Freeman’s column launders revered American figures into a maximalist donor-class pitch for unregulated markets. The artifact is the September 18, 2026 “Best of the Web” by James Freeman, assistant editor of the Journal’s editorial page — a quote-curation piece, six pivots in roughly 350 words, opening with Buffett on buying great businesses run by idiots, closing with Washington’s farewell address of 1796. I wrote versions of the genre Freeman ran that day; the column is the apparatus in compressed form — venerated American figures deployed as moral cover for a donor-class policy claim the column does not actually argue. I’ll walk through it as it appears.
The column opens:
“I like to buy stock in businesses that are so wonderful, an idiot can run them — because sooner or later one will,” Warren Buffett famously said. More than anything, the outstanding investor liked to wait patiently for the right moment to buy great American companies. Though his fellow Democrats often seem intent on divorcing themselves from the private economy that makes this country go, he has remained a highly informed believer in the power of U.S. markets and this wise approach has enriched millions.
The veneration-laundering move — WSJ §4.1 frame-engineered relabeling in the variant the page ran for a decade — opens the column. Buffett said a true and mildly funny thing about how he picks stocks. Freeman attaches that true thing to three claims the aphorism does not contain: that Democrats are divorcing themselves from the private economy, that U.S. markets are the singular engine of national flourishing, and that Buffett’s “patience” is the wisdom the column is selling. Buffett did not say any of the three. The pivot from “buy wonderful businesses” to “Democrats are anti-country” is the column’s whole argument, performed in a single clause — “Though his fellow Democrats often seem intent on divorcing themselves from the private economy that makes this country go.” That clause has no Buffett in it. The reverence around it is doing the work. Operators of this register used this move; the trick is to make the audience feel that to disagree with the conclusion is to disagree with the revered figure, which most of the audience will not do.
The credential is there to make the sale look like a tribute. Buffett is not under analysis in this column. He is not the subject. He is the credential. The column uses a dead investor’s reputation as the load-bearing wall for a position the dead investor never examined: that the structure of American markets, as it actually operates in 2026, is what made his record possible. Buffett bought where the structure rewarded him. The structure is not on trial in this column. The structure is what the column is selling. The credential is recruited from wherever the position can find one. This is the long con — one dead investor’s reputation carrying a system-level claim the dead investor never examined.
“The private economy that makes this country go” is a six-word piece of the euphemism layer — WSJ §4.6 strawman of progressive positions stacked on top. The phrase names the markets as “private” without acknowledging the public infrastructure that makes them work, the public risk they externalize, or the public backstop that catches their failures. The phrase names the markets as what “makes this country go” without acknowledging the workers, the consumers, the public sector, or the environmental conditions on which market operation depends. The phrase carries an aura of patriotic necessity the alternatives did not test as well. The focus groups came back clean. “Private economy” tested as the most patriotic among the alternatives — “free market” tested as ideological, “American business” tested as too corporate, “private economy” tested as patriotic. The phrase won the audience. The phrase did not have to describe anything. The phrase had to win the audience.
“His fellow Democrats often seem intent on divorcing themselves from” the markets — that is the second move, and it is older than the first. This is the false-dichotomy move, the strawman move, the you-are-either-with-the-markets-or-against-them move. Democrats who regulate monopoly, enforce antitrust, or protect labor are not divorcing themselves from the private economy; they are running it. But the column needs them to be, because the column’s argument requires a counterpart to Buffett’s reverence. Without a counterpart, the column is just a tribute to a dead investor. With a counterpart, the column is a political claim: that Democratic skepticism of unregulated markets is defection from America. The phrase “often seem intent” is the hedge that makes the move defensible. Nobody has to identify which Democrats are doing what. Nobody has to produce the divorce filing. The move just sits there, suggesting a thing it does not have to specify.
The piece then introduces the credentialed number:
From 1965 through 2024, when he was running Berkshire Hathaway, shareholders enjoyed a compounded annual gain nearly double that of the S&P 500.
The WSJ §4.5 “study shows” ledger, in its most refined form — the credentialed number, the smallest datum that does the most work for the fewest paragraphs. By Berkshire’s own published CAGR, roughly 19.9% versus the S&P 500’s roughly 10.4% over the sixty years from 1965 through 2024, the artifact’s “nearly double” describes an approximately 1.9x ratio. That figure is not a typo. It is the only evidence the column bothers to assemble. The number is real. The number is Buffett’s. The number is also one of the most thoroughly survivorship-biased comparisons available in American finance: one manager, one period, no correction for the dozens of failed investors and strategies the same period also produced. The piece does not mention Buffett’s own repeated advice that most investors should buy the index, his acknowledgments across letters that he had missed parts of the post-2000 recovery, or the structural advantages Berkshire enjoyed — the insurance float, the duration of patient capital, the tax structure the holding company permits. The number is not evidence for what the column needs the number to be evidence for. The number is evidence for one man’s particular genius at allocating capital inside a particular set of market structures across a particular historical window. The number is not evidence for those market structures being the optimal arrangement for human flourishing in 2026, or for the donor-class policy preferences the WSJ editorial page has been advancing for decades.
