Managing Partner, @ACGAnalytics. Housing finance, trade policy, LATAM, merger-arb, fintech, telco. Proud father of four daughters and three dogs. Views my own.
Washington, DC
Joined November 2019
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David Metzner retweeted
So it wasn’t a coincidence after all. The New York Times now confirms that Mary Peltola’s own campaign ran the scheme to recruit a second “Dan Sullivan” and plant him on the ballot to confuse voters and steal votes from the real Senator Dan Sullivan.
Democrats cry about "voter suppression" all the time while undertaking one of the dirtiest tricks in modern politics. Peltola should be ashamed.
BREAKING: NYT reports that operatives with Democratic Alaska U.S. Senate candidate Mary Peltola’s campaign were behind the effort to find & recruit a candidate named Dan Sullivan to run against incumbent GOP Senator Dan S. Sullivan in an effort to confuse voters and peel votes from him.
Specifically, NYT says they have reviewed text messages and documents that reveal in summer 2025, a Peltola staffer received instructions from campaign staffers to find as many people named Dan Sullivan in Alaska as possible.
The staffer complied, going through voter records, and compiled a list. The operation “involved secret trips to far-flung Alaskan communities and the appearance of a mysterious Midwestern operative, who traversed the state using a fake name and made his pitch to would-be candidates over beers at brew pubs.”
Per NYT:
“The plan worked. This spring, a retired teacher from a tiny fishing village along the Alaska Panhandle, reachable only by air and sea, announced his candidacy for Senate. His name was Dan J. Sullivan.”
nytimes.com/2026/10/28/us/po…
David Metzner retweeted
Busy times at ACG Analytics: @davidametzner and Molly McGrady joined clients in Brussels to visit with key competition leaders on a shift to more European champions. From there, they headed to London to talk mergers, macro and midterms.
David Metzner retweeted
Une famille juive nommée Karnofsky, qui a émigré de Lituanie aux États-Unis, a eu pitié d'un garçon de 7 ans et l'a accueilli chez elle.
Là, il séjourna et passa la nuit dans cette maison familiale juive, où, pour la première fois de sa vie, il fut traité avec gentillesse et tendresse.
Lorsqu'il se couchait, Mme Karnovski lui chantait des berceuses russes, qu'il chantait avec elle.
Plus tard, il apprit à chanter et à jouer diverses chansons russes et juives.
Au fil du temps, ce garçon est devenu le fils adoptif de cette famille.
M. Karnofsky lui a donné de l'argent pour acheter son premier instrument de musique, comme c'était la coutume dans les familles juives.
Plus tard, lorsqu'il devint musicien et compositeur professionnel, il utilisa ces mélodies juives dans des compositions telles que St. James's Hospital et Go Down Moses.
Le garçon a grandi et a écrit un livre sur cette famille juive qui l’a adopté en 1907. Et il parlait couramment le yiddish avec fierté.
En mémoire de cette famille et jusqu'à la fin de sa vie, il a porté l'étoile de David et a déclaré que dans cette famille il avait appris « à vivre une vraie vie et avec détermination ».
Le nom de ce petit garçon était Louis Armstrong. Ce petit garçon s'appelait Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong. Louis Armstrong parlait fièrement couramment le yiddish et « Satchmo » signifie en yiddish « grosses joues », un surnom que certains disent que Mme Karnofsky lui a donné !
David Metzner retweeted
The British army once sentenced Daniel Morgan to 500 lashes, a punishment that usually killed a man, for the crime of knocking out an officer who struck him. He survived every stroke. And he spent the rest of his life joking that the drummer had miscounted and only given him 499, so the British still owed him one. He collected that debt at a place called Cowpens.
Morgan was not born to anything. He was a rough, barely educated frontiersman who made his living hauling freight by wagon on the Virginia frontier, a big, powerful, hot-tempered young man. During the French and Indian War, serving as a civilian teamster with the British army, a British lieutenant struck him with the flat of a sword. Morgan answered with his fist and dropped the officer cold. For a colonial to strike a British officer was close to a capital offense, and the court-martial sentenced him to five hundred lashes with the cat-o'-nine-tails, a flogging meant to flay a man and very often to kill him.
They tied him up and laid it on, and Daniel Morgan did not die. He carried the ridged scars on his back for the rest of his life. But instead of breaking him, that brutal punishment forged something. It left him with a cold, permanent hatred of the British army and its contempt for colonial men like him, a hatred he would one day repay with interest. And it gave him his lifelong joke: the drummer lost count and stopped at 499, so the British, he liked to say, were still one lash short of paying him in full.
