“Be a strong Jew,” he commanded the 24-year-old founder.

And that is the missed opportunity.

A Cornell student turned down a job interview with an ignorant and stupid line about not wanting to work for a Jewish founder. Nobody has to defend it. The kid is not the story.

The opportunity is the story.

The founder, Gabe Einhorn, blacked out the student’s name before posting it. Then billionaire Joe Lonsdale, Peter Thiel’s partner and one of the world’s most powerful men, stepped in and told him he was weak for not naming the kid.

Leo Terrell, a civil rights attorney now serving in the Justice Department, called for the student to be flagged wherever he tries to get hired. Two months earlier, on April 10, President Trump posted from Truth Social lauding Palantir and explicitly including its stock ticker, “PLTR.”

When elite power brokers combine with government power, they get their way. That is the point. The problem is that this power almost never runs to the benefit of young white men. It runs over them, around them, or through them.

Lonsdale is not Renee Good. He is not supposed to be the activist at the red light, middle finger up, horn blaring, chanting no justice, no peace. Yet in this case, that is exactly what he became: a billionaire activist with better software and a balance sheet.

He is not a victim. He is a beneficiary of the new MAGA order: contracts, defense work, data, surveillance, artificial intelligence, and a president publicly praising the company. Palantir’s business is finding people. If he wanted to lead, he could have found the student, called him, and helped both the young founder and the Cornell kid.

That would have been strength.

Instead, he chose exposure, humiliation, and professional punishment.

Young white men already knew the left would come for them. That was priced in. They know what universities, hiring departments, and DEI rooms say before they open their mouths. They know they are blamed for systems they did not build and denied the protections everyone else gets for claiming injury.

They have grievances. Real ones.

They do not get the benefits of victimhood. They get the accusation. They get collective guilt without collective defense. They get told they are privileged while institutions treat them as the problem.

Now they are watching powerful men on the right borrow the same machinery.

That is the betrayal. The same class that wants their votes, taxes, obedience, and eventually their sons for war now wants the power to erase them, too. These are the same people who cheer Middle East wars, young white men disproportionately fight in, push visa pipelines that undercut American workers, build AI systems that will decide who gets hired or erased, and take working towns by eminent domain for data centers.

Then they tell Americans Silicon Valley will take care of them with a universal basic income while they collect billions in federal contracts.

Get out of the way. Obey.

No.

In a text exchange with journalist Glenn Greenwald, Lonsdale said he would defend all people equally.

False.

If that were true, civil rights enforcement would look very different. When a black man allegedly says “kill the white bitch,” the system forgets how to say hate crime and charges mass transit instead. When Daniel Penny steps in on a subway, the system finds its moral energy. When Austin Metcalf is killed at a Texas track meet, the national machine moves on.

Republicans know these issues can be dangled every cycle. Immigration. Crime. Voter ID. Political violence. The promise is always just over the next hill. One more election. One more donation. One more emergency.

But what exactly do young white men need to give Republicans to get anything in return? Their votes? Their tax dollars? Their silence? Their sons?

Republicans hold the House, the Senate, and the White House, and still cannot pass something as basic as voter ID. What is missing, a hundred senators?

There is an 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. That is not a small thing. It is a question of the age. What happens to dignity when machines decide who counts, who works, who is watched, who is punished, and who gets a second chance?

The answer cannot be permanent punishment. It cannot be elite men using government, data, and digital mobs to crush the weak while calling it virtue. It cannot be a country where every group is trained to weaponize pain, and no one is taught to lead.

Today is Father’s Day. That matters.

This country was not built by perfect men. It was built through pain, loss, betrayal, confession, courage, faith, love, and return. George Washington is called the father of the country not because he never failed, but because he understood restraint, duty, and the burden of building something bigger than himself.

America was built on the journey back. A man falls. A family corrects him. A church calls him to confession. A country gives him room to become better. That is not weakness. That is civilization.

The founders built a system on the assumption that men would fail and that failure need not be permanent. That is the architecture of a life worth living and a country worth keeping.

The machine age will test whether America still believes that. The demigods can build tools of control, or men can choose leadership. They can build systems that erase, or a country that restores.

Be strong men.

That was always the answer.

Eric Beach is CEO of Lineage Corporation and the former chairman of Great America PAC.

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