Author and crime expert <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/heather-mac-donald" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Heather Mac Donald</a> said during an interview Tuesday night that recent acts of mass lawlessness in inner cities that have gone viral on social media are the direct result of the political Left&#8217;s demonization of law enforcement as &#8220;racist.&#8221;
Mac Donald made the remarks during an interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson where she also discussed her new <a href="https://www.amazon.com/When-Race-Trumps-Merit-Sacrifices/dp/1956007164" target="_blank" rel="noopener">book</a>, “When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives,” which is published by <a href="https://store.dailywire.com/collections/dw-books-1" target="_blank" rel="noopener">DW Books</a> and came out on Tuesday.
&#8220;So it does seem like these outbreaks of lawlessness and mob rule are the easiest kinds of crimes to stop,&#8221; Carlson said.
&#8220;Well, that would depend on believing in the police&#8217;s authority, and the elites have done everything they can possibly do to discredit legitimate police authority by calling it &#8216;racist,’” Mac Donald responded. &#8220;We are seeing civilization break down in front of our eyes. It&#8217;s a willed and voluntary break down, and it will continue and worsen until we stand up against the phony charge of racism, whether directed at the police, at medicine, or the arts, and start defending America&#8217;s civilizational inheritance.&#8221;
Mac Donald mocked the political Left&#8217;s claim that the lawlessness was the product of &#8220;starvation or deprivation or poverty.&#8221;
&#8220;These mobs are all organized on social media, the participants all have smartphones, that&#8217;s not my idea of starvation or deprivation,&#8221; she said.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
.<a href="https://twitter.com/HMDatMI?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@HMDatMI</a> to <a href="https://twitter.com/TuckerCarlson?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@TuckerCarlson</a>: “We are seeing civilization break down in front of our eyes&#8230;It will continue and worsen until we stand up against the phony charge of racism, whether directed at the police, medicine, or the arts, and&#8230;stop capitulating to the racial hustle.” <a href="https://t.co/HygB7aIj0e">pic.twitter.com/HygB7aIj0e</a>
&mdash; Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) <a href="https://twitter.com/realDailyWire/status/1648486727789735937?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 19, 2023</a></blockquote>
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When asked by Carlson why it seemed to be so hard for politicians to clean up the streets, Mac Donald said it&#8217;s because a lot of them are intimidated of being labeled a racist.
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&#8220;It&#8217;s very odd, because the Left says there&#8217;s no racial disparities in crime,&#8221; she said. &#8220;And yet, if somebody talks about crime, they&#8217;ll be accused sotto voce of being racist. So the Left actually knows something that it&#8217;s not letting on.&#8221;
&#8220;The fact is, is that law enforcement is not racist for having a disparate impact on black criminals,&#8221; she continued. &#8220;It has a disparate impact on black criminals, when it&#8217;s enforced in a color blind manner, because the black crime rate is so high. Who suffers from that black crime? Overwhelmingly black victims, and yet we&#8217;re not allowed to talk about those black victims because doing so means talking about black crime, and America turns its eyes away from the pathological inner city culture that gives us these mobs, that gives us these barbaric drive-by shootings, and that will tear down everything unless we stop capitulating to the racial hustle.&#8221;

Heather Mac Donald

Heather Mac Donald On Mass Acts Of Lawlessness: This Is What Happens When Leftists Call Police ‘Racist’

Crime

Law Enforcement

Tucker Carlson

U.S.

