Heather Mac Donald and "the Pursuit of Equity"

 

Some readers describe Ann Coulter as a flame-thrower, and her columns are always provocative, whether you agree with her or not.  However, at TakiMag she’s just reviewed Heather Mac Donald’s book, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives. And the review is excellent – and informative:

“No Biggie, Just the End of Civilisation”

. . . It seems that in the hysteria that followed George Floyd’s death in 2020, we agreed to destroy all of Western civilization — law, music, art, education, policing, science and medicine — to make up for black people not doing well on standardized tests.

Mac Donald cites not hundreds but thousands of institutions that have flung aside standards in order to more fully dedicate themselves to the sole, driving purpose of our nation: boosting black people’s self-esteem.

And her review concludes:

Luckily, learning to identify and treat disease isn’t such a big deal at today’s medical schools, anyway. Instead, the faculty are charged with teaching about “systems of power, privilege and oppression.” More than half of the top 50 medical schools now require students to take courses in systemic racism, Mac Donald notes. I’m sure that will be a huge relief when doctors miss your brain tumor.

In 2021, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute announced that it would spend $2 billion … to find a cure for brain cancer? Parkinson’s disease? Heart disease? NO!!! The $2 billion would go to promoting “diversity and inclusion in science.”

In 2022, the National Cancer Institute, funded by you, taxpayer, decided to change its mission from conquering cancer — and really, who cares about that? FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS! — to guess what? Yes!!! Promoting diversity! Instead of Outstanding Investigator Awards being granted solely on the basis of merit, the gender and race of the researchers would have to be considered.

All this has done wonders for the morale of doctors. Mac Donald quotes one cancer researcher: “It’s the end of the road for me as a Jewish male doctor.” A UCLA doctor told her that the smartest undergraduates in science labs are saying, “Now that I see what is happening in medicine, I will do something else.”

In response to this dystopic future, Mac Donald asked an oncologist, “When would white and Asian male scientists fight back? How much longer would they continue to allow their hard work and accomplishments to be disparaged and sidelined?”

He emailed back: “We value our jobs. We need our jobs. Our peers will turn on us. Speak out, lose job forever, be quickly forgotten and abandoned.”

That’s why, Mac Donald says, it falls to the rest of us to never shut up about the tearing down of standards, to put forth “unapologetic defense(s) of color-blind standards,” and to “relentlessly provide the data that explain the lack of racial proportionality in meritocratic institutions.”

To paraphrase Orwell: If there is hope, it must lie in the uncancelable.

Read the whole column here.

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Civilization in the Danger Zone

 

Darlene Casella's posting links to a documentary this blogger has not seen, but it looks like one that we expect to watch and review here.  Here’s Darlene Casella at American Thinker on Civilization in the Danger Zone:

Gloria Greenfield's potent documentary, Civilization in the Danger Zone, explores Western civilization and what happens when crucial components are targeted for destruction.  The film brings together scholars and guiding lights of conservatism who share razor-sharp insights about the critical interconnectedness of God, family, and nation, which are necessary to maintain Western civilization in the world.

When one's sex or skin color or political outlook is more important than competence, intelligence, or character, a slippery slope of value erosion is created.  This paradigm is a precursor to communism and anarchy, the evil opposites of Western civilization.

For 65 minutes, the individual narrations of 23 celebrated intellectuals flow together.  They tell a compelling story about the targeted destruction of the Western concept of civilized society and behavior.  The dangers to Western civilization are dismaying, yet the speakers bring finesse and charm to their delivery. . . .

Read the full column here. Among the “celebrated intellectuals” whose names you may recognize are Larry P. Arnn, Frank Gaffney, Victor Davis Hanson, Heather Mac Donald, Christopher Rufo, and Carol Swain.

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Mac Donald: The Corruption of Medicine

 

Heather Mac Donald is a favorite of mine.  In her most recent column at City Journal, she comments on “The Corruption of Medicine”:

The post–George Floyd racial reckoning has hit the field of medicine like an earthquake. Medical education, medical research, and standards of competence have been upended by two related hypotheses: that systemic racism is responsible both for racial disparities in the demographics of the medical profession and for racial disparities in health outcomes. Questioning those hypotheses is professionally suicidal. Vast sums of public and private research funding are being redirected from basic science to political projects aimed at dismantling white supremacy. The result will be declining quality of medical care and a curtailment of scientific progress.

Virtually every major medical organization—from the American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC) to the American Association of Pediatrics—has embraced the idea that medicine is an inequity-producing enterprise. The AMA’s 2021 Organizational Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Equity is virtually indistinguishable from a black studies department’s mission statement. The plan’s anonymous authors seem aware of how radically its rhetoric differs from medicine’s traditional concerns. The preamble notes that “just as the general parlance of a business document varies from that of a physics document, so too is the case for an equity document.” (Such shaky command of usage and grammar characterizes the entire 86-page tome, making the preamble’s boast that “the field of equity has developed a parlance which conveys both [sic] authenticity, precision, and meaning” particularly ironic.)

