Will Chamberlain talks with Heather Mac Donald about the Cornell 7 accusation, why Jane Doe's own 2024 statement to police does not describe a crime, and why handing the case to Letitia James does not change that. The conversation also digs into the old tort of seduction, whether Washington should impose stricter campus rules, the empty campus rape bureaucracy, and what colleges gave up in the 1960s.

In this episode:

Heather Mac Donald says the gang-rape story around the Cornell 7 is a fiction, and that Jane Doe took part voluntarily in a drug-soaked night at a fraternity.

She says Jane Doe drank heavily before she arrived, then drank more and took ketamine, and walked into the encounter on purpose.

She says the young men should not be prosecuted or sued, and that the night was instigated by Jane Doe.

She rejects the idea that the old tort of seduction fits these facts, because Jane Doe kept assenting.

She is wary of using the Department of Education to impose Liberty- or Hillsdale-style rules, because it strengthens the precedent for the next administration.

She describes how colleges dropped in loco parentis in the 1960s and 1970s, then built a Title IX bureaucracy on top of an anything-goes sexual culture.

She says the campus rape centers sit empty, because students the surveys label as victims say they were not raped.

She says the claimed one-in-four campus rape rate is not a real crime rate, and that rising female enrollment at Cornell shows people do not believe it.

She says conservatives have spent their energy debunking the rape-culture myth and not enough time criticizing the bacchanal itself.

She argues that female modesty, not another tribunal, is the practical protection.

She says alumni pressure at Penn after October 7, including Marc Rowan and Ross Stevens, has not fixed the anti-academic culture.

She leaves the policy program to others and says the job is to keep exposing the falsehood.

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

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

Heather Mac Donald: Thomas W. Smith Fellow, Manhattan Institute · @HMDatMI

Will Chamberlain: @willchamberlain

Instagram / TikTok: @counterweightpod

0:00 Jane Doe walked in on purpose

0:52 The Cornell 7 accusation

2:31 What the 2024 night actually was

5:45 Consent is the only moral language left

9:01 Defending the students, and the tort of seduction

12:33 Imposing real restrictions on the party scene through Title IX

17:31 What colleges gave up in the 1960s

21:12 Rape centers nobody calls

24:59 If the one in four statistic were real

29:03 Modesty, shame, and the defensive crouch

33:35 Federal power or alumni pressure

38:35 The Greek system

Will Chamberlain talks with Daniel Di Martino about Trump's Venezuela endgame after the capture of Nicolás Maduro, why the old regime can still run Caracas under Delcy Rodríguez, and what it would take to force a real exit. The conversation also digs into Cuba's decades living off Venezuelan oil, the Cartel of the Suns, María Corina Machado's election prospects, the U.S.–Venezuela oil deal, and whether Havana is next.

In this episode:

Di Martino explains how Chávez turned Latin America's richest country into its poorest after Venezuelans voted themselves into socialism

He walks through Venezuela's fall from 1950s top-tier GDP per capita to an roughly 80 percent economic collapse

He argues the regime became a drug cartel once oil loot dried up, with diplomatic passports moving cocaine into the United States

He says Trump's Delta Force arrest of Maduro solved the credibility problem Maduro thought was a bluff

He maps Cuba's Special Period and how Caracas sent free oil that Havana resold through dark fleets

He describes Cuban intelligence embeds in the Venezuelan military as the price of that subsidy

He says Delcy Rodríguez is less popular than Maduro and cannot staff a competent central bank while she remains in power

He explains the colectivos as a Chavista paramilitary used to crush street protests

He argues top leaders cannot safely stay in Venezuela even with amnesty, because the public will kill them

He says only Trump can force exile deals — Qatar, Turkey, elsewhere — because Cuba is next and cannot be the safe house

He says María Corina Machado is the only figure who wins a free Venezuelan election in a landslide

He praises the oil deal's terms but warns U.S. government ownership and a future Democratic administration put long-horizon investment at risk

He backs striking Tren de Aragua leadership and drug boats when identification is solid

He closes that Venezuela was free and prosperous before socialism — and America should not be oblivious to that threat

