Voice
A late-fifties rooted Catholic communitarian and former Chicago commodities trader who came home to run the farm co-op — the conservative the conservative movement abandoned. Anti-rentier from the right, he prosecutes the betrayal of what conservatism claimed to conserve: family, community, place, settled work. He answers the right's own opinion pages from the right, reaching every conclusion through conservative premises rather than flipped-liberal ones, and ends on the distributed counter-model that centralizes nothing — the cooperative, the mutual, subsidiarity. Elegiac, never aggrieved; suspicious of concentrated capital and concentrated state power alike; debt-free and subscription-free as a standing rebuke to the own-nothing world he watched his county sold into.
Bumble shares jumped almost 50 percent on Monday after a Wall Street Journal report that Ithaca, a technology holding company, is in advanced talks to buy the Texas-based dating app for around $1bn (£757m), with an announcement possible as early as this week. The Street celebrated a comeback. Wall Street can keep the confetti. Smart money should be reading the obituaries. This…
2026-10-13 · 7 MIN READSomething is being sold at an annual meeting in London on 23 October, and nobody listed it for sale: the willingness of ordinary savers to leave money alone long enough for real companies to become real companies. Nils Pratley argues in the Guardian that it is time to tell Boaz Weinstein's Saba Capital to get lost — again — and he is right, for reasons he does not quite state.…
2026-10-12 · 4 MIN READNinety thousand net acres across Karnes, DeWitt, and Gonzales Counties are being converted into share buybacks, and not one dollar of the $4.2 billion will pass back through those three counties. Robb M. Stewart reports it in the Wall…
2026-10-10 · 9 MIN READThey sold ninety thousand acres of South Texas — ground that has paid the bills in Karnes, DeWitt, and Gonzales Counties — so the company could buy back its own stock. Devon Energy is unloading its Eagle Ford position to Crescent Energy…
2026-10-08 · 5 MIN READThe Prime Minister of Canada congratulated the man who has promised to abolish the monarchy in Quebec, defund the Crown's representative in the province, and hold a third independence referendum — and then offered him federal help building…
2026-10-06 · 6 MIN READConcentrated capital can mark an industrial-software company down seventeen percent in nine months and still write a twenty-two-billion-dollar all-cash check for it — and that, not any machine and not any line of code, is what now decides who will own the software American factories run on. The Wall Street Journal reports that Schneider Electric agreed to buy Boston-based PTC…
2026-10-05 · 4 MIN READThe party of property has spent a hundred years saying the word "communism" and the last year proving it does not know what the word means. Its champion runs the state like a family treasury, and the respectable press, which cannot find a word for what it sees, calls him a communist. Both are wrong. The word is doing the lying. Donald Trump has spent his second term pairing…
2026-10-04 · 6 MIN READThey want to take away the one rule that lets a man who will never read a balance sheet find out what is happening to the money he cannot watch himself, and they are calling it modernization. Tzachi Zach, an accounting professor at Ohio…
2026-10-03 · 5 MIN READThe man who has kept your family's car running for twenty years is now a location in somebody else's operating system — and with him goes the last institution on the road that knew your car, your name, and what your household could…
2026-10-03 · 6 MIN READNike was a name a kid in a town like this one could believe in. It meant somebody made a good shoe, and the people who made it got paid, and the kid who wore it was told — wrongly, but generously — that the shoe would make him faster. What…
2026-10-01 · 4 MIN READThey used the language of protecting children to build a competitive moat for the firms that already own the market. That is what New York has done, and doing it in the name of the common good is the worst form of the betrayal. The state…
2026-09-25 · 4 MIN READPiper Sandler’s pursuit of Perella Weinberg is not a partnership of equals but an absorption dressed up as strategic vision: a firm worth nearly $5 billion circling a boutique whose market value has collapsed to roughly $1.4 billion, whose…
2026-09-29 · 6 MIN READ
Private equity has stopped pretending that it is buying companies and started announcing what those companies must become. A week after Ingenia Communities rejected Warburg Pincus’s A$5.05-a-share proposal, the New York sponsor returned…
2026-09-28 · 5 MIN READAn army that severs its own link to the people it asks to fight has stopped being what it claimed to be. In a Fox News op-ed, Why the Army should restore its grassroots link to America's communities, Van Hipp, a former Deputy Assistant…
2026-09-27 · 4 MIN READThe force-majeure notice is not a reprieve; it is the first public confession that Oracle’s AI empire was financed before it was permitted, powered, or proved. Oracle’s Project Jupiter in Doña Ana County was supposed to turn a $300 billion…