. . .

And so medical schools and medical societies are discarding traditional standards of merit in order to alter the demographic characteristics of their profession.  . . .

Read Ms. Mac Donald’s full article here.  Her sad conclusion: “The guardians of science have turned on science itself.”

Exit question: What criteria would you use to decide on which doctor to choose for your open-heart surgery?

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Now it's classical music: Denounce Putin or Be Blacklisted

 

And now compelled speech is canceling classical music.  Heather Mac Donald is a favorite of mine, and even if classical music is not your thing, you’ll probably know that canceling a performance of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture is a stupid way to virtue-signal any solidarity you may have with the Ukraine or opposition to Putin.  Ms. Mac Donald published yesterday at City Journal, and here’s her opener:

Compelled speech is becoming routine in academia. On campuses, faculty candidates for hiring and tenure increasingly must attest to their dedication to diversity to be considered for a job or a promotion. At least one university requires professors to post a “land acknowledgement”—a statement declaring that the space being used was originally the habitation of indigenous people—on their syllabus page.

Now the classical music establishment is adopting that same norm. Russian musicians are being asked to condemn President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine to retain jobs and performing engagements in the West. Staying above the fray is not an option, and denouncing the war will not ward off cancellation. Russian musicians must criticize Putin by name or be blacklisted.

Classical music’s recent self-abasement for its “whiteness” laid the groundwork for this presumptive group guilt. Since the George Floyd race riots in May and June 2020, directors of orchestras, opera companies, and conservatories have lambasted their own field for its historical demographics, said to be inextricably linked to racism. Music critics have sneered at Beethoven and other composers for having allegedly leveraged their whiteness to achieve undeserved acclaim. Mea culpas and promises of fealty to Black Lives Matter have become de rigeuer in mission statements and fundraising pitches. Now these coerced confessions are demanded of a subset of musicians whose Russianness makes them as suspect as whiteness does the entire Caucasian population. Even Russian music itself faces a political litmus test.

Ms. Mac Donald goes on to cite chapter-and-verse on the numerous cancellations worldwide of Russian-born musicians, including the cancellation of superstar Anna Netrebko’s upcoming appearances at The Metropolitan Opera -- and even dead composers such as Tchaikovsky.  Madness.  Full article is here.  

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The lockdowns simply didn’t work

 

Brad Palumbo at FEE (Foundation for Economic Education - h/t Instapundit) confirms what many of us figured out maybe a month into the lockdowns:

We Just Got Even More Proof that
Stay-At-Home Orders Lethally Backfired

A new study finds that lockdown orders didn’t reduce overall mortality, and may have even increased it.

Life under lockdown was hard for all of us. From economic destruction to social isolation, the costs of restrictive government policies intended to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 have been steep. But now, yet another study suggests that the benefits wrought by our collective sacrifice were negligible at best—and that stay-at-home orders may even have increased overall mortality.  

In a new paper, economists from the University of Southern California and the RAND Corporation examined the effectiveness of “shelter-in-place” (SIP) mandates, aka stay-at-home orders, using data from 43 countries and all 50 US states. The experts analyze not just deaths from COVID-19, but “excess deaths,” a measure that compares overall deaths from all causes to a historical baseline. 

The authors explain that lockdown orders may have had lethal unintended consequences in their own right, such as increased drug overdoses, worsened mental health problems, increased child abuse, deadly delays in non-COVID medical care, and more. So, to find out whether stay-at-home orders truly helped more than they hurt, examining excess deaths, not just pandemic outcomes, is key. 

The results aren’t pretty. 

“We fail to find that shelter-in-place policies saved lives,” the authors report. Indeed, they conclude that in the weeks following the implementation of these policies, excess mortality actually increases—even though it had typically been declining before the orders took effect. And across all countries, the study finds that a one-week increase in the length of stay-at-home policies corresponds with 2.7 more excess deaths per 100,000 people.

 

. . .

Read more here.

Flashback:  In July 2020. this blog linked to Heather Mac Donald’s Imprimis article “Four Months of Unprecedented Government Malfeasance”;  click here.

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Heather Mac Donald on crime, race and policing

photo credit: City Journal 

John Hinderaker at PowerLine announces an event with Heather Mac Donald tomorrow Jul-30 at noon central / 1 pm EST.  I’ll post the link (probably  later tomorrow) that will let you watch and listen at your leisure.

