The DSA’s leaders are so privileged they can’t even see the insanity of their ideas
It’s no coincidence that all the prominent leaders of the Democratic Socialists of America turn out to be the pampered children of the upper class, drunk on delusions of their purity of heart.
Gustavo Gordillo, who co-chairs the city DSA branch, lives in a million-dollar Brooklyn house that his dad bought (and had remodeled) for him and his brother; he also paid Gustavo’s rent for years while the Yale grad — well into his 30s — pretended to be an electrician while he worked his way up the DSA ladder.
Gordillo’s parents — Peruvian immigrants who prospered in America! — own two Florida mansions, one on the rental market for $11,000 per month, but he’s never worked a real day in his life.
Which explains his smug assertion that neighborhood groceries driven out of business by city-owned, tax-subsidized stores “shouldn’t have been in that business in the first place”: He has no idea how a small business owner struggles — it’s irrelevant to the DSA’s grandiose plans to remake society as a collectivist utopia.
Of course, such is the DSA braintrust.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s filmmaker mother Mira Nair modestly allows that her family is “privileged to have three homes,” well-appointed apartments in Manhattan and New Delhi, plus of course the villa in Kampala, Uganda.
Cea Weaver, the chief of Mamdani’s Office to Protect Tenants, calls homeownership a “weapon of white supremacy”; her mom, Celia Applegate, a full professor at Vanderbilt University, owns a $1.6 million Nashville manse.
DSA comrade City Councilman Chi Ossé is a nepo baby on both sides: His dad was a prominent music attorney in the hip-hop world, and his maternal grandfather was Grammy-winning songwriter Teddy Vann; college dropout Chi “worked” briefly as a promoter before winning his council seat at 23.
Rent abolitionist and Mamdani ally Tracy Rosenthal, whose father won multiple Grammys, grew up in a million-dollar Lower Manhattan apartment; she brags about having bankrupted her landlord by refusing to pay rent for years.
Grace Mausser, Gordillo’s fellow co-chair, grew up in comfortable circumstances in a posh Houston suburb before attending George Washington University.
Virtually the whole DSA inner circle comes from wealth and privilege; so much so, they can afford to ignore reality as they preen about supposedly working as class traitors.
These are profoundly silly people . . . except they’re now managing to achieve real power, and to impose the lunatic ideas they absorbed in the ivory tower.
Never mind that socialism, hard and soft, has failed all the world over; the lie seems lovely, and it lets the cognoscenti feel superior to the parents who’ve set them up in life: What more could a Bushwick hipster want?