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The $1.5 Million Rich Kid Socialist: NYC-DSA Co-Chair Gustavo Gordillo Lives The Revolution From Daddy's Townhouse

Zero Rss
1 month 3 weeks ago
The $1.5 Million Rich Kid Socialist: NYC-DSA Co-Chair Gustavo Gordillo Lives The Revolution From Daddy's Townhouse

Gustavo Gordillo wants you to believe the system is broken. He wants landlords punished, private property redistributed "from landowners to the landless," and double-digit returns on investment declared unconstitutional. He wants New York City to stop being a "playground for the rich." He wants grocery stores that can't compete with government-run ones to simply close. And he wants you to see him as a blue-collar union electrician fighting for the working class. What he does not want you to notice is the $1.5 million Bed-Stuy row house his multimillionaire parents bought and renovated for him - the very kind of asset his politics treat as moral failure.

The New York Post reported this week that the 38-year-old co-chair of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America lives in a nearly 2,000-square-foot, two-story converted single-family home on a tree-lined block in historically Black Bedford-Stuyvesant. The property was purchased in 2019 by Chucuito LLC - controlled by his parents - for $935,000. Extensive renovations followed: new facade, landscaping, interior overhaul, roof decks. The fair-market value now sits around $1.5 million.

His father confirmed it on the record: "My son and my other son both live there. The LLC purchased the home, and then we did the renovations."

Via @nypost at x.com

This is not a modest starter apartment. It is a luxury single-family residence carved out of what had been multi-family housing stock - the exact reduction in units that DSA rhetoric claims to abhor when ordinary developers do it. Bed-Stuy has undergone intense gentrification. Gordillo's presence there, financed by parental capital, is textbook displacement by another name. The same organization that decries "greedy landlords" and "gentrifiers" has a co-chair living the outcome those forces produce.

The hypocrisy compounds. Gordillo has spent years presenting himself as a working-class union electrician. His X handle and bio still lean into the brand. He joined IBEW Local 3 in 2019. Yet there is no public record he completed the multi-year journeyman process. He told The New York Times earlier this year he is no longer an electrician. Before the union phase, he was a Yale graduate with an MFA in sculpture and video who worked in the art world - the same rarefied scene he later said was funded by "the very same people that we were fighting in DSA." The electrician persona appears to have been a political costume.

Immigrants from Peru, the family is a capitalist success story. Starting with low-wage work - Wendy's and house cleaning. His father founded Draftpros Inc., an engineering and consulting firm specializing in telecommunications infrastructure. The company operates multiple offices across Florida, plus Houston, Chicago, and Lima, Peru. The parents own two Florida properties valued at roughly $3 million each, including a sprawling Boca Raton home listed for $3.1 million. They previously paid $2,600 a month, through the same LLC, for Gordillo's Lower East Side apartment from 2016 to 2019. 

On Fox News in July, Gordillo called his parents "an exception." Most of his generation, he claimed, cannot afford families because the city has become a playground for the rich. The same interview produced his most revealing line: "We don't think that anybody should have the constitutional right to double-digit returns on their investment… No one has a right. That's not in the Constitution." Landlords, he said, were "crying" about rent freezes.

Fox News’ Martha MacCallum: “Your family came here from Peru really in the middle of the heat of the Shining Path. They were Maoist communist guerrillas in Peru. So why did your family come to America?”

New York City DSA co-chair Gustavo Gordillo: “The economic situation in… pic.twitter.com/mz8nPSrZYG

— RedWave Press (@RedWavePress) July 18, 2026

Yet the property his parents purchased for him has appreciated by roughly half a million dollars in seven years. The returns he declares illegitimate are the returns that house him.

The house itself has appeared on Mayor Zohran Mamdani's controversial "shame the rich" list of second homes potentially subject to the pied-à-terre tax - a list generated by an administration closely aligned with the DSA. The optics write themselves: a socialist leader's family property flagged under a policy designed to punish wealth concentration, while he continues to live there rent-free in all but name.

Gordillo's politics are not subtle. DSA rhetoric frames private landlords as extractive, profit as suspect, and land ownership as a system to be dismantled. He has argued that if city-run grocery stores drive private ones out of business, "maybe they shouldn't have been in that business in the first place." The consistency ends at his front door. The capital that bought and upgraded his home, the business success that produced it, and the intergenerational transfer that sustains him are precisely the mechanisms his ideology seeks to constrain or seize for others.

