As his fortune grew, Lonsdale, like Musk, became deeply disenchanted with California. Announcing his move to Texas in a Wall Street Journal op-ed<\/a>, he explained that California\u2019s political leadership had crushed the state\u2019s entrepreneurial spirit and that its cities were awash in crime, thanks to ill-conceived criminal-justice reforms and \u201cradical district attorneys.\u201d \u201cWe grew weary of California\u2019s intolerant left,\u201d Lonsdale wrote, \u201cwhich would rather demonize opponents than discuss honest differences of opinion.\u201d The solution to all these problems was obvious, if, of course, you had the vision. \u201cWe\u2019re betting that the future of America is going to be built in the middle of the country, in places with good government and a reasonable cost of living,\u201d he wrote. \u201cIn other words, places like Texas.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Lonsdale believed Austin had the potential to leave Silicon Valley in the dust. Regulatory red tape would be cut to shreds so that new businesses could thrive. Innovation would explode: Austin would become a center for AI companies, cancer curing, longevity-hacking biotech labs, and firms developing new weapons systems that would make America safe again.\u00a0<\/p>\n But five years into his life in Austin, Lonsdale was realizing that he had fled the catastrophes of California only to find them replicated here, in Texas\u2019s Democratic capital city\u2014the place former Governor Rick Perry once called the blueberry in Texas\u2019s tomato soup. Maybe, in his desperation to leave California behind, Lonsdale hadn\u2019t anticipated that locals on Austin\u2019s left, of which there were so many, would come to view him as an archvillain of the Silicon Valley migration\u2014as much as or even more so than Musk.\u00a0<\/p>\n But Lonsdale is not the kind of guy to cut and run. He has an unshakable belief in the work he is doing to make Austin better for everyone. \u201cA lot of us are trying to just be good citizens and leaders and keep things functional,\u201d he told me. \u201cAnd part of that is going to be figuring out how to confront the people who are causing a problem.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Instead of following his own advice last February\u2014that is, to engage in a discussion of \u201chonest differences of opinion\u201d\u2014he took to X<\/a> to speak to his more than 200,000 followers, posting a photo of the protesters above a combative caption. \u201cToday at @Institute Cicero Office: multiple buses of protesters, trespassing, yelling w\/ megaphones, and banging on windows, to try to stop our homeless reform work. To be clear: we won\u2019t be intimidated. Their tactics are designed to stop anyone from standing up against NGOs.\u201d<\/p>\n Even Thiel encouraged him to fight on. Appearing on Lonsdale\u2019s American Optimist YouTube talk show, he told his prot\u00e9g\u00e9, \u201cIf Austin can be fixed, you will be the one to fix it.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n But like many newcomers from California, Lonsdale was discovering that Austin did not want to be fixed.\u00a0<\/p>\n No city has done bereavement better than Austin. For many old-timers, grieving Old Austin<\/a>\u2014a paradise lost\u2014has become a pastime. The place even bests San Antonio in its resolute attachment to a comparatively recent past, one that is often tied to when the bereaved went into exile after graduating from the University of Texas. No fewer than three<\/a> valedictory<\/a> books<\/a> have been published in the last two decades on the subject of the city\u2019s supposed descent from liberal heaven to tech-bro hell.\u00a0<\/p>\n But the most recent eulogizing is not just a function of nostalgia. During the pandemic, California\u2019s tech leaders got the idea<\/a> that Texas in general and Austin in particular could provide a workable alternative to their declining state. At the turn of the decade, coders, venture capitalists, crypto bros, web developers, and inventors packed up and headed to the Texas capital<\/a>, drawn by the dream of a reverse gold rush, with new fortunes and a bold new future to be made from new technologies. They came to work at Oracle<\/a>, which moved its headquarters here in 2020. They came for Tesla<\/a>, which relocated in 2021. They came for Apple and Facebook. The population of the city rose by almost 11 percent between 2020 and 2024, and while a lot of the transplants weren\u2019t in Musk and Lonsdale\u2019s tax bracket, they still looked like high-end earners to the Census Bureau. Between 2020 and 2021 the median household income in Travis County grew by 12.5 percent.\u00a0<\/p>\n By Russell Gold<\/a> <\/p>\n To ambitious, visionary moguls\u2014who maybe never checked<\/a> Austin\u2019s August and September temperatures\u2014the Texas capital made a lot of sense. Tech titans had been souring on the Democrats since the late 2010s, angered by their tightening of the regulatory noose. Meanwhile, the city was blooming with the kinds of opportunities that had made so many so rich in Silicon Valley: government contracts as tech began to change virtually everything in the modern world, including health care, education, finance, and, particularly, the extremely lucrative arena of defense, which greatly expanded in Austin with the arrival in 2018<\/a> of the Army Futures Command. While California was locking down during the pandemic, our state government couldn\u2019t roll out the welcome mat fast enough for the likes of Musk, Lonsdale, and a posse of friends, associates, and hangers-on. Faster openings<\/a> of businesses! Fewer regulations mandating remote work! A governor who seemed to spend every waking minute scheming to own the libs\u2014and probably dreamed of it too!