Meghan's guest this week is author, legal scholar, and Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald, whose fearless reporting on cultural sacred cows has long made her essential reading. Meghan has followed Heather's work for nearly two decades and brought her on to confront two complex issues where dominant public narratives frequently collide with reality.
Together, they look at the recent high-profile sexual assault allegations at Cornell University alongside the escalating crisis of street homelessness in major American cities. Beneath both topics lies a troubling common thread: the tendency of media and institutional bureaucracies to ignore inconvenient facts in favor of ideological storylines.
In this conversation, they examine:
The Cornell Rape Narrative vs. Initial Facts: How omitted text messages, campus consent bureaucracy, and selective media coverage distorted the timeline and facts of a controversial fraternity encounter.
The Reality of Street Homelessness: Why housing-first policies and harm-reduction strategies routinely fail to address the root drivers of severe addiction, mental illness, and shelter resistance.
Institutional Incentive Structures: How both the campus rape bureaucracy and the vagrancy advocacy industry rely on perpetuating crises to sustain their funding and authority.
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Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor to City Journal, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and a widely published journalist. She is the author of several influential books on criminal justice, immigration, campus culture, and higher education, including The Diversity Delusion and When Race Trumps Merit. You can follow her work and commentary on X.
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