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.
They 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 entertainment complex on the Willets Point parking lots next to Citi Field, blessed by Albany's "parkland alienation" bill, signed memorandums of…
2026-07-24 · 5 MIN READThe conservative movement that once existed to limit the state has spent sixty-five years learning to love the very thing it swore to resist — and the education began with a pilgrimage to a dead king's tomb. In Daniel J. Flynn's Walking in Brent Bozell's Footsteps in El Escorial, he traces how National Review senior editor Brent Bozell Jr. — Barry Goldwater's ghostwriter, the…
2026-07-24 · 4 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 moves — the Thames Valley parks, the Midlands logistics corridors, the hubs through which food, furniture, and spare parts reach the people…
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, Moses, and David "were Christian" — a move that erases Judaism from Christianity's own roots. Brooks called it "the right-wing version of…
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 Republic is a side hustle now. The men and women sent to Washington to serve the public trust are monetizing that trust on their phones, between votes and cocktail hours, turning the national security briefing and the presidential…
2026-07-18 · 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 READ
The 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 READTo read the National Review autopsy of Europe's Green Deal is to watch a movement burn down the only thing that could have saved it. Johan Norberg and Christian Sandström have written for National Review an indictment of the European Green…
2026-07-16 · 3 MIN READThe Dow Jones Industrials closed above its 50-day moving average for the sixty-eighth consecutive session on Tuesday. Somewhere in Friendship, Wisconsin, the farm cooperative lost another member. Those two facts are not unrelated, and the…
2026-07-16 · 6 MIN READA man who has never answered to a town council, a parish board, or a school board — who lives in Miami, who watches election returns snacking on stone crab — has spent forty million dollars deciding what the Republican Party will stand for…
2026-07-16 · 5 MIN READThe private equity playbook is simple once you've seen it enough times: find the infrastructure people depend on, buy it cheap, load it with debt, and raise the tolls. Stripe and Advent International offered $53 billion for PayPal this…
2026-07-15 · 3 MIN READThey want to centralize the soul and sell the parish. In a new essay for National Review, Lee J. Strang argues that Sustaining an American National Identity Requires Civic Education is required to save the republic from polarization,…
2026-07-12 · 6 MIN READThe KOSPI climbed five percent Thursday, and three chip giants took the entire run. Two hundred eighty-nine other stocks rose. Five hundred eighty-eight fell. Market reports Thursday noted that Micron's better-than-expected earnings drove…
2026-07-12 · 3 MIN READThe S&P 500 closed at 7,542.37 on Wednesday, the Nasdaq climbed another thirteen tenths of a percent, the Russell 2000 added twelve tenths, and every financial page in the country will tell you this is a healthy economy. It is not. Our own…
2026-07-09 · 4 MIN READThey are selling shares in a future that does not yet exist to pay for the compute power to simulate it today, and the market rewards the wager with a twenty-two percent surge in the stock price. The thirteen percent discount to the prior…
2026-07-09 · 9 MIN READI used to trade the wheat before it was harvested. Two private-equity firms just sold each other the Italian company that supplies the pastry case at your local bakery, and the people who actually bake were not in the room. They never are.…
2026-06-29 · 4 MIN READThe movement liquidated the working town and left us a parade. In As the nation bickers, small-town America still loves a parade, David Marcus for Fox News Digital marvels at the "America 250" festivities in Cumberland, Maryland — 30 new…
2026-06-29 · 3 MIN READThey bought the universities. Koch money, Heritage money, the Manhattan-Institute-and-Federalist-Society apparatus, with sixty million federal dollars thrown in by an administration that calls itself conservative — money the Department of…
