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
new aoc just dropped
To be fair aoc never represented herself in any way they showed an understanding of Marxism, yet alone referencing any revolutionaries or really saying anything leftist ever. She was only ever doing the "I'm a socialist bc socialism is when the government does stuff" bit
first of all, i will never trust anyone who runs for office and willingly associates themself with the dsa. secondly, somebody in the deep state is going to make it clear to her that she will get fred hampton'd if she doesn't aoc herself
good things will never happen in this country, and they will certainly never happen because of who's in congress
Nah they won't threaten HER. People could be brave and willing to face death for what they believe in. They'll threaten her family. It's much more effective. Risking your own life is easy to justify. Risking the life of your 6 year old cousin isn't.
I definitely don't have any hope for any elected official, but she is qualitatively leagues away from AOC in her history in the left and the way she has represented herself as a leftist.
hopefully she will at least try to keep that energy even if it's literally impossible within the system she is operating in
I don't appreciate your negativity
I get the hesitancy but
I’m sorry AOC was NEVER saying this and saying she prefers to read about Juche instead of Marx lmfao
cw mention of self harm
spoiler
my point isn't about her in particular but rather that the powers that be will not allow her to actually do anything radical once she gets to washington. some sufficiently high ranking fed will make it clear to her that if she actually threatens capital several members of her family will shoot themselves twice in the back of the head. believing anything else is just pure naïveté or lack of understanding of the history of radical movements in the usI think this is doomerism. I get the desire to be skeptical of elected socialists. It's warranted, as there's a lot of ways for them to stray. But we can't lose hope on the wins we get.
Electoralism won't bring the ultimate changes we need, but this is fantastic for movement building, and spreading agitation. A real party is starting to form, which is a great thing to see.
Also, we live in a decayed society. There are plenty of fascist, reactionary forces, but they too have been hollowed out by neoliberalism. The government still has great force, but it's a shadow of its anti-communist peak.
The main point in participating in elections is to show how much of a sham they are while using the elections as a platform to agitate for socialism. 2016 Sanders was a goodish example, 2020 Sanders less so, and the rest (AOC et al) not at all.
2016 Sanders was cool enough to crash into Clinton's coronation and run as a Democratic nominee despite never once registering as a Democrat up until that point. The most insufferable losers in the world kept on calling him a DINO which only made him even more popular because Democrats ain't shit.
2020 Sanders lost that energy after bending the knee to Clinton. And as for everyone else, it's the same old story.
People were genuinely excited for an independent progressive presidential candidate who at least had a political career where he wasn't beholden to the duopoly. They do not express the same excitement for a bunch of Democratic Congresspeople and mayors from New York.
This isn't true, DSA holds a national 17 point lead on the DNC dems, Bernie Sanders never came close to that in substantiated polling
In fact "17 points" is the legendary hypothetical polling number between Trump and Bernie in the general that so many chapos here once used as proof the libs are out of touch
And yet here it is manifested in reality on the ground not under one man, but with an entire org full of Marxists
its doomerism to learn from history? lol. i've learned my lesson from bernie 2016, bernie 2020 and aoc that national level electoralism is a dead end and will only ever waste leftists time and energy
this is not a "win" for the left, it's an image of a win projected onto your tv or phone screen. electoral politics is a tv show, pure spectacle. describing what constitutes a real, actual, non-spectacular win for the left is considered fedposting on this site
All I have to say is that it would be really nice in a time where Israel is such a mainstream issue to point to one person in congress voting to not send them weapons to commit genocide and saying “yes, that one is the socialist”
Electoralism in the sense of trying to make large scale meaningful governmental reform is dead yeah, but that doesn't make the real power of the congressional position not exist. It's visibility, it's interviews, it's money to agitate. It's a constant naysayer and contrary voice to the motions of the greater state.
That's a voice with power, and one to use. To ignore the potential of this voice is anti-materialist.
