Darializa Avila Chevalier, the Democratic Party nominee in New York’s deep blue 13th Congressional District, refused to disavow her support for communist causes in a recent interview with MS-NOW.
Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old community organizer and longtime college student, was one of three self-styled socialist candidates that unseated Democrat incumbents in this past Tuesday’s New York primary elections. With the backing of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Avila Chevalier unseated five-term incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat by a narrow margin.
The soon-to-be congresswoman has a documented history of involvement with far-left organizations and causes. During her time at Columbia University, she helped launch Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), a group associated with the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement targeting Israel.
“We are Westerners fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization,” the group stated in a now deleted 2024 Instagram post.
Other statements from the group include expressions of solidarity with “every movement for liberation in the Global South” and descriptions of its efforts as “an internationalist one — we are fighting for nothing less than the liberation of all people.” The group has also stated that it rejects “every genocidal, eugenicist regime that seeks to undermine the personhood of the colonized.”
In a recent interview with MS-NOW’s Ali Velshi, Avila Chevalier refused to disavow her associations with anti-western extremist groups, as well as a number of now-deleted social media posts in which she trashed the United States. “How do you respond to allegations that you’re a communist?” Velshi asked.
“For far too long, this reactive conversation of what we should be afraid of has prevented us from being able to have a politics Democrats can identify win,” Avila Chevalier responded.
“That framing is one that I’ve been very proud to be able to say I don’t respond to, one in which I have been very intentional to say I won’t be reactive,” she continued. “We are presenting a vision of what we’re fighting for. And I think for far too long, we have had politics that is reactive to what Republicans are doing. What we need is Democrats who are actually going to present a positive vision, one that sets the tone for what we should be talking about, which is the issue of affordability, which is the issue of how our budgets are moral documents.
