Among the many frustrationsthat drove Joe Lonsdale from California, his home state, where he’d made a fortune launching the software company Palantir, was an afternoon seven years ago when his wife returned home shaken and out of breath. She’d taken their toddler for a walk on Market Street in San Francisco’s downtown, he recalled, and had been accosted by a group of homeless people, who screamed at her and the child as they fled.
At the time, Lonsdale, who had long seen himself as a moderate conservative, was already growing discontented with the liberal Bay Area. Everywhere he looked, he found reasons to be enraged. Environmental zoning codes prevented development, raising housing costs, which meant his household staff had to travel more than an hour to work at his estate in the wealthy Silicon Valleyenclave of Woodside. The rise of “wokeism” and Black Lives Matter, with its oppressed-versus-oppressor framework, was pushing the culture away from the meritocratic values that he felt made America exceptional.
He instructed his staff to fire off a round of friendly emails to the mayor’s office, members of the city’s board of supervisors and state legislators, and asked connected friends to get him meetings to help them fix these problems. Almost no one replied, he said, and those who did were curt and disdainful. He thought that officials had little interest in his views because he was wealthy and conservative.
So Lonsdale made a decision — for his family and for his worldview — that would help him propel a movement now reverberating in Washington and around the country.
