Heather Mac Donald

Heather Lynn Mac Donald is an American conservative political commentator, essayist, attorney, and author. She is a Thomas W. Smith Fellow of the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of the institute's City Journal. She has written numerous editorials and is the author of several books. She is known for her pro-police views and opposition to criminal justice reform, as expressed in her book The War on Cops and columns such as "The Myth of the Racist Cop" and "The Myth of Systemic Police Racism."

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), praising her thinking about urban problems. In The New York Times, Allen D. Boyer wrote a brief positive review of The Burden of Bad Ideas, concluding that "among discussions of urban malaise, where so much hot air has been recycled, this book has the freshness of a stiff, changing breeze."

Tim Lynch, director of the Cato Institute's project on criminal justice, gave her 2016 book The War on Cops a negative review in Reason magazine, concluding, "What Mac Donald calls a 'war on cops' is better described as a much-needed debate about crime, law enforcement tactics, and how to deal with systemic police misconduct," and adding, "Conservatives have some worthwhile ideas to offer in this debate, but Mac Donald's polemics add heat, not light."

Steven Pinker, Charles Murray, and Shelby Steele were featured in blurbs for Mac Donald's 2018 book The Diversity Delusion. Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, wrote, "with her spitfire writing and scorn for nonsense, she is forcing universities to live up to their principles." Murray, an American Enterprise Institute scholar, said the book was "crammed with facts and numbers that universities go to great lengths to hide." Steele, a conservative author, wrote, "Not since Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind has a book so thoroughly exposed the damage done to American institutions—particularly universities—by modern liberalism's glib commitment to diversity."