New York City literally just passed a two year rent freeze, in New York City! The heart of American real estate
I was meaning on the national level, the State as a whole. The more local the politics, the more electoral outcomes can drive real, positive change.
I agree the question of whether this new phenomenon can scale on a national level has not been answered yet
But figures like El-Sayed are locked in to win a senate seat in Michigan, by itself it doesn't answer the question but it does turn it into a easy multiple choice option
Essentially it shows that if a Brown Muslim man in the rust belt can win on anti-zionism despite being targeted by AIPAC.....
Then the key has been turned and the national door is unlocked, this proves underlying conditions are shifting in our favor
My prediction is that if there’s ever risk of meaningful national policy change in a socialist direction, the powers that be will simply cheat, ignore rules, and apply physical intimidation as needed.
I mean, if it didn't work in New York City with real estate moguls and the NYPD at their beck and call, then the elites will have to march into unprecedented territory to halt this train
Also I know this will piss some folks off, but the fact DSA skews white in membership (while acknowledging most of the national leadership is POC) will serve as a useful buffer against the implementation of more "southern" strategies of suppression
DSA is killing it with the Debras and Brians of suburban blue strongholds and purple battlefields
ok but that's gonig to be turned into nothing after less than a year exaclty like what happpend with aoc. congresspeople do have a powerful voice, but theres literally no reason to believe theyll be allowed to use it for good without being shot
congress is powerless to help you, not to hurt you
Why do anything then if you will just get shot?
do you not believe it's possible to do politics outside of electoralism? what kind of a leap are you making here?
By your logic, doing anything will just lead to you getting shot. So go away and let the rest of us be happy. Seriously your attitude sucks
Zohran got NYC childcare and froze the rent. What has your book club done that comes anywhere close to helping the working class that much?
They did not threaten AOC with violence to make her deradicalize. She deradicalized because she was young, new to marxism and surrounded by the same consultant class that advises every other democrat.
Chevalier will be sidelined even harder than AOC and the DCCC will spare no expense to primary her next election but no dark secret threats of violence. They simply don't need to do that.
how could you possibly know what conversation she had (or was forced to have) in private?
You're the one claiming to know that.
If she is personally principled enough she can draw attention to those systemic constraints and agitate for alternative methods. The main limitation is really that these are all individuals beholden to nobody except maybe the bourgeois structures they're entering. It would be much better to have a principled and disciplined organization behind them. One ready to expel and replace if they step too far out of line, for example, and able to provide security and grassroots actions. In the very best case scenario without such an org, she becomes a likely target of bourgeois terrorism.
no one is "drawing attention to systemic constraints" if it means their mother is going to be executed. she's going to be a quiet obedient servant of capital, just like every other radical whos ever gone to washington, by one way or another
also there is absolutely no org in the us that could protect her from bourgeois terrorism, they've got more guns and more money than even the most disciplined leftist org by a factor of 10000:1
black americans will never be able to destroy the masters house with the masters tools
I dunno they might do that even with family threatened. But that's the risk of doing this stuff without a principled and disciplined org, it's way less likely an individual will stand up to the pressure. And I think it could even start more subtle and still break a person. Don't even need to outright threaten, just have security be lax when bourgeois terrorists inevitably try to attack them. I mean we are basically describing revolutionary suicide in one individual and coming from an org that won't be able to support them as well as even a much smaller communist org could someone like Fred Hampton.
I do think orgs that could protect leaders from bourgeois terrorism could be built but I agree they don't exist now. Those that are principled are too small and those that are large aren't principled enough. But I do acknowledge that none will likely every perfectly protect every leader, the violence will come for us the more we succeed and it will force civil war or something similar under the best case scenario.
That's basically what happened to AOC. She's was freaking out how the panic buttons in her office didn't work when 1/6 happened.
Oh interesting was it just hers? Or is this the general context of the capitol police not really giving a shit that 1/6 people were infiltrating?
good grief you people will find a way to whine about anything
the level of ambient doomerism on hexbear of late has been on the rise for sure. even just the ability to enjoy a tiny W for what it is seems to be beyond most posters
Personally, I'm in "wait and see" mode. Like, cool, I hope they follow through. It's only very recently that the radical factions have gained this amount of influence in the DSA and they have historically been unable to enforce any sort of coherent party line, since they don't really have one as a big tent organization. So while I'm not doomposting, I think it makes sense to be skeptical.
"I hope they follow through, but let's wait and see" is distinct from the tone of "everybody is a succdem liberal and if you even hope that the DSA libs can do one single good thing you're a liberal idiot. I don't have a tangible suggested alternative BTW but definitely don't join, support, or even pay attention to the DSA liberals" that comes up every week.
I've made jokes about DSA aligned people being the vanguard or above criticism, which they aren't. I would like our community to support a balanced analysis of global politics, including US domestic policy, including criticisms of the liberal tendencies of the Democratic Socialist movement.
It is actually very straightforward to recognize that they are not sufficiently radical/revolutionary to make the substantial changes to undermine US imperialism and capitalism. Pointing that out in a snarky sentence is not interesting and is awarded no points by me. I am curious about what it leads to. How can this energy be appropriated into a stronger revolutionary movement? Is it really just sheepdogging people to the Democratic Party line? (show your work!) What alternatives can one suggest to socialists in the United States, if we dont believe the DSA can get the job done?
One element of answering these questions is definitely "wait and see". Someone can set their expectations bases on their knowledge of history, but the conditions of the United States in 2026 are definitely unique to itself.
For alternatives to electoralism, you can find them even in the DSA, getting droned out by electoralists on a regular basis. There is internal struggle in the DSA, a war of attrition between people smiling at each other and calling each other comrades, seeing who can exhaust the other first on driving a political line and making their priorities into org priorities.
Sometimes (often?) people frame actions add purely mutually exclusive. Either you're doing electoralism and nothing else or something else and definitely not electoralism, so it goes. There is an element of truth to this in that an org has finite human hours with which to do work and that limiting focus to a few priorities is a good way to increase impact. And even if you have 4 priorities, there is a tendency for certain kinds to suck up all of the energy or perhaps appeal to people who think it's the only thing that matters and insults everyone that disagrees. This is an long-recognized tendency. Marx called a version of this parliamentary cretinism (apologies for the problematic terminology) and it is a real thing. But with that said, it is possible to do several things at once and do them well, but it requires a willingness to be self-critical and disciplined in exact opposition to the subject of that term from Marx. That is the key that tends to go missing. DSA electoralists tend to stick to electoralism and try to do things every cycle even if they don't have ideas of what to do - it's just the thing to be doing. Sometimes they succeed, usually they fail, and for reasons that are fairly unserious. And the idea of accepting criticism or imposing discipline on "electeds" tends to be rejected by the exact people so invested in electoralism. I believe these are structural, not incidental issues - if discipline and principles are the antidote, the way to create it through structure is the thing to be doing.
Anyways there are DSA groups focused on:
But they don't make national news because it isn't flashy. And of course other orgs engage in plenty of alternatives to constant electoralism.
Excellent post comrade!
Thanks! Now give me that aforementioned smile! (lol jk)
wait where did we mention that?
Oops here we go :D
also one congresswoman isn't worth much power in the scheme of things, she gets a bigger platform, she might get railroaded out of committee assignments, etc. freshmen congresscritterrs basically never do anything real anyway.
voting against a bunch of shit will be cool but never prevent it.
It's all doomerism and assuming bad faith on the part of every other user (except for infamously bad faith users)
Nah, most people were celebrating when Iran fucked up those military bases and humiliated the US in front of the world. Just because people aren't celebrating what you personally find worthy of celebration doesn't mean there's "ambient doomerism." Imagine using this standard in real life.
wheres the lie