AMERICA’S TOP EXPERT DEFENDS THE POLICE

Thursday, day after tomorrow, at Noon Central, Heather Mac Donald, the nation’s premier expert on the intersection of crime, race and policing, will deliver the definitive smackdown of the anti-police myths that not just liberals, but corporate America, sports teams, and many Republicans have bought into. The truth is that there is no “systemic” racism in American policing. Heather’s data-rich presentation will make that clear.

How do I know that Heather will lay waste to the mythology of the Left? I’ve seen the script. The data are overwhelming. Contrary to popular belief, blacks are not “over-represented” in “police shootings,” the vast majority of which are praiseworthy. On the contrary, using crime data as the guide, they are under-represented.

There is much more, which you won’t want to miss. To see our event live, go here to register. The event is free. Registration means you will get email reminders, but anyone can watch the event live on American Experiment’s YouTube channel or Facebook page, and it will be archived for a long to come on YouTube, Facebook, the American Experiment site, and more.

Hope to see you on Thursday. It should be a dynamite event.

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Heather Mac Donald on government failures: lockdowns and riots

                       

One of our free subscriptions is to Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.  In the latest issue, Heather Mac Donald just published “Four Months of Unprecedented Government Malfeasance” and it is now available online.  She is addressing the unnecessary and arbitrary shutdown due to COVID-19, as well as the passive, not to say complicit, government role with the Black Lives Matter-fueled rioting. 

Over the last four months, Americans have lived through what is arguably the most consequential period of government malfeasance in U.S. history. Public officials’ overreaction to the novel coronavirus put American cities into a coma; those same officials’ passivity in the face of widespread rioting threatens to deliver the coup de grâce. Together, these back-to-back governmental failures will transform the American polity and cripple urban life for decades.

Before store windows started shattering in the name of racial justice, urban existence was already on life support, thanks to the coronavirus lockdowns. Small businesses—the restaurants and shops that are the lifeblood of cities—were shuttered, many for good, leaving desolate rows of “For Rent” signs on street after street in New York City and elsewhere. Americans huddled in their homes for months on end, believing that if they went outside, death awaited them.

This panic was occasioned by epidemiological models predicting wildly unlikely fatalities from the coronavirus.

On March 30, the infamous Imperial College London model predicted 2.2 million deaths in the U.S. by September 1, absent government action. That prediction was absurd on its face, given the dispersal of the U.S. population and the fact that China’s coronavirus death toll had already levelled off at a few thousand. The authors of that study soon revised it radically downwards.

Too late. It had already become the basis for the exercise of unprecedented government power. California was the first state to lock down its economy and confine its citizens to their homes; eventually almost every other state would follow suit, under enormous media pressure to do so.

Never before had public officials required millions of lawful businesses to shut their doors, throwing tens of millions of people out of work. They did so at the command of one particular group of experts—those in the medical and public health fields—who viewed their mandate as eliminating one particular health risk with every means put at their disposal.

If the politicians who followed their advice weighed a greater set of considerations, balancing the potential harm from the virus against the harm from the shutdowns, they showed no sign of it. Instead, governors and mayors started rolling out one emergency decree after another to terminate economic activity, seemingly heedless of the consequences.

. . .

The full essay is here.  [Note: my only criticism of MacDonald’s essay is that she implies that the behavior of the police officer who restrained George Floyd was “grotesquely callous and contrary to sound tactics.” However, based on the police complaint, the medical examiner’s report with toxicology report, and reasonable analysis by Clarice Feldman, Floyd died of a heart attack while in police custody; the neck restraint was consistent with police training in Minneapolis when an officer is trying to prevent a suspect exhibiting drug-related “excited delirium syndrome” from inflicting injury on himself.]

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Resist the lockdown

cartoon credit: leadersedge.com

Heather MacDonald hits the nail on the head, as she always does.  Her column at Spectator USA (“Where are the deaths?: The drum beat to halt the re-openings gets louder by the day. It should be resisted”) begins:

The coronavirus doomsayers could not even wait until the fall for the apocalyptic announcements of the dreaded second wave. Because the red states recklessly loosened their lockdowns, we are now told, the US is seeing a dangerous spike in coronavirus cases. ‘EXPERTS SKETCH GLOOMY PICTURE OF VIRUS SPREAD: FAUCI TELLS OF “DISTURBING” WAVE, WITH A VACCINE MONTHS AWAY,’ read the front-page lead headline in the New York Times on Wednesday. ‘VIRUS SPREAD AKIN TO “FOREST FIRE”’ read another front page headline in the Los Angeles Times on Monday, quoting Michael Osterholm, one of the media’s favorite public health experts. Osterholm had told NBC’s Meet the Press: ‘I’m actually of the mind right now — I think this is more like a forest fire. I don’t think that this is going to slow down.’