Heather Mac Donald ripped into how the media covers crime on The Ben Shapiro Show on Tuesday as she discussed her new book on equity.
Mac Donald&#8217;s <a href="https://www.amazon.com/When-Race-Trumps-Merit-Sacrifices/dp/1956007164" target="_blank" rel="noopener">book</a>, titled &#8220;When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives,” is published by <a href="https://store.dailywire.com/collections/dw-books-1" target="_blank" rel="noopener">DW Books</a> and came out on Tuesday.
Mac Donald&#8217;s book addresses the &#8220;elephant in the room,&#8221; arguing that dysfunctional inner-city culture, not &#8220;systemic racism&#8221; is what is hindering the progress of black Americans.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
.<a href="https://twitter.com/HMDatMI?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@HMDatMI</a>: “The media doesn’t give a damn about most black victims.”
Heather Mac Donald joins <a href="https://twitter.com/benshapiro?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@benshapiro</a> to discuss her brand new book, &quot;When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives.” <a href="https://t.co/8M1TYDnT2a">pic.twitter.com/8M1TYDnT2a</a>
&mdash; Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) <a href="https://twitter.com/realDailyWire/status/1648440305807421441?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 18, 2023</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
&#8220;That culture belittles academic achievement as ‘acting white,'&#8221; Mac Donald writes. &#8220;America turns its eyes away from this pathological culture and blames itself for phantom racism. We pretend that the reason for the lack of proportional representation in institution after institution is racist measures of achievement rather than vast academic and behavioral gaps. As a remedy for this alleged racism, we create double standards of accomplishment and behavior. But double standards help no one. They are condescending, and they are lethal.&#8221;
Shapiro and Mac Donald discussed Thursday&#8217;s shooting of Ralph Yarl, a 16-year-old black teenager shot and injured by an 84-year-old white man after ringing the doorbell of the wrong house in Kansas City. Yarl was trying to pick up his twin younger brothers but went to the wrong home.
The shooter has been charged with the equivalent of attempted murder. The district attorney said there was a &#8220;racial component&#8221; to the shooting. The shooter faces up to life in prison if convicted.
&#8220;This is a horrible shooting. The man should face some sort of criminal accountability, but it is not the way that black people die,&#8221; Mac Donald told Shapiro.
&#8220;Black people almost never die at the hands of whites. They die at the hands of other blacks, and the media doesn&#8217;t give a damn about that. It doesn&#8217;t give a damn about most black victims because it&#8217;s not willing to talk about black criminals,&#8221; the attorney and author continued.
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&#8220;Blacks, sadly, and this is a difficult thing to talk about, but they commit crime at vastly higher rates than any other group,&#8221; Mac Donald said.
The result of the criminal justice system often not enforcing the law against black Americans is &#8220;more black lives being lost,&#8221; she said.
Mac Donald also addressed the broader issue of the West &#8220;canceling itself&#8221; because of its &#8220;demographic past,&#8221; its traditions of music, art, science, and mathematics that came from white Europeans.
&#8220;Get over it. That&#8217;s not racist,&#8221; she said.
George Floyd&#8217;s death and the riots that followed during the summer of 2020 brought racism once again to the forefront of the political debate. Protesters were upset about police brutality but also &#8220;systemic racism,&#8221; the idea that America has widespread discrimination poisoning the ability of black Americans to be successful.
The &#8220;disparate impact&#8221; theory has been used to invalidate school discipline policies, bank lending standards, and written tests for first responders.
Now, however, Mac Donald&#8217;s book shows that &#8220;disparate-impact thinking is jeopardizing scientific progress, destroying public order, and poisoning the appreciation of art and culture. And the crusade against standards is based on a lie,&#8221; according to a press release promoting the release.

Heather Mac Donald on The Ben Shapiro Show

‘The Media Doesn’t Give A Damn About Most Black Victims’: Heather Mac Donald Talks New Equity Book On Ben Shapiro Show

