Fearless Thinking In An Age Of Conformity

America is in the midst of a cultural crisis. Protests over police shootings have led to civil unrest, major corporations are proclaiming their social and political commitments, and the press and social media companies sometimes seem to be tipping the scales of our national conversation. In this atmosphere, Heather Mac Donald, Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, has carried the standard of free—and fearless—thinking, and City Journal, edited by Brian C. Anderson, has been a home for such independent thought. Mac Donald has criticized the pernicious argument that bedrock American institutions, especially its police departments, are irredeemably racist. Her recent piece in City Journal, “Conformity to a Lie,” identified elite academic institutions as a source of this argument, not to mention a place of stifling intellectual conformity. This conformity is not confined to college campuses, as Mac Donald discovered when ac talk she delivered defending law enforcement was pulled from YouTube, only to be restored under age-appropriate content restriction.