Grace Ryan, a 25-year-old DSA member who calls herself “Lulu Lenin,” defended her wealthy upbringing on X this week.
The chocolate heiress, who graduated from NYU this spring and worked on Brad Lander’s congressional campaign, fired back at critics Tuesday with a phrase borrowed from French aristocracy. “Everyone’s trying to dunk on me for being a progressive from a privileged background but like have y’all never heard of noblesse oblige?” She wrote on X. “I have a moral obligation to use my advantages to help those who are struggling.”
Ryan, from Ohio, attended the $35,000-a-year Columbus Academy before finishing her degree at the $70,000-a-year New York University. Her father, Michael Ryan, is a registered Republican who bought Columbus’ Maramor Chocolates and built it into a $10 million national brand. She has been open about her family’s fortune, regularly posting about her privileged lifestyle on social media.
She recently shared photos from a family lake house showing herself puffing a cigar on a boat while wearing a $400 Ralph Lauren stars-and-stripes sweater, with a $115,000 Hummer visible in the driveway. “I’ve been very outspoken about coming from a privileged background and being disturbed by income inequality from a young age,” she wrote in response to criticism of those posts.
Ryan’s “noblesse oblige” remark references the 1835 Honoré de Balzac phrase encapsulating the aristocratic notion that privilege carries a duty to aid the less fortunate. The concept stands in direct tension with the Democratic Socialists of America’s stated goal of a classless society, which would eliminate the very hierarchies her argument assumes.
Stu Smith, an investigative analyst at the Manhattan Institute, pushed back on Ryan’s framing. “It’s really easy to have all these crazy thoughts about well policing should work this way and ownership should work in this way and yet you guys have maximum benefits on a lot of these fronts,” he said. “It’s like the Pied Piper leading people to destruction — you are really giving people a disservice as you have a safety net, you could run back to mommy and daddy whenever you decide to give this up.”
Another critic called her invocation of the phrase historically absurd. “You could be someone who was an aristocrat that got revolutionary consciousness, but the concept she’s invoking is totally antithetical to that,” the person said. “It is so absurd that she would bring that up, because she’s invoking a bourgeois ideal. It’s so asinine and so arguably anti-socialist.”
Ryan has also drawn fire for her housing situation. She rents a $3,170-a-month studio in Bushwick’s “Commie Corridor,” a new luxury building with a gym, squash court, rooftop, doorman and elevator. The unit is rent-stabilized through a city program giving developers tax breaks in exchange for including affordable units. “East Williamsburg was invented by my landlord to charge me an extra $100/month on my rent,” she complained on X last year.
Former Council Member Robert Holden blasted that arrangement. “They’re literally pricing longtime New Yorkers out. Everything they do, they actually hurt New Yorkers. So spare me the noblesse oblige BS,” he said. “At least the old communists had to seize the wealth first. Today’s laptop-latte commies already have mom and dad paying the bills while they cosplay as revolutionaries and put the boot on the neck of the working people they claim to represent.”
Ryan worked for Lander between April and July, according to her LinkedIn profile, helping him win the Democratic Primary for New York’s 10th Congressional District on June 23. “I’m so insanely grateful that Brand Lander took a chance on a random volunteer almost two years ago. I’m so proud to have been brought up in the Brad Lander school of politics, and I can’t wait for what comes next,” she wrote on X after the victory.
In the viral moment that preceded her “noblesse oblige” post, Ryan had been taking heat alongside other DSA figures exposed in recent weeks as coming from wealthy backgrounds while posing as champions of the working class. Her social media trail of luxury vacations, including a beach club in Montauk last month and $50-a-class reformer Pilates in Manhattan, had already made her a target before she embraced the aristocratic defense explicitly. Critics argue the problem is not her privilege itself but the perceived gap between her lifestyle and her political rhetoric, particularly her claims to understand working-class struggles while showing little indication of giving away her own wealth.
Ryan’s next political move remains unclear after Lander’s primary win.