The Peter Pan Politicians Plaguing The Left

There have always been rich politicians: the Roosevelts, the Kennedys, President Trump. But there is an increasingly common breed of liberal politician and leftist loudmouth. One who is also rich, spoiled, supercilious. One who whines and complains about problems they have no intention of solving. One who hasn’t built, created, or provided for others, only leeched off society’s backside. One who, seemingly, has never grown up.

Call them the Peter Pan politicians. They’re plaguing the Left.

Gavin Newscum is an obvious example. The California governor can afford a $9.2 million home in Marin County, financed by a wine-and-hospitality empire that took off on Getty fairy dust — the oil dynasty that treated his father’s boy like one of their own.

He didn’t build Neverland. He was flown there.

This is a man so lost he “literally didn’t even know” his own $7.5 million former home had a 5,000-bottle wine cellar. Except he did keep his books down there, like any pretentious goon would, with spines out along the oak shelves. For show, of course, because he doesn’t actually read, thanks to his dyslexia. Which, as he once explained, makes him just like black people.

The 58-year-old millionaire was raised in the uppity Getty orbit in Pacific Heights, posed for Harper’s Bazaar as one of “The New Kennedys,” needed a waiver to graduate Santa Clara after failing statistics three times, was handed a business by his oil-heir family friend, walked straight from that business into public office, torched his first marriage by sleeping with his best friend’s wife, and kept climbing the ladder anyway. Today he presides over a state with roughly 182,000 homeless residents, a median home price near $900,000, and the nation’s highest cost-of-living-adjusted poverty rate, and spends his afternoons trying to dunk on the president so the Lost Boys still think he’s cool.

“I don’t want ever to be a man,” Peter said. “I want always to be a little boy and to have fun.”

Mamdani’s worse. The mansion Marxist is kingpin of his own political playground, where everything is antifun and games, cops and robbers has become zero cops and free the robbers, and where money is make-believe and everything’s free if you just wish upon a star.

He’s the boy who didn’t grow up. 

The 34-year-old democratic socialist was born in Kampala to an Oscar-nominated filmmaker and a Columbia postcolonial terror-sympathizing theorist, who imported their darling to the Upper West Side bubble, enrolled him in a progressive private school where adulthood was optional, then sent him through Bronx Science and on to Bowdoin for Africana studies. The lost boy spent his twenties playing dress-up as a C-list rapper named Mr. Cardamom, lived rent-free in his parents’ “plush apartment,” and decided the natural next step was running New York City.

The silly socialist smarmball later held down a rent-stabilized place in Queens while campaigning on the premise that make-believe and true are the same thing! Freeze the rent for two million people, get rid of the billionaires, make buses, groceries, and daycare free. Like magic!

In his victory speech, he quite literally said, “I am young, despite my best efforts to grow older.” We know. It shows. 

The little boy has turned the playground into a hellscape: jailed criminals running free, terror threats spiking, affordability collapsing, the means of production seized, and the Wendys of the world, the high-achieving taxpayers who keep things running, attacked for the crime of succeeding.

And when he doesn’t get his way, like when immigrant business owners speak out against his asinine, money-hemorrhaging city-run grocery stores, he hits the dissidents with sanction fines. Like a child throwing a tantrum, except this tantrum ends in poverty for hardworking Wendys who just wanted to run a bodega in peace.

His fellow DSA travelers are characters from the same book. City council co-chair Gustavo Gordilla boasts about seizing the means of production from New Yorkers and expresses zero remorse for the bodega owners his comrades will put out of business — all while his parents cover the mortgage on his $1.5 million townhouse.

Tracy Rosenthal, a DSA nut and advisor to the NYC marxist mayor, hasn’t paid rent on her $2,300/month apartment in nearly six years, despite being a trust-fund baby whose daddy is a four-time Grammy winner. Turns out little girls can be Peter Pans too, right Woke 1? Then there’s Cea Weaver, the DSA-loving Director of the Office to Protect Tenants, who whines that homeownership is a “weapon of white supremacy,” whilst stomping her feet and demanding bedtime stories. Meanwhile, her mother, a Vanderbilt professor, owns a roughly $1.6 million compound in Nashville, which is obviously the most racist thing anyone’s ever done.

I’d call Bernie Sanders a Peter Pan, but he looks 900 years old, so maybe he grew up physically, just not mentally. He’s the original Lost Boy who stuck around long enough for the hair to go white. Forty-plus years on the public payroll, three houses, book-deal millions, and the same speech he was giving when the Gettys were still cutting Newsom’s checks: Wendy should hand over her paycheck because only he knows how to handle your money – based on his prolific experience, and millionaires (now billionaires) are the real villains! Name one policy of his that’s made a single person’s life measurably better in that very long time span. Or are his wins imaginary too?

If this is the next cadre of leadership, commie Lost Boys who inherited the nursery and never graduated out of it, then the country is being run from the playground.

What we actually need are adults: people who build, hire, ship, invent, and leave something for the next generation. Not another seminar about other people’s money.

It’s worth remembering how recently this country was poorer than the Peter Pans can imagine. In 1959, more than one in five Americans lived below the poverty line, and plenty of those families were white. What changed wasn’t a municipal grocery store or a lecture on white supremacy. It was free markets, wages, appliances, antibiotics, housing that actually got built, and millions of unglamorous people clocking in to work every day. Yesterday’s luxuries became today’s ordinary. That’s what growing up looks like at the scale of a nation.

It’s easy to inherit the comfort your parents and grandparents wrung out of that system, then sneer at the privilege of whoever showed up after you. It’s easy to stay in Neverland, tax the pirates, and never learn what it takes to keep a store open. It’s hard to fly, but we can do it; we just don’t all get fairy dust. We get it the old-fashioned way: work, discipline, a little capitalism, and the willingness to grow up.