Heather Lynn Mac Donald (born November 23, 1956) is an American conservative political commentator, essayist, attorney, and author. She is known for her pro-police views and her 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." Early life Heather Mac Donald was born in Los Angeles, California, the daughter of Robert (an attorney) and Elouise MacDonald. She added the space to her surname independently. In 1978, she graduated from Yale University with a BA summa cum laude in English. After receiving a Mellon Fellowship from Yale, she attended Clare College, Cambridge, earning an MA in English. While at Cambridge she also studied in Italy through a Cambridge study grant. In 1985, she graduated with a Juris Doctor degree from Stanford University Law School. After graduating from Stanford, Mac Donald clerked for Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and was subsequently an attorney-advisor in the Office of the General Counsel of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and a volunteer with the Natural Resources Defense Council. Employment She is a Thomas W. Smith Fellow of the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of the institute's City Journal. Positions Mac Donald refers to herself as a secular conservative. She has argued that conservatism is superior to liberalism by virtue of the ideas alone, and that religion should not affect the argument and is unnecessary for conservatism. Mac Donald maintains that conservative values like small government, self-reliance and liberty can be defended without "recourse to invisible deities or the religions that exalt them." She has testified on criminal justice and the deincarceration movement before the US Senate Judiciary Committee, has testified before the Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights of the US House Committee on the Judiciary, and has advocated positions on numerous subjects including victimization, philanthropy, immigration reform, crime prevention, racism, racial profiling, black incarceration, rape, effect of two parents on crime, politics, welfare, and matters pertaining to cities and academia. Mac Donald has criticized welfare and philanthropic institutions such as the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation for suggesting that welfare is a right; in particular, she has criticized welfare because "generations have grown up fatherless and dependent". She has written that welfare programs serve as a "dysfunction enabler" and that food