When the Revolution came, that uneducated wagoner turned out to be a natural soldier of rare gifts. He raised a company of frontier riflemen, crack shots who could kill at distances that terrified British regulars, and he led them north to Saratoga, where his marksmen helped shatter Burgoyne's army and win the turning-point victory of the war. Morgan had a feel for battle that trained European officers lacked, an instinct for ground, for timing, and above all for the men he led. He understood that his militia were not professional soldiers and could not be asked to do what professionals did, so instead of cursing them for it, he built his tactics around what they could do.
That genius reached its peak at the Battle of Cowpens in January 1781, one of the most perfectly fought battles in American history. Facing the dreaded Banastre Tarleton, Morgan set a trap built entirely on human nature. He put his unreliable militia in the front line and asked them only for two volleys, then permission to fall back, which they gladly did. Tarleton's British, seeing the Americans retreat, charged forward in a confident rush straight into Morgan's real line of hardened Continentals, and then Morgan sprang the jaws, hitting the British on both flanks at once in a double envelopment while his cavalry rode down their rear. In minutes Tarleton's command was destroyed, hundreds killed and captured, one of the most crushing and complete victories of the war, and Tarleton himself barely escaped. It was the frontier wagoner out-generaling the darlings of the British army.
So the debt was paid. The boy they tried to flog to death grew up to be the man who methodically dismantled the British in the field, who understood soldiers because he had been treated like dirt as one, and who turned the hard lessons of his own back into some of the finest tactics the Revolution ever saw. Remember Daniel Morgan. The British gave him 499 lashes and made an enemy who never forgot, and he collected the last one at Cowpens, with interest.
David Metzner retweeted
June 20, 1942. A car pulls up to the main gate of Auschwitz.
Inside are four men in SS uniforms. The guard doesn't raise the barrier fast enough, so the officer in the passenger seat leans out and screams at him in German to open the damn gate.
The guard snaps to attention and lets them through.
None of them were SS. All four were prisoners. And they had just stolen the car right out of the camp.
The man who yelled at the guard was Kazimierz Piechowski, prisoner number 918. He had been in Auschwitz for two years, since the camp's very first months, when it held mostly Polish political prisoners. He was 22.
His friend Eugeniusz Bendera, a mechanic working in the camp garage, came to him with news. His name was on a list to be executed. He wanted out. He knew where the SS kept their cars. And he could drive.
Piechowski knew something too. Because of his work assignment, he knew there was a storeroom full of SS uniforms and weapons.
So they planned the impossible.
They recruited two more men, a Polish army officer named Stanisław Jaster and a priest named Józef Lempart. On a quiet Saturday, when fewer guards were around, the four of them pushed a cart full of trash out through the camp gate. The one with the words Arbeit Macht Frei over it. To the guards, they looked like just another work detail.
Once outside the inner fence, they slipped into the building with the storeroom. Piechowski climbed in through a coal chute, unlocked the door, and they grabbed SS uniforms, pistols, and grenades.
Bendera went to the garage and took one of the best cars on site, a Steyr reportedly used by the camp commandant himself, Rudolf Höss.
Then they drove calmly through the camp toward the exit.
As they got closer to the final gate, the barrier stayed down. Nobody moved. Seconds felt like hours. The men in the back were sure they'd been caught.
Then Piechowski leaned out the window and shouted at the guard like an angry SS officer.
The barrier went up.
They drove away and ditched the car later. All four escaped.
The Germans were humiliated. Some of the escapees' families paid a terrible price. Jaster's parents were sent to Auschwitz and died there.
But here's the twist. Stanisław Jaster wasn't just escaping. He was carrying something out. A report from inside the camp, written by Witold Pilecki, the man who volunteered to go into Auschwitz to expose it.
Piechowski joined the Polish resistance and kept fighting. When the war ended, communist Poland arrested him for having served in the Home Army and sent him to prison for years.
He lived to 98 and spent his later years telling his story.
A prisoner who spent two years in Auschwitz walked out through the front gate yelling at the guards. In the commandant's car.
David Metzner retweeted
On my way to the office this morning, I passed a group of young people protesting, a Palestinian flag draped over their shoulders.
And I asked myself a question I can't shake: why does this generation always fall into the same trap? No matter the history. No matter the context. Even the ones from wealthy families, who went to the best schools, who were dealt every good card. Always the same trap.