Heather Mac Donald Talks New Equity Book On Ben Shapiro Show

Ben Shapiro

Media

Politics

Race

The Ben Shapiro Show

The following excerpt is taken from Heather Mac Donald&#8217;s new book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/When-Race-Trumps-Merit-Sacrifices/dp/1956007164/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1O8S3UD04SV6E&amp;keywords=heather+mac+donald&amp;qid=1681832109&amp;s=books&amp;sprefix=heather+mac+donald%2Cstripbooks%2C115&amp;sr=1-1" target="_blank" rel="noopener">When Race Trumps Merit</a> now available from <a href="https://store.dailywire.com/products/when-race-trumps-merit-by-heather-mac-donald" target="_blank" rel="noopener">DW Books</a>.
<h2>Medicine’s Racial Reckoning</h2>
The a priori truth that health disparities are necessarily the product of systemic racism has devalued basic science and encumbered medical research with red tape. The fight against cancer has been particularly affected.
Cancer grant applications must now specify who, among a lab’s staff, will enforce diversity mandates and how the lab plans to recruit underrepresented researchers and promote their careers. White and Asian oncologists are assumed to be part of the problem of black cancer mortality, not its solution, absent corrective measures. According to the NIH, leadership of cancer labs should match national or local demographics, whichever has a higher percentage of minorities. In Baltimore, which is over 60 percent black, only 10 percent of black eighth graders can read proficiently. Should Johns Hopkins’s comprehensive cancer center nevertheless have 60 percent black physician-administrators? 
Grant applicants seek the services of the burgeoning diversity-consulting profession to make sure that their proposals sound the right diversity notes. As with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Freeman Hrabowski scholarships, an insufficiently robust diversity plan means that a cancer research proposal will be rejected, regardless of its scientific merit. Discussions about how to beef up the diversity section of a grant proposal have become more important than discussions about tumor biology, reports a physician-scientist. “It is not easy summarizing how your work on cell signaling in nematodes applies to minorities currently living in your lab’s vicinity,” the researcher says. Mental energy spent solving that conundrum is mental energy not spent on science, he laments, since “thinking is always a zero-sum game.”
A lab’s diversity gauntlet has just begun, however. The NIH insists that participants in drug trials must also match national or local demographics. If a cancer center is in an area with few minorities, the lab must nevertheless present a plan for recruiting them into its study, regardless of their local unavailability. Genentech, the creator of lifesaving cancer drugs, held a national conference call with oncologists in April 2022 to discuss products in the research pipeline. Half of the call was spent on the problem of achieving diverse clinical trial enrollments, a participant reported. Genentech admitted to having run out of ideas.
There is no evidence that racist researchers are excluding minorities from drug trials on nonmedical grounds, nor has anyone presented a theory as to why they would. The barriers to such drug trial diversity include a higher incidence among blacks of disqualifying comorbidities, more challenging personal lives, and a suspicion of the medical profession (which that same profession constantly amplifies with its drumbeat about racism). Those barriers to drug-trial diversity are not recognized by grant evaluators, however.
In May 2022, a physician-scientist lost her NIH funding for a drug trial because the trial population did not contain enough blacks. The drug under review was for a type of cancer that blacks rarely get. So there were almost no black patients with that disease to enroll in the trial in the first place. It’s better, however, to foreclose development of a therapy that might help predominantly white cancer patients than to conduct a drug trial without black participants.
The diversity-driven requirement of racial proportionality in drug trials is perplexing, since diversity advocates insist that race is a social construct, without biological reality. Suggesting that genetic differences exist between racial groups will brand you a racist. The AMA’s Organizational Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Equity sneers that “much of medicine still looks for cultural, behavioral or even genetic explanations” to explain racial gaps in life expectancy. Such a focus rests on “discredited and racist ideas about biological differences between racial groups,” according to the AMA. In May 2022, the American Association of Pediatrics announced that it was eliminating “race-based” medicine, defined as including a patient’s race in assessments of some health risks. If race does not exist, as received wisdom now has it, then the racial makeup of clinical trials should not matter.
The idea that race is merely a social construct is anti-scientific, however. DNA analyses show that there are at least five distinguishable races. The refusal to acknowledge race is also anti-health. Blacks with sub-Saharan roots have a high rate of kidney disease, for example, thanks in part to a more frequent genetic mutation. Drug companies have sought a treatment for that mutation. The reaction to that research has been unhinged. A lecturer in ethics at Columbia University and author of the book Medical Apartheid told the New York Times in May 2022 that knowledge about the genetic variant might drive the medical establishment toward “a blame-the-victim approach signaling an inherent flaw in African Americans.” This is fictional. No one thinks that possessing a genetic mutation means that the possessor is inherently flawed.” The activists are terrified, however, that work in basic science will supplant the political crusade against white supremacy. They would rather stop medical progress than improve blacks’ quality of life, if doing the latter acknowledges biological reality.
Biological reality comes into play in another kidney-related area. A common blood test for kidney health understates healthy kidney function in black patients. Nephrologists therefore adjusted the test results for black patients to estimate their kidney function with greater accuracy. Then the activists showed up, arguing that this correction must be abolished. The American Society of Nephrology and the National Kidney Foundation announced that they no longer supported the separate reporting of the kidney function measure for black patients. The University of Pennsylvania health system, among others, proudly presented its changed reporting protocol as part of the fight against medical racism. A more complicated diagnostic formula was widely adopted. But no patient was damaged by the original, more straightforward formula, nor was that original formula based on racism.
This is an excerpt taken from Heather Mac Donald&#8217;s new book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/When-Race-Trumps-Merit-Sacrifices/dp/1956007164/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1O8S3UD04SV6E&amp;keywords=heather+mac+donald&amp;qid=1681832109&amp;s=books&amp;sprefix=heather+mac+donald%2Cstripbooks%2C115&amp;sr=1-1" target="_blank" rel="noopener">When Race Trumps Merit</a> now available from <a href="https://store.dailywire.com/products/when-race-trumps-merit-by-heather-mac-donald" target="_blank" rel="noopener">DW Books</a>. Used with permission. 
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. She is a recipient of the 2005 Bradley Prize. Her writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, and The New Criterion.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
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Heather Mac Donald Examines The Dangers Of Diversity Mandates In Medicine In New Book

