A NYC socialist and self-described “Lulu Lenin” said rich people like her have an obligation to help the less fortunate.
Grace Ryan, a 25-year-old chocolate heiress from Ohio who graduated from NYU this spring and worked as an organizer on Brad Lander’s congressional campaign, has emerged as one of the most shameless members of the Democratic Socialists of America.
“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?” Ryan wrote in an out-of-touch post on X Tuesday.
“I have a moral obligation to use my advantages to help those who are struggling.”
The remark — a reference to the phrase Honoré de Balzac used in 1835 to encapsulate the aristocratic notion that privilege comes with a duty to help the less fortunate, in direct contradiction to the DSA’s beliefs — came after a slew of DSA leaders were exposed in recent weeks as nepo babies posing as champions of the proletariat.
Ryan, who attended the $35,000-a-year Columbus Academy, regularly takes to social media to defend both her socialist views and her family fortune.
Her father, Michael Ryan, a registered Republican, made his fortune buying Columbus’ Maramor Chocolates and turning it into a $10 million national brand found in almost all candy isles.
She recently flaunted her summer at a family lake house posting photos on X of herself puffing a cigar on a boat in a $400 Ralph Lauren stars-and-stripes sweater — and posing beside a $115,000 Hummer parked 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 defended to criticism of the snaps.
The recent graduate from $70,000-a-year New York University with a Bachelor of Arts also posted about being at a beach club in Montauk last month and attending $50-a-class reformer Pilates in the Big Apple.
But critics of Ryan and her comrades say the problem isn’t being privileged — it’s pretending to understand the struggles of the working class and claiming to know what’s best for them while preaching from a mountain of gold they show little interest in giving away.
“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,” said Stu Smith, investigative analyst at the Manhattan Institute.
“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.”
The idea of “noblesse oblige” conveniently lets the rich keep their fortunes so long as they deign to share a small portion of it — but the DSA’s own program advocates for a classless society, a goal Ryan doesn’t appear to be in any sort of rush to advance.
“You could be someone who was an aristocrat that got revolutionary consciousness, but the concept she’s invoking is totally antithetical to that. 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.”
Her riches didn’t stop her from whining about overpaying for rent in Brooklyn’s “Commie Corridor.”
“East Williamsburg was invented by my landlord to charge me an extra $100/month on my rent,” she said on X last year of her $3,170 a month Bushwick studio.
The pad, in a new luxury building with a gym, squash court, rooftop, doorman and elevator, is rent-stabilized through a city program that gives developers tax breaks in exchange for including affordable units.
“They’re literally pricing longtime New Yorkers out. Everything they do, they actually hurt New Yorkers. So spare me the noblesse oblige BS,” said former Council Member Robert Holden of Ryan nabbing a rent-stabilized pad.
“At least the old communists had to seize the wealth first,” he quipped. “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, when he won the Democratic Primary for New York’s 10th Congressional District, which includes lower Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn, according to her LinkedIn profile.
“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 gloated on X after the June 23 win.
The Post could not reach Ryan for comment.
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