Welcome to the Megan Kelly show, your home for open, honest and provocative conversations.

Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly. Welcome to the Megan Kelly show. Today, Heather McDonald.

Oh, I don't know if you've read Heather McDonald, but if you haven't, you must. The woman's got facts.

She has done her homework and her research and you look at her academic history. That explains it.

That's I guess how one gets into Yale for one's BA and Cambridge for one's masters and Stanford for one's JD.

She's a lawyer too. So very, very smart woman. What's interesting about her is she just eight. Yes, she has data, but B.

She is she comes from things from just a new perspective. You'll hear in this interview like she she's going to come at things from areas where you didn't expect her to come from.

And you learn from Heather, you hear a different point of view, right when that you don't hear from every talking point or talking head on cable news or you know the normal journals you go to.

Anyway, so loved this discussion. I was planning on doing this whole thing with her on cops. We didn't even get to cops. We didn't even get to it because we had so much to go over. Anyway, I know you're going to find the interview fascinating and Heather fascinating.

She's the Thomas W Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute. She writes for city journal, which you know I love among other places. And she's written several amazing, amazing books, including the diversity delusion from 2018, which I recommend.

The war on cops 2016 also recommend our cops racist 2010. Can you believe we didn't get to cops so much to go over, but it's a whole other show.

We did get to so much else going on in the news and we'll start it in 60 seconds.

Heather, McDonald, I haven't been this excited since Douglas Murray came on.

Oh man, well, that's a little scary. We'll put Douglas Murray out of our minds for now. Thank you so much for having me on.

Let's start here. I read a really great piece by Wilford Riley in tablet magazine yesterday. And he called it the assault on empiricism.

And this is a subtitle from crime to climate change, the hostility of movements to data is making it impossible to address real world problems. He's talking about how we're living in a post truth world.

And how it's really affecting our ability to make important decisions and have important discussions on things that matter from COVID to crime.

You've been railing about this too. There are actual data that we can consult to solve a lot of our problems when it doesn't line up with quote the narrative. We ignore it.

So let's start there and on COVID because even though you're a conservative and you you read a lot of stuff that conservatives love, you're taking on both sides and their refusal to not get hysterical when it comes to COVID disinformation. Can you explain?

For a while, it seemed like progressives had cornered the market on hysterical anti-rational policymaking for the majority of the COVID period.

We have seen the biggest failure of policymaking in American history. Our leaders have refused to balance costs and benefits. They have focused monomaniacally on one kind of risk, which is the risk from COVID.

We're ignoring the costs of lockdowns on much more serious aspects of human life such as child development, the very possibility of economic activity and the creation of economic and human capital.

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