This is not an isolated personal story. It is a recurring pattern among certain progressive activists: elite credentials, family money, radical aesthetics, and zero willingness to apply the rules to themselves. Gordillo is not a tenant scraping by under a rent freeze. He is the beneficiary of successful immigrant capitalism, living in a renovated single-family home in a gentrifying neighborhood while demanding the rest of the city accept lower returns, fewer private options, and redistributed ownership.

The revolution, it turns out, comes with a $1.5 million roof and parental financing. Some animals remain more equal than others.

Tyler Durden Wed, 08/19/2026 - 16:40
Tyler Durden

The Cruelty Of DEI

Zero Rss
1 month 3 weeks ago
The Cruelty Of DEI

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

This past week ended with shock and sadness at the news that Jason Arday ended his own life in the midst of an investigation over his intellectual credibility. He was the vaunted education sociologist at Cambridge University, media darling and beneficiary of a big book contract, the toast of the town, and the subject of countless hagiographic profiles in media venues.

People walk past floral tributes to remember Jason Arday, attached to the railings outside Senate House in the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, eastern England, on Aug. 15, 2026. (Justine Gerardy/AFP via Getty Images)

Plenty of people had whispered for years that he nowhere near qualified for all this celebration. He was not a genius. He was a fabulist. Saying it, however, was dangerous to one's career. As a result, he kept getting away with it. His luck ran out when a U.S. academic pressed the issue. The tissue of lies collapsed.

The circumstances surrounding his absurd appointment to a full professorship with a named chair - the youngest black professor to enjoy such privilege - are hardly unique to him. When the full truth coming out about his plagiarism and autobiographical embellishments hit the international news, despair overwhelmed him in tragic ways.

It goes without saying that this young man had benefitted from what's called DEI, which is the new term for what used to be called "affirmative action" but mutated into rampant privilege based on raw identity politics. Reverse racism doesn't describe it fully. It is institutionalized discrimination that breeds deep resentment from those passed over and cultivates hidden contempt for those who ride this wave to unearned prestige and plaudits.

Something else has always bugged me about these systems that confer high titles and salaries on people solely on grounds of their race. It is deeply condescending and cruel to the point of being abusive of our fellow human beings. While it is easy to resent people who benefit from unearned exaltation, the plight of those who are its seeming beneficiaries also deserves some attention.

Years ago I had the opportunity to get to know a university administrator and his wife who occupied such a role. We met at a dinner party. He was the only black gentleman in the upper echelon of a major state university. His title was vice president for civil rights or some such made-up badge. It was a position invented to create the appearance of diversity. The position fell to him because he ticked all the boxes.

He was proud of his new position. But the more we spoke, the more he had doubts that he would express under his breath. He said that he has a large budget and staff but is rarely included as part of any serious planning team. He told me that he is mostly sent out on fundraising efforts to tell his story about how he grew up poor, overcame racism, and now has a prestigious position in university administration. But, he told me with frankness, he is tired of that story of himself.

We met up a few weeks later because I was curious to know more. He laid it all out to me. He came of age in an educational environment that was especially seeking blacks who performed above expectations which he always did. But instead of moving up a notch based on merit, he said he became aware early on that he was being accelerated and escalated beyond a level that was justified.

It became obvious in his college admissions, which pushed him into an institution far above that for which he was prepared. He found himself lost in a sea of high achievers. His privilege became a burden. He could not keep up in his classes and began to cut corners. It became obvious to him early that he was going to get away with this.

It seemed like the entire system was on his side. He tried to justify this to himself on grounds that every university has white kids on trust funds with legacy connections. They work less hard than a working-class kid who made it on his own so perhaps this is not unusual.

But, he said, he always felt burdened in multiple directions. It was sad enough that he grew up poor and black in the Deep South and was not expected to achieve. But it was far worse that he was given advancements beyond what he deserved when everyone knew it and considered him to be little more than a token of a compensatory system.

He described to me that choice he had to make. He could refuse the high grades, the advanced placements, the awards and attention that he knew were unmerited. But he was never sure what the point of that would be. Instead, he accepted them all as part of a game. He lost trust and respect in the system that he joined precisely because the system never really expected a high degree of performance from him.