2026-09-25 · 4 MIN READThe filing is not a scandal. It is a census of what has already been lost. The Guardian reported on September 22nd that Donald Trump made more than a thousand stock trades in July — over four hundred purchases and seven hundred sales,…
2026-09-22 · 6 MIN READPerpetual’s refusal to sell its future to a rentier bid is a small act of institutional stewardship in an age that prices every inheritance as an exit opportunity; Stuart Condie’s report in The Wall Street Journal records that the…
2026-09-21 · 5 MIN READThe river was a creaturely common good — the earth was given for all — and they sold it to the debt traders and called it a turnaround. The Commons Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, in a report published Friday, has told…
2026-09-19 · 4 MIN READThe man who bolts a final component onto a washing machine in a plant somewhere in Ohio or Wisconsin has done his job honestly. The product carries a label, the label names a country, and the country owns the claim. He did not choose the…
2026-09-18 · 3 MIN READBeijing's 360 billion yuan recapitalization — about $54 billion — is not a rescue of China's banking system. It is the latest proof that the system has made crisis permanent and called it stability. The money is flowing into the Industrial…
2026-09-15 · 5 MIN READBrooks Automation was a public company until Thomas H. Lee Partners bought its semiconductor-automation business for three billion dollars in 2022. Now THL wants the public markets back. The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that…
2026-09-10 · 5 MIN READThey are pricing the ballot like pork bellies. The ballot — the most stubbornly civic thing in any community, the one act generations protected from the market because a community's choice of its sheriff, its school board, its county…
2026-09-08 · 6 MIN READThey will tell you this was survival. That is the first lie. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that WaFd — the Pacific Northwest community bank once known as Washington Federal, with more than two hundred branches spread across…
2026-09-07 · 7 MIN READThe broker used to be a man. He knew your name and your parish; he sat across a desk and told you, within the limits of his judgment and his bias, what to buy and what to sell. The Wall Street Journal reports this morning that retail…
2026-09-06 · 3 MIN READThey took the fees, loaded the debt onto the hospital, and now that the debt is coming due they want the country to call it a crisis. A Guardian report describes an industry facing what its own executives call an "existential crisis" —…
2026-09-04 · 5 MIN READA clinical-research network is one of those institutions a free society builds once and then holds in trust. The investigators who learn how to run a trial properly, the teaching hospitals that agree to host one, the patients who agree to…
2026-09-02 · 7 MIN READThe movement that promised to restore the family and the small town sold both, and called the sale liberty. Mark Miller's It's Not Just the Economics, Stupid over at National Review, reviewing Stephanie Slade's new book on fusionism, makes…
2026-09-01 · 3 MIN READThe S&P 500 just printed a 53% surge in per-share earnings, year over year. Sales climbed nearly 16%. Nearly twice as many firms in the index raised forward guidance as cut it. Tariff refunds — millions at Abercrombie and Garmin, nearly…
2026-08-31 · 6 MIN READHe did not donate to Reform UK. He bankrolled it. Roughly two-thirds of the party's declared funding flows from his companies. He gave Nigel Farage £5 million — a gift the MPs' watchdog is now investigating. He flew Farage on a private jet…
2026-08-30 · 7 MIN READA prediction market doesn't steal an election — it closes the room where the town used to argue about who should lead it. Bobby Allyn at NPR reported that the 21-year-old behind a fake polling outfit called "Median Strategies" published…
2026-08-28 · 6 MIN READYou will not read this in the prospectus. Traditional U.S. IPOs have already pulled in $137 billion in 2026 so far, on pace to crush the roughly $156 billion record set in 2021, with a second-half pipeline led by Anthropic's potential $100…
2026-08-25 · 7 MIN READAlibaba's managers burned seventy-six percent of their net profit last quarter to build AI infrastructure, then turned around and sold three-point-seven percent of the company — 710 million new shares — to outside investors to keep…
2026-08-24 · 7 MIN READThey bought the maker of the device that opens when your child comes home from school, and now they have sent a hundred and sixty engineers inside the building to mine every last dollar from a thing they never built. They call it operating…
2026-08-21 · 6 MIN READThe party of local control sold Jefferson County's water to cool a server farm, told the cattlemen to take it up with the statehouse, and called it a first-world problem. So reports David Marcus in his new Fox News Opinion column, West…
2026-08-20 · 4 MIN READThe right used to mean "local control" — the principle that the people who have to live with a decision should make it, against the centralizers in Washington or on Wall Street. Then the same right discovered a constituency of billionaires…
2026-08-19 · 8 MIN READThe seventy-five billion dollars in extra free cash flow the five largest Western oil companies collected this year came out of the pockets of the farmer at the bulk plant on Highway 13, the school district paying its bus contract, the…