\u00a0<\/p>\n Almost overnight\u2014or so it seemed, at least\u2014the city had a new group of players<\/a> whose names were virtually unknown to the average Austinite, much less to the average Texan. Along with Musk and Lonsdale, there were housing-policy advocate Nicole Nosek<\/a> and her husband, Luke<\/a>\u2014the PayPal cofounder and Space X investor who, with his partner, Stephen Oskoui, runs the venture capital firm Gigafund. Also gone to Austin was Joe Gebbia<\/a>, the cofounder of Airbnb, who earlier this year pitched in with Musk at DOGE to ostensibly streamline some rickety old government systems. Matt Michelsen<\/a>, a venture capitalist with an upstart disaster and migrant-detention logistics firm, fled California for Austin at around the same time.<\/p>\n These newcomers were nothing like typical Austinites, and not only because their wealth dwarfed that of just about everyone else in town. Mostly, they gravitated toward enormous faux Italian villas on the lake or built sprawling, contemporary glass-and-concrete bunker-like structures high up in the hills with the best water views. They kept to themselves, partly because people who are that wealthy tend to be that way and partly because they already had their affinity group from California. They also shared the same politics, in large part. Like Gebbia, Musk, and Nicole Nosek, many are former Democrats who have replatformed as Republicans. Many are also prot\u00e9g\u00e9s of Thiel, the country\u2019s most brilliant thinker or the country\u2019s most dangerous techno-fascist, depending on your politics. To Thiel, who warns that the Antichrist is coming, wokeness is weakness; the hoi polloi are not to be trusted. As he famously wrote in an essay<\/a> for the right-wing Cato Institute, \u201cI no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n If in the old Austin, libertarians would have been laughed out of town, that is no longer the case. On a blustery day last winter, for instance, I attended a gathering at Arena Hall, a membership-driven nonprofit networking venue that is sort of a Silicon Valley dupe. It hosts frequent events and programs, styling itself as a center for thought-leaders-to-be. Techies were once known for being antisocial, but they seem to have gotten over it.<\/p>\n Located in a refurbished, whitewashed mini manse west of the UT campus, Arena Hall features a robber baron aesthetic inside. There are richly paneled walls, bookcases with actual books, and a worn, creaky grand staircase where you\u2019d expect to see the ghost of J.\u2009P. Morgan descending in velvet slippers and a smoking jacket.\u00a0<\/p>\n Founded by Ivy Leaguer, self-help author, and venture capitalist Evan Baehr in 2022, Arena Hall describes itself on its website as \u201ca force for flourishing\u201d and \u201ca collective of like-hearted leaders in Austin collaborat[ing] through friendship to initiate and propel critical projects for the betterment of our city, state, and nation.\u201d Baehr says he\u2019s \u201ctrying to build a third space that brings together both Austin\u2019s old guard and the large new population arriving from cities like L.A., San Francisco, and Chicago.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Baehr is also a cofounder of the Teneo Network<\/a> with Missouri Senator Josh Hawley. Their goal is to create a network of men under forty in the business world that replicates the Federalist Society\u2019s now unparalleled influence in law and the judiciary. What constitutes \u201cbetterment\u201d at Arena Hall, then, includes lectures on the need for (more) deregulation (a seed investor for Uber championed \u201cdismantling the regulatory state\u201d), lectures by prominent VCs and the Nasdaq president, and, for fun, talks on longevity<\/a> (hosted by Bryan Johnson, a proponent of the \u201cdon\u2019t die\u201d movement) and psychedelic research.<\/p>\n On this night, the theme was \u201cWhat Does It Mean to Be Human?\u201d The crowd resembled a Young Republicans gathering of earnest, well-dressed, and well-heeled professionals. The fruit-and-cheese plate was the size of a sailboat. One lecturer was the intense, elegantly dressed Mia Chung, a classical pianist. Chung founded the Octet Collaborative, a Christian-based Massachusetts Institute of Technology group \u201cthat champions intellectual hospitality, biblical wisdom, and community.\u201d (The promotional material references MIT\u2019s \u201cchallenges,\u201d including woke-driven \u201climits to freedom of expression.\u201d)\u00a0<\/p>\n Chung\u2019s lecture explored the possibility of AI finishing Beethoven\u2019s uncompleted tenth symphony, and her reassuring if not totally surprising answer was sure, it could<\/a>\u2014but the results were lousy. Chung played an excerpt that an AI tool had made, and she deemed it \u201cbasically incoherent.\u201d She went on to declare that Beethoven\u2019s \u201chardship and crisis shaped the Ninth Symphony, and at the end of his life he had a quest to know God.\u201d All of this seemed pretty benign, and it was nice to see Beethoven get the credit for his hard work and personal growth.<\/p>\n When it comes to more provocative topics, though, the wealthiest California newcomers tend to pick their spots, leaning into not just exclusivity but insularity. In 2022, for example, the Noseks hosted a semisecret salon. Luke Nosek, of the chiseled cheekbones and Renaissance-prince curls, is famous for being rich but infamous for appearing in public occasionally in what look like pajama pants. Nicole is a stunning California blonde with a history of working in Democratic political campaigns and with expertise in communications. This fete was by invitation only\u2014the location wasn\u2019t announced until the day of\u2014and the topic was \u201cwhether we\u2019re approaching the end of western civilization\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. or just the beginning.\u201d The discussion was held in the Noseks\u2019 massive Italianish mansion overlooking the lake, a house once owned by the founders of the Fiesta grocery chain; the only food served was\u2014yes\u2014a single cheese board.