Books

Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI)

Doctors

Racism

Readers Pass

Systemic Racism

Heather Mac Donald told <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/megyn-kelly">Megyn Kelly</a> that &#8220;whites have to stop apologizing&#8221; and warned that merit-based institutions are in jeopardy because of unfounded claims the country is racist.
During the Sirius XM &#8220;The Megyn Kelly Show&#8221; <a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/3VFIs4ZC4KWCoRErPY0IrG?si=mqMM0IVbSMqj_JihFFeHyQ">podcast</a> on Monday, the author of &#8220;<a href="https://www.amazon.com/When-Race-Trumps-Merit-Sacrifices/dp/1956007164">When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives</a>,&#8221; which is published by <a href="https://store.dailywire.com/collections/dw-books-1" target="_blank" rel="noopener">DW Books</a>, said the U.S. is committing &#8220;civilization suicide&#8221; by tearing itself apart over the &#8220;phony charge of racism.&#8221;
&#8220;The problem is a vast academic skills gap,&#8221; Mac Donald said, adding that imposing standards in education is not racist.
&#8220;And the elites in this country are terrified that this skills gap is never going to close and they make it taboo to discuss it,&#8221; she added. &#8220;America is tearing down every meritocratic institution on the phony charge of racism. It has to end.&#8221;
WATCH:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="Colleges Claim Racism is Behind Everything, and When Race Trumps Merit, with Heather Mac Donald" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/9MOLr0MD4-g?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>
&#8220;The culture in those [black] communities has to change,&#8221; Mac Donald said. &#8220;There&#8217;s a very terrible, destructive, self-destructive ideology in black communities that says that academic effort is acting white. So, if you are a black student who is studying, who is paying attention in class, you will be demeaned as somehow betraying your race.&#8221;
When asked about claims by race activists that these steps are necessary because of the injustice of the past and slavery in America, the author said she&#8217;s done her homework and is &#8220;absolutely heartbroken and appalled&#8221; by how &#8220;ugly America&#8217;s past was.&#8221;
&#8220;That is not our reality today,&#8221; Mac Donald said. &#8220;&#8230; We are a different country and racism is not the problem. Here&#8217;s the reality Megyn, black privilege. It&#8217;s not white privilege, it&#8217;s black privilege. The reality is being black today, in any mainstream institution confers an enormous advantage.&#8221;
&#8220;There is not a single law firm, a single bank, a single tech lab in Silicon Valley, a single science lab that&#8217;s not twisting itself into knots to try to find, hire and promote as many as remotely qualified blacks as possible,&#8221; she added. &#8220;White heterosexual males, it&#8217;s over for them. They are at the bottom of the heap.&#8221;
&#8220;As bad as our country was,&#8221; Mac Donald said, no one alive today owned slaves, and most white people yearn to be &#8220;post racial.&#8221;
&#8220;We are not systematically racist,&#8221; Mac Donald said. &#8220;But today there&#8217;s nothing that the outside world can do to make them [blacks] competitively qualified. You have to do the reading yourself. The only person who can put knowledge of arithmetics in your head is yourself.&#8221;
&#8220;There&#8217;s no amount of compensatory transfers or trying to pull white people down that is going to make you able to read better,&#8221; she added. &#8220;The effort has to come from within that home. And right now, whites have to stop apologizing, Megyn, it is all coming down &#8230; there is not a single meritocratic institution above all in the sciences and medicine that is not in the crosshairs.&#8221;
&#8220;Any institution that is not proportionally black is now vulnerable,&#8221; she added. And said this &#8220;absurd disparate impact&#8221; and canceling of things like advancement placement/honors classes is &#8220;civilization suicide.&#8221;
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/defund-the-police-movement-leading-to-increase-in-black-deaths-report-says">&#8216;DEFUND THE POLICE&#8217; Movement Leading To Increase In Black Deaths, Report Says</a>

Kelly-Mac Donald at 1.23.39 PM

‘Whites Have To Stop Apologizing’: Heather Mac Donald Tells Megyn Kelly Our Institutions Are ‘All Coming Down’

'Whites Have To Stop Apologizing': Heather Mac Donald Tells Megyn Kelly Our Institutions Are 'All Coming Down'

