How crazy is Darializa Avila Chevalier, the Zohran Mamdani-backed socialist trying to unseat incumbent Adriano Espaillat in New York’s 13th congressional district in the Democratic primary today? Well…how much time do you have? My challenge in this article is not to establish that Chevalier is crazy; my challenge is to find words to describe just how bonkers this Cirque du Soleil-level shit shows truly is.
Like virtually every socialist candidate, Avila Chevalier has a social media feed full of statements crazy enough to make their as-yet-unborn descendents feel shame. Here are some of her greatest hits:
She called for abolishing police, prisons, and borders.
She clarified her position on defunding the police by writing that her vision “means ending policing full stop. Period. No more police at all ever.”
She retweeted posts saying “yes, literally abolish the border” and “all deportation is wrong”.
She called the United States “a fucking disgrace”, referred to the US as “occupied” Native American land, and joked about wiping her dirty hands on the American flag.
She wrote favorably about communism, wrote “seize the means of production”, called for nationalizing utilities, pharmaceutical companies, and “seiz[ing] all properties from landlords”, and wrote that “the pyromania associated with anarchism is very intriguing to me.”
She called Joe Biden a “rapist” and a “war criminal” and said she wouldn’t vote for him, said “fuck Kamala Harris”, and criticized Bernie Sanders and AOC for being too pro-Israel.
She retweeted a post saying “Israel doesn’t exist”.
She wrote that Black and Arab men “[fetishize] ugly colonizer women”.
This type of stuff is why I’ve argued that we need to bring back the word “retard”. “Moron” or “ninny” doesn’t capture the intensity of what we’re dealing with here — those words are a pea shooter when we need an elephant gun. And, just as I use the words “moron” and “idiot” in a non-literal way, my use of “retard” does not refer to anyone with a cognitive impairment, but only to people who could lead normal lives but choose to have cognition similar to that of an oyster or a termite-infested log.
That being said: Chevalier’s posts are deep retard stuff. This is a type of retard that we don’t normally encounter; physicists have previously only theorized that this level of retardation might exist somewhere in the universe. Beyond the event horizon of this level of retard, the laws of space-time are ripped apart, and each new particle of retard that crosses the event horizon destroys intelligence somewhere else in the universe. Chevalier is less of a politician and more of fascinating phenomenon of the physical world — kind of like the Higgs-Boson particle or Ötzi the Iceman — and every newspaper should be running Pearl Harbor-sized headlines that read “QUANTUM RETARD ACHIEVED!!!”
Chevalier says that she has “grown considerably” since those tweets. She also hilariously accused her opponent of “re-litigating social media posts from half a decade ago” — yeah, who can even remember as far back as half a decade!?!?!? Half a decade ago is the early 2020s, a mostly-forgotten, black-and-white era so antiquated that many of us had slightly different haircuts and our around-the-house jeans were still our out-on-the-town jeans. Five years ago, I was a Mormon communist who thought that the global economy was run by the Keebler Elves — just like everybody back then!!! It was the early ‘20s, baby! Chevalier wants us to believe that people change dramatically in five years, and would also like us to elect her to represent a D+32 district, which has an expected incumbency period of 70-90 years.
But has Chevalier changed? Here she is a few days ago:
There is only one sane response to that type of rhetorical Chernobyl, and it is this:
It actually seems that Chevalier hasn’t changed her extreme views at all. The New York Editorial Board tried to get Chevalier to sanewash her position on prison abolition — they did the thing that Fox News does with Trump where they try to walk him towards sanity but he stubbornly refuses — but Chevalier couldn’t give a straight answer to questions as simple as “What happens to the murderer?” Chevalier has maintained that it is always wrong to deport anyone, even if they’ve committed a crime. And Chevalier failed to get the endorsement of a left-wing New York group (that endorsed Zohran Mamdani) because when they met with her, she “[refused] to condemn Hamas or anything about it.” (my emphasis!) Really…she didn’t have any criticisms of Hamas? Not even, like…the outfits? Just “five stars, no notes” across the board? Even Sgt. Pepper has a few ho-hum tracks — the fact that Chevalier couldn’t find anything to criticize about Hamas forces me to conclude that she’s either unbelievably ignorant or should be contained by some sort of Hannibal Lecter-type prison setup.
So, pick you adjective of choice — “half-wit”, “lunatic”, “certified, notarized nut job” — this person should obviously not have power. I think that anyone who votes for a candidate like Chevalier should have to wear a diaper and a frilly bonnet, and be made to skip around town holding a big lolly and singing “I went boom boom at the ballot box!” Because that is just how egregiously that person has shirked their responsibilities as an adult. I could only imaging voting for Chevalier in the unlikely event that her opponent was somehow worse, such as if she was running against Reanimated Hitler or a robot programmed to skin and eat every human it encounters.
So: How crazy is she? I give her my highest possible craziness rating: Five Marjorie Taylor Greenes!
And I really hope that nobody votes for her. And may God have mercy on our souls.
Why I Write About the DSA Left So Much
I feel guilty about writing yesterday about the activist duo who recruited Graham Platner. There are, after all, far more important things than a maddening interview with a couple that seems like an AI-generated caricature of smug leftists. My first line of defense is simply that I’m a comedian, and that guy’s Henry-Kissing…
The Platner/Paxton Symmetry/Asymmetry
My article about how I don’t like Graham Platner but would still vote for him generated feedback both positive (people like the SenateBot 5000 joke!) and negative (people want to see me struck by a train!). Some people noted a similarity between my logic (i.e. Platner…
One cannot help but wonder if this person is actually a deep cover operative planted by radical right-wingers decades ago within the DSA's ranks, because if I were writing for the Daily Wire and created this person as a satire they would accuse me of being too heavy-handed.
(And I've read that part of the NYT interview. Anyone who thinks that the solution to murder is to create a socioeconomic system where people aren't going to have motives to commit murder is not a grown adult who should be taken seriously.)
I live in her district and so I see all her volunteers at tents passing out flyers. This is a predominately black and latino neighborhood and Darializa claims to be speaking for"the community" but of course all her volunteers I see are bright-eyed corn-fed white 20-somethings who probably just moved here and have no idea what life is like in a big crime-ridden City. That is, gentrifiers. The community she speaks for is Columbia students.