Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale on FNC’s “The Will Cain Show” said resentment, elite universities, and government overreach are fueling the rise of democratic socialism. Lonsdale also responded to New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani using working-class people in his videos to tout his agenda.
Democratic Socialists, you see, are a very specific group. They’re educated, privileged, and yet downwardly mobile. Take Graham Platner, for example. His rugged oyster farmer image only existed because his mommy funded that oyster farm.
Nate Silver writes: “Platner didn’t graduate from college, but he came from a fairly privileged background. I don’t think it would be unfair to classify him as downwardly mobile. El-Sayed is in some ways the polar opposite, a first-generation American who went to a good public school in suburban Detroit and is obviously a high-achieving person.”
But the supporters of the DSA occupy the highly educated, low-income sector of the electorate. Eighty percent of them have bachelor’s degrees or higher. And nearly half of them earn an income of below $60,000 a year.
That’s a phenomenon that MS NOW’s Chris Hayes seems to have stumbled upon. He wrote on X: “The most left-wing people in America are people with postgraduate degrees who are financially strapped, and the most right-wing are people without four-year college degrees who are rich,” to which Ben Shapiro wrote: “Fork found in the kitchen. Unsurprising,” he says, “the most resentful people in the United States are those who believe they are owed everything and fail. And the least resentful are those who were given nothing and achieve.”
Joining me now, University of Austin founding chair and the Palantir co- founder Joe Lonsdale.
Joe, it’s good to see you on this program. In some ways, you might be unsurprised by this data put out by Nate Silver, but that members of the far left in America tend to be the most entitled and least accomplished among us in the country.
JOE LONSDALE, CO-FOUNDER, PALANTIR TECHNOLOGIES: There’s a lot of resentment. There’s a lot of lack of common sense on that side. And it’s not surprising at all to me.
I think it’s what you’re seeing. You’re seeing people who go to university, they’re programmed by these crazy ideologies that have conquered these universities, and when they don’t succeed, they become activists.
CAIN: And is this an adage which I have heard said before, Joe, and I have never found proper attribution, but is this that there is no greater resentment than that of the merely rich to the truly wealthy? Or is this merely rich kids going and getting totally useless degrees and Ph.D.s at big-time elite universities?
LONSDALE: You know, I think it’s driven by the surplus elites. Those are – – that’s where a lot of the vibes come from. And then — and then people think it’s the working class, but the working class — it’s really funny.
Mamdani is talking to these working-class people on his videos, and he’s saying it’s too expensive, right? We got to fix it. And the guy responds to him. His first video I saw today, the guy responds, yes, the licenses are too expensive. I have to pay somebody for my license because I’m waiting in line for a license from your government.
And Mamdani is featuring this. And I think he’s not even necessarily smart enough to understand he’s making like a pro-liberty argument, right? So all these things he’s complaining about are actually caused by government.
I think some of the smarter socialists, they purposely break things with government in our cities in order to then have an excuse to black pill people on our society. But I think a lot of these people maybe don’t even understand, Will, that they actually are the ones breaking things.
CAIN: Well, Joe, what do you say to the argument that Zohran Mamdani made to Jon Stewart and many of these DSA and in fact Democrat candidates make, which is, hey, you enjoy Social Security? Do you enjoy the DMV? Do you enjoy the post office? Do you enjoy libraries? Well, that is courtesy of democratic socialism.
LONSDALE: Yes, the library actually in New York was from Andrew Carnegie, right? Actually, it was a huge gift at the beginning of the century, as were most libraries. They’re created by capitalists. And the wealth that makes America exceptional, the wealth that makes all these people doing so much better — I mean, listen, move to Africa, right?
Move to a poor country that doesn’t have a free society, move to socialist Nicaragua, move to a place where it’ll take away everyone’s guns and then take away their money. Like, obviously, you want to be a poor person in a rich world.
The things that are broken, the fact that we have traffic even, that our government’s incompetent, won’t let us build cheap tunnels with Elon Musk, right, the fact that the health care is expensive, A.I. could be fixing that right now. We’re fighting hard to fix the policy to fix that. It’s government that’s broken these markets.
And we have to get government out of the way and let us help the poor people, let us help the middle class.
CAIN: And then finally, Joe, what do you make of what’s happened in Nicaragua and this premise that you can vote your way into communism, but you cannot vote your way out of communism?
LONSDALE: You know, we’re Texans will, and they got to take away your guns first to do that. In China and Iran and Turkey and Nazi Germany and Nicaragua, they took away their guns and then they took away their right to vote. We’re going to keep our guns here in Texas, so we’re going to keep our right to change government through a republic, and we’re not going to let it happen.
CAIN: Well, it’s a great point. It seems like a simplistic point, but it’s a great point that makes whatever happens here somewhat ahistorical.
The history of communism and socialism is that you can get in, but you cannot get out. But that does not run into a highly armed and motivated rebellious population that is the United States of America.
Joe Lonsdale, great to see you.
LONSDALE: Right. Great to see you.
