Darializa Avila Chevalier, the socialist who won New York’s 13th Congressional District, has her own version of what it means to be America First. But in her mind, like the rest of the socialists quickly rising to power, it all comes back to Israel.
In her telling, socialism is not just about getting people past the idea of profit incentives and redirecting politics toward “human dignity.” That vision depends on a voting base and a leadership class that insists Israel is committing "genocide" in Gaza. For example,she blames the money going to Israel for the fact that there’s no money for schools in the United States, no money to address childhood poverty, and no money to even begin fixing the housing affordability crisis.
Darializa Avila Chevalier blames Israel for American poverty and other political issues:
— DSA Watch (@DSA_Watch) June 28, 2026
“What we need is a mentality of people over profit. You can’t tell me there is no money for schools, there’s no money to address childhood poverty, there’s no money to address this housing…
"What we need is a mentality of people over profit, right?" Chevalier said. "We need to make sure that we are centering human dignity at the heart of all of our politics. And I think, you know, we've just forgotten that as a society. And we need to re-center human dignity at the heart of this."
I think Ta-Nehisi Coates put it best when he said, if I can't trust you to stand against a genocide, how can I trust you to stand up for our democracy? And I think for so many people, that understanding has resonated, right? To know that we have people who can look at something as horrific as what's happening in Gaza and call it what it is, call it a genocide, and that you can trust them with other things. If you can trust them to understand the importance of human dignity and human life in a context like Israel-Palestine, then I can trust you, for example, on issues like healthcare.
"And so I think, yeah, I think it's time that we just have representatives who actually have moral clarity on a number of these issues and understand the connection, right?" she said. "Because you can't tell me that there is no money for schools, there's no money to address childhood poverty, there's no money to address this housing crisis while voting time and time again to send billions and billions of dollars to a war machine to a country that's currently enacting a genocide."
Little does Chevalier acknowledge that New York already spends roughly $40,000 per child in the public education system, about $11,000 per enrolled person per year on the state’s main public health coverage programs, and another $11,000 per person on housing subsidies, according to some estimates. And yet education, housing affordability, and health insurance remain among the biggest issues of voters in New York, especially in the city.
Why? Not because Israel is getting billions of dollars. It’s because pouring more money into government programs doesn’t solve problems, and never will. Plain and simple. That money gets passed through every hand it can, filtered through layer after layer of bureaucracy, and by the time it reaches the person it was supposed to help, it does little more than treat the symptom, never the root cause.
The lesson government never seems to learn is that a program’s effectiveness matters more than its funding. Private enterprise, working under tighter budget constraints, routinely outperforms government in everything from space programs to utilities, to housing, and so many other industries. That’s because the profit motive rewards efficiency and punishes failure. Government, by contrast, has little incentive beyond keeping votes flowing every few years. So instead of doing good work, they launches propaganda campaigns celebrating its supposed achievements, even when those results are rarely the product of its own policies.