Ave, Heather Mac Donald!

Two bloggers I respect have, independently, cited this Heather Mac Donald article, of which I provide an excerpt below. Mac Donald (sic: there's a space between the "Mac" and the "Donald" when she writes her name) came into the national public consciousness when she began writing about the Black Lives Matter movement, using logic and statistics, as opposed to stylistic flair and emotionalism, to make the point that the BLM movement is based on a false premise, to wit: that cops are most likely to shoot (and kill) black people. The stats don't actually bear this out: cops are, in fact, more likely to shoot (and kill) white and Latino people. Mac Donald's point was that BLM would do better to focus on the true statistical problem, which is black-on-black violence, which occurs at a much higher frequency than violence perpetrated by the police.

The article to which I linked above features Mac Donald's speculation as to how leftists reconcile the desire for an open-borders immigration policy with the idea, also propounded by leftists, that the US is a hellhole. Here's the excerpt that both of the above-mentioned bloggers cited, plus a little extra:

But why should social-justice warriors want to subject these potential asylees to the horrors of America? In coming to the U.S., if you believe the dominant feminist narrative, the female aliens would simply be exchanging their local violent patriarchy for a new one. Indeed, it should be a mystery to these committed progressives why any Third World resident would seek to enter the United States. Not only is rape culture pervasive in the U.S., but the very lifeblood of America is the destruction of “black bodies,” in the words of media star Ta-[Nehisi] Coates. Surely, a Third World person of color would be better off staying in his home country, where he is free from genocidal whiteness and the murderous legacy of Western civilization and Enlightenment values.

But the same left-wing establishment that in the morning rails against American oppression of an ever-expanding number of victim groups in the afternoon denounces the U.S. for not giving unlimited access to foreign members of those same victim groups. In their open-borders afternoon mode, progressives paint the U.S. as the only source of hope and opportunity for low-skilled, low-social-capital Third Worlders; a place obligated by its immigration history to take in all comers, forever. In their America-as-the-font-of-all-evil-against-females-and-persons-of-color morning mode, progressives paint the U.S. as the place where hope and opportunity die under a tsunami of misogyny and racism.

Which reality do progressives actually believe? They likely hold both mutually exclusive concepts in their heads simultaneously, unaware of the contradiction, toggling smoothly between one and the other according to context. But both claims cannot be true.

I encourage you to read the rest. It's a fairly short article.