This DSA Leader Was Just Slapped With Fines for This

Gustavo Gordillo wants to abolish private property. He also owns a $1.4 million house, paid for by his parents, and he's renovating it without pulling permits or hiring the union labor his own movement claims to champion. You couldn't write a better parody of the socialist landlord if you tried, and yet here it is, playing out in real life in New York City.

This is the same script we've watched for years now. The people screaming loudest about capitalism's injustices tend to be remarkably comfortable inside it. Gordillo isn't scraping by on a barista wage while organizing tenants. He's got a nice house funded by generational wealth, and when it came time to fix that house up, he skipped the union crews and skipped the paperwork too. Rules are apparently for other people's neighborhoods.

The fines are almost beside the point. What actually matters here is what this tells you about the DSA's leadership class more broadly. A lot of these figures are not workers speaking for workers. They're comfortable people who've found a language that lets them feel righteous while changing nothing about their own lives. Gordillo didn't even keep his hypocrisy contained to ideology, he brought it into his own backyard, cutting corners on the very labor protections he'd lecture the rest of us about.

None of this means the underlying arguments about housing or labor are automatically wrong. But it's fair to ask why so many of the people making them can't be bothered to live by them. Gordillo had every chance to model what he preaches. Instead he built himself a nice home and skipped the union guys to save some money. That's not socialism. That's just being a landlord with better talking points.