In recent days, The War on Cops author Heather Mac Donald was the target of multiple campus protests by students and the Black Lives Matter movement. The most recent protest took place on April 6^th at Claremont McKenna College (watch video of the protest here), where Mac Donald was invited to speak about her new book.

Photo of Claremont McKenna College Library

As word traveled about the talk, a group created a Facebook event called “Shut Down the Anti-Black Fascist Heather Mac Donald” calling for a protest outside of the venue where Mac Donald was to speak. The Facebook event even contained a photo-shopped photo of Mac Donald, featuring devil horns.

In her account for City Journal, Mac Donald wrote that the mob, which grew from 100 to an estimated 300 students, was “chanting and drumming” and the silhouettes of the students could be seen as they “pounded on the windows.” On Fox & Friends she said, “they surrounded the building where I was supposed to speak, prevented any students from entering…They’re using brute force to prevent other people from hearing a point of view that is basically not allowed on campuses.” Ultimately, Mac Donald delivered her speech to an empty room via livestream (with 250 watching), but before finishing her speech the event organizers decided to end the event. Mac Donald was then escorted by police officers through the kitchen and out a side door.

On April 5^th a similar event happened at the UCLA campus—but this time Mac Donald was able to deliver her speech. During the Q&A portion of the event, however, more disruptions broke out. When Fox & Friends asked Mac Donald just what exactly her “outrageous” point of view was that made the students react so harshly, Mac Donald stated:

“There is no government agency more dedicated to the proposition that black lives matter than the police and the police have saved tens of thousands of minority males over the last two decades thanks to constitutional proactive policing.”

Mac Donald expounded on this in her City Journal article, writing that she is “trying to give voice to the thousands of law-abiding minority residents of high-crime areas who support the police and are desperate for more law-enforcement protection.”

The College Fix reported that when Claremont Independent editor, Steven Glick questioned protesters on why they opposed Mac Donald “not a single one could point to an issue they had with her work.” Though one protester at UCLA screamed expletives and shouted, “I don’t trust your numbers.”

Mac Donald said that the students believe “a certain point of view is a form of violence and they are then entitled to use violence to shut it down.” The Wall Street Journal’s Bill McGurn agrees with Mac Donald writing:

“[There is] a generation of students indulged in the view that they should never have to hear an opinion different from their own. How much easier it is to bang on windows, block an entryway and drop your F-bombs than, say, engage the formidable Ms. Mac Donald in genuine argument.”

On The O’Reilly factor, Mac Donald called the student protest “the very definition of fascist behavior” and pointed to the ironic double standard that if the conservative right were to engage in the same behavior, the term “fascist” would be “thrown around promiscuously.”

The protests on the UCLA and Claremont McKenna campuses ultimately failed to silence Heather Mac Donald and her position on the Black and Blue Lives Matter movements. Instead, as Claremont McKenna’s Vice President of Student Affairs Hiram Chodosh wrote, they “effectively amplified it to a much larger audience.”

For more from Heather Mac Donald, read The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe

This feature is by Vanessa Silverio, an intern at Encounter Books.