Gustavo Gordillo wants Americans to rethink capitalism. The co-chair of New York City Democratic Socialists of America recently argued that private grocery stores unable to compete with government-run stores perhaps shouldn't be in business. He also said nobody has a right to double-digit investment returns.
Then Mom and Dad entered the picture.
Gordillo lives in a Brooklyn townhouse his parents bought for $935,000 through a family LLC in 2019 and later renovated. The property is now valued around $1.5 million. Before that, his parents paid the $2,600 monthly rent on another apartment he occupied.
From the New York Post:
Gustavo Gordillo, the 38-year-old co-chair of the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, is peddling his anti-capitalist lefty agenda while enjoying the life in the two-story, nearly 2,000-square-foot row home on a gentrifying tree-lined block in Bed-Stuy.
“I wish my family could afford to buy me a million-dollar home,” said local renter Faith Smith, 36 — who called the socialist Yale University grad a hypocrite.
“It’s a rich kid,’’ she said of the Yalie. “That’s basically people who don’t have to deal with the struggles we have to deal with.”
The Ivy League radical’s converted single-family home was bought in 2019 by his mommy and daddy through a dummy corporation, Chucuito LLC, for just under $1 million, property records show.
Since then, it has undergone a major facelift, with renovations done to its entire front facade, the planting of lush landscaping, the revamping of the interior and the addition a pair of decks on the roof as well as near the front door, according to plans filed with the borough in 2023.
Updates to the property continued Tuesday at least on its second floor, The Post observed.
“My son and my other son both live there,” Gordillo’s father said when reached by phone. “The LLC purchased the home, and then we did the renovations.”
Capitalism apparently becomes more tolerable when Dad owns the LLC.
Gordillo is an unusually funny example, but he's hardly alone in today's socialist movement.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is a DSA member who proudly governs as a democratic socialist. His mother, Mira Nair, is an acclaimed filmmaker. His father, Mahmood Mamdani, is a Columbia University professor. The family lived in Columbia faculty housing in Manhattan, and Mamdani attended private schools and described his upbringing as privileged.
From the New Yorker:
In 1996, Mahmood published his breakthrough work, “Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism,” which described the persistence of colonial structures in independent African nations. He dedicated it to Nair and to Zohran, who, he wrote, “daily takes us on the trail that is his discovery of life.” Three years after the book was published, Columbia offered Mahmood a tenured professorship. The family moved to New York, into a faculty apartment in Morningside Heights, where they often had Edward and Mariam Said and Rashid and Mona Khalidi over for dinner. “For Zohran, they were ‘uncles’ and ‘aunties,’ ” Mahmood told me in an e-mail.
During the fall of 1999, Mamdani’s parents enrolled him at the Bank Street School for Children, a private school. The first year, he felt singled out—“being told again and again that I was very articulate with my English,” Mamdani recalled. Eventually, though, he settled into a typical Upper West Side childhood: Absolute Bagels, soccer in Riverside Park, listening to Jay-Z and Eiffel 65 on his Walkman on the way to school. In 2004, Mahmood took a sabbatical, and the family returned to Kampala for a year. One day, Mahmood went to Zohran’s school, to see how his son was adjusting. “He is doing well except that I do not always understand him,” Zohran’s teacher told him. On orders from the headmaster, the teacher had asked all the Indian students to raise their hands. Zohran had kept his down, and, when prodded, he’d protested, “I am not Indian! I am Ugandan!”
On a Saturday morning this summer, I met Mamdani outside the Bronx High School of Science, his alma mater, to walk around with one of his favorite old teachers, Marc Kagan, who happens to be the brother of Elena Kagan, the Supreme Court Justice. Kagan, the author of “Take Back the Power”—a firsthand account of his years as a radical organizer in the city’s transit union—taught social studies at Bronx Science for ten years. He inspired fervent admiration in his students, some of whom (Mamdani included) called themselves Kaganites. In his classes, Kagan talked about how race, gender, and class had shaped world events. “We got away from the great-man theory of history,” Kagan, a bespectacled, gray-bearded guy in his late sixties, said as we crossed the school’s sunken courtyard. Mamdani caught my eye and mugged. “There’s just one,” he said, nodding toward Kagan.
Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson calls herself a democratic socialist, although she isn't a DSA member. Her parents were both evolutionary biologists.
