Deleted tweets on Darializa Avila Chevalier’s account had favorable references to communist leaders and Marxism

 

Democratic congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier speaks during a Get Out The Vote rally ahead of New York's primary election, in the Brooklyn borough of New York, on June 18.

Ryan Murphy/AP

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.”

Asked in a subsequent phone interview with MSNOW if she was a communist, Avila Chevalier said, “I’m not. I’m a democratic socialist.”

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.