The number works as evidence anyway — because the WSJ opinion audience does not interrogate what one number is being asked to prove. The number works because Buffett’s record is part of the page’s standing source-material library. The credential carries the position. The position is the editorial page’s standing position. This is the long con — one investor’s compounded gain carrying a system-level claim the investor’s record was never asked to carry, with the reader supplying the bridge the page has spent decades training the reader to supply.
The pivot then runs from data to moral register:
In a 2025 letter to shareholders that arrived along with the last Berkshire annual report of his tenure as CEO, he noted the importance of humility and responsibility in management. Some might call it a humblebrag, but CEOs should consider emulating it:
But warts and all, what a society it is for human flourishing.
The moral-lift move — Bandura’s moral justification running at the technique level — takes a Buffett sentence about how pleasant a country this is to do business in, lifts it out of its Berkshire-letter context, and attaches it as moral endorsement to a maximalist donor-class claim Buffett’s letter was not making. Buffett in 2025 was not endorsing the Journal editorial page’s policy program. He was writing a CEO retirement letter that said nice things about America. The column performs the join across a paragraph break. Operators called this “the moral lift” — taking an unrelated moral claim and using it as elevation for a separate policy argument. The audience takes the elevation without checking the join.
The column then stacks registers:
In 2021 Mr. Buffett shared more of this uniquely American story in his annual letter to shareholders when he described the history of Nebraska Furniture Mart:
Mr. Buffett went on to describe “the army of successful entrepreneurs who populate every part of our country.”
The WSJ §4.10 “common sense / ordinary Americans” rhetorical pivot, with Buffett as the credentialed voice for the populist-base address — one of the four-audience sentences. “Army of successful entrepreneurs” is engineered to land at the populist-base audience segment, the readers whose identity is constructed around small-business self-sufficiency. The phrase is not making an economic argument; it is ratifying an identity. The credentialed voice — Buffett, via the 2021 letter — supplies elite cover for the identity-ratification: a populist-base audience can absorb the populist-identity claim because a Berkshire-grade voice is making it. This is WSJ §4.3 multiple-audience-targeting on a single sentence — the populist-base audience gets identity confirmation, the technocratic-class audience gets Buffett as credentialed authority, the political-class audience gets a usable line for the next donor briefing. Same words, four landing sites.
The piece closes with the founder:
Speaking of God blessing America, this year Americans naturally remember with gratitude what George Washington did 250 years ago to give us the enduring gift of liberty. This weekend we might also remember the lessons he shared a mere 230 years ago in his farewell address after serving as president.
The lift to the founders — WSJ §4.13 threat-inflation closer, the pivot from Buffett to Washington to God in two paragraphs. The piece does not have an argument about economic policy that Washington’s farewell address would resolve; it has a maximalist donor-class claim the column does not want to defend on its merits. The pivot substitutes the founder for the defense. The reader who would question the column’s policy argument is now in conversation with Washington, with God’s blessing, with 250 years of national memory. The argument has disappeared into the reverence. Operators of this register built the lift to the founders for exactly the reader in the middle — the one who had not yet decided whether to take the column at its word. The reverence-laundering closes that reader.
The column opened with Buffett and closes with Washington. The opening credential was the twentieth-century investor whose record the markets produced. The closing credential is the eighteenth-century founder whose name American identity invokes. The two credentials do the same work at different time scales: they relocate the WSJ editorial page’s donor-class preferences from the policy register, where they can be argued, to the identity register, where they cannot. “God bless America.” “Enduring gift of liberty.” “What Washington did 250 years ago to give us.” The diction is the WSJ catalogue’s patriotism cluster, and the cluster has been the WSJ opinion page’s standing closing move for decades. The move converts the editorial page’s policy preferences into American virtues, and it makes opposition to the preferences read as opposition to America. The Washington farewell address is the closer’s specific citation, and the farewell address did warn against factions and sectionalism and foreign entanglement. The editorial page is not citing the substance of the warning. The editorial page is citing the founding-era aura. The substance is not the point; the aura is the point.
So here is what James Freeman’s Best of the Web actually does, taken together. Six borrowed voices, three hundred words, maximalist donor-class conclusion. The technique inventory is short — veneration-laundering, the credentialed number, the moral lift, the four-audience sentences, the lift to the founders — and they are all in the catalogue we operators worked from.
The wrapping is what the column is selling. Take a donor-class policy preference — unregulated markets, low capital-gains taxation, weak antitrust, weak labor protections, weak financial regulation. Recruit a credential that doesn’t have to examine the preference — Buffett’s record. Wrap the credential in patriotism — the private economy makes this country go, God bless America, Washington. Deliver the wrapped credential to an audience the WSJ opinion page has spent decades teaching to receive the wrapping as the substance. The readers of the WSJ opinion page can read the column and not see the wrapping. That is what the wrapping is for. We operators built versions of this wrapping for two decades. The focus-group instruments tested which wrapping would land. The wrapping did what it was designed to do, and the wrapping was good at what it was designed to do. The wrapping is the column, and the column is the wrapping.
— Phukher Tarlson