The New York Post’s editorial board makes a blunt argument about the Democratic Socialists of America: the people steering it are, with striking consistency, the children of the professional and moneyed classes their program is meant to dismantle. The board’s case is a roll call.
Gustavo Gordillo, co-chair of the city branch, lives in a million-dollar Brooklyn house that his father bought and had remodeled for him and his brother, and who also covered his rent for years. The Yale graduate, the editorial says, spent his thirties presenting himself as an electrician while climbing the DSA ladder. His parents — Peruvian immigrants who prospered in America — own two Florida properties, one of them listed on the rental market at $11,000 a month.
That biography, in the board’s view, explains a remark Gordillo made about neighborhood grocers driven out of business by city-owned, tax-subsidized stores: they “shouldn’t have been in that business in the first place.” Someone who has never carried a small business’s risk, the editorial argues, can treat its destruction as a rounding error in a larger plan.
The rest of the roster
- Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s mother, the filmmaker Mira Nair, has said the family is “privileged to have three homes” — apartments in Manhattan and New Delhi, plus a villa in Kampala, Uganda.
- Cea Weaver, who runs Mamdani’s Office to Protect Tenants, calls homeownership a “weapon of white supremacy”; her mother, a full professor at Vanderbilt, owns a $1.6 million house in Nashville.
- City Councilman Chi Ossé is the son of a prominent hip-hop music attorney and the grandson of Grammy-winning songwriter Teddy Vann; a college dropout, he worked briefly as a promoter before winning his seat at 23.
- Tracy Rosenthal, a rent abolitionist and Mamdani ally whose father won multiple Grammys, grew up in a million-dollar Lower Manhattan apartment and has boasted of bankrupting a landlord by refusing to pay rent for years.
- Grace Mausser, Gordillo’s fellow co-chair, grew up in a well-off Houston suburb before attending George Washington University.
Why the editorial thinks it matters
The board’s conclusion is not simply that these people are hypocrites. It is that inherited comfort buys the freedom to be wrong at other people’s expense — to “preen about supposedly working as class traitors” while never facing the bill. Socialism has failed wherever it has been tried, the editorial argues, but the idea flatters those who hold it, and flattery is cheap when someone else is paying the rent.
What has changed, in the board’s reading, is the stakes. These are no longer campus positions held by people with no power to act on them. The same figures now hold City Hall offices and council seats, with the authority to turn ideas absorbed in seminar rooms into policy that lands on grocers, landlords and tenants who never got a vote on the theory.
This piece summarizes a New York Post editorial. The characterizations and judgments described are the Post editorial board’s, not this newsroom’s. The photograph is a stock file image.