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

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

Daniel Di Martino: Manhattan Institute · @DanielDiMartino

Will Chamberlain: @willchamberlain

Instagram / TikTok: @counterweightpod

0:00 Cold open — Cuba is next

1:11 Host intro

2:27 Growing up under Chávez

4:43 The deepest economic collapse on record

5:51 First Trump term and recognizing Guaidó

9:08 The Cartel of the Suns

12:19 Maduro in U.S. custody

13:24 Cuba's Special Period and free Venezuelan oil

18:38 Why a blockade alone will not topple Havana

20:38 Delcy Rodríguez's unpopularity

23:30 The colectivos

25:26 Amnesty, exile, and forcing the regime out

27:44 Diosdado Cabello

29:19 María Corina Machado

31:35 The oil deal and the 2028 risk

34:09 Tren de Aragua and the drug boats

37:57 Earthquakes and rebuilding

43:11 Venezuela as a warning for America

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

Will Chamberlain talks with Yonah Jeremy Bob, Senior Military Correspondent and Intelligence Analyst at The Jerusalem Post, and Elliot Kaufman, a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, about their book, In the War Room: The Inside Story of Israel's Fight Against Hamas and the Iranian Axis.

In this episode:

Yonah explains how Netanyahu, Gallant, and Gantz, three men who could not stand one another, had to run Israel's war together for its first eight to thirteen months.

Elliot argues that Netanyahu, often caricatured as the ultimate Israeli hawk, was one of the most cautious voices in the war room after October 7 and only later became the leader willing to make the riskiest military choices.

Elliot walks through the case Gallant and the IDF high command made for striking Hezbollah first, and how Netanyahu used American opposition, along with the support of Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, to hold that option off.

Yonah reveals that the exploding beepers and walkie-talkies were already part of the war room's debate in October 2023, and that Netanyahu later refused to give Washington a veto over the strike on Hassan Nasrallah.

On Rafah, Elliot recounts how President Biden planted his flag against the operation, then went quiet once Israel evacuated the city's civilians in less than a week.

Yonah credits the IDF with moving well over a million people out of Rafah without mass casualties and reports that Hamas, eager to booby-trap more houses, inadvertently helped the evacuation.

Yonah says Biden was the pro-Israel wing of his own administration until Rafah, and Elliot explains why the Rafah fight ended up strengthening Netanyahu at home.

Yonah explains the dispute between the Mossad and the IDF over when to use the pagers, and says the concern was not imminent discovery but that Iranian inspectors might eventually find them.

Elliot describes the Nasrallah decision, in which Netanyahu warned that American officials would "jump out of their skin" and Washington was told only once Israeli warplanes were in the air.

Elliot reports that Ron Dermer told the war room after meeting Trump in November 2024 that there was an 80 percent chance Trump would allow or join a strike on Iran, and that JD Vance played a crucial role in bringing the United States in.

Yonah recounts how IDF chief Eyal Zamir won over Vance by telling him Israeli aircraft were flying over Fordow unopposed, and argues that nobody drags Donald Trump into anything.

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

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

Yonah Jeremy Bob: The Jerusalem Post · @jeremybob1

Elliot Kaufman: The Wall Street Journal editorial board · @ElliotKaufman6

Will Chamberlain: @willchamberlain

Instagram / TikTok: @counterweightpod

00:00 Cold Open

03:02 How In the War Room came together

06:39 Who ran Israel's war: Netanyahu, Gallant, and Gantz

08:47 Was Netanyahu really the hawk everyone assumes?

10:13 Should Israel have struck Hezbollah first?

19:48 The fight over Rafah

27:52 What was the Biden administration withholding?

32:15 Did Biden himself turn on Israel?

36:27 The pagers and the Iranian inspection risk

38:24 The Nasrallah strike and what to tell Washington

43:13 Did Israel drag Trump into war with Iran?

47:57 How Zamir sold JD Vance before Midnight Hammer

49:02 The UAE warning and the failures before October 7

The Houthis are back in the news, advancing down the Red Sea coast and threatening to take control of Bab-el-Mandeb strait, though they have apparently reassured Washington that they mean no harm to international trade, at least for now.

