New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is standing behind a congressional candidate who called the United States "a f-----g disgrace," demanded the abolition of borders, police, and prisons, and used an American flag as a napkin, all in social media posts she later deleted.
The candidate is Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old democratic socialist and community organizer now running to unseat five-term Democratic incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat in New York's 13th Congressional District, which covers Upper Manhattan and parts of the west Bronx. Mamdani first endorsed her in late May. When the deleted posts resurfaced, he did not flinch.
Asked about the posts at a Wednesday news conference, Fox News Digital reported, Mamdani dismissed them as old news and praised Avila Chevalier's record as an activist who helped free people detained by ICE.
The posts, attributed to Avila Chevalier and dated from 2018 to 2022, read like a checklist of far-left grievances against the country she now wants to represent in Congress.
She wrote: "This country is a f-----g disgrace." In another post: "I forgot to get napkins so I just wiped my hand on the American flag behind me." She reposted in 2021 that abolishing borders, prisons, and police is "possible, necessary, and the only moral way forward." She declared that "all deportation is wrong" and said: "Yes, literally abolish the border."
She reportedly called former President Joe Biden a "rapist" and "war criminal." She chastised Sen. Bernie Sanders, hardly a moderate, for his "liberal Zionism." And she said "F--k Kamala Harris."
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Avila Chevalier demanded the government provide $3,000 per month in universal basic income, nationalize utilities, pharmaceutical companies, and hospitals, suspend mortgages and rent, seize private property from landlords, dissolve insurance companies, and expand Medicare to every citizen. That is not a policy platform. That is a wish list for state seizure of the private economy.
She also led anti-Israel protests at Columbia University, a fact that fits neatly into the broader pattern.
None of this gave the mayor pause. At the Wednesday press conference, Mamdani offered a lengthy endorsement that treated the deleted posts as a minor biographical footnote. He told reporters:
"When it comes to Darializa's campaign, I had not seen those tweets and what I've heard from her and what I know a lot of others in the district that have heard from her is that her views have evolved and that the campaign she is running on is reflective of what she's going to be fighting for."
He then went further, praising her activism on behalf of people detained by immigration authorities, a cause that puts her squarely at odds with federal law enforcement. Mamdani has repeatedly called for abolishing ICE, so the alignment is no surprise.
Mamdani said Avila Chevalier has "a record like she does of freeing New Yorkers who are unjustly detained by ICE, of standing up for the working person who has often been left out of our politics." He added:
"She grew up with a commitment to the very people that politics have left behind, and what I see in her is that commitment fulfilled."
He closed by saying he "can't wait for her to be introduced to so many across the city and across this country as we fight for that affordability agenda, from New York City to D.C."
The claim that Avila Chevalier's views have "evolved" does the heavy lifting here, and it deserves scrutiny. The deleted posts span from 2018 to 2022. That is not ancient history. The most recent ones are barely three years old. Deleting posts is not the same as disavowing them, and Mamdani himself acknowledged he had not even seen the posts before being asked about them.
So what exactly has evolved? Avila Chevalier's campaign still centers on the same themes: opposition to ICE, hostility to landlords, demands for massive government spending. The deleted posts were not some youthful indiscretion from a college sophomore. They came from a woman in her late twenties who was already deep in political organizing.
Mamdani's own record suggests the "evolution" defense is more about optics than substance. His administration has pushed plans to strip buildings from landlords and hand them to tenants, a policy goal that mirrors Avila Chevalier's pandemic-era demand to seize private property. When the candidate's deleted posts and the mayor's governing agenda overlap this closely, the word "evolved" starts to look like a euphemism for "scrubbed."
Fox News Digital reported that it reached out to the offices of Mamdani, Avila Chevalier, and Espaillat for comment. None responded.
The silence is telling but not unusual for this mayor. Mamdani has faced repeated questions about the gap between his promises and his performance. His promised $1.7 billion in budget cuts collapsed to just $200 million in actual savings. He has clashed with major New York institutions over credit-taking and street closures.
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin has responded to Mamdani's posture on immigration enforcement with blunt language, saying the department will "restore law" in American cities and pursue criminals "no matter where they're at," including New York. Mullin described Mamdani as a "socialist communist" with "zero respect", framing that, whatever one thinks of the phrasing, reflects a real policy divide between a mayor who champions people who resist ICE and a federal government trying to enforce immigration law.
The June 23 primary in New York's 13th District will test whether voters in Upper Manhattan and the west Bronx want a representative who called for abolishing borders, wiped her hands on the flag, and demanded the nationalization of hospitals and utilities, or whether those positions, even deleted, are too far even for a deep-blue district.
Mamdani is betting that the answer is yes, voters want exactly that. His endorsement is not an act of political charity. It is an ideological investment. Avila Chevalier in Congress would give Mamdani a socialist ally in Washington at a time when his own governing promises are already running into reality.
Several questions remain unanswered. Avila Chevalier has not publicly addressed the deleted posts or explained which specific views she now rejects. Mamdani has not said whether he agrees with any of the positions she expressed in the posts. And no one has explained why the posts were deleted in the first place, whether it was a genuine change of heart or a campaign cleanup.
Voters in the 13th District deserve straight answers. They deserve to know whether a candidate who wrote "all deportation is wrong" still believes that. They deserve to know whether a candidate who demanded the government seize private property from landlords would vote for similar measures in Congress. And they deserve to know whether the mayor who endorsed her shares those views or simply finds them politically convenient.
The posts were deleted. The ideas behind them were not.
When a mayor endorses a candidate whose scrubbed record reads like a manifesto against the American system, voters are entitled to wonder whether "evolved" means anything more than "learned to use the delete button."