Good afternoon. Welcome to our virtual event, Fearless Thinking in an Age of Conformity.

I'm Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal, and I'm excited to talk today with Heather

McDonald, the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Our country is in the midst of a cultural crisis.

Protests over police shootings have led to civil unrest and calls from activists, academics,

and celebrities and journalists to defund police departments. Social media companies

and mainstream press are increasingly unwilling to give a fair hearing to arguments that they disagree with.

In this atmosphere, free and fearless thinking is especially valuable.

Heather McDonald has carried that standard in the City Journal's pages, and beyond, she's criticized the pernicious argument that key American institutions,

including the nation's police departments, are irredeemably racist. Her essay in the summer issue of City

Journal, conformity to a lie, identified elite academic institutions as a source of this argument

in places of stifling intellectual conformity. This conformity is not confined to college campuses,

however, as Heather recently discovered, when a talk she delivered defending law enforcement was pulled from YouTube,

only to be restored under age-appropriate content restriction.

In short, Heather McDonald's been doing invaluable work, and again, we're glad to have the opportunity to talk about it with her today.

Now, throughout the conversation, please feel free to submit your questions on whatever platform you're watching us on,

and we'll try to work in as many as feasible.

So Heather, thanks very much for joining me today.

Thank you so much, Brian. It's an honor to be with you.

Now, in your essay, which I just mentioned for City Journal's summer issue,

you detail the academic response to the death at police hands of George Floyd in Minneapolis in late May,

an awful incident that has set off months of urban protests,

...