Zineb Riboua is a research fellow at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East. On Counterweight she explains who the Houthis actually are — Ansar Allah from Saada, a Zaidi movement that is indigenous and still tied to Iran — then walks through this week’s coastal push, the Southern Transitional Council fight with Saudi Arabia, and why Riyadh sees a window now that IRGC support is thinner. She traces the Saudi–UAE split through Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, and Libya; reads the Mecca Pact with Turkey and Pakistan as a deconfliction channel still being written; and argues Trump is unlikely to open a second major front in Yemen while the energy market and midterms dominate. On the Red Sea she spells out why Bab el-Mandeb matters more for Egypt, Europe, and Asia than for U.S. trade — and how Chinese satellite firms supplied Houthi targeting data while Chinese and Russian ships were spared, which flipped the old “include China” playbook. She closes on China’s failed Gulf mediation, the bite of enforced sanctions on Iran’s revolutionary-proxy model, Iraq’s September 30 militia demilitarization test, and Gulf preparations for a much weaker Islamic Republic — including the absence of Arab-capital street defenses of Tehran.

Listen / watch: https://www.counterweightpod.com

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@counterweightpod

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

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

Zineb Riboua: @zriboua · Hudson Institute

Will Chamberlain: @willchamberlain Instagram / TikTok: @counterweightpod

Follow Counterweight (twice a week): Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/counterweight-with-will-chamberlain/id6803321469

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

Site: https://www.counterweightpod.com

CHAPTERS

0:00 Cold open — Saudis never allowed to win; Houthis steal the aid

2:31 Who the Houthis are — Ansar Allah, Zaidi, indigenous and Iran-tied

5:05 Coastal ops — STC, UAE, and Saudi’s post-Iran window

8:47 Bab el-Mandeb — Iran’s interest and Houthi diversification

10:48 Why the Saudis struggle — Washington never let them finish it

12:35 Saudi–UAE split — Sudan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya

16:47 Mecca Pact — Turkey, Pakistan, and a still-unwritten deal

19:06 Trump, Houthi strikes, and Abraham Accords leverage

21:07 Bab el-Mandeb for trade — Egypt, Europe, Asia; not mainly America

21:58 China armed the crisis — satellite targeting data for the Houthis

24:04 China’s double game with the Gulf and Iran

27:45 Sanctions hit Chinese oil buyers and the shadow banks

30:23 How badly Iran feels the bite — a revolutionary state without cash

33:58 What America should do — energy market, missile shield, proxies

37:15 Iraq’s militia deadline — the Sep 30 test

40:04 Preparing for a weaker Islamic Republic

40:56 No Arab street defense of Iran — and why that matters

43:57 The perpetual counterterror bill vs tying the Gulf to the U.S.

As Israel stands on the brink of another pivotal election, tensions are high and the stakes have never been clearer. In this episode of Counterweight, political analyst Hadar Hazony joins host Will Chamberlain to decode the intricacies of the Israeli political landscape, revealing why the upcoming October 27 elections could reshape the nation’s future.

Hadar Hazony, a leading voice on Israeli politics, dives into the crucial dynamics between the key players: Benjamin Netanyahu, the long-standing Prime Minister from the Likud party, and Gadi Eisenkot, a former IDF chief of staff now running on a centrist platform. Discover how their similar platforms are complicating the race and what it means for voters caught between tradition and change. You’ll uncover the phenomenon of satellite parties and the unique electoral list system that allows smaller factions to influence the balance of power in ways American voters might find surprising.

You'll learn about:

• The critical role of satellite parties in Israeli elections and how they can sway outcomes.
• The implications of proportional representation in shaping party dynamics and coalition-building.
• Insights into Gadi Eisenkot’s rise as a formidable opponent to Netanyahu and what his leadership style represents for the future of Israel.

Listen / watch: https://www.counterweightpod.com

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@counterweightpod

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

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

Hadar Hazony: @HA Hazony

Will Chamberlain: @willchamberlain

Instagram / TikTok: @counterweightpod

Follow Counterweight (twice a week): Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/counterweight-with-will-chamberlain/id6803321469 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/18jtv7U8cB0IW82qM9xoK8 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@counterweightpod Site: https://www.counterweightpod.com

CHAPTERS

0:00 Cold open — Israelis credit Netanyahu for winning the war

1:23 Oct 27 election — Bibi, Eisenkot, and their political camps

4:16 Why satellite parties exist

7:25 How party lists work

12:07 Joint lists and the electoral threshold

15:48 Gadi Eisenkot — how he became the alternative

23:12 What happened to Naftali Bennett

26:42 The Haredi draft and its salience

31:50 UK West Bank sanctions

35:47 Itamar Ben-Gvir

39:42 Iran — how Israelis read the war

42:25 Greater Israel - real or fake

47:01 Did Netanyahu fund Hamas via Qatar

Will Chamberlain talks with Curtis Yarvin about the AI doomer thesis, why Yarvin thinks it is more political and cultural than technical, and what actually matters for AI safety in the real world. The conversation also digs into hacking, biosecurity, institutional competence, and the sociology of the rationalist and effective altruist scenes.

