Welcome to the Capitalist Wing of Antifa!

Three stories about corporate greed and the tale of a community with a mission.

May 15, 2026

I know we should talk about the amazing summit Our Favorite President just had with the wise and very good-looking—right out of central casting, many people are saying—Chairman Xi.

But sometimes I need to do one for myself. And that’s what today is.

We’re going to talk about how, yes, capitalism is good. Lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, higher standards of living, blah blah blah.

Also: It can kind of suck?

Today I want to tell you three stories about the rotten fruits of capitalism and one story about a plucky, independent media company that has grown up because of space the free market created.

Who’s ready to embrace some contradictions!

1. Youth Hockey

At the youth level, every sport is idiosyncratic. Soccer is the global sport because it requires no inputs, or organization, beyond a ball. You can play it anywhere—a street, a field, a patch of concrete. You can play it with any number of people. You can play it as a game, or merely kick a ball around as an activity, a pastime.

Football is a distinctly American sport because it requires massive inputs. You need a ball, pads, helmets, tremendous amounts of space, and large numbers of players. Football can’t really be played outside of an organized context. Which is why it is the perfect expression of American values.1

Before this week I did not know much about the idiosyncrasies of youth hockey, which include the fact that it is uniquely susceptible to the corporate enshittification that is the hallmark of modern free markets.

Would you like to know more? 🫠

Here’s a USA Today investigation of a firm called Black Bear which is bringing corporate greed to youth hockey:

As a hockey dad, Murry Gunty saw how money and access can determine which kids make it to the sport’s highest levels.
As an investor, he built a business around it. . . .
Gunty, founder of Blackstreet Capital Holdings, used his private investment firm’s youth sports arm, Black Bear Sports Group, to rapidly buy up ice rinks and teams across the Northeast and Midwest and then leveraged that control to steer families into its own costly ecosystem of leagues, tournaments and fees.
The result: higher prices, fewer choices and growing concern from legal experts that one company is consolidating power over a sport long rooted in local nonprofits, turning youth hockey into a pay-to-play pipeline where families must spend hundreds more each year or risk being shut out.

Really, you must read the whole thing. You will be shocked to learn that Gunty went to Harvard Business School and has spent his career in private equity. Some highlights from USA Today:

Black Bear is the largest owner-operator of ice rinks in the United States.
It also owns hundreds of for-profit youth teams.
It also owns the leagues, tournaments, and showcases these teams compete in.
It also owns the streaming software parents use to watch the games.

USA Today describes how, once Black Bear owns the ice, it uses access to extort the customers it doesn’t own. For instance, at one rink in Michigan it threatened to raise rink rates for an independent youth team unless the team switched its uniform supplier to a vendor who gives kickbacks to Black Bear.

Yay capitalism!

Traditionally, youth hockey in America was run by community-based nonprofit groups. Black Bear’s business model is to buy the ice and then either purchase or kill the existing nonprofit teams and replace them with Black Bear-owned, for-profit contraptions. Here’s a case study:

Christine George, president of the nonprofit North Hills Amateur Hockey Association, knew little about Black Bear in May 2021 when it bought Pittsburgh Ice Arena, the home rink of the association’s youth teams. . . .
[I]n 2022, Black Bear approached the association’s parent-run board with a proposal to buy its teams for $1.
Branovan pitched the idea as a boon for players, who would benefit from Black Bear’s professional coaches and marketing support, multiple board members told USA TODAY.
Giving control of the region’s oldest youth hockey organization, founded in 1964, to a for-profit company was a nonstarter, said Amanda Rose, a board member. But as she and other parents learned, the proposal wasn’t so much an offer as a demand.
After the board refused to sell to Black Bear, Branovan in December 2022 told parents that the rink would no longer rent ice time to most of the association’s teams.
Its five elite Tier I teams—the top level of youth competition—could stay. But players on its lower-level teams, called the Pittsburgh Vipers, would have to either join Black Bear’s new in-house teams or find another rink.
“It was almost like a hostile takeover,” Rose said.

It’s a huge piece and kudos to USA Today for doing tremendous reporting work. Do not miss it.

2. M&A

If you run a restaurant, you have two choices for supplies: Sysco or Restaurant Depot. In March, Sysco agreed to buy Restaurant Depot for $29 billion.

One restaurant trade group, the Food Away from Home Association, says this will be a good thing:

“It will increase the portfolio of products that are available at Restaurant Depot,” said Charlie McConnell, VP of industry insights, research and education at the trade group. “It might allow Sysco to introduce some of their private label into Restaurant Depot, which will be a cost-savings for independent restaurants. And it increases the negotiating power with Sysco’s suppliers so they can use that leverage to lower their costs of goods.”

