By Michael Gold
Darializa Avila Chevalier, who is running as a Democrat to become the U.S. Representative for New York’s 13th Congressional District, covering upper Manhattan and parts of the Bronx, wants to cut the work week down to 32 hours, with no loss in pay.
The French are only required to work 35 hours a week. Here’s how that’s worked out for them: France has an economy that’s dead in the water.
Chevalier wants to establish a universal basic income for every American. She also wants universal health care for all. How are we going to pay for all that? Chevalier doesn’t have an answer.
Over the last ten years, Chevalier, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), who won the Democratic Party nomination in June, has tweeted that she believes all police, prisons and borders should be abolished and that private property be seized from its owners.
She also believes that the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7th, 2023, was justified. Hamas murdered 1,200 Israeli civilians and 40 American citizens that day, then took 250 hostages back to Gaza. Chevalier has deleted thousands of her tweets. Does that mean she’s disavowing them, or just worried that she’ll suffer public blowback because of her opinions?
During the 2020 election, she called President Biden a rapist and war criminal and said she wanted to wipe her dirty hands on the American flag.
Claudia Tenney is a Republican Representative in New York’s 24th Congressional District, spanning the Finger Lakes and western New York, near Rochester and Buffalo. While not outright denying that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, she said, there was “irregularity” in the vote.
“I just hope we don’t have this irregularity again because it’s caused a great amount of disharmony,” she said.
“Disharmony” is a really weird way to describe what President Trump did on January 6th, 2021. He organized a riot at the Capitol to derail the vote to certify the 2020 election results. The approximately 2,000 rioters broke into the Congressional chambers, threatened to hang Vice President Mike Pence and attacked and injured about 140 police officers. Five people were killed. A police officer defending the building died of a stroke the next day, and four police officers committed suicide after the attack.
Tenney is trying to get her hands on New York State’s voter registration records to attack a problem that does not exist – there is no widespread voter fraud. Her efforts are designed to suppress the vote, even if she won’t say that.
Tenney opposed impeachment of Trump for the January 6th Capitol riot and a commission to investigate how the riot happened, saying an investigation would have a political motive.
These two individuals demonstrate how both the Democrats and Republicans are failing the broad center of the country. Yes, of course, one individual does not a party make, but each of these politicians illustrate how our two major parties have been bent by the rise of extremists.
As a DSA member, Chevalier is part of a new corrosive force in the Democratic Party. A DSA member is running as a candidate for the U.S. Senate in Florida. The DSA is heavily supporting a Senate candidate in Michigan. They’re got two candidates in New York for the House of Representatives—Chevalier and Claire Valdez, in the 7th Congressional District, in Brooklyn and Queens. And we have a DSA mayor of New York City.
The Senate race in Michigan features two particularly odious fellows – Abdul El-Sayed is the Democratic nominee, and Mike Rogers is the Republican candidate. El-Sayed is not a member of the DSA, but he’s got plenty of friends in the organization, and they helped push and promote his candidacy in the June primary election, beating a more moderate Democratic candidate in a tight race.
El-Sayed has sought out the support of a man named Hasan Piker, who has three million followers on the Twitch streaming service.
Piker is the type of guy you call to take a baseball bat to a bee’s nest. In other words, he’s a man full of violent rhetoric, which has the potential to hurt people in profound ways.
Piker has said the U.S. deserved 9/11. He later retracted his remarks. He’s expressed support for China, one of the most repressive nations in the world. Piker has downplayed China’s policies to eradicate the culture of the native population of Tibet and likes the government’s socialist system. This is a country where nobody is free and the average monthly salary is about $1,500. He put some blame on the U.S. for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
On the other side, Mike Rogers, the Republican in the race, has recently supported President Trump’s vividly imagined, and unsubstantiated fantasies claims of election fraud about 2020 and has sown great doubt about the integrity of the voting system.
Rogers, a former Congressman, said in 2020 that Trump’s election fraud claims had no proof to back them up. Now that he needs the President Trump’s support, he’s changed his tune. Casting doubt about election outcomes is one of the best ways to destroy trust in our democracy.
Alongside the election denial and fraud bleatings of the Republican Party, its recent emphasis on white supremacy is going to only further divide the country. We have become a racially and ethnically diverse nation, and we are better and stronger for it.
Directing ICE to arrest and imprison people of color, under horrid conditions, or deporting them to Africa is the kind of thing you expect from Russia, China, North Korea and Iran, not what used to be called the greatest democracy in the world. We have laws for treating people with decency. No, they weren’t always followed, and America has certainly done some terrible things, but we have not seen the government act so brutally in generations.
Also, we are borrowing money as easily as water pours out of a loose faucet. The Republicans are silent about the national disgrace that is our debt of $40 trillion. This has happened under a Republican President who cares more about building a ballroom than reducing our deficits.
Concerning the Democrats, I still distrust them because of the Presidential election in 2024. Joe Biden had clearly deteriorated. The Biden Administration said, in effect, “he’s fine.” I wrote emails to the White House about once or twice a month in 2023 and 2024, urging Biden to not run again. You think they’re going to pay attention to a little guy like me? But I tried.
I went to a fundraiser for Biden in March 2024. Past presidents Obama and Clinton were there. Obama was the most eloquent. He had a lot of energy. Clinton was articulate enough, but his voice was rough, which made him seem frail. But compared to Biden, Clinton was a robust picture of health.
Biden’s speech at Radio City was slow and without passion, but he made sense. However, he talked old. He walked old.
I wanted to trust him, but in the debate he had with Trump in June 2024, Biden was barely coherent. I wrote savage emails almost every day to the White House demanding that Biden drop out. Thankfully, a lot of other, much more powerful people got him to do that.
He waited several weeks to take himself out of the race. Without any kind of democratic process, such as some kind of mini-primary or open convention that Obama had suggested, Kamala Harris was simply handed the nomination by the poohbahs that ran the Democratic party. After the election, I changed my voter registration to Independent.
So, the American people were not given a real choice in 2024. They clearly were not happy with the way the Democrats had handled the economy, the Presidency and the 2024 nomination.
The election suffered from a delusional mindset on the part of the Democrats – that the economy was fine and that Joe Biden was capable and competent.
Donald Trump, sold the country a delusional vision that we would quickly rid ourselves of inflation, get much lower energy and electricity prices, enjoy gasoline at $2 a gallon and a better economy, and suffer no more foreign wars. He said he would cut government spending and bring peace to Ukraine in one day.
Inflation is running 3.4 percent higher than last year. We’re at war with Iran, with no way out. Gas costs $5.00 or more a gallon. Electricity costs are way up too. Ukraine and Russia are still slugging it out.
Extremists in both political parties are infected with fantasies about what the country looks like and what it needs. They’re sowing division and driving people apart.
We need a politics that puts an end to the verbal bomb-throwing, and the divisiveness. We need leaders who are clear-eyed about our problems, can offer up realistic solutions, who try to include every citizen and inspire us to build a better country together.
Michael Gold is a columnist for The Yonkers Times. His work has been published in The New York Daily News, The Albany Times-Union, The Hartford Courant and other newspapers.