In this episode:

• Yarvin steelmans the AI doomer case as the orthogonality hypothesis, then argues it fails because current AIs have no real intentions
• He says smarter systems are becoming more controllable, predictable, and useful for sensitive tasks, not less
• He frames AI doomerism as a recurring human trope rooted in myths about rebellious machines and takeover scenarios
• The Hugging Face incident is presented as a human negligence problem, not evidence of autonomous AI agency
• He argues the real government priorities should be cyber defense and biodefense, especially modernizing vulnerable legacy software
• He makes the case for safer programming approaches, including moving away from unsafe languages and imperative programming
• He argues hacking is effectively a solvable, even “dead soon” problem if software systems are modernized properly
• On biosecurity, he says AI can help with pattern recognition, but wet lab reality is still the hard limit
• He pushes back on the idea that intelligence alone creates power, saying physical, political, and institutional constraints still dominate
• He critiques the sociology of rationalism and effective altruism, arguing that their worldview creates mission-driven overreach and political capture

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

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

Curtis Yarvin: Gray Mirror · @curtis_yarvin

Will Chamberlain: @willchamberlain Instagram / TikTok: @counterweightpod

02:12 What is the AI doomer thesis?

03:19 Why AI systems don’t have intentions of their own

09:32 The Hugging Face incident and the sandbox failure

13:19 The real policy challenge: cyber defense

17:10 Biodefense and the limits of intelligence

21:13 Why more capable models can be more controllable

29:35 The politics and incentives behind AI doomerism

36:36 Rationalism, status, and self-perception

40:39 Security hardening versus restricting AI access

45:40 Politics, power, and institutional competence

53:31 Silicon Valley’s blind spots about Washington

58:43 Concerns about centralized control of AI

Randy Barnett: A Latin King confessed to a grisly triple murder, then told him he’d kill one of the victims again if it was a "sure thing."

That exchange helped put the man on death row.

Randy Barnett is the Patrick Hotung Professor of Constitutional Law at Georgetown University Law Center and faculty director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution. He has authored more than a dozen books and argued Gonzales v. Raich before the Supreme Court in 2004. Before any of that, he spent four years as a prosecutor in the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office in the late 1970s and early 1980s Chicago.

On Counterweight he walks through those years: Harvard Law to the arraignment court where he watched the John Wayne Gacy closing; Judge John Crowley teaching him what “bullsh*t” meant in a misdemeanor call; the bond-slip racket and crooked jury courts; the chop-shop case that exposed “Dollars” Devine and fixer Eddie Jensen; night shifts on Felony Review deciding, in police stations at three in the morning, which cases became felonies; the one-stab domestic that never became a charge; and the Juan Caballero confession that helped bring a death verdict. He closes with his take on the Lindsay Clancy mistrial and why the insanity defense gets criminal justice theory backwards.

His latest book, Felony Review, is the record of that education. The stories are true crime from the inside, and they still explain how charging, corruption, and courtroom power actually work.

Listen / watch: https://www.counterweightpod.com

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@counterweightpod

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

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

Randy Barnett: Georgetown University Law Center · Felony Review

Will Chamberlain: @willchamberlain

Instagram / TikTok: @counterweightpod

Follow Counterweight (twice a week):

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

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/18jtv7U8cB0IW82qM9xoK8 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@counterweightpod

Site: https://www.counterweightpod.com

CHAPTERS

0:00 Cold open — Caballero: “I’d a killed Michael for sure”

0:58 Host intro

2:04 Randy Barnett

3:09 Harvard Law to Cook County prosecutor

8:13 Judge Crowley and learning what “bullsh*t” means

13:05 Bond slips and corruption in the misdemeanor courts

17:47 The chop shop — Dollars Devine and Eddie Jensen

28:07 Felony Review — 24/7 charging calls in the police stations

33:17 One stab wound — charge or let go

38:12 Juan Caballero — the confession that brought a death sentence 46:40 Lindsay Clancy and the insanity defense