From KUOW:
But not included in the narrative Wilson tells on the campaign trail is how she affords this expensive city. The answer is simple, and arguably very Seattle: Her parents, professors in New York State, give her money.
“They send me a check periodically to help with the child care expenses,” she said, adding that daycare for her toddler costs around $2,200 a month. She did not say precisely how much her parents contribute, noting that she does not keep track. When pressed, she said money arrives every couple of months.
“Before I decided to run for office, my husband and I were just kind of juggling our kid back and forth,” Wilson said. “We didn't have her in daycare because it's so expensive. But then when I decided to run, we're like, we really need childcare.”
Wilson has mentioned the exorbitant cost of child care in Seattle throughout the campaign — noting what it costs to send her 2-year-old to daycare — but without noting how she paid for it.
Wilson acknowledged the “immense privilege” she had growing up in a secure, academic household. She became aware of that privilege while attending public schools, where she had friends who were not as lucky.
“That definitely affected me,” she said. “The feeling that this wasn’t fair, this wasn’t right.”
That realization informs her politics today, with a campaign that has resonated with tens of thousands of Seattle voters.
She attended Oxford University and left six weeks before graduation, debt-free because her parents paid her way. Wilson later stopped taking their money and worked ordinary jobs, which, I guess, deserves to be acknowledged.
In other words, she woke up on third base thinking she hit a triple.
Hasan Piker, one of America's loudest socialist voices, also arrived at the revolution with a useful head start. His father spent 24 years at Sabancı Holding, one of Turkey's largest conglomerates, eventually serving on its board and as a vice president.
Piker disputes descriptions of himself as a privileged rich kid and says his family later suffered financial problems.
From National Review:
Hasan Doğan Piker was born on July 25, 1991, in New Brunswick, N.J., to Turkish parents. Many online biographies say Piker “grew up in Istanbul,” but Piker described spending part of his childhood in the Turkish capital of Ankara. In 2018, Piker posted a picture of himself in his high school years, riding a show horse.
His father, Mehmet Behçet Piker, spent 24 years working at Sabancı Holding, rising to the board of directors and position of vice president. Sabancı Holding is one of Turkey’s largest business conglomerates, with a net asset value of $10.5 billion in 2024. Piker’s father was also a founding member of the Future Party in Turkey, formed in 2019.
Piker disputes the notion that he grew up wealthy and privileged; in November 2025, Piker claimed that his father “went broke by the time I got to college, and I was broke for the first decade after college.” Apparently it was the kind of “broke” that could afford a Equinox gym membership in 2013, which cost $133 to $142 a month with a separate $175 initiation fee; Piker likely means “broke” as a synonym for “not earning as much money as I would like.”
Hasan Piker’s uncle is Cenk Uygur, a leftist commentator and co-founder of The Young Turks, a progressive news organization. Hasan joined as an intern in 2013; in a later interview, Piker described himself as a “nepo baby,” a term for a beneficiary of nepotism. Within three years, he pitched his uncle’s organization on the idea of his hosting his own show, The Breakdown. For several years, Piker created videos discussing topics such as how Florida Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum “DESTROYED” his Republican opponent, Ron DeSantis. (You may have noticed that Governor DeSantis, reelected with almost 60 percent of the vote, was not destroyed.)
Wisconsin state Rep. Francesca Hong is an actual democratic socialist and DSA member. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) remains backed by NYC-DSA.
Neither grew up fabulously wealthy, and AOC's family experienced genuine financial strain after her father's death.
Those facts don't ruin the argument; they clarify it.
The modern socialist movement's most visible figures frequently emerge from educated, professional, politically connected, or financially supported homes. They know the language of class struggle; far fewer know childhood poverty.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I/Commie-Vt.) is the interesting exception. He grew up in a modest-income Brooklyn family. His father sold paint; money was tight.
Sanders came closer to the economic anxiety modern socialists claim to represent than many of the younger revolutionaries who followed him.
Family success isn't shameful; parents helping their children isn't hypocrisy either, as most parents would do exactly the same if they could.
The comedy begins when beneficiaries of capitalism's opportunities lecture everyone else about dismantling the system that gave their families enough prosperity to cushion the landing.
Before the DSA finishes redistributing America's wealth, somebody might want to check whether Mom and Dad are still covering the mortgage.
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