Celebrities

Education

Entertainment

George Floyd

Megyn Kelly

The Daily Wire

Efforts to demonize and defund law and order in America have led to an increase in crime in major cities across America, including an increase in deaths among African-Americans.
Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute and author of the 2016 best-seller “The War On Cops,” has looked at police data and news reports in major cities such as Chicago and New York and written <a href="https://www.city-journal.org/ferguson-effect-inner-cities">a report</a> detailing how violent crime has risen in the wake of racial protests.
Mac Donald wrote in 2014 about what she called the Ferguson Effect, an increase in violent crime following a wave of protests after the police shooting of Michael Brown. Back then, protests also denounced police across the country as racist en masse – and media and social elites supported the narrative. In 2015 and 2016, a spike in violent crime led to an additional 2,000 black homicide victims.
Mac Donald says the trend has started much quicker following the current round of protests and riots. “In Minneapolis,” she wrote, “shootings have more than doubled this year compared to last. Nearly half of all those shootings have occurred since George Floyd’s death, according to a Minneapolis Star Tribune <a href="https://www.startribune.com/surge-in-gun-violence-tests-minneapolis-leaders/571524202/">analysis</a>.”
Chicago and New York City have seen some of the worst increases in violent crime, according to Mac Donald:
<blockquote>In Chicago, 18 people were killed and 47 wounded in drive- and walk-by shootings <a href="https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2020/6/28/21305237/chicago-weekend-shootings-gun-violence-june-26-29-2020">last weekend</a>. The fatalities included a one-year-old boy riding in a car with his mother (the gunman drove up alongside and emptied his gun into the vehicle) and a 10-year-old girl struck in the head inside her home; a group of youth on the street outside her house had started shooting at another group of youth nearby. The previous weekend in Chicago, <a href="https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2020/6/20/21297470/chicago-fathers-day-weekend-shootings-homicide-gun-violence-june-19-22-104-shot">104 people were shot, 15 fatally</a>. The deceased included a three-year-old boy riding in a car with his father on Father’s Day—his gangbanger father was the intended victim—and a 13-year-old girl shot in her head in her home.
New York City’s homicide rate is at a <a href="https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/nycs-criminal-justice-system-is-imploding-nypd-boss-says-as-homicides-hit-5-year-high/2483376/">five-year high</a>; the number of shooting victims was up over 42 percent through June 21 compared with the same period in 2019. The number of shootings in the first three weeks of June was over twice that of the same period in 2019, making this June the city’s bloodiest in nearly a quarter century, according to the New York Times. At 4 A.M. last Sunday, a 30-year-old woman was shot in the head in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, at a house party. On Saturday afternoon, a man and a woman were shot to death outside a Brooklyn home. Early Friday morning, a 19-year-old girl was shot to death in the heart of Manhattan, near Madison Square Park, on East 26th Street.</blockquote>
Milwaukee, Mac Donald reported, has seen homicide increase by 132% and “more people have been killed in Baltimore than at this point in 2019, which ended with the highest homicide rate on record for that city.” Further, 78% of the homicide victims in Chicago are black, even though blacks make up less than a third of the city’s population.
Meanwhile, a handful of people in these cities have been killed by police, most of whom were shot after attacking or threatening police with guns or knives. Yet all over the country, police morale is down as protests and politicians continue to call for defunding departments, with some cities even introducing bills to do just that.
The Daily Wire, headed by bestselling author and popular podcast host Ben Shapiro, is a leading provider of conservative news, cutting through the mainstream media’s rhetoric to provide readers with the most important, relevant, and engaging stories of the day. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe"> member</a>.

