On the West & the “hermeneutics of suspicion.”
Editors’ note: The following is an edited version of remarks delivered at The New Criterion’s gala on April 24, 2025, honoring Heather Mac Donald with the twelfth Edmund Burke Award for Service to Culture and Society.
I would like to thank The New Criterion for this generous honor—hugely undeserved, I would say, but who am I to question Editor and Publisher Roger Kimball?
Throughout 2024, you see, Roger spoke confidently about the outcome of the November election. He sounded certain; he was certain. And when his editors at The Spectator of London asked him whether he really wanted to go out on such a limb, predicting victory for the Republican nominee, his response was to double down: not just victory, but landslide victory! Roger is even rumored to have had the foresight to buy up magnums of Champagne before the tariffs were announced.
My own prediction record, by contrast, has been a disaster. I made four bets—steak dinner bets, no less!—on the November outcome, certain that the Democratic nominee would win decisively. Because, I thought, that is how life goes: just when things are terrible, they will get worse.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The New Criterion
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Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor at City Journal. Her latest book is When Race Trumps Merit.
Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images