He continued in this vein to tell me about graduate school and PhD studies which were more of the same. There was no point in this where he knew when to refuse, when to say no, when to call out the condescension and fakery of which he was presumably benefiting. In fact, he never saw himself as much of a beneficiary at all. He felt burdened by it all, and even robbed of what all the white kids faced: high expectations and the satisfaction of knowing that one climbed the ladder by virtue of his own efforts.

The story ends with his then appointment, which he knew to be fake at least on some level, though he believed that he truly did have something to contribute to university culture. It was that tag of having been marked by DEI that prevented it. He said he knew from childhood that in any endeavor in life, a title is easy but genuine respect from colleagues must be earned. He simply did not have that and did not know how to get it.

I was hardly in a position to give him advice so I did my best simply to be a sympathetic ear. I've thought about this case often through the years, knowing all the while that such cases were growing in academia to absurd extents.

What if the entire system of educational and professional achievement suddenly decided that white guys from Southwest Texas needed a boost through the ranks to make up for past wrongs? Everything I did and everywhere I went was read through my accidental identity and I was celebrated on the basis that I was from Southwest Texas, bypassing everyone else. How would this sit with me?

Absurd, right? Well, for my friend and by virtue of his race, whole degree programs were being manufactured as well as departments all designed to create the illusion of achievement without the reality. And who was doing this? For the most part, it was white left-liberals who were seeking some kind of propitiation for perceived social sins, using black people as pawns in their egalitarian gamesmanship.

And it wasn't just academia. DEI bled into corporate America, banking, media, the movies, arts institutions, publishing, and into every space and sector in modern life. Objecting to it at any point meant taking a huge risk of being called a racist. Whole systems of communication and enforcement have been invented to cover up all the ways in which meritocracy was being displaced by a new racial hierarchy.

Countless whistleblowers in academic and corporate life have faced brutal retaliation for calling this out. Everyone knows the rules: play along or face the purge. This is how Arday and so many others have gotten away with this for so long. The brave dissidents are smeared and broken. All that's left are the people willing to live with the lies.

None of this can end well. In the case of Jason Arday, it was not a case of Icarus who flew too closely to the sun and saw his wings melt before falling to earth. No. Instead he was catapulted by others at his previous schools and by Cambridge itself as high in the air as possible but given no parachute.

One day, seemingly out of the blue, the standards police came for him and revealed vast plagiarism and implausible biography. He tried the old tricks of calling them names but they would not stop their investigations. His entire life story was being upended and he was being made a laughingstock, merely for playing along with a system that everyone knew was fake to begin with.

The personal pain of this level of public humiliation is impossible to describe. It is worse than prison. Even when it is completely deserved - he had played the game all along, just as his critics had said - the suffering is unbearable for most mortals. What angers me most about this is not even that Arday played along with the racket that he knew was nothing more than that. It's that the racket was constructed to work exactly the way it did work, and then suddenly and without any warning, it stopped working.

Decades have gone by when such intellectual fakery has only grown and persisted. It's not that such systems have been abused by bad actors. It's that the systems themselves were built to baptize abuse and injustice as a fairness and compensation for past wrongs.

In reality, DEI is demeaning to everyone: the bypassed, the whistleblowers, and the seeming beneficiaries. It is a socially engineered scam created by guilt-ridden intellectuals that is exploitative even of those who seemingly win from its emoluments.

Jason Arday, despite all his failings, never deserved the indignity that comes with an unmerited promotion to the top. He knew this all along, just as my friend knew it. Any serious person with the capacity for self-examination knows it. We should stop these absurd games. They are unsustainable and can end in terrible tragedy.

Jeffrey A. Tucker is the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press, as well as 10 books in five languages, most recently "Liberty or Lockdown." He is also the editor of "The Best of Ludwig von Mises." He writes a daily column on economics for The Epoch Times and speaks widely on the topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

Tyler Durden Wed, 08/19/2026 - 16:20
Tyler Durden

California city bans feeding stray cats to save endangered rabbit

NY Post
1 month 3 weeks ago
A Central Valley city is cracking down on people feeding stray cats in public places, fearing the growing feline population could threaten an endangered rabbit found nowhere else in the world. The Ripon City Council unanimously approved an ordinance amendment Tuesday banning people from feeding feral cats and other stray animals on public property, according...
Nina Joudeh

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