\u00a0<\/p>\n Among the guests were 23andMe cofounder Linda Avey; Chris Bosh, the Dallas native and NBA Hall of Famer now living in the Austin area; and journalist Sewell Chan, then the editor of The Texas Tribune. \u201cAnd then it was like a clown car of twenty or twenty-five VC guys, Tesla guys, tech-med guys,\u201d one guest, an Austin fixture, told me. Not much was settled about the end of civilization, except that Luke Nosek and many of his guests seemed to think it was coming soon. \u201cBasically, all of those guys were like, \u2018We need to burn it down,\u2019\u200a\u201d the guest told me. That decided, the party broke up. \u201cWe had to be out of the house by eleven because Elon was coming.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Of all the newcomers, Lonsdale seemed the most intent on publicly persuading Austin to see itself differently. He would lead by example\u2014show the city a new value system (or a classic Texas one) where money talks, and lots of money talks even louder. Lonsdale was, after all, an extremely successful businessman. When he came to Austin, he was running the technology investment firm 8VC, which had more than $6 billion from committed investors as of 2023. Lonsdale had also cofounded OpenGov, a software firm that served government agencies. Raised by his Jewish mother, he often references a variation on the Hebrew dictum tikkun olam (\u201cto repair and heal\u201d), which he has interpreted as \u201cthe world is broken; let\u2019s fix it.\u201d<\/p>\n He moved his wife and six children into a 15,000-square-foot house with eleven bedrooms and eleven baths that resembles a Norman castle. He kept up his regular, business-oriented appearances on CNBC and the like and conducted interviews on his YouTube channel<\/a>. Broadcasting from a wood-paneled, book-lined library with a large marble fireplace to some 70,000 subscribers, he\u2019s chatted with Thiel, techno-nationalist Alex Karp, and right-wing megadonor Charles Koch. Lonsdale also brought to Austin the Cicero Institute, the think tank he founded in 2016 to super-spread his ideas, as in his anti-left blog post \u201cHow to Dismantle the NGO Underground.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n But he also arrived in Austin with newer, bigger plans. Lonsdale conceived of the idea for the University of Austin<\/a> in 2021 along with Bari Weiss, the right-of-center journalist who founded The Free Press and now is editor in chief of CBS News, and the British American historian Niall Ferguson, a vociferous critic of the \u201cilliberal monoculture\u201d in higher education. Lonsdale founded the school in 2022 with his own $25 million\u2013plus, plopping it smack in the middle of downtown in the old Scarbrough\u2019s department store. In a welcome video on the website, Governor Greg Abbott appears with UATX kids inside the Capitol, students cavort in Lonsdale\u2019s backyard, and others convene at Arena Hall. Another Sunfish-size cheese board does a cameo.<\/p>\n \u201cUniversities have been captured by new ideologies of intolerance that order subservience and quash those who think differently,\u201d Lonsdale wrote, announcing the creation of UATX. His desire, he said, was for open debate, for boldness, for new ideas to solve old problems. \u201cWe are challenging a jealous orthodoxy and expect to be scorned, mocked and even viciously attacked.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Soon enough, he was.<\/p>\n It must have been something of a shock when Lonsdale got to Austin and saw the city\u2019s homeless population clogging intersections and sleeping on downtown benches in numbers similar to those in California, where in the early aughts the subprime-mortgage crisis consigned so many people to the streets. \u201cI guess the mayor [of Austin] was very progressive, and he went to San Francisco and L.A., and he copied some of their policies,\u201d Lonsdale mused on his YouTube show in 2022. \u201cI believe he was told to show people capitalism doesn\u2019t work and put it in their faces.\u201d (\u201cI\u2019ve never said capitalism doesn\u2019t work,\u200a\u201d Steve Adler, Austin\u2019s mayor from 2015 to 2023, told me. \u201cAnd I went to San Francisco and L.A. to learn what not to do, not to copy what they were doing.\u201d)<\/p>\n For much of its recent history, Austin had responded to its homeless population with characteristic laissez-faire<\/a>. A camping ban became law in 1996 by one city council vote, after which journalist Molly Ivins and singer Steven Fromholz spent a night sleeping on Congress Avenue with other protesters and those who were actually homeless. The ban was pretty much doomed from the start\u2014no one showed up in court to pay fines associated with their tickets. \u201cHow could you give somebody who\u2019s homeless a five-hundred-dollar ticket?\u201d Ivins asked. \u201cIf they had that, they wouldn\u2019t be homeless.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2019 a lefty city council, at the urging of Councilman (now Congressman) Greg Casar<\/a>, voted to repeal the ban formally. \u201cWe can house people,\u201d Casar told a reporter. \u201cWe can serve people. We can address the core issues. We can improve all of our safety, rather than perpetuating instability and insecurity.\u201d It was an article of faith among local liberals that criminalizing the homeless was inhumane and created danger for those living on the streets, forcing them to live in dire locales, like creek beds and storm drains. In addition, the criminal records that resulted from ticketing made it even more difficult for people to find a place to live or a job. As long as there was no \u201caggressive confrontation,\u201d the council decided, panhandling was okay, as was camping under freeway underpasses and on sidewalks.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Austin Church Targeted by Ken Paxton for Helping the Homeless<\/a> <\/p>\n The silver-haired, soft-spoken Adler also asserted, in that idealistic Austin way, that allowing the homeless to become more visible might make the public more inclined to support the building of shelters, affordable housing, and other support systems the city was lacking.\u00a0<\/p>\n This did not happen to any substantial degree.\u00a0Today, on one of Austin\u2019s most important streets, Congress Avenue, substantial numbers of homeless people occupy benches and sleep on the sidewalks. Beloved businesses like Royal Blue Grocery have closed<\/a> because of assaults on employees and persistent shoplifting.\u00a0<\/p>\n Frustrated by so-dubbed Spendthrift Steve, Republican legislator Bryan Slayton<\/a>, from Royse City, once proposed designating a section of Interstate 35 that abuts downtown the Steve Adler Public Restroom Highway. For years, though, Republicans couldn\u2019t get beyond the name-calling. The blue-eyed, baby-faced political operative and Travis County GOP chair Matt Mackowiak, for one, had agitated fruitlessly for years against Adler, who, he told me recently, was the \u201cworst mayor in the history of Austin, and it\u2019s actually not even close.\u201d He added: \u201cWe\u2019re still trying to rescue our city from that damage. I blame him and Casar personally.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n In 2019 a fed-up Mackowiak founded Save Austin Now<\/a>, a political advocacy group determined to reinstate the camping ban. Mackowiak asserted that the existing homelessness policy was itself cruel, because it failed to help people get back on their feet.\u00a0<\/p>\n At the time, plenty of Austin liberals dismissed him. The first time Mackowiak tried to get the camping ban on the ballot, city officials determined that Save Austin Now\u2019s petition contained duplicate signatures and out-of-city signers, which got it thrown off<\/a>. Mackowiak then scrambled to get it on the ballot for a special election in 2021.\u00a0<\/p>\n This time, however, the cavalry showed up. It turned out that a number of local businessmen thought something had to be done\u2014Whole Foods founder John Mackey, King of the Hill<\/a> creator Mike Judge, and even Adler\u2019s law partner, Michael Barron, contributed to the cause. But more to the point, a new class of donors<\/a> in town showered Save Austin Now with $1.9 million\u2014the second-highest amount ever raised for a candidate or measure in an Austin city election.\u00a0Lonsdale chipped in $40,000, quite a lot for a local skirmish.\u00a0<\/p>\n You would have thought Save Austin Now was trying to resurrect Armadillo World Headquarters<\/a>, the legendary local music venue; according to Texas Ethics Commission records, the group spent $1.6 million on advertising and $800,000 on direct contact including door-to-door canvassing. Ironically, locals complained about hordes of Save Austin Now workers dogging them on city streets for signatures. Like panhandlers.<\/p>\n Lonsdale shaped the campaign with far more than cash, as Save Austin Now used Cicero\u2019s talking points and research to orient its marketing efforts. In May 2021, Proposition B, a camping ban, passed by a margin of 57 percent to 42 percent. For Lonsdale, Austin\u2019s homeless fight served as market testing for a much larger campaign. The Legislature used Cicero\u2019s bill templates to craft a statewide camping ban that was passed three weeks after Prop\u00a0B\u200a and that Abbott swiftly signed into law. Meanwhile, the homeless encampments under I-35 were razed.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe did two things,\u201d Lonsdale told me. \u201cOne, we got people in Austin to vote against their own city council, and two was we passed the law at the state level.\u201d<\/p>\n It was an early if not widely noted example of Lonsdale\u2019s influence. Faced with city-government opposition, he and other Prop B bigwigs found backup at the Capitol. \u201cThe people who run the Legislature are very interested to meet me, and they take notes,\u201d Lonsdale told me of his meetings there. \u201cAnd we debate. . . . They don\u2019t agree with me on everything, but they are respectful. And we get laws passed; we\u2019ve gotten a lot of laws passed.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Cicero\u2019s work has since been used as a model<\/a> by other states\u2014versions of the Texas bill have been introduced in legislatures in Arizona, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin, and have passed in Georgia, Missouri, Tennessee, and Utah. These laws favor mandatory treatment and\/or jail time over what Cicero disparages as \u201cfree\u201d (they\u2019re really subsidized) housing and voluntary mental health and addiction treatment. Clearing the streets, in this model, requires data-driven surveillance and expanded incarceration facilities\u2014services, perhaps not coincidentally, offered by some of Lonsdale\u2019s 8VC clients.<\/p>\n In one interview from his library bunker, Lonsdale expounded on his philosophy. \u201cYou say, \u2018I\u2019m sorry, we\u2019re not gonna put you in prison because we are not jerks,\u2019\u200a\u201d Lonsdale explained to an interviewer of his approach to those repeatedly getting ticketed. \u201cBut we are going to put you in forced treatment.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhich is also kind of like prison, right?\u201d a reporter countered.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is,\u201d Lonsdale said. \u00a0<\/p>\n Hooked on a Thiel-ing <\/p>\n Elon Musk Ken Howery Joe Gebbia Luke Nosek Nicole Nosek Evan Baehr Flush with victory, members of the wealthy California contingent, along with a passel of no-longer-lonely local conservatives, moved on to a new fight. Broadly, the issue was crime, which had spiked during the pandemic, as it had in most other large American cities. Just how bad Austin\u2019s crime problem was, however, would become a subject of intense debate.\u00a0<\/p>\n Overall, the number of incidents reported to the police each year had been trending downward since 2009.\u00a0But violent crime started rising in 2019 and peaked in 2022 (it has subsequently declined). Property crimes, like car theft, also ticked up slightly in 2022, and the rate was higher than in cities of comparable size. Then, too, the homeless population was still very visible\u2014there were few spots for the economically displaced to go\u2014and sometimes more frightening as fentanyl made its way to town. Even so, according to FBI Uniform Crime Reporting data for 2020, Austin\u2019s violent-crime rate was significantly lower than the average for large U.S. cities.\u00a0<\/p>\n Despite the statistics, some conservative business leaders and California \u00e9migr\u00e9s were certain the city was becoming as lawless and chaotic as San Francisco. Or they saw an opportunity for political gain by jumping on the tough-on-crime bandwagon that had been embraced nationally by the right.<\/p>\n The local battle began, as it did across the country, in response to the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. Protesters took to the streets, demanding changes at the Austin Police Department<\/a>, particularly regarding its treatment of minorities. Austin\u2019s left-leaning city council, in response, transferred a substantial chunk of its law enforcement budget toward social services, hoping to make Austin a model for other cities trying to improve treatment of minority residents. \u201cThis moment has been born out of a lot of hurt in the community,\u201d Casar said at a council meeting, causing apoplexy among law-and-order types.<\/p>\n The Republican-dominated Legislature and the governor pounced. Never one to miss a lib-bashing opportunity, Abbott called the council\u2019s actions reckless and downright dangerous. Attorney General Ken Paxton chimed in, labeling<\/a> the city council\u2019s move \u201ca political haymaker driven by the pressures of cancel culture.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n In June 2021, backed by a battalion of state legislators and law enforcement officers, a gleeful Abbott signed several<\/a> \u201cBack the Blue\u201d bills into law that (once again) punished Texas\u2019s biggest cities, especially Austin. This time, if any city cut police spending, the state would deduct an equal amount from its sales-tax-revenue distributions to fund state cops and would freeze property tax revenue. Another law made it a felony for protesters to block highway traffic, as many had done during Black Lives Matter marches. A third measure made it a felony to distract a police officer with a laser pointer.<\/p>\n Subsequently, the city council capitulated and restored the cuts it had made to the APD. But a contingent of local conservatives and tech moguls wanted more. In 2023 the group, led again by Mackowiak, launched a new Save Austin Now initiative to attack what it claimed was Austin\u2019s exploding crime problem. \u00a0<\/p>\n Lonsdale told me that there was a need at the time for opposition to local government, because \u201cotherwise the city gets captured by the grifting interests, and it defunds police and it brings more [of the NGOs that help the homeless] in the wrong way, and you have more crime.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Save Austin Now centered on a target: district attorney Jos\u00e9 Garza, whom it saw as perilously and capriciously soft on crime. Lonsdale regards Garza as part of a larger problem: He told me that the \u201cfar left are doing something very dangerous all over our country. And I think Texas is very naive to that so far, because they haven\u2019t dealt with it as much as we have where I come from.\u201d<\/p>\n You could say the soft-voiced Garza, who favors algebra-teacher glasses and a Vandyke-beard-and-mustache combo, appeared vulnerable to Lonsdale\u2019s and Save Austin Now\u2019s accusations. A reformer, he had been the executive director of the Workers Defense Project from 2015 to 2021 and was a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America; Garza\u2019s first race for district attorney had been funded in part by George Soros\u2019s Open Society Foundations network. (As Peter Thiel is to the left, Soros is to the right\u2014the equivalent of Hannibal Lecter.) In his first term as DA, Garza fought<\/a> to end low-level drug prosecutions, earned the enmity of the Austin police for his largely unsuccessful attempts to prosecute alleged abuses within the department, and\u2014even worse\u2014championed bail reform. As time went on, Garza also developed a reputation<\/a> for failing to prosecute violent crimes that were not committed by police officers.\u00a0<\/p>\n Save Austin Now found a more-than-welcoming statehouse in its effort to dispatch Travis County\u2019s district attorney. State Representative David Cook, a Republican from Mansfield, introduced a bill<\/a> allowing for the Legislature to impeach any DA for misconduct\u2014that is, if he or she isn\u2019t vigilant about prosecuting certain crimes, including low-level thefts as well as abortion and voter fraud. The bill passed and became law. Save Austin Now also helped launch a website in September called Garzawatch<\/a>, where crime victims could share their stories. Whistleblowers were invited to contact the site to rat out any abuses or legal violations in the DA\u2019s office.<\/p>\n As Garza announced a bid for reelection in 2023, Save Austin Now began beating the bushes for a candidate to oppose him. The candidate had to be a Democrat, of course, because a Republican would have been a nonstarter in Austin.\u00a0<\/p>\n It must not have been easy. Jeremy Sylestine<\/a> signed on the last day of the filing deadline, December\u00a011, 2023. With bright eyes and dark hair, Sylestine might have looked great on paper: He was a member of the Alabama- Thanks to its prosperous donor group, though, Sylestine was well funded; he raised $250,000 in January alone, a hefty sum for a local DA\u2019s race. In total, Kind Snacks founder Daniel Lubetzky chipped in $160,000; the estate of Majid Hemmasi, an Austin businessman who was\u00a0murdered<\/a>\u00a0in 2017, three years before Garza first took office, contributed $100,000; and Lonsdale forked over $25,000.<\/p>\n Within the first two months of 2024, Austin became a battlefield\u2014an ugly, political, and very expensive battlefield. You could say that Save Austin Now took the high road, enjoying the support of the police union and pummeling Garza for being weak on crime while encouraging Republicans to hold their noses and cross party lines to vote for Sylestine. The Free Press, edited by Lonsdale pal Bari Weiss, published a story<\/a> whose headline asked, \u201cIn a Deep-Blue City, Will Locals Get Tough on Crime?\u201d (\u201cCrime in Austin has soared under a progressive district attorney . . .\u201d)\u00a0<\/p>\n Meanwhile, a new group called Saving Austin<\/a>\u2014why the names seemed so similar is a mystery\u2014went low. The then-unidentified dark money PAC barraged the populace with flyers, emails, and TV commercials. The most infamous was a mailer that featured a bloodied teddy bear and the caption \u201cJose Garza Is Filling Austin\u2019s Streets With Pedophiles & Killers.\u201d It reminded residents that the \u201cnext victim could be your loved one\u201d and urged them to demand that Garza \u201cstop cutting plea deals with these monsters.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n In turn, Sylestine raced to distance himself from exploding public outrage over what was then believed to be his campaign\u2019s scare tactics. \u201cI want to make unequivocally clear that I, and my campaign, denounce the demagogic mailer by the so-called Saving Austin PAC attacking Jos\u00e9 Garza,\u201d Sylestine declared on social media on March 1, while the teddy bear flyer was going viral. \u201cThat extreme rhetoric and imagery should have no place in this race.\u201d You had the feeling that Sylestine might be regretting his decision to run.<\/p>\n Later that same day, an outraged Team Garza issued a cease and desist order declaring that the flyer violated Texas election laws by not disclosing who had paid for it. As Mimi Marziani, a lawyer for the firm representing the campaign, announced, the document was \u201ccowardly, misleading and divisive.\u201d She threatened legal action. In fact, the PAC had not registered with the Texas Ethics Commission or the secretary of state, which not only made it illegal but made its origins hard to trace. As was frequently noted by a mystified press at the time, the address on the flyer turned out to be a UPS store in Irving, 205 miles to the north. Months later, The Wall Street Journal would report<\/a> that Elon Musk had funded the group.\u00a0<\/p>\n Austin went to the polls just a few days later and summarily rejected Sylestine and the $1.3 million his backers had spent on the race. They might as well have set their cash on fire: Garza trounced his opponent by a two-to-one margin. \u201cThis community didn\u2019t take the bait,\u201d Garza told his supporters triumphantly at his victory party.<\/p>\n The Save Austin Now contingent was nothing if not determined. They kept looking for ways to depose Garza even as spring turned to summer and the November election loomed. Garza\u2019s Republican opponent, a proud criminal defense attorney, wasn\u2019t generating any enthusiasm. But then hope arrived in the form of a woman named Betsy Dupuis.\u00a0<\/p>\n Dupuis was in her mid-thirties, with brown eyes, long sable-hued hair, and a soft, round face that could, on first meeting, suggest she had an accommodating personality.\u00a0<\/p>\n Dupuis knew her way around Austin\u2019s tech community. She had worked as a software designer at an Austin company called New Knowledge (now Yonder), a controversial<\/a>, NSA-linked cybersecurity firm that specialized in ferreting out disinformation, including Russian interference in the 2016 election. Dupuis had once leaned libertarian but jokes that she is now \u201ca pragmatic anarchist with positions that would upset both parties.\u201d She finds the progressive left \u201ctotalitarian.\u201d<\/p>\n Dupuis is also someone for whom trawling the internet was a lot more than a pastime; her research skills matched those of a grizzled CIA analyst. All told, Dupuis has the classic whistleblower\u2019s personality\u2014sharp, relentless, and prickly. She\u2019s never met a document or text message she didn\u2019t squirrel away for possible use at a later date.<\/p>\n Before the pandemic, Dupuis dated a wealthy tech entrepreneur. Their months-long relationship eventually deteriorated into a toxic stew of recriminations and abuse: \u201cI wasn\u2019t ever going to date you long term,\u201d her ex wrote in a text message. \u201cBecause you are pathetic and I\u2019m top 1%.\u201d The relationship ended in 2019 with what Dupuis considered a sexual assault and her former partner defined as consensual sex.\u00a0<\/p>\n Except that the relationship didn\u2019t end. In the years that followed, Dupuis\u2019s ex\u2019s father reported her to the police for harassment, and her ex sued her for defamation after she posted his texts on Twitter. During a hearing in that case, Dupuis learned that her former lover faced a warrant for his arrest on charges of assaulting another woman (he ultimately received a conditional dismissal of the charges, having \u201ccompleted treatment\u201d). Dupuis hired a lawyer and countersued, accusing her ex in civil court of sexual assault.<\/p>\n With knowledge of the prior accusation and on her lawyer\u2019s advice\u2014he told her it would help her case\u2014Dupuis went to APD and filed a police report. She waited. But in early 2023, Dupuis learned that the DA\u2019s office would not file charges. She said she was told that she couldn\u2019t prove the encounter was not consensual and hadn\u2019t made an \u201coutcry\u201d\u2014in other words told anyone else what had happened. Dupuis said she had. (Garza did not respond to questions about why his office did not pursue charges.)<\/p>\n Then Dupuis went nuclear. She consulted another attorney, Martin Harry, who had also been Garza\u2019s opponent in 2020. Using the law passed by the Legislature that Save Austin Now had pushed for to punish progressive prosecutors, she filed a petition in April 2024 asking for Garza\u2019s removal \u201cdue to incompetency and official misconduct.