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Darializa Avila Chevalier is almost certainly headed to Congress, having won the Democratic primary in New York’s 13th congressional district. In 2024, while she was a sociology PhD student at Columbia,¹ she founded a group called “Columbia University Apartheid Divest”, which was involved in the Palestine protests. In a now-deleted Instagram post, CUAD declared: “We are Westerners fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization.” Avila Chevalier’s group also tweeted “Marg Bar Amrika”, meaning “Death to America” in Persian.
Avila Chevalier is also known for making plenty of “controversial”² statements on social media. In 2019, in another now-deleted tweet, she lambasted Black and Arab men for “fetishizing ugly colonizer women”:
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In 2020 she endorsed a theory that COVID-19 began in France, rather than in China.
Also in 2020, Avila Chevalier was an ardent supporter of the movement to abolish the police:
During the nationwide protests in 2020 following the killing of George Floyd, Avila Chevalier responded to a user asking what a better slogan would be than “defund the police,” by posting, “F**k you. We’re gonna defund and abolish. You don’t get to water down our movements.”…Two days later, Avila Chevalier rejected an argument that abolishing police meant ending policing only “as we know it.”…“No. It means ending policing full stop. Period. No more police at all ever,” she replied, adding several clap emojis.
She has also supported the abolition of prisons — a view she probably still holds. In a recent interview, when repeatedly asked point-blank whether she would put a murderer in prison, she refused to answer the question.
In 2022, she claimed that America’s support for Ukraine against Russia’s invasion was America “bullying Russia”:
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Avila Chevalier has also endorsed any number of extreme economic policy positions:
During the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, Avila Chevalier reposted a message calling for a sweeping government takeover of large parts of the economy. The repost advocated nationalizing utilities, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies; suspending rent and mortgage payments; dissolving private health insurance companies; and “seiz[ing] all properties from landlords.”
Other deleted posts and reposts included references to communism and anti-capitalist politics. In one April 2020 post, Avila Chevalier wrote that while most of the political theory she had read was communist, “the pyromania associated with anarchism is very intriguing to me,” adding a laughing emoji.
If this all sounds absolutely crazy, it’s because it is. The woman who said all of these things is going to be a U.S. Representative — not a state representative, or a member of a city council, but a member of the United States’ highest legislative body. And she will be a Democrat — she will be formally supported by the Democratic Party, she will presumably caucus with the Democrats in Congress, and so on.
Avila Chevalier is as much of an extremist as anyone associated with the MAGA movement. The best comparator on the right would probably be Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has made a long string of similarly extreme and wacky statements. My typical line is that “both extremes are bad, but the Republican extreme is worse”. Avila Chevalier is severely testing that asymmetry.
Nor is this a case of one wacky person winning a lone, lucky victory. Avila Chevalier was one of three Congressional primary candidates backed by New York City’s powerful and charismatic mayor, Zohran Mamdani. All three won their primaries this week, and two of them — including Avila Chevalier — unseated incumbent Democrats.
But it isn’t even just Mamdani. Around the country, candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America are starting to win more races in blue cities: