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
The House could vote to expel them I think? The respective branches of congress can remove members for cause and they could just call her a traitor or something and kick her out with a proper vote I believe. Easier to just kill them in an encounter with police or have their car just explode or drive off a cliff though if they’re actually a problem. To be honest I think Republicans would view a single Marxist as such a great thing to rally against they would be less eager than Democrats (as a party apparatus, individual members would be absolutely chomping at the bit) to kick them out. And there’s always the chance of coercing and enticing them to moderate to help redefine socialism and Marxism as social democracy in practice so lots of ways to go about it. A single member isn’t really a threat though.
At the end of the day unless she’s part of an explicitly Marxist party like PSL and uses her platform to stump for their planks and organization I’m very doubtful she’ll accomplish anything but being a sheep-dog for the left flank of the Democrats. It’s important in that situation not just to hold views but to be part of something so you can pull staffers from within its ranks, so you have strength to fall back on and a way to hold you to account for holding the party line.
The vote to expel her is the one thing I think they might try. It depends on whether or not the want to let her sit and use her to attempt to constantly scandalize and humiliate the left, both electoral and not.
I don’t think it’d even be hard to get a critical mass of Dems on board with removing her. A decreasing but still large amount of the country identifies with anti-communism, probably enough to pull it off. Way more politically effective for them to use/humiliate her than to kill
This would raise the contradictions. The base would see her be expelled, see John Fetterman not expelled, and start to wonder.
Yes of course, I’m just making commentary on likely ways they’d act against her
For the record, the house has only ever expelled 6 members. Three were for joining the confederacy. The other three were for corruption, eg George Santos.
People are overreacting here more than the right will. Look at how much they Tlaib and Omar. Do you really think Chevalier is going to get that much more flak than them?
For Republicans, in their minds people like Avila-Chevalier, Hasan, etc are very “useful”. They can point to them and say “oooooh look they even call themselves COMMUNISTS!” They think that simple red-baiting will score them points with voters.
For now, they don’t see how every day this tactic is becoming less effective and for anyone under 40 or so, it’s actually having the opposite effect of making socialism look good. I don’t expect they will figure it out and change tack anytime soon, though.