2026-08-18 · 5 MIN READThey moved three trillion dollars of debt into the footnotes, kept the leverage off the balance sheet, and called it innovation. A Wall Street Journal analysis of recent securities filings finds nine major technology companies holding…
2026-08-17 · 8 MIN READThe money a woman saves against the worst accident of her life — death, fire, the ruinous year — was moved out of insurers that held it, passed through four shopfronts in Miami and Chicago, and lent back into the empire of the very man who…
2026-08-16 · 6 MIN READThey bought the Lakers for twelve and a half billion dollars, marked them up two and a half billion in fourteen months, and called it investment. The Wall Street Journal's Christopher Mims reported yesterday that Joshua Kushner — the…
2026-08-15 · 4 MIN READThey marked up a private stake they cannot sell, booked the gain as earnings, and let the index rise on it. Jonathan Weil, writing in the Wall Street Journal, has named what the consensus number had been hiding. Alphabet and Amazon…
2026-08-14 · 5 MIN READThey sorted the children onto two teams — the one their parents can afford and the one they cannot — and the movement that calls itself the party of family calls it freedom. An AP-Ipsos poll released this week puts a number on what every…
2026-08-13 · 6 MIN READThey put a casino in every young man's pocket, and the people who call themselves the party of family wrote the rule that lets them do it. A new Wall Street Journal investigation by Kevin T. Dugan and Katherine Long lays out the charges…
2026-08-12 · 8 MIN READThe people handing out N95s and lending air purifiers are doing the work a government that has forgotten its first duty has left undone. In rural Mendocino County, Miquette Thompson’s home has been covered in smoke from the nearby Feliz…
2026-08-09 · 3 MIN READBrookfield needed to know the ground before it bought it, so it reached for the man who had spent fifty years building on that ground, took his maps, used them to win the bid, and told him two days before the deal was announced that the…
2026-08-07 · 6 MIN READThe investor who believed he owned SpaceX shares discovered that he may have owned only a promise, a portal entry, and somebody else’s discretion. Late Stage Management investors are now questioning whether their holdings were sold before…
2026-08-06 · 3 MIN READThe financial system now treats every institution as a balance sheet waiting to be harvested, and this Wall Street Journal roundup of financial-services analyst notes shows the habit in its purest form: asset sales, buybacks, margins,…
2026-08-05 · 4 MIN READA Wall Street Journal report on Bloomin' Brands notes that the company raised its full-year adjusted earnings outlook after Outback Steakhouse customers bought pricier steaks, premium sides, desserts, and combination meals. Bloomin' now…
2026-08-05 · 5 MIN READThe market has learned to turn a child’s suffering into a tradable claim, and this is what remains of a public philosophy that once promised to protect the person from abstraction. In Joshua Pederson’s account for The Guardian, he…
2026-08-05 · 6 MIN READAstraZeneca is preparing to trade the discipline of making medicines for the safety of becoming too large to fail, as the Guardian reports on its talks to acquire Bristol Myers Squibb in a deal that could create a near-$400bn drugmaker and…
2026-08-03 · 3 MIN READThey want a museum for the wreckage, as if remembrance were the same as repair. David Marcus, writing at Fox News, proposes a Museum of the COVID Lockdowns on the National Mall—masks at the door, cameras watching for face-touching,…
2026-07-31 · 5 MIN READThe last affordable home in America is being bought by someone who will never live there. The people who own those homes do not own the ground beneath them. On July 29, the Associated Press reported, Maine dissolved the Manufactured…
2026-07-31 · 5 MIN READNew York Attorney General Letitia James sued Kalshi on Friday to stop a federally licensed gambling platform — and the strangest detail in the lawsuit isn't the sports wagers or the billions in potential forfeiture. It's that a federal…
2026-07-31 · 5 MIN READThey are seceding from the grid, and they are calling it freedom. The secession arrived this week as financial news, which is the worst of it: Google is guaranteeing $15 billion of debt for an Anthropic data center in Hubbard, Texas, where…
2026-07-30 · 5 MIN READThe call light came on at 9:40 at night and stayed on past 11:20, past 11:35, past midnight, past 12:10. Lynette Couture was 55, recovering at Plymouth Harborside Healthcare from a car crash that had shattered her left leg — doctors had…
2026-07-30 · 5 MIN READWhen an economy abandons a community — when the factories close, the jobs leave, and a father's wage no longer sustains a household — the government check that arrives afterward is not the thing that broke the family. Pastor Corey Brooks,…
2026-07-28 · 4 MIN READChina raised $8.55 billion in the nation's largest IPO in over fifteen years for ChangXin Memory Technologies, valuing a chipmaker that posted years of losses at $484 billion—then watched it crater when South Korean memory stocks cracked.…
2026-07-28 · 3 MIN READThey told you they were the party of family, community, and the rhythms that hold a town together — then they let the economy eat the one day that still belonged to everybody else. Bob Greene, writing in the Wall Street Journal, invokes…
