A 19-year-old college student turned down a job interview with a message about not wanting to work for a Jew. He said something stupid. He is not a cause, and he does not need anyone defending him.
What happened next is the point. The company founder who received the message blacked out the child’s name before he posted it. Then Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale stepped in. He told the founder, “You are being weak.” Leo Terrell, senior counsel for civil rights in the Justice Department, simultaneously called on the public to flag the student wherever he tries to get hired. This follows President Donald Trump tweeting from Truth Social in April: “Buy Palantir. PLTR.”
That is what happened, but this is where the victim Olympics get exposed.
Every group in this country gets to play. Black Americans, yes. Jewish Americans, yes. Women, yes. Immigrant communities, yes. Every one of them has institutions, advocacy, legal frameworks, media attention, and powerful people who will show up when one of their own is under attack. That is not a criticism; that is how communities protect themselves, and it is legitimate.
White men — specifically young white men — are the only ones who don’t get a seat at that table. They are the only group where advocacy is called supremacy, where grievance is called fragility, where saying “this isn’t fair” is treated as proof that they’re the problem.
These young men are getting it from every direction: From the colleges that tilted admissions against them, from the job market that made their demographic the acceptable variable to adjust, from the training rooms that told them what they are before they said a word, from the feminist industrial complex that profits from degrading them while calling their discomfort toxic.
The irony is that young white men form the largest demographic being sent to die in every unpopular Middle East war — wars that Lonsdale supports. These are wars funded with their tax dollars, benefiting the defense contractors and the investment class. But when a child from that same demographic says something stupid about not wanting to work for Jewish founders, the full machinery of institutional power mobilizes instantly.
Media amplification. Federal enforcement. Permanent professional execution.
Where is that same machinery for Austin Metcalf, 17 years old, killed at a school track meet in Texas? There was no trending moment, no federal scrutiny, just a family left picking up the pieces.
After drawing criticism for his actions, Lonsdale then claimed he would do the same thing if it were white people. He says he defends everyone equally. False.
Over the last 15 years, the federal hate crime statute has barely ever been used when the victim was white — not in North Carolina, not in Texas. When a woman is killed on a train and the attacker says, “I got that white girl,” federal prosecutors charge mass transit crime. When a teenager is murdered at a track meet, prosecutors charge murder. The statute sits there, designed to protect people targeted for their race, and it stays in the holster.
Gen Z is watching. They feel it. They’re tired of it, and there is hope in them going back to church. This is no coincidence.
What Lonsdale and men like him have captured is not justice. It is a machinery of power. And now they want to transfer it to artificial intelligence. Tech demigods want to control the machines that will shape everything that comes after. They tell everyday Americans that Silicon Valley will take care of them with a universal basic income while they benefit from billions in federal contracts and a presidential endorsement.
Get out of the way. Obey. That is what the demagogues who captured MAGA now want for the world.
I was early in the original MAGA movement. I understood what it was supposed to be about — not subsidies and handouts and permanent punishment.
There is a real opportunity here. The first American pope opened his papacy this spring with an encyclical about safeguarding the human person in the age of the machine. He wrote that dignity precedes everything. It is not earned. It is not conditional. That is the foundation. That is the rule that has to hold.
Every man who ever built something worth keeping in this country — now celebrating 250 — was flawed, sometimes gravely. The founders knew it. They built a system on the assumption that men would fail and that failure would not be permanent. That cycle — the fall and the return — is the architecture of a life worth living and a country worth keeping.
Permanent punishment is not justice. It is the refusal to accept the one condition that makes us human. And it will fail, because the people it targets are not finished, and the country that gives a man room to come back is not finished either.
MAGA’S DEBT DENIAL UNDERMINES WHAT THE MOVEMENT STANDS FOR
The demigods who captured MAGA want to build machines to decide who rises and who falls. The first American pope is asking us to remember something simpler: that dignity comes first, that redemption is possible, that we are not defined by our worst moment.
If Americans can hold onto that promise while demagogues build their machines, we have a fight worth fighting. Enough is enough.
Eric Beach is CEO of Lineage Corporation and former chairman of Great America PAC.