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.)

Finally, they talk about another subject in which Mac Donald has expertise: homelessness. But is that the right word?

A talk with Heather Mac Donald is dependably bracing, and in this podcast she is perhaps especially so.

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  1. Eugene Kriegsmann Member
    Eugene Kriegsmann
    @EugeneKriegsmann

    Heather Mac Donald is one of the great, rational voices of our time. I went to college in the 1960s to become a complete man, educated in the arts and literature, not to learn a profession. What I learned was how to learn and how to continue my education through the rest of my life. I have done so, and have no regrets. What troubled me most was how few people I met during my more than 40 years as a teacher who read or studied anything but the required nonsensical methods courses mandated to maintain their certification. When I started teaching in the late 1960s many of my colleagues were erudite and knowledgeable beyond their area of specialization. Through the years I found that fewer and fewer could discuss anything but the leftist agenda. Discuss is, perhaps, the wrong word. More appropriate would be parrot. They were never taught to think.

    On a later issue, there has arisen in recent years a profession of beggars who plant themselves in shopping centers and freeway off ramps. They all have a well developed backstory, largely nonsense. They all have handprinted signs on cardboard asking for help.  I haven’t felt the need to actually track one of these, but I suspect that if I did at the end of their day, I would discover them climbing into a car and driving home like any other worker. I know this sounds cynical, but when I was working and living in downtown Seattle I was accosted one night on my way home from work by a young man who told me a tale of woe about running out of money and needing enough to get home to Portland. I gave him sufficient funds to take a bus home. Two nights later on my walk home he accosted me again forgetting that it was me who had given him bus fare home. That was a lesson for both of us. For me, never again. For him, remember your earlier marks.

    • #1
  2. FredGoodhue Coolidge
    FredGoodhue
    @FredGoodhue

    Eugene Kriegsmann (View Comment):
    “I would discover them climbing into a car and driving home like any other worker.”

    This is like a Sherlock Holmes plot.

    • #2
  3. Charlotte Member
    Charlotte
    @Charlotte

    Superb. Thank you.

    • #3
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