Democratic Socialist congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier has made her way back into the headlines after her archived Twitter account from 2020–2022 was discovered.
Chevalier won her New York Democratic primary Tuesday amid criticisms for previous social media posts making inflammatory comments against Kamala Harris as well as calling for an end to police and prisons. As a previously deleted Twitter account has resurfaced, Chevalier is facing another round of fire for appearing to endorse communism and praising communist leaders.
Chevalier agreed with a former terrorist, who said she preferred Chinese and Cuban communist leaders over Marx and Lenin, since they were white.
She reposted a quote from cop-killer Assata Shakur in 2020, saying, “I preferred Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il Sung, Che, or Fidel [Castro], but I ended up having to get into Marx and Lenin just to understand a lot of the speeches and stuff… They were two white dudes who had made contributions to revolutionary struggle too great to be ignored.”
Shakur, whose quote Chevalier reposted, was a member of the Black Liberation Army who was arrested in 1977 for murdering a police officer. She fled to Cuba two years later, where she died in 2025 having never been brought to justice. The FBI had put her on its list of “most wanted terrorists.”
“Most of the theory I’ve read is communism [sic] but the pyromania associated with anarchism is very intriguing to me,” Chevalier had posted earlier in the year. “Must read further,” she finished with a laughing emoji.
Chevalier reposted several tweets criticizing libraries for the lack of communist books, even in the banned books section. In another post, Chevalier appears to lament that the “banned books” sections featured at many politically left-leaning bookstores rarely feature The Complete Works of J. V. Stalin, in which she likely meant the Collected Works of Josef Stalin: Volume 1 — a collection of English translations of the writings of the late Soviet communist dictator, Joseph Stalin, who is estimated to have killed around 20 million people during his nearly 30 year reign.
Several of Chevalier’s posts joked about anti-communist pop culture, such as the Don Bluth classic animated film Anastasia, which she described as “An explicitly anti-USSR kid’s movie about a Romanov and her puppy fleeing to Paris.” She said Sheryl Crow’s song Soak Up the Sun was “bootstrap capitalist propaganda” since it opens with the lyrics “my friend the communist.”
In addition, Chevalier reposted a tweet criticizing capitalism for creating too much consumer choice and one from the account Boot Riley, calling for the ‘democratization of wealth.’
“I believe that we need a world in which the people democratically control the wealth that we create with our labor,” the Boot Riley post read. “This would be real, actual power in the hands of the people. Actual ‘democracy’. [sic] You can call that communism, you can call it socialism, you can call it pancakes.”
Despite her deleted Twitter posts, Chevalier refused to respond to Trump’s accusation of her being a communist when on an interview with MS NOW’s “The 11th Hour.”
“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,” Chevalier said.