2026-06-28 · 6 MIN READThe word was broken, and the country has been paying the bill ever since. The Wall Street Journal this week catalogued what is left of the bargain — twenty-two states with auto-enrolled retirement programs for workers their employers…
2026-06-27 · 4 MIN READWise PLC moves two hundred forty-three billion dollars a year across borders for nineteen million people — most of them immigrants and small businesses whom the big banks have decided are not worth serving — and last Thursday the…
2026-06-26 · 3 MIN READThe party that spent a generation accusing the press of bias just sold it to the man in the White House. Senator Elizabeth Warren warned this week, in an interview with The Guardian, that a Trump-administration "frenzy" of mergers — $111…
2026-06-25 · 4 MIN READThe Wall Street Journal's Markets A.M. newsletter on Monday cast Michael Saylor's Strategy—the former MicroStrategy, now a bitcoin holding vessel—alongside Walt Disney and Steve Jobs as the latest chapter in a great American tradition of…
2026-06-22 · 7 MIN READA fund in Minneapolis that has never once checked in for a 6 a.m. flight to Málaga wants to buy the airline that makes that flight possible — during a shooting war, because the share price is low and the board said no. Castlelake, which…
2026-06-22 · 5 MIN READThey built a fake betting parlor, stocked it with paid actors pretending to win, and aimed it at every college kid with a phone — then called it a prediction market and asked the regulators to stay out of its way. The Journal found the…
2026-06-21 · 7 MIN READThey bought the therapy centers, loaded them with debt, inflated the diagnoses, and billed the government for therapies that never happened. The owners drove Aston Martins and wore Rolexes while families sat on waitlists stretching into…
2026-06-18 · 5 MIN READDaniel J. Flynn, writing in National Review, assures readers that the Trump administration is right to dismember the Department of Education — that an unconstitutional bureaucracy built to pay off a teachers' union has only ever produced…
2026-06-17 · 5 MIN READThe class that buys productive work with borrowed money, extracts its fees, and sells the husk is multiplying, and the financial press has a name for it — the "golden age of spinouts" — as if the multiplication of extraction machines were…
2026-06-16 · 5 MIN READWhen everyone trades, no one grows the corn. The Wall Street Journal’s Spencer Jakab has collected a charmingly damning catalogue of the American investor at the top—a dental chair abandoned for a stock tip, a stripper’s rent check that…
2026-06-15 · 5 MIN READThe movement that spent forty years hollowing out every Catholic institution that ever formed a conscience now wants a saint as its Founding Mother. In a Fox News op-ed, "America has Founding Fathers. A Catholic saint was a Founding…
2026-06-15 · 3 MIN READThe men who spent forty years dismantling every institution that ever formed a soul now want a polling number as their absolution. In “Young men are returning to church — and it could reshape America’s future,” former education secretary…
2026-06-14 · 6 MIN READThe conservative movement, having spent forty years dismantling the institutions that once taught a child what to love, has just discovered that someone still has to do it, and its answer is a university in Malibu and a standardized test.…
2026-06-14 · 4 MIN READThe conservative movement spent forty years dismantling every institution that kept a local merchant alive, and now its answer is another bill out of Washington. Mike Davis, writing in Fox News, calls Amazon a tollbooth that skims nearly…
2026-06-13 · 4 MIN READTicketmaster owns the gate to nearly every major arena in America, and it will let you know when you are not welcome — not as a neighbor, not as a fan, but as a billing address that fell outside the radius its algorithm was told to honor.…
2026-06-13 · 7 MIN READThe movement that made it impossible to raise a special-needs child on a single income now wants to criminalize the parents who see the numbers. Lauren Veldhuizen, writing in National Review, tells the story of Dave and Josh Bruno — a…
2026-06-12 · 4 MIN READThe index climbed four point six three percent on the rumor of a signature, and the men who front-ran the whisper took their forty thousand won a share and went to bed richer, while the ground outside didn’t move a millimeter. United Press…