I don't think it's stupidity. I think it's a mechanism. And a mechanism can be taken apart, piece by piece.
A. The observation: everything the state touches becomes unaffordable.
Look at economist Mark Perry's famous chart, the one people call "the chart of the century." It tracks US prices since 2000.
At the top, what explodes: hospital services, college tuition, textbooks, childcare, housing. Increases of +100%, +150%, up to +250%, far above general inflation.
At the bottom, what collapses: TVs, software, phones, toys, clothing. A TV today costs a fraction of what it did in 2000, for an infinitely better product.
Look at what separates the two groups. It isn't technology. It isn't complexity. It's one variable: how much the state is involved.
At the top, sectors that are subsidized, regulated, shielded from competition, where the state funds demand and blocks supply. At the bottom, sectors where companies fight every single morning to serve you better and cheaper.
B. The mechanism: why it's systematic.
When the state subsidizes demand without freeing supply, prices rise. Every time. Guaranteed student loans, and universities raise tuition. Housing aid plus blocked building permits, and rents skyrocket. Administered healthcare, and bureaucracy eats the budget before it ever reaches the patient.
In France it's even more vicious, because the price doesn't disappear: it hides. You never see the hospital bill, you pay it through payroll contributions. You never see the cost of school, you pay it through taxes. Public spending at 57% of GDP, one of the heaviest tax burdens in the world, more than €3.4 trillion in debt. And the result? Overflowing ERs, falling PISA scores, young people who can't afford to live in the city where they work.
The market didn't fail in these sectors. It was never allowed in.
C. Suffering demands a culprit.
A 22-year-old lives all of this in their bones. They can't find a place to live. Their degree either buries them in debt or opens no doors. The future feels blocked. That suffering is real, and I don't deny it for a second.
But human beings can't stand suffering without a culprit. They need a face. A scapegoat.
And this is where everything is decided: who taught them how to read the world?
D. Whoever tells the story picks the villain.
Schools are public. Universities are public. Culture runs on grants. Film goes through funding committees. Public broadcasting shapes the narratives. The people handing down the interpretive framework are, overwhelmingly, paid by the very system that creates the problem.
Do you really think that system is going to name itself as the culprit?
No. It names the capitalist. The boss. The landlord. "The rich." The multinational. The commercial West. Same role, same casting, every time.
E. One lens, a thousand causes.
And this brings me back to that flag. A generation taught to read every situation through a single lens, oppressor on one side, rich, Western, capitalist, oppressed on the other, will apply that lens everywhere. To housing. To climate. To conflicts on the other side of the world. The cause changes, the lens stays. That's why the trap is always the same: it's not the cause that draws them in, it's the way of thinking that was installed in them.
F. The perfect inversion.
Here's the irony. Capitalism is the force that drove down the price of almost everything it touched. The state is the force that blew up the price of almost everything it captured. And young people blame the first for the crimes of the second.
It's like blaming the firefighter for the fire because you saw him at the scene.
G. The ballot box confirms it.
In the US, a few weeks out from the midterms, a large share of urban young voters is getting ready to vote Democrat for more state, more spending, more regulation. New York elected a self-described socialist mayor, carried by young voters, on promises of rent freezes and city-run grocery stores. Rent freezes, the policy that has made housing scarcer everywhere it's been tried. The cure that worsens the disease.
In France, it's the same play in two acts. Part of the youth votes for the radical left, which promises more state. Another part votes for the center, which promises to "manage" the state well, and has dug the debt deeper than ever. Two different ballots, one shared assumption: the problem is the market, the solution is the state.
H. The way out.
These young people aren't stupid. They're right to be angry. They're just aiming at the wrong target.
The day they understand that their rent, their tuition and their hospital are expensive precisely because the state runs them, their anger will change direction. They'll stop protesting against those who create. They'll start protesting against those who capture.
That day, the greatest intellectual scam of our time will be over.
David Metzner retweeted
Our team had a wonderful time visiting Albuquerque and Santa Fe! @davidametzner and Molly McGrady especially enjoyed learning more about the incoming energy investments in New Mexico.
David Metzner retweeted
My latest in the @nypost: Rob Bonta’s Paramount-WBD debacle has created political chaos
nypost.com/2026/09/27/busine…
David Metzner retweeted
I submit that in America, rights come with responsibilities.
