Democrats have a love-hate relationship with rich people. On one hand, they love the billions of dollars they pay in taxes and see them as a font of even higher taxes for purposes of wealth redistribution. On the other hand, they act like they hate billionaires for purposes of fomenting class warfare in their quest for more political power.
In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani released a campaign video in late April announcing a new tax he wants on people who own expensive second homes in the city. But rather than simply making his case to further soak the rich, Mamdani shot the video outside the home of billionaire hedge fund manager Ken Griffin, and told viewers that Griffin’s home was behind him. Griffin can be forgiven if he finds it unsettling when a Socialist calls him out by name and his home by address in a campaign video.
Mamdani’s video is among the latest salvos in the left’s ongoing attack on billionaires. The tactic was perfected of late by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and U.S. Rep. Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14), who launched their Fight Oligarchy campaign in a series of joint appearances beginning in 2025. A reporter for KTVU News described the response to their Los Angeles rally last year as “A sea of people, shoulder to shoulder, outside L.A City Hall,” so it seems there are many people in Southern California who are upset with the wealthy.
All billionaires may be equal, but some billionaires are more equal than others, especially in The Golden State, where billionaire Tom Steyer is the Democrat frontrunner in the state’s open primary for governor. Like Griffin, Steyer made his billions as a hedge fund manager, and as the only oligarch in the race, he’s won over more Democrat voters than any of his party rivals.
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This juxtaposition demonstrates the utter hypocrisy of the progressive/Socialist wing of the Democrat Party. If you give billions of dollars to local hospitals and other charities as Griffin has, you’re a bad billionaire. But if you give substantially smaller sums to promote political discord, climate alarmism and policies that cause economic harm to ordinary people, as Steyer has, you’re a good billionaire.
The hypocrisy goes deeper. There’s a reason Mamdani is going after Griffin by name and making ads outside his home, but not doing that outside the homes of Elizabeth Simons and Tom Preston-Werner. Both are billionaires, but unlike Steyer or Griffin, Simons is not a hedge fund manager; she’s the daughter of a hedge fund manager who inherited her father’s billions. As for Preston-Werner, he earned his fortune as a software entrepreneur who sold his start-up to Microsoft in 2018.
While somewhat obscure and unknown to most people, Preston-Werner and Simons are financial backers of Mamdani. Their contributions helped fuel his campaign to become the first Socialist mayor of America’s largest city, so they have immunity from attacks by him, Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of the ‘Fight Oligarchy’ crowd.
That would include Graham Platner, the presumptive Democrat nominee for the US Senate from Maine, who has a Nazi tattoo on his chest. Platner's parents weren’t billionaire oligarchs, but they did well enough to send him to a prestigious prep school with tuition and fees pegged at $80,000 a year. Today, Platner says wealthy people are the enemy.
It would also include Abdul El-Sayed, who won the endorsement of Sanders in his campaign for the Democrat Senate nomination in Michigan. El-Sayed is also cozy with Marxist Hassan Piker, who believes America deserved the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. El-Sayed claims to disagree with Piker on that point, which raises the question of why he would bother to appear at rallies with someone just fine with the deadliest attack on American soil in the nation’s 250-year-old history.
As for Sanders himself, the contemporary godfather of the campaign against wealth, he is not a billionaire; he’s merely a multi-millionaire. Like Griffin, Sanders has not only a second home but three homes, though they’re not as nice as Griffin’s. It’s clear the issue for Sanders and his oligarch-fighting fellow travelers is not whether people have wealth but what they think and believe. Billionaires who are on-brand with the progressive and Socialist agenda are inoculated against leftist rage while those who fund hospitals treating cancer patients are villainized.
The Left’s selective outrage over wealth is essential to their political goals. Wealthy men in New York, like Ken Griffin, are the enemy, while those in California, like Tom Steyer, are the heroes in this tale of two billionaires. As broadcaster Chris Plante is wont to say, “Were it not for double standards, liberals would have no standards at all,” and the left’s war on wealth is the clearest example of Plante’s axiom.
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