Crime Scene

‘DEFUND THE POLICE’ Movement Leading To Increase In Black Deaths, Report Says

Police

In the latest edition of &#8220;The Rubin Report&#8221; podcast, two people I adore, Dave Rubin and Heather Mac Donald, dialogue about some of the great issues facing America. Interestingly, though both are secular, Dave opened the interview asking Heather about God and religion.
She began by saying that she is not conservative because of religion but because of her commitment to empirical truth. It is empirical truth that leads her to affirm, for example, &#8220;the necessity of the two-parent family&#8221; and &#8220;most traditional values.&#8221;
Heather is right that one cannot be committed to empirical truth and be a leftist (though one can be a conservative or a liberal). Left-wing assertions that men give birth; that America was founded in 1619 (when the first enslaved black was brought to the American colonies); that people can be lifted from poverty on a mass scale without capitalism; that there are no innate differences between men and women; that America is a racist nation; that women are paid less than men for the same type and amount of work because they are women; and innumerable other leftist assertions are all false.
But while a secular conservative may be committed to the two-parent family because of empirical truth, marriage and family are not &#8220;empirical truths&#8221; nearly as much as they are religious values. Few secular arguments to get married and/or have children are as compelling as religious ones. That&#8217;s why religious people are so much more likely to get married and have children.
Mac Donald said: &#8220;(P)eople who I respect enormously &#8230; whether it&#8217;s Dennis Prager or Michael Medved &#8230; are making the argument that you cannot have a moral society without a foundation of religious belief.&#8221;
That is precisely the argument nearly every founder of America made. Not all were Christ-centered Christians, but virtually every one believed that inalienable rights come from the Creator, and only from the Creator. And none (except perhaps Thomas Paine) believed that America could endure if it were to become a godless society.
Mac Donald: &#8220;Part of my resistance to this is simply I don&#8217;t find claims of petitionary prayer and the idea of a personal loving God consistent with what I see — what I call the daily massacre of the innocents. To me it&#8217;s a very hard claim to make that I should expect God to pay attention to my well-being when He&#8217;s willing to allow horrific things to happen to people far more deserving and innocent than I am. So, for me, it&#8217;s partly just a truth value. I cannot stomach what appears to me to be a patently false claim about a personal loving God.&#8221;
I agree with Heather&#8217;s premises but not with her conclusion. I have never believed that God has any reason to pay more attention to me than to any other innocent human being. And I, too, &#8220;cannot stomach&#8221; the &#8220;daily massacre of the innocents&#8221; — so much so that I have written how I find the commandment to love God the hardest commandment in the Bible.
But what I also cannot stomach is the thought of a universe in which the horrible suffering of innocents is never compensated by a good and just God: The good and the evil all die; the former receive no reward and the latter no punishment.
The problem of unjust suffering troubles every thinking believer. But the Jewish theologian Milton Steinberg offered a powerful response: &#8220;The believer in God has to account for unjust suffering; the atheist has to account for everything else.&#8221; Between the two, I would argue that the atheist&#8217;s burden is infinitely greater. And insurmountable.
Mac Donald: &#8220;(T)he idea of what started the universe — we can&#8217;t really answer that. I think to say, &#8216;God&#8217; — that&#8217;s just a placeholder for ignorance. That doesn&#8217;t help.&#8221;
Maybe we really can&#8217;t answer what started the universe. But, as Charles Krauthammer, a great secular conservative, said, &#8220;The idea that this universe always existed, that it created itself ex nihilo — I mean, talk about the violation of human rationality. That, to me, is off the charts.&#8221; God, therefore, is not &#8220;just a placeholder for ignorance.&#8221; Since science can never and will never answer the question &#8220;Why is there anything?&#8221; attributing the origins of the universe to an intelligent force (which we call &#8220;God&#8221;) strikes me as the most rational explanation.
Rubin: &#8220;I might have to get you in here with Prager.&#8221;
Mac Donald: &#8220;I&#8217;d love to.&#8221;
I&#8217;d love to, too.
Mac Donald: &#8220;Where are we all headed? What is the meaning of life? To me, anybody who claims &#8230; he doesn&#8217;t find meaning in life when there is Mozart and Haydn — to invoke a Dennis Prager favorite — or Beethoven or John Milton or Aeschylus or Anthony Trollope —&#8221;
Rubin: &#8220;Or just waking up with purpose for whatever you do.&#8221;
Mac Donald: &#8220;Exactly &#8230; trying to do the best you can do. I don&#8217;t find life meaningless for one second.&#8221;
Haydn began every manuscript with the Latin words &#8220;in nomine Domini,&#8221; &#8220;in the name of the Lord,&#8221; and ended his manuscripts with the words &#8220;Lauds Deo,&#8221; &#8220;Praise be to God.&#8221; I would ask Heather and other secular conservatives: Do you or don&#8217;t you identify the steep deterioration of the arts with the death of God and religion? Is a secular society capable of achieving artistic achievement equal to that which was accomplished in tribute to God?
As for meaning, you — and I — may find meaning every day in trying to do the best we can do, or in great works of art. But, as I know you will agree, that does not mean life has any ultimate meaning. If there is no God, we are nothing more than self-conscious stellar dust. And stellar dust has no meaning.
We really need to continue this dialogue. In the meantime, for what it&#8217;s worth, I want to say to both of you, who do so much for our country, God bless you.
Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. His latest book, published by Regnery in May 2019, is &#8220;The Rational Bible,&#8221; a commentary on the book of Genesis. His film, &#8220;No Safe Spaces,&#8221; came to theaters fall 2019. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.