A year of voluntary service for young people, whether in the military, etc, builds community, self-reliance, patriotism, and a sense of duty that keep a free people free. 🇺🇸 READ MY OP-ED HERE: desmoinesregister.com/story/…
David Metzner retweeted
The pro-Palestinian and DSA movements are stuffed with privileged children of elites cosplaying as the oppressed. Here's the latest example. Hannah Gann darkened her skin, faked an accent, and invented relatives in the West Bank. All of it was a lie.
nypost.com/2026/09/23/us-new…
David Metzner retweeted
She survived Auschwitz, raised a son alone in Queens, and never remarried. Her son would go on to become a rock star, but to him, she remained the strongest person he had ever known.
Flora Klein was born in Hungary in 1925. She was a Jewish girl growing up in a country that would eventually try to destroy her people. In 1944, when the Nazis finally invaded Hungary after years of an uneasy alliance, Flora was 19 years old. For a time, Hungarian Jews had been spared the fate that had already overtaken Jewish communities elsewhere in Europe. Then that protection disappeared almost overnight.
Flora and her family were rounded up, forced into cattle cars, and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the extermination camp where more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews were murdered within a matter of months. Flora survived. One of her brothers, Larry, survived as well. Everyone else in her family, including her parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins, was killed in the gas chambers. Flora was only 19 when the world she knew was destroyed.
She would live another 74 years carrying the weight of what had happened.
After liberation in 1945, Flora spent years in displaced persons camps, places that became a kind of limbo for survivors who had nowhere to return to. Eventually, she married and became pregnant. In 1949, in Haifa, Israel, she gave birth to a son named Chaim Witz.
The marriage did not last. By 1958, Flora made the decision to leave for America. She went alone with her eight-year-old son. She spoke no English and had no money. All she had was her child and the same instinct to survive that had carried her through Auschwitz.
They first settled in Washington Heights and later moved to Queens. Flora found work in New York's garment factories, working long hours for little money and stitching clothes by the piece. She never remarried. Her son later explained that she had been deeply affected by the losses she had endured and had become fiercely protective of the small family she had left.
Flora rarely spoke about the camps. She didn't explain the nightmares, the silences, or why she saved every scrap of food and could never bring herself to throw things away. But she didn't have to explain everything. Her actions said enough.
From his mother, her son learned two lessons that would stay with him for the rest of his life: nothing is impossible, and survival means working harder than everyone else.
Those lessons helped build a rock star.
Chaim Witz would eventually become Gene Simmons, the bass player, co-founder, and fire-breathing face of KISS. The makeup, the outrageous performances, and eventually the global empire all grew alongside the work ethic Flora had instilled in him.
“Everything I am is because of my mother,” Gene has said. “She survived hell and still had the strength to raise me. Nothing I’ve done compares to what she survived.”
Flora lived long enough to see her son become famous and wealthy, but she never wanted the spotlight for herself. She had survived Auschwitz by learning how to remain unseen, and even after finding safety, she stayed private, quiet, and humble.
For decades, she refused to speak publicly about her past. But when she reached her 80s, she slowly began sharing her story. She gave testimony to Holocaust museums and allowed her experiences to be recorded for future generations. Gene said she did it because the survivors were growing older and dying, while Holocaust denial was becoming more common. She also wanted her grandchildren to understand where they came from.
After remaining silent for nearly sixty years, Flora Klein finally spoke because she didn't want the memory of her generation to disappear with it.
She died in December 2018 at the age of 93 in Los Angeles, surrounded by her family.
Her obituary identified her as Gene Simmons's mother. But that was only one part of her story.
Flora Klein was 19 when she entered Auschwitz. She should have died there. Instead, she survived.
David Metzner retweeted
On September 21, 1966, a twenty three year old Air Force lieutenant named Karl Richter did something no American had done, and it made him a legend for the short time he had left.
Richter was flying an F-105 Thunderchief, a big fast fighter bomber built to haul bombs into North Vietnam at low altitude, not to dogfight. That day he was north of Haiphong hunting surface to air missile sites when he spotted two MiG-17s making a pass. He went after them and shot one down with his 20mm cannon. At twenty three, he became the youngest American pilot to down a MiG in the war.
What people remembered about Richter was not really the kill. It was what he did next. After a pilot flew one hundred missions over North Vietnam he had earned his ticket home. Richter flew his hundred, and then he volunteered for a hundred more. Almost nobody did that. The odds of surviving that many trips into the most heavily defended airspace on earth were grim and everybody knew it.
On July 28, 1967, on his 198th mission, his aircraft was hit. He ejected but was badly injured in the process, and he died of those injuries. He was twenty four years old.