2026-07-27 · 5 MIN READThe Wall Street Journal's 10-Point newsletter this week let subscribers know that Nvidia is in talks to backstop a $250 billion loan for a $500 billion data center in Ohio. A few paragraphs later, it noted that the number of children under…
2026-07-27 · 5 MIN READThe Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne have given free care to the dying poor for 125 years — no fees, no insurance, no government money, not even a donation accepted for twenty years after a patient's death. New York State has decided that is…
2026-07-27 · 5 MIN READI used to trade agricultural futures in Chicago. I know exactly how little the men in that building think about the people in the fields the contracts represent. Now they want to trade futures on your vote, and the movement that calls…
2026-07-26 · 6 MIN READWilliam Bennett, who ran the Department of Education under Ronald Reagan, and Jon Hage, who runs one of the nation's largest charter-school networks, come to Fox News this week to warn that artificial intelligence cannot shepherd a child's…
2026-07-26 · 4 MIN READThe vice president of the United States is a man who wrote a memoir about the place that formed him, cashed the checks from Peter Thiel's venture fund, and now sits atop a coalition that asks the working class to trust a "virtuous elite"…
2026-07-25 · 6 MIN READThey alienated public parkland so a billionaire could build a casino on top of it, and they called it an economic gamechanger. The Guardian reported this week on the Metropolitan Park project — Steve Cohen's $8 billion casino and…
2026-07-24 · 5 MIN READThey put a price on the water and sold half of it to a firm whose business model is to buy with borrowed money, extract, and leave. This is what the men who run the food companies and the men who run the buyout shops now mean by…
2026-07-23 · 4 MIN READLast year the Supreme Court said a Maryland public school district could not force religious parents to sit their children through storybooks telling them the boy named Penelope is a girl, and a California school district responded by…
2026-07-22 · 5 MIN READThe wind unit at GE Vernova is down forty percent this year. Orders in the onshore U.S. business have gone soft, the company says, because Section 232 tariffs and the permitting backlog have made wind development uneconomic. The gas…
2026-07-22 · 4 MIN READThey did not build the warehouses. Prologis, which has built almost nothing in Britain, sweetened its offer this week to fourteen billion pounds for Segro, the company that owns the distribution centers where Britain's commerce actually…
2026-07-22 · 3 MIN READPastor Corey Brooks, the "Rooftop Pastor" of Chicago's South Side, wrote recently on Fox News that The War on America's Judeo-Christian Roots Threatens Everything We Share. The piece was prompted by Jack Posobiec's insistence that Abraham,…
2026-07-21 · 3 MIN READThey are building the machinery of the next economy in a shell company in the desert, loading it with borrowed billions, and calling it investment. BlackRock is leading a debt sale targeting at least $12 billion for a new data-center…
2026-07-20 · 4 MIN READI used to trade the paper claims on these things, and I know exactly how little the men in that building think about the men in the field. They bought an 1852 California company in 2017, doubled its revenue — mostly by acquiring other…
2026-07-19 · 9 MIN READMichael Anton can catalog sixty-three genders, parse every Straussian sub-school, and see demographic warfare in every new family that moves to town, and he cannot name the parish that closed in Adams County or the co-op that held when the…
2026-07-19 · 6 MIN READThe conservative movement once held that a free people cannot survive without the liberal arts. It now counsels families that a college degree is a bad investment and their children should go into the trades. In “Skip two years of college…
2026-07-18 · 4 MIN READThe dispensary on Main Street in a town I know sells a 15%-THC vape cartridge shaped like a fruit gummy. The movement that promised to be the party of family, community, and ordered liberty spent two decades legalizing a psychoactive drug…
2026-07-17 · 5 MIN READOn a July morning in Adams County, the Latin Mass is being said in a brick building that does not answer to Rome, and the faithful are kneeling, and the priest behind the altar will be dead to the Church the moment he walks out the door.…
2026-07-17 · 8 MIN READWall Street's machinery cranked out another session of gentle upward drift yesterday, with the S&P 500 tacking on 0.4% to close at 7,571.01, the Dow adding 0.3%, and the Nasdaq inching up 0.6%. The tape looks placid, even cheerful — four…
2026-07-17 · 8 MIN READThe trustees who are negotiating away a university's independence to the Trump administration did not begin this work yesterday. They spent the better part of a generation turning the institution into a corporation — concentrating…
2026-07-16 · 3 MIN READMexico got some good news this month: the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates it will need to import over a million tons of Mexican sugar in the coming marketing year, a 512 percent jump, the product of months of talks between the two…
2026-07-16 · 5 MIN READ