The ‘this’ is an uptick in daily new cases from 19,002 on June 9 to 38,386 on June 24. The high to date in new daily cases was on April 24 — 39,072. Since April 24, the daily case count started declining, then began rising again after around June 9. What virtually every fear-mongering story on America’s allegedly precarious situation leaves out, however, is the steadily dropping daily death numbers — from a high of 2,693 on April 21 to 808 on June 24. That April high was driven by New York City and its environs; those New York death numbers have declined, but they have not been replaced by deaths in the rest of the country. This should be good news. Instead, it is no news.

. . .

There are no crises in hospital capacity anywhere in the country. Nursing homes, meat-packing plants, and prisons remain the main sources of new infections. Half the states are seeing cases decline or hold steady. Case counts are affected by more testing; the positive infection rate captured by testing is declining. The current caseload is younger, which is a good thing. The more people who have been infected and who recover, the more herd immunity is created. Meanwhile, daily deaths from heart disease and cancer — about 3,400 a day combined — go ignored in the press.

But the drum beat to halt the still far too tentative reopenings gets louder by the day. It should be resisted. The lockdowns were a mistake the first time around; to reimpose them would be disastrous for any remaining hope of restoring our economy. The damage that has been done to people’s livelihoods and future prosperity will continue to outweigh the damage done by the coronavirus. The only vaccine against poverty and resulting despair is a robust economy. 

Read the full column here.

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Continue the lockdown or re-open?

photo credit: Times of India

Once again, Heather Mac Donald is a voice of reason during the destructive lockdown. Her article appeared in The Hill the other day, and here’s part of it:

Who has the burden of proof regarding the economic lockdowns: Those who argue for continuing them or those who want to lift them?  

. . .

. . .both sides of the lockdown debate are motivated by public health concerns. Pace [Gov. Andrew] Cuomo, his ornately complicated reopening plan does have a trade-off. Lives are being lost to the lockdown, a toll that will mount the longer the economy remains shuttered. Some doctors estimate that the closure of hospitals to non-coronavirus cases and the reluctance of patients to burden 911 have increased mortality as much as the virus. The global depression will devastate life expectancies in the less-developed world. Overdose deaths and suicides brought on by joblessness and loss of hope will rise, as more and more businesses fold permanently.  

The rhetoric of lockdown proponents is growing more apocalyptic. “A Virus Tightens Its Deadly Grip” announced the lead print headline in Wednesday’s New York Times — even as the data keep reinforcing the case against universal shutdown. Infection outbreaks are occurring in highly specific locales, not universally: nursing homes, meatpacking plants and prisons. Deaths are tragically concentrated in the former.   

. . .

The demographics of COVID-19 allow for a targeted response. Nursing homes and all congregate facilities must be kept immaculately clean and protected. Over the long term, Americans will need to rethink how they care for elderly parents and how much they are willing to pay for such care. But if the proponents of universal lockdowns had to prove the case for continuing to destroy the complex web of transactions by which human beings flourish, the economy would reopen and millions of livelihoods would be saved. 

Ms. Mac Donald’s full analysis is here.  Highly recommended.

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The costs of the COVID-19 lockdown

Heather Mac Donald at American Greatness asks all the right questions:

More than a dozen governors extended their economic shutdown orders recently into May and beyond. Those officials should have publicly addressed the following questions first:

• How many coronavirus deaths do you expect to avert by the shut-down extension?
• What will your state’s economy look like after another month of enforced stasis?
• How many workers will have lost their jobs?
• How many businesses will have closed for good?
• How many of your state’s young residents, seeking employment for the first time, will be unable to find it?

Instead, the announcements of the prolonged shutdown were representative of government decision-making during the coronavirus crisis: opaque, lacking in criteria for measuring success and failure, and bereft of any attempt to measure the benefits of mitigating one particular health problem against the costs—including other health problems. . . . 

She concludes:

The focus on saving “just one life” from the coronavirus, as Cuomo put it in March, to the exclusion of all other considerations likely will prove a catastrophic failure of policymaking. The devastation to individuals’ ability to flourish or even survive may soon become irreversible. Every scientific model used to justify these economic death sentences has been discredited. But even if those models were proven reliable, government decision-making must turn toward opening up. Officials must be made to justify, through a transparent analysis of costs and benefits, all further mandates to prevent people from working. Otherwise, there may be nothing recognizable as our economy to return to, with a resulting cost in human life and well-being that will match anything the coronavirus could inflict.

Ms. Mac Donald’s full article (“The Deadly Costs of Extended Shutdown Orders”) is here.  All good reasons to Open Ohio Now.

Details of the Open Ohio Now rally in Columbus 

on Saturday, April 25, are here.

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