He never got his second hundred, and he never went home. Karl Richter is remembered as one of the most driven pilots of the air war, a kid who could have walked away twice and chose the mission both times. There is a building named for him at the Air Force Academy, so cadets learn his name before they ever strap into a jet.
David Metzner retweeted
Wow. This is one of the most powerful ads I've seen in a long time.
The father of Todd Beamer, one of the heroes of Flight 93, narrates a takedown of Abdul El-Sayed over his close ties to Hasan Piker, the man who said America deserved 9/11.
When a Gold Star family speaks, everyone should listen. Must watch.
David Metzner retweeted
For the sake of argument, lets just say @AGRobBonta had an airtight antitrust case against $PSKY over its $WBD deal. Then consider all that he's ignoring in the meantime, as Ric points out. Now come back to the fact that his case is absurd--every regulatory body in the world has concluded that two middling media cos cant pose a monopoly threat given the competition from Big Tech and tech adjacent @netflix. No wonder taxpayers are leaving that state
David Metzner retweeted
Justice Department Sides With Paramount on Demand That States Post $1.88 Billion Bond hollywoodreporter.com/busine…
David Metzner retweeted
It's rich watching Democrats pile on Mitch McConnell for a hospital stay when they spent four years propping up a commander in chief who was non compos mentis. They hid Joe Biden's decline from the country, and lied about it to your face.
David Metzner retweeted
I was booked on United Flight 93 on 9/11, 2001, flying nonstop from Newark NJ to San Francisco CA. Around midnight the night before, a coworker called me urging me to change my flight to fly into San Jose instead. This meant I had move to a flight that boarded 20 minutes later (from the same gate) with a stopover in Denver. I was very reluctant to do it but I did.
When I got to the airport, I watched people boarding flight 93 and I was upset that I was not leaving earlier, in my 1st class seat on a direct flight. I didn’t notice or care about the people as they were boarding, only myself.
When I finally boarded my plane, we were 7 planes behind flight 93. When we were 3 planes away from we taking off, the pilot told us to look out the right side of the plane because it appeared the Twin Towers had been hit by a plane. I thought it might have been a small Cessna until I saw the second plane strike the other tower. We were grounded just before taking off.
I changed that day. I now take every opportunity I have to watch and if possible, get to know the people I’m boarding a plane with. I never hesitate to give up my seat for a later flight if requested. I’ve had two children since 9/11 and went to multiple mission trips to war torn countries. Every day I wake up breathing is another gift from God.
Never forget 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
David Metzner retweeted
On the 25th anniversary of 9/11, Abdul El-Sayed said the attacks scarred our country, "but what we did after 9/11 scarred millions of other people." Why does he have to do this? Why can't he just honor the victims and the heroes who gave their lives that day? It's incomprehensible that anyone could take 9/11, of all days, and turn it into an indictment of America.
David Metzner retweeted
She held the keys to the cockpit of the hijacked flight 11. That's why she became the very first person k*lled on the 9/11 morning.
Her name was Karen Ann Martin.
She grew up in Danvers, Massachusetts.
Friends called her Type A-plus. Competitive. Organized. In charge, to a fault.
She took the steeper slope skiing.
She hit from the men's tee golfing.
In 1989, she became an American Airlines flight attendant.
She celebrated by jumping onto a chair and announcing to her friends: "There is now something special in the air."
She loved the long hauls. The hardest routes most attendants tried to avoid.
She never married, but her friends' kids all knew her as "Aunt Karen."
On September 11, 2001, Martin was the lead flight attendant aboard American Airlines Flight 11, out of Boston, bound for Los Angeles.
She was 40 years old.
She had the keys to the cockpit.
When the hijackers moved to take control of the plane, Martin stood between them and that door.
By multiple accounts, she was violently att*cked in the struggle for those keys.
She is believed to have been among the very first people k*lled that morning, before either tower was even struck.
At 8:46 a.m., Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
For years, her family had almost nothing to bury. A memorial first. Then, in October 2001, a funeral built around an urn holding rubble from Ground Zero.
"We, all of us, never thought we'd have any rem@ins for her," her brother Paul said.
It took the New York City medical examiner nine more years to identify enough of her remains to finally give the family something real.
"It was always like something was missing," Paul said. "Some people in my family never got to mourn her death."
A woman who announced her own career with pure joy, standing on a chair in front of her friends. A woman who stood, one final time, between danger and everyone behind her.
Rest easy, Karen.
