By Jim Geraghty
Friday, June 26, 2026
Darializa Avila Chevalier — a community organizer who won
the Democratic primary for New York’s 13th congressional district this week,
graduated from Columbia University with a bachelor’s degree in Middle Eastern
Studies in 2016.
Chevalier was one of the leaders of the 2023–24 Columbia
encampment and protests that smashed windows, overturned furniture, and led to about 220
arrests in two separate waves.
(The Manhattan district attorney’s office later moved to dismiss the charges
against most of the protesters.) By 2025, nearly 80 Columbia students had been either expelled or suspended for up to three years
over their roles in the encampment or subsequent protests.
Since 2019, Chevalier has been a doctoral student in
sociology at the City University of New York. (On average, Ph.D. programs take
five to seven years, so she’s hitting that seventh year now.)
It’s not that Chevalier has never held a job in
the private sector; according to her
LinkedIn, for two years she was a paralegal at Sivin, Miller &
Roche, “a New York law firm dedicated to achieving justice for victims of
police and prison abuse.”
She has never held any elective office before; she has
never run an organization. During most of her time as a doctoral student, she’s
been an “activist.”
Chevalier was recruited by Justice Democrats, the group
that recruited and promoted Raúl Grijalva, Pramila Jayapal, Ro Khanna,
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib.
Justice Democrats writes of Chevalier that “[s]eeing her family navigate
immigration issues, economic hardship, and structural racism shaped her
commitment to justice.”
Chevalier’s father is a landlord renting out his two-bedroom,
2.5-bathroom townhouse-style condominium with updated bathrooms, tile floors,
and an assigned parking spot in Miami for $1,750 a month.
The message and agenda of the Justice Democrats and
Democratic Socialists of America were succinctly summarized by New York City
Mayor Zohran Mamdani in his inaugural address: to “replace the frigidity of
rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” This past week, the
“warmth of collectivism” overran establishment Democrats with the cold,
ruthless efficiency of the Borg assimilating a Starfleet crew.
In most (but not quite all) of New York City’s
congressional primaries, the verdict is clear: The existing American economy
has failed to provide opportunities or a good life for far too many people.
Only socialism — which its most ardent adherents insist has never been tried in
its truest form — can provide a better life.
Compared to some of my colleagues, I’m a pessimist in my assessment of the U.S. economy lately. The cost of living is too high, the
inflation rate never got down to that 2 percent range that we want, tariffs made imported goods more expensive, and our second
straight octogenarian president’s economic policies are erratic and
contradictory. One day, the artificial intelligence company Anthropic had a
$200 million contract with the Pentagon; the next, Trump ordered “EVERY Federal Agency in the United States
Government to IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic’s technology.” Then a few months later, Trump says he no longer thinks
Anthropic is a national security threat. Good luck making long-term business
investment decisions when the federal government’s policies can turn on a dime
via a Truth Social post.
Still, even in subpar economic circumstances, an American
— particularly a young and able-bodied American — has a buffet table of
opportunities for a better life that is the envy of the rest of the world.
Back in November, I looked at the diagnosis of modern
America from that hateful little troll Nick Fuentes and pointed out that even
with our flaws, a young person in America today has more opportunities to
improve his life than roughly 99.99 percent of human beings in the history of
human existence.
(Fuentes reportedly makes an average of $60,000 per month from his
program, although some months he made more than $100,000. That little twerp
makes beaucoup bucks ranting into a camera about how America is no longer the
land of opportunity. If he’s aware of the irony, he hides it well.)
There’s a bizarre mirror image between the angry populist
Groyper right and the angry populist DSA or woke left. They’re both utterly
convinced of their own unparalleled victimhood, the unmatched injustice of
their daily lives, and the absolute failure of modern American society to
provide opportunities for a better, happier life. Furthermore, both fringes
share a desire to tear down the existing structures and traditions of American
life.
All these whiners should shut the heck up. If you’re an
American, you’re lucky enough to live in one of the most generous societies that has ever existed. I won’t repeat the whole
thing; click and reread it if you missed it or forgot when I laid it out in excruciating detail in November, but America
gives a young person more opportunities for education, jobs, career
advancement, and the good life than just about anywhere else. If you do not
apply for help, you cannot complain that no one is willing to help you. If you
do not even try to take advantage of existing opportunities, you cannot
legitimately complain that American society has somehow failed you.
