Political views
Lonsdale is an active Republican political donor and fundraiser, and has been involved with the Koch network. He is a member of the board of trustees of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute. In 2024, Lonsdale joined Douglas Leone, David O. Sacks, and other venture capitalists and tech executives in supporting Elon Musk's America PAC, a super PAC backing Donald Trump's 2024 presidential campaign. Lonsdale has been described as a friend and "political confidant" of Musk's. According to The New York Times, Lonsdale is among the leaders of the super PAC, and was a major fundraiser for the committee in addition to making his own $1 million contribution.. He also appears in the directory of Peter Thiel's Dialog organization.
In 2016, Lonsdale founded the Cicero Institute conservative think tank, and runs it along with his wife, Tayler. The group has pushed for criminalizing homelessness and rejecting Housing First policies. The group publishes a template for state legislation that includes fines of up to $5,000 for repeatedly violating encampment bans and language to facilitate involuntary psychiatric commitments. As of August 2024, bills based on the template have been introduced in fifteen states and passed in eight. According to Rolling Stone, the Cicero Institute "helped transform homelessness policing from a niche fixation of a segment of Silicon Valley into a rallying cry in the culture war".
In 2017, Business Insider described Lonsdale as "lean[ing] right" and a "politically conservative contrarian". In his college-years at Stanford, he joined other right- and libertarian-leaning students at the Stanford Review. Speaking later about this decision, he said: "It's not as much about the politics as it was about being contrarian. Hopefully, I'm slightly more mature now, but I've always relished standing out from the crowd, standing up and disagreeing with everyone. If I had grown up in Arkansas, I would have joined up with the left-wing club."
In November 2020, Lonsdale announced that he was moving his family, 8VC, and the Cicero Institute from the Bay Area to Austin, Texas. In an opinion editorial published in The Wall Street Journal, he cited California's "bad policies [that] discourage business and innovation", worsening public safety, high taxes, and a deteriorating quality of life as the primary factors in his decision. In the editorial and subsequent interviews, Lonsdale argued that the "intolerant far left" that ran California's government and were the loudest voices in Silicon Valley companies were the root cause of these problems.
In 2021, The Guardian described Lonsdale as "a regular critic of 'woke' politics". He criticized men for taking paternity leave.
In 2023, Lonsdale, writer Bari Weiss, and others co-founded the University of Austin. Lonsdale and his collaborators described the school as dedicated to freedom of thought and discussion, and criticized academia for treating faculty "like thought criminals" and suppressing open inquiry among students. When asked why he created the university, Lonsdale expressed his view that Ivy League universities and Stanford had been "conquered" by "radical, far-left ideologues", and that people could no longer become professors or Ph.D. students at such institutions unless they acquiesced to the "woke mind virus". The University of Austin promised "Forbidden Courses" involving topics including science, religion, race, gender politics, and conservatism, with lecturers including prominent tech founders and venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen, Antonio García Martínez, and others. The school raised $150 million, much of it from venture capitalists and those in the tech industry.
Early in 2025, Lonsdale announced he was working to embed a team of engineers inside the Food and Drug Administration to "accelerate the FDA's latest AI initiatives," a claim the Department of Health and Human Services later said was "not true."
In April 2025, Lonsdale convened a closed-door meeting of University of Austin faculty and staff in which, according to Politico, he articulated a sharply partisan vision for the institution, asserting that staff and faculty should adhere to a set of ideological principles and warned that those uncomfortable with his views should consider leaving. Faculty accounts characterized his remarks as a significant departure from the university's public branding as a politically open, free speech-oriented institution. Critics accused Lonsdale and the University of ideological double standards, for engaging in the same "cancel culture" the institution was established to fight.
During the 2026 U.S. immigration enforcement protests, in Minneapolis, Lonsdale decried the protesters as being an "organized illegal insurgency" and compared it to being a rebellion. Lonsdale has advocated for publicly hanging criminals to demonstrate "masculine leadership". He has also promoted the opinions and lectures of Peter Thiel about the Antichrist.
In 2026, following the capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, Lonsdale reposted another person's tweet that "Commies... should be blown up", writing, "Exactly. What did you think founding Palantir was supposed to be about?" His comments have led to public criticism for endorsing extreme political rhetoric and promoting fringe ideological views.
