Will Chamberlain talks with Manhattan Institute President Reihan Salam about Nikole Hannah-Jones’s New York City schools essay in the New York Times, what her experiment with her daughter actually revealed, and why the city’s accountability collapse keeps getting blamed on racism instead of the adults in the building. The conversation also digs into Salam’s own NYC public-school path through Stuyvesant, the charter networks that work, and the marriage of clannish politics and elite self-abnegation.

In this episode:

Salam describes growing up in Borough Park and Kensington and how New York’s ethnodemographic mix reshaped the public schools since the 1980s

He walks through Stuyvesant in the 1990s as an immigrant-rich melting pot that felt less siloed than today’s composition fights imply

He profiles Hannah-Jones as the high priestess of woke 1.0, from ProPublica and the Pulitzer to the 1619 Project and her outsized leverage at the Times

He recounts her choice to send her daughter into Vinegar Hill rather than the high-demand Brooklyn Heights school, and her theory that her own activism would transform the place

He argues New York’s best public options are capped charter networks with high expectations, which the left despises precisely because they work

He says Hannah-Jones talks integration while practicing a racialized nationalism about where her daughter should feel “deeply black”

He frames the real crisis as top-to-bottom unaccountability: no homework, no grading, no consequences, while spending north of $40,000 per pupil

He notes New York City offers about 150 hours less instruction than the average U.S. district — roughly a year of schooling across K–12

He says the middle-school principal who failed her daughter still got escape-hatch praise, blaming racism instead of teaching algebra

He and Will discuss Larry Auster’s “unprincipled exception”: elites applaud 1619 politics until it threatens their own kids’ schools

He argues a healthy society goes with the grain of family self-protection, and that demanding self-abnegation invites hypocrisy

He closes on the Mamdani coalition as the marriage of ethnic nepotism and ideological self-abnegation, and why civilizational self-confidence is fragile

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/counterweight-with-will-chamberlain/id6803321469

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/18jtv7U8cB0IW82qM9xoK8

Reihan Salam: President, Manhattan Institute · @reihan

Will Chamberlain: @willchamberlain

Instagram / TikTok: @counterweightpod

0:00 Check homework after the revolution

2:00 Welcome

2:17 Growing up in NYC public schools

11:59 Who is Nikole Hannah-Jones?

16:18 The Vinegar Hill experiment

18:20 Charters that work, and the ones that don’t

28:08 Accountability collapse

28:56 $40k per pupil and a year less school

33:40 The principal’s racism excuse

38:47 The unprincipled exception

40:47 Family before the state

47:32 Clans, communism, and Mamdani

51:17 Why civilizational confidence is fragile