I mean, anything is possible, but . . . c’mon bro. The point of reducing competition is never to make things better for consumers.

Capitalism tends toward monopoly the way systems tend toward entropy. That’s physics. It’s inevitable.

Which is why to be in love with capitalism you also have to be committed to robust government regulation. Unchecked capitalism always—always—leads to its own demise. The free market tends toward monopoly and then monopolists tend toward rent-seeking.

As the saying goes: Capitalism is too important to be left to the capitalists.

Government plays a number of roles in a free-market system, but two of them sit above all others:

(1) Ensuring the rule of law.

(2) Preserving competition.

What we have blooming in America is the worst of all worlds: A two-tier system in which there is a command economy run by the head of state at one level and then a lawless race to consolidate at the level beneath the sovereign’s notice.

3. Worse on Purpose

In looking at the Sysco–Restaurant Depot merger I came across this essay from a site called Worse on Purpose. It explains how increasing consolidation in the sector has made eating out both more expensive and worse. You should read the whole thing.

Worse on Purpose does a lot of these investigations: They dig into the private equity dealings, or mergers and acquisitions, which deliberately destroy brands to extract money for corporate ownership. It’s like reading a business-school version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Here is its history of why your backpack now sucks:

VF Corporation started as Vanity Fair Mills. Bras and underwear. They paid $762 million for a company called Blue Bell and picked up JanSport in the deal. That acquisition made them the largest publicly traded clothing company in the world.
Then they went shopping.
In 2000, they bought The North Face. Same year, they bought Eastpak. In 2004, Kipling. In 2007, Eagle Creek. By the time they were done, VF Corporation controlled an estimated 55% of the US backpack market.
More than half. One company.
Every time you stood in a store in the 2010s and compared a JanSport to a North Face to an Eastpak, you were comparing three labels owned by the same parent corporation. Same earnings call. Same margin targets. Same quarterly pressure.
Competition is what kept these brands honest when they were independent. If JanSport built a shitty bag in 1985, you walked across the aisle and bought an Eastpak instead. That threat disciplined every material choice, every stitch count, every zipper spec. Once they all report to the same parent, the discipline evaporates. Nobody needs to outbuild anybody. The only pressure left is the one coming from above: hit the margin target.
The easiest way to hit a margin target is to make everything a little worse, across the board, all at once.

Because I am a backpack snob,2 this is a transformation I have absolutely noticed over the years—in order to get a good pack these days, you have to go to a mission-first company like Patagonia or an indie shop like Hyperlite.

So I knew what was happening: Big brands were reducing their denier count and using off-brand zippers. (Some day I will write an entire newsletter about YKK.) I didn’t realize the business case for this enshittification. Corporations had started to think of backpacks not as goods, but as services:

A $35 JanSport that dies in eighteen months: $23 per year. . . .
A $200 bag that lasts ten years: $20 per year. . . .
The “expensive” bag costs less. But VF Corp doesn’t want you to do this math, because the $35 bag creates a repeat customer every eighteen months. The $200 bag creates one transaction and zero follow-ups. From a shareholder’s perspective, the bag that falls apart is the better product.
That’s the business model. Repeat failure, repeat purchase, repeat revenue. The quality decline isn’t a side effect. It’s the strategy.

And here’s where anti-competitiveness is the key: VF Corp uses size to dominate supply chains and access to retailers. Big Backpack needs scale because preventing competition is how it builds a moat around its business of enshittification.

Oh, and if you’re the sort of person who is dying for 2,000 words of me talking about YKK zippers while we all fight against the dying of the Republic, come be part of Bulwark+. This is the place for you.

4. The Bulwark

All three of those stories are really the same story: Youth hockey, restaurant supply, Big Backpack.

They’re the story of how corporations use leverage to create anti-competitive advantages and how anti-competitiveness is bad for consumers—and eventually bad for the macroeconomy.

But let me tell you one last story.

This week The Bulwark went over 1 million free subscribers on Substack. This is very nice and I’m proud of it, I guess. To be honest, my inclination toward toxic competitiveness makes me want to downplay the milestone.3

The Bulwark exists at two levels. The first is as a business, and here I view us as disruptors attempting to bring more competition to the marketplace. Five years ago that amazing Rob Flaherty piece we published yesterday would have run at one of the giant media conglomerates. But we got it. We drink their milkshake.

Now I’m a realist. I understand that we will never beat the New York Times. But by giving them competition, we can force them to be better.4

Building an independent, new media competitor as we have at a moment of transformation has—and I truly believe this—made a difference. The Bulwark has forced legacy media outlets to change, in some small way, their approach to Trump’s authoritarian attempt.

We are the embodiment of the principle of free-market competition. We are, as someone said about us early on, something like the capitalist wing of antifa.

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