Article text:
Darializa Avila Chevalier, the Democratic congressional nominee endorsed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who ousted longtime Rep. Adriano Espaillat in Tuesday’s primary, maintained a since-deleted Twitter account with repeated sympathetic references to communism, Marxist ideology and Soviet figures, including Vladimir Lenin.
Avila Chevalier, a sociology PhD student whose victory sent shockwaves throughout the Democratic establishment, has been under fire for a since-deleted Twitter account, previously reported by CNN, that included phrases such as “seize the means of production,” along with calls to abolish police, prisons and borders. Other controversial tweets include one that said Black and Arab men are both “Fetishizing ugly colonizer women” and another that described wiping her dirty hands on the American flag in lieu of a napkin.
As an undergraduate, Avila Chevalier attended Columbia University, where she organized with Students for Justice in Palestine, and after graduation became involved in pro-Palestinian campus protests over Israel’s war in Gaza. She also attended a controversial October 8, 2023, pro-Palestinian rally in Times Square — one day after Hamas’ attack on Israel — that featured speeches and rhetoric praising the attack.
She previously told CNN, “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 charge that she said she wouldn’t respond to while on MSNOW, saying, “I won’t be reactive.”
A further review of Avila Chevalier’s archived Twitter account from 2020-2022 found repeated references to communism and Marxist ideology. The account, “Darializabonet,” appears to have been deleted in June 2022.
The account’s bio read in 2020, “how communist of you.” Archived posts and retweets during this timeframe included a recommendation that Karl Marx’s Capital was an “essential must-read,” a complaint that public libraries did not carry enough Marxist literature by Lenin and other revolutionary writers, and a retweet from a Communist-identifying account lamenting that bookstore “banned books” displays did not include The Complete Works of J. V. Stalin.
One archived retweet from 2020 quoted Assata Shakur, the former Black Liberation Army member who, in 1977, was convicted in the murder of a New Jersey state trooper before later escaping prison and fleeing to Cuba. In the quote, Shakur said she “preferred Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il Sung, Che, or Fidel (Castro)” before studying Marx and Lenin because the two “white dudes” had made contributions to “revolutionary struggle” that were “too great to be ignored.”
In April 2020, Avila Chevalier shared a post lamenting that people wouldn’t accept communism over a lack of varieties of soup – a reference to the critique that the political system leads to fewer consumer choices.
“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 read.
Other posts critiqued or joked about popular culture she viewed as anti-communist.
In one post, Avila Chevalier described the animated film Anastasia as “an explicitly anti-USSR kid’s movie,” and in another post 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 claim that Disney had removed Anastasia from Disney+ streaming service because it was anti-Russia after the invasion of Ukraine.
In another post, Avila Chevalier joked that Sheryl Crow’s hit song 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 worker control of wealth, dismissing ideological labels by concluding: “You can call that communism, you can call it socialism, you can call it pancakes.”
And previously, CNN had surfaced an April 2020 post where Avila-Chevalier said that while most of the political theory she had read was communist, “the pyromania associated with anarchism is very intriguing to me,” punctuating the remark with a laughing emoji.
Ok I’ll say it: these posts are hilarious. Our first lefty shitposter congressperson
In my experience, most critics (not all) are chronically online people who have never organized their community a day in their life.
Most of my chapter is MLs. Please let us know when the revolution is 😎
I said in another post that harcorest marxistest lenisistest maoistest party in my area should have some sort of positive relationship with our local DSA, since if DSA is truly doomed to fuck up at some point due to their electoral tendencies, you’ll want to recruit everyone who is ready to step things up at that time. Obviously organize (far) beyond that, but calling people a bit to the right of you “liberal liberal liberal” is cutting off the pipeline that’s going to be very useful in the future just to be smug.
The purity policing online is indeed very tiresome. I don’t witness much of that irl … people just come together to solve the problems that need to be solved.
I work with PSL and DSA alike. This online shit is so dumb. (honestly my one PSL colleague doesn’t even really do much with PSL anymore since the org doesn’t do much other than protest marches … this comrade is is way more active in rapid response groups and immigrant solidarity orgs now)
You can actually make that kind of thing happen by just doing a joint project where the chapter is likely to fail those involved. For example, launching a police abolition campaign now. I think that’s pretty likely to get a response along the lines of “that was a good thing to jump on in 2020 but not now”. Focusing on Palestine has a similar effect.
You don’t really need a direct relationship with DSA or whoever is on their main local committee, you just need to be known to the membership and get your events attended by them.
Agree!
In my experience most critics are communists with decades of experience running parties and organizing major events.
And I don’t mean this to be demeaning but if most of your chapter is MLs I’m guessing it is very small, like it has a small enough number of active members that a single clique of 5-10 people controls the political orientation.