2026-06-12 · 5 MIN READThe Dow did not climb because a rooted community was saved, but because the abstract machinery of speculation was spared from the geopolitical interruption it had already priced into every server farm and semiconductor future. Asa Fitch…
2026-06-11 · 4 MIN READThey treat the earth’s yield as a spreadsheet line, a hedge against a currency they broke, while the men who actually turn the soil and run the saw are reduced to an input cost in a model whose owners will never meet them. In a morning…
2026-06-11 · 5 MIN READDan McLaughlin’s exhaustive preview of the Supreme Court’s remaining term in National Review catalogs 22 cases the conservative legal movement expects to win. It is, by its own terms, utterly competent. And it contains not a single word…
2026-06-11 · 3 MIN READThe conservative legal movement’s defense of the textualist high ground has become nothing more than a ceremony performed over a corpse. Dan McLaughlin, in National Review, celebrates the Supreme Court’s 6–3 ruling in FS Credit…
2026-06-10 · 4 MIN READThe conservative movement has spent thirty years winning every abstract constitutional argument it set out to win, and not a single one of those victories has kept a rural parish open or a local hardware store solvent. Ramesh Ponnuru, in…
2026-06-10 · 3 MIN READThe men who write the research notes do not call it looting. They call it "optimizing and exiting," which is the modern phrase for buying a utility that moves people, loading the balance sheet with borrowed money, squeezing the margin…
2026-06-10 · 7 MIN READThe Nasdaq's latest stumble was not a tremor; it was judgment. A market that rests its entire weight on the speculative valuation of a handful of abstract giants is a market waiting to break. For months, chip stocks have been lifted on…
2026-06-10 · 5 MIN READThey bought the molecule that might save a miner’s life with borrowed money, wrapped it in a distant portfolio, and called it a strategic turnaround. This is what the global pharmaceutical order now does with healing. In a report on the…
2026-06-09 · 4 MIN READThe Dow Jones closed at 50,786 yesterday, and not a single soul in Adams County will feel it. Asa Fitch’s Markets P.M. newsletter at The Wall Street Journal chronicled the day’s financial rebound, cataloging a 5 percent surge in chip…
2026-06-08 · 3 MIN READOne of the oldest listed companies in Britain just agreed to be swallowed by a bigger American rival, and two things happen before anyone opens a spreadsheet: someone decides how many local communities they no longer need to feed, and…
2026-06-08 · 4 MIN READThe Wall Street Journal editorial board celebrated the hunger of four million Americans this week, and called it a win for the country. In “The Food Stamp Rolls Decline—Hurray,” the editors applaud the fact that the Supplemental Nutrition…
2026-06-07 · 4 MIN READThe paper has risen 19 percent in nine weeks, and the men who trade it will call that number a vindication. It is, rather, the exact arithmetic of a community hollowed out from the inside. The Wall Street Journal reports this week that…
2026-06-07 · 5 MIN READMarian L. Tupy’s moral case for Jeff Bezos’s fortune, in National Review, mistakes the cold efficiency of a spreadsheet for the warm health of a community — and calls that mistake conservatism. In “A Moral Case for Jeff Bezos’s Wealth”,…
2026-06-06 · 7 MIN READThe Wall Street Journal editorial board has just catalogued, with evident dismay, the equity stakes, golden shares, and revenue‑sharing demands its own party has already imposed on the AI industry. Now, in “The Road to AI State Socialism,”…
2026-06-05 · 6 MIN READThey bought the mill that fed your town with borrowed money, billed the workers for the severance, and called it an act of optimism. In Freedom Is Worth the Risk, published by National Review on June 5, 2026, David L. Bahnsen argues that…
2026-06-05 · 4 MIN READExxonMobil’s shareholders voted last week to move their legal address out of New Jersey after 140 years. Marlo Oaks, writing in “ExxonMobil Shareholders Chose Fiduciary Duty over Political Theater” for National Review on June 4, celebrates…
2026-06-04 · 4 MIN READPrivate equity did not buy the Boston Red Sox; it bought the rights to evict us from our own Saturdays. As Main Street Independent reported, Senate candidate Graham Platner bought airtime during a Red Sox broadcast last weekend, ran a…
2026-05-27 · 6 MIN READ
