Darializa Avila Chevalier, the Democratic congressional nominee endorsed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who ousted longtime Rep. Adriano Espaillat in Tuesday’s main, maintained a since-deleted Twitter account with repeated sympathetic references to communism, Marxist ideology and Soviet figures, together with Vladimir Lenin.
Avila Chevalier, a sociology PhD pupil whose victory despatched shockwaves all through the Democratic institution, has been beneath fireplace for a since-deleted Twitter account, beforehand reported by NCS, that included phrases such as “seize the means of production,” together with calls to abolish police, prisons and borders. Other controversial tweets embrace one which mentioned Black and Arab males are each “Fetishizing ugly colonizer women” and one other that described wiping her soiled arms on the American flag in lieu of a serviette.
As an undergraduate, Avila Chevalier attended Columbia University, where she organized with Students for Justice in Palestine, and after commencement turned concerned in pro-Palestinian campus protests over Israel’s conflict in Gaza. She additionally attended a controversial October 8, 2023, pro-Palestinian rally in Times Square — someday after Hamas’ assault on Israel — that featured speeches and rhetoric praising the assault.
She beforehand instructed NCS, “I have grown considerably in the years since these tweets, and I am focused on our community and our community’s future.”
On Thursday, President Donald Trump accused Avila Chevalier of being a communist, a cost that she said she wouldn’t reply to whereas on MSNOW, saying, “I won’t be reactive.”
An additional assessment of Avila Chevalier’s archived Twitter account from 2020-2022 discovered repeated references to communism and Marxist ideology. The account, “Darializabonet,” seems to have been deleted in June 2022.
The account’s bio learn in 2020, “how communist of you.” Archived posts and retweets throughout this timeframe included a advice that Karl Marx’s Capital was an “essential must-read,” a complaint that public libraries didn’t carry sufficient Marxist literature by Lenin and different revolutionary writers, and a retweet from a Communist-identifying account lamenting that bookstore “banned books” shows didn’t embrace The Complete Works of J. V. Stalin.
One archived retweet from 2020 quoted Assata Shakur, the previous Black Liberation Army member who, in 1977, was convicted within the homicide of a New Jersey state trooper earlier than later escaping jail and fleeing to Cuba. In the quote, Shakur mentioned she “preferred Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il Sung, Che, or Fidel (Castro)” earlier than finding out Marx and Lenin as a result of the 2 “white dudes” had made contributions to “revolutionary struggle” that had been “too great to be ignored.”
In April 2020, Avila Chevalier shared a publish lamenting that individuals wouldn’t settle for communism over a scarcity of types of soup – a reference to the critique that the political system leads to fewer client selections.
“I just cannot get over the fact that the universe has foisted upon us the perfect illustration of literally every failing of capitalism and people are still like we can’t be communists cuz there won’t be enough types of soup,” the post she retweeted learn.
Other posts critiqued or joked about in style tradition she considered as anti-communist.
In one publish, Avila Chevalier described the animated movie Anastasia as “an explicitly anti-USSR kid’s movie,” and in another publish she linked to she wrote: “Time for me to once again sympathize with the people the Bolsheviks put in the blender for like 90 min 😌.”
Avila Chevalier was responding to a viral false declare that Disney had eliminated Anastasia from Disney+ streaming service as a result of it was anti-Russia after the invasion of Ukraine.
In one other publish, Avila Chevalier joked that Sheryl Crow’s hit track Soak Up the Sun was “bootstrap capitalist propaganda” after noticing it opens with the lyric “my friend the communist,” quipping that the character was “apparently also a bad organizer lol.”
Another 2020 retweet argued for democratic employee management of wealth, dismissing ideological labels by concluding: “You can call that communism, you can call it socialism, you can call it pancakes.”
And beforehand, NCS had surfaced an April 2020 post the place Avila-Chevalier mentioned that whereas many of the political concept she had learn was communist, “the pyromania associated with anarchism is very intriguing to me,” punctuating the comment with a laughing emoji.