\u201d<\/p>\n Democrats, Garza included, took to the media<\/a> to label Dupuis a MAGA plant. Matt Mackowiak, however, saw an opportunity. He contacted her, hoping to enlist her in the fight to stop Garza.\u00a0<\/p>\n The two fell out relatively quickly. They disagreed over how a Mackowiak- But other anti-Garza types did not give up on her. Another Garza nonfan by the name of Chad Grills\u2014podcaster, entrepreneur, Army infantry veteran, self-help author, and a beneficiary of Thiel\u2019s venture capital Founders Fund\u2014invited her to a meeting at Arena Hall. Dupuis accepted. She was curious, she told me.\u00a0<\/p>\n The subject line for the event invitation was \u201cRebuilding Austin.\u201d A decidedly cryptic note below promised \u201ca private briefing and discussion around what\u2019s happening in Austin and Travis County.\u201d In attendance were, among others, James P. Sullivan, Greg Abbott\u2019s general counsel, who would be appointed to the state Supreme Court in January 2025, and a woman who had worked on a documentary, Riding the Dragon, about Hunter Biden\u2019s dealings in China. On the invite list was Cody Wilson, the founder of Austin-based Defense Distributed, a company that produced a so-called ghost gun that could be purchased online and made with a 3D printer, and a Lonsdale-adjacent former Palantir and 8VC employee who was now a \u201ctalent network manager\u201d for the University of Austin.\u00a0<\/p>\n At the event, the Arena Hall founder himself, Evan Baehr, greeted Dupuis with \u201cWelcome to the team.\u201d But over the next hour or so, Dupuis did not feel welcome. At one point a guest jokingly referred to her as a conspiracy theorist and suggested a real researcher take a look at the opposition research on Garza that she had done on her own.<\/p>\n The guest\u2019s name was Andrew Beck. He is the cofounder of Beck & Stone<\/a>, a far-right, anti-woke political and brand consultancy with links to male-only private investment clubs and the Claremont Institute, which championed Project 2025, the right-wing political initiative to reshape the federal government that has been adopted by Donald Trump. Beck has called for<\/a> \u201ca showdown on Mount Carmel, with all the people gathered to see Christian civilization and secular atheist civilization confront one another as opposing ways of life.\u201d On his company website, he describes himself as someone who \u201chelped put intellectual conservatism and dissident thought on the map in the rapidly evolving public square of the internet\u201d and notes that \u201chis work is widely emulated and his input highly valued by decision makers.\u201d Dupuis recalled that at the Arena Hall meeting, \u201che kept saying he was going to turn Travis County red.\u201d<\/p>\n After the event, Beck and Dupuis began a correspondence. She sent me a twelve-page, single-spaced compilation of the 22 email messages they exchanged. \u201cI do not appreciate the condescending and disrespectful commentary about my activism, research, and the horror story I have been living through that has pushed me to fight for change in Travis County,\u201d her first email began. As for his challenge of her bona fides, \u201cI am a researcher that has researched the research of researchers to help researchers do better research,\u201d she wrote.<\/p>\n Beck tried desperately to apologize\u2014\u201cHey Betsy, sorry to hear this!\u201d\u2014but he was doomed. After several additional lengthy and increasingly angry emails from Dupuis, he asked her \u201cpolitely\u201d to \u201cstop communicating with me and about me.\u201d<\/p>\n In the end, Beck and the rest of the Arena Hall gang did not succeed in turning Austin red. Garza won the November general election by almost the identical percentage as he had the blistering March primary and the 2020 general. A month or so later, a judge dismissed Dupuis\u2019s recall petition against Garza.\u00a0<\/p>\n After the election, Steve Adler suggested that Baehr and Garza break bread. \u201cThe conversation was eye-opening,\u201d Baehr told me. \u201cI realized we actually share goals\u201d concerning public safety and \u201cpaths to healing for those in extreme addiction.\u201d He invited Garza to Arena Hall to lead an innovation workshop on public safety, telling me, \u201cThis city is too small and its future too important to fight our battles through political campaign ads.\u201d<\/p>\n When we spoke, Lonsdale did not sound like a man close to surrender. He was on his way to give a speech at the Reagan library, in Southern California, and he sounded even more rushed than usual. His words tumbled out as if spilled from some incomprehensible altitude. He wanted to preserve Austin\u2019s culture. He wanted to make the city more affordable for the working class and the middle class. He just wished the local leadership were more \u201cfunctional.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n He went on. The city\u2019s policies really just drive him crazy, he said, because he loves Austin and doesn\u2019t want to see it destroyed by virtue signalers, nonprofit grifters, corrupt politicians, and \u201ca lot of the people around them who are very naive and who don\u2019t realize what\u2019s happening.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThis is what happened in Silicon Valley,\u201d he continued. \u201cYou had all this wealth come in, but then you had all these very corrupt, very ideological leaders in these cities, and they stole a lot of wealth and broke things and made it terrible for the working class. And so I really don\u2019t want that to happen in Austin.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n How to make it more \u201ccentrist and rational?\u201d That was the key question.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt would be great,\u201d he said, \u201cif we could figure that out.