Some readers absolutely hated that edition of the Jolt,
because they really love their narrative that they’ve been uniquely screwed and
life has been particularly unfair to them. Or they hated my declaration that
“no one ever said that achieving the American dream was going to be easy. No
politician is coming to save you. The person who has the most influence over
your quality of life is you.” Because it’s a lot more satisfying to
blame other people than to look at our lives and contemplate how we’ve let
ourselves down, and a lot easier to believe in some politician as a messiah figure — complete with their own temples.
There is no shortage of Gen-Z members who want to believe
they have it harder than any generation before them. Never mind that there’s no
draft, that there’s no Cold War-style threat of potential imminent nuclear
annihilation, that there’s no Great Recession, that AIDS is a shadow of the menace it used to be, and that the
threat from al-Qaeda and ISIS is a fraction of what it used to be (unless you
want to count that New Jersey congressional candidate). Your great grandfather had to
storm Omaha Beach to fight Nazis; today, you just have to vote for Susan
Collins to do that.
It is not surprising that the socialist — and in many
cases, de facto communist — revolution is being led by angry young people in
New York City. Everyone likes to repeat the lyric, “If you can make it there,
you can make it anywhere.” Implied in that is that it is hard to make it in
New York City, and no place is actually harder to live in than the Big Apple. The
competition for the best-paying and most glamorous jobs is fierce. New York
City has the highest cost of living in the country, and it has
competed for that crown for a long, long time. You’re smart? Great, but in a
metro area of almost 20 million people, there are lots of smart people
around. You’re hardworking? Pal, in New York City, that’s a requirement, not a
unique asset.
One of my all-time favorite essays ran in 2010 in the comedy site Cracked,
asserting, somewhat jokingly and somewhat seriously, that the trope of montages
in movies leaves people with an unrealistic sense of how much effort it takes
to become really good at a particular task. People tend to drastically
underestimate how much time and effort it will take to become exceptional at
something they want to do. A whole lot of young people set out to live the good
life in New York City and are surprised to find that after a couple years, they
have not achieved it.
There’s a real discussion to be had about the “elite overproduction hypothesis” and whether inevitable
changes in the professions of academia, media, law, nonprofits, etc. led to
lots of people preparing for and expecting a comfortable white-collar career in
a profession that was declining or shrinking. But almost no one walks directly
out of college into the good life. (Even fewer walk out of high school into
it.) Yes, technological changes have made those entry-level white-collar jobs
scarcer — the sort of internship or post-internship gigs where you’re answering
the phones, sorting the mail, refilling the toner into the photocopier, and
generally doing the drudge work that no one else at the company wants to do.
But almost no one finds their first real job is what they wanted. And in a
strange way, that’s a blessing; if you instantly achieve your dream in your
early twenties, what do you do with the rest of your life? How do you grow? How
would you ever develop any sense of accomplishment, determination, or tenacity
if everything came easily to you and you achieved everything you wanted quickly
and effortlessly?
What we have are young people who grew up comfortably to
older Millennial, Generation X, or late Baby Boomer parents, who think the
level of wealth and success their parents achieved is the baseline. But what
they saw growing up was often what their parents had achieved after at least a
decade in the workforce, and often considerably longer. The peak earning years are, supposedly, from 45 to 54, although
it varies a lot. It is unrealistic to expect that when you’re starting your
career, you will be able to afford a lifestyle comparable to what your parents
enjoyed in their middle age or later middle age.
Now throw in social media and its ability to create the
perception that everyone else is living a luxurious, low-stress, or even
hedonistic life except for you, and people really walk around with unrealistic
expectations for their own lives.
This isn’t even counting the false perceptions cultivated
by young people who are nominally employed and being financially supported by
their parents. Because I’m so in tune with young people these days, I enjoyed
the recent kerfuffle about pop star Olivia Rodrigo calling out young men for having “fake
jobs.”
On the 12th track,
“Expectations,”
Rodrigo sings about going back into the dating minefield with higher
expectations for men, because the bar was on the ground for far too long. In
the song, she jokes that now she “won’t settle for a guy with a fake job / They
seem so desperate for loving / But baby I’m not.” While it’s nice that
Rodrigo’s is finally demanding the love she deserves, it’s even better that she
is drawing attention to a larger epