joins Seth Barron to discuss homelessness on the streets of San Francisco and the city’s wrongheaded attempts to solve the problem.

“San Francisco has conducted a real-life experiment in what happens when a society stops enforcing bourgeois norms of behavior,” writes Mac Donald in City Journal. For nearly three decades, the Bay Area has been a magnet for the homeless. Now the situation is growing dire, as residents and visitors experience near-daily contact with mentally disturbed persons.

This special double-length episode features a wide-ranging conversation with best-selling author and iconoclast Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute, with special focus on her new book, The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture. I hosted Heather this week at  . . . UC Berkeley (!!), and we decided that rather than going with a set-piece speech, I’d interview her about the full range of topics she’s written about.

So we talk about her own intellectual odyssey, the decline of literature in universities, crime and punishment, the drug war, why we’d actually cheer the return of old-fashioned Marxism, as well as the hot button issues of her new book: preferential college admissions and the entire “diversity industrial complex.” We even get to the “T-question” (Trump), where Heather remains skeptical and conflicted.

Heather Mac Donald joins senior editor Mark Bauerlein to discuss her latest book, “The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture.”

Heather Mac Donald discusses the decline of the university and the rise of campus intellectual intolerance, the subjects of her important new book, The Diversity Delusion How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture. She spoke at a Manhattan Institute event in autumn 2018.

Toxic ideas that originated in academia have now spread beyond the university setting, widening America’s cultural divisions. Too many college students enter the working world believing that human beings are defined by their skin color, gender, and sexual preference, and that oppression based on these characteristics defines the American experience. In The Diversity Delusion, Mac Donald argues that the root of this problem is the belief in America’s endemic racism and sexism, a belief that has spawned a massive diversity bureaucracy, especially in higher education.

This week, the bomber is apprehended and Rob Long is not surprised, there’s a caravan headed our way, professional prognosticator Patrick Ruffini opines on his epic Tweet storm and makes some mid-term predictions, and the great Heather Mac Donald stops by to chat about her new book The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture. Finally, some thoughts about Megyn Kelly, free speech, and…Halloween?

Music from this week’s podcast: Caravan by Van Morrison

Heather Mac Donald joins Brian Anderson to discuss how universities and the scientific community are being pressured to alter the gender and racial balance in STEM disciplines—science, technology, engineering, and math—and the implications for America’s future.

For decades, multiculturalism, quotas, and identity politics have been pervasive in humanities departments at most major universities—but not in scientific fields. Now that’s changing, as the identity-politics obsession has penetrated STEM programs, and administrators, professors, and other officials attempt to increase the number of women and minorities in the field, by almost any means necessary. As Mac Donald writes, this pressure is “changing how science is taught and how scientific qualifications are evaluated. The results will be disastrous for scientific innovation and for American competitiveness.”

Heather Mac Donald and Frank Furedi discuss the hostility to free speech that has provoked disturbing incidents on campuses across the country and the ideology behind safe spaces, micro-aggressions, and trigger warnings. Their discussion, from a Manhattan Institute event held in June 2017, was moderated by City Journal contributing editor Howard Husock.

American universities are experiencing a profound cultural transformation. Student protests designed to shut downalternative opinions have become frequent and sometimes violent. Frank Furedi‘s What’s Happened To The University? A Sociological Exploration of Its Infantilisation explores the origins of the anti-free speech climate at U.S. and U.K. universities.

Heather Mac Donald joins City Journal associate editor Seth Barron to discuss the dubious scientific and statistical bases of the trendy academic theory known as “implicit bias.” The implicit association test (IAT), first introduced in 1998, uses a computerized response-time test to measure an individual’s bias, particularly regarding race.

Despite scientific challenges to the test’s validity, the implicit-bias idea has taken firm root in popular culture and in the media. Police forces and corporate HR departments are spending millions every year reeducating employees on how to recognize their presumptive hidden prejudices.

Back in April, Heather Mac Donald went to Claremont McKenna College to give a talk. Some 170 students blocked the entrance to the hall, preventing people from hearing Mac Donald. Now, seven students have been disciplined in the case.

Mac Donald is a scholar at the Manhattan Institute and the author, most recently, of The War on Cops. She talks with Jay about her experience at Claremont and about higher ed in general – particularly the victim mentality that is ruining so many young people. Then they talk about policing, with President Trump’s recent remarks in mind. (He encouraged rough treatment of arrestees.)

Heather Mac Donald joins Brian Anderson to discuss the state of policing today, the “Ferguson Effect,” former FBI director James Comey’s defense of proactive policing, and the recent protests against conservative speakers on college campuses.

Since the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri on August 9, 2014, public discussion about police and the criminal justice system has reached a fever pitch: activists claim that policing is inherently racist and discriminatory, while supporters say that public pressure has caused officers to disengage from proactive policing.

City Journal editor Brian C. Anderson and contributing editor Heather Mac Donald (author of the New York Times bestseller “The War on Cops“) discuss law and order in the Donald Trump administration, how the left’s anti-police narrative contributed to his victory, and Trump’s choice to head the Justice Department.

“Donald Trump was the only person that was willing to talk about the breakdown of law and order in the inner cities and saying that that is the most fundamental government responsibility, without which nothing else matters.” — Heather Mac Donald