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n Lifestyles of the Austin Rich and Not So Famous <\/p>\n But with the influence of its booming tech sector, Austin has become as status obsessed as the Texas cities it\u2019s historically dissed. Now the town is awash in private clubs, from the pricey, sybaritic Soho House to the far more earnest (and political) Arena Hall. South Congress, once Austin\u2019s funkiest hood, has been unsuccessfully rebranded as \u201cSoCo\u201d and feels like a lifestyle-training ground for budding moguls. It features the infamous Herm\u00e8s store<\/a>, where the brand\u2019s version of a Frisbee\u2014in orange, conveniently similar to UT\u2019s favorite shade\u2014sells for $265.<\/p>\n But craving the riches of Silicon Valley expats isn\u2019t the same as having those riches. As a local wealth manager with several tech clients explained to me, \u201cthere\u2019s a difference between people showing up and bringing wealth with them and people making wealth who live in Austin.\u201d A prospective client might live in a $5 million house, have a boat on Lake Travis, own three cars, \u201cand only have $250,000 in savings.\u201d<\/p>\n Based on the number of Silicon Valley\u2013style self-help gurus now here, this new moneyed class also needs assistance managing human capital. \u201cAustin has become a permanent outpost for the techno-spiritual ecosystem,\u201d said sexologist Coral Osborne, who added that many of the newcomers she works with exhibit \u201cself-serving delusion masked as radical honesty.\u201d<\/p>\n Fortunately, a host of start-ups and lifestyle consultants in town offer transplants help reconnecting with their humanity.\u00a0Judson Kauffman, a \u201ctransformational coach\u201d with clients in the tech and VC sectors, said many folks come to him because they \u201cdon\u2019t understand the meaning of life. They don\u2019t understand what their purpose is. They don\u2019t exude love.\u201d\u00a0 <\/p>\n![\"photo](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/turning-austin-red-1.jpg\")
A protest at the Cicero Institute\u2019s headquarters in February.Courtesy of VOCAL-TX<\/p>\n![\"elon](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/elon-musk-texas-energy-1.jpg\")
<\/a> Elon Musk Came to Texas to End the Oil Age<\/a> <\/p>\n![\"photo](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/turning-austin-red-2.jpg\")
Joe Lonsdale at the 8VC offices in Austin.Dave Creaney<\/p>\n![\"photo](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/turning-austin-red-3.jpg\")
The Cicero Institute.Photograph by Chad Wadsworth<\/p>\n![\"photograph](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/turning-austin-red-6.jpg\")
Shoppers on South Congress Avenue. Photograph by Chad Wadsworth ![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/turning-austin-red-10.jpg\")
South Congress Avenue. Photograph by Chad Wadsworth <\/p>\n![\"photo](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/turning-austin-red-4.jpg\")
A homeless camp under Interstate 35 in downtown Austin on September 22, 2025. Photograph by Chad Wadsworth<\/p>\n
PayPal CEO until ousted by Thiel. Founder of SpaceX and Starlink and CEO of Tesla. Former DOGE ringleader. Briefly deposed by Larry Ellison as the richest person in the world but back on top. He built an Austin compound reportedly to house some of his ex-wives and children.<\/p>\n
PayPal and Founders Fund cofounder; Clarium Capital VP. Trump ambassador to Sweden 2019\u20132021. Musk bunked as a guest at his lakeside mansion while reportedly house hunting in Austin in 2020. Graduate of J. Frank Dobie High School, in Houston.<\/p>\n
Cofounder of Airbnb, Tesla board member, Musk pal, DOGE superstar, and first-ever U.S. chief design officer. Declared his allegiance to Trump on X in January 2025 after a \u201cwoke-up call.\u201d Has lived in Austin since 2020. Big on therapeutic sound baths.<\/p>\n
PayPal and Founders Fund cofounder with Thiel and Howery and founder of the Gigafund venture capital firm (which invests in SpaceX, Neuralink, and the Boring Company). Like Thiel, was once registered to be cryogenically frozen and defrosted in the future. Married to . . .\u00a0<\/p>\n
Former Democratic campaign operative with expertise in communications. Created the bipartisan Texans for Reasonable Solutions, which successfully pushed the Legislature to allow more affordable housing across Texas.<\/p>\n
Worked for Thiel at Clarium Capital and created Able Lending, a fintech company that Thiel invested in. Founded Arena Hall, a membership club, and the Teneo Network, a Federalist Society dupe established to expand conservative influence in the private sector. <\/p>\n![\"exterior](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/turning-austin-red-8.jpg\")
![\"exterior](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/1761718958_698_turning-austin-red-8.jpg\")
The exterior of Arena Hall.Photograph by Chad Wadsworth<\/p>\n
Coushatta tribe from East Texas, and he was a graduate of UT-Austin and the University of Virginia law school. Sylestine had also been a prosecutor in the Travis County DA\u2019s office for fifteen years but left as Garza arrived, saying (when he announced his run) that the office had been \u201cheaded in the wrong direction.\u201d With the primary set for March 5, there wasn\u2019t much time for Save Austin Now to save Austin.\u00a0<\/p>\n![\"interior](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/turning-austin-red-7.jpg\")
Students in a common area at the University of Austin.Jay Janner\/The Austin American-Statesman via Getty<\/p>\n
arranged TV news segment proceeded and over the language in an anti-Garza press release. Mackowiak said it was necessary to edit the statement. Dupuis didn\u2019t like someone putting words in her mouth.<\/p>\n![\"closeup](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/turning-austin-red-5.jpg\")
Matt Mackowiak at the Austin Police Department headquarters in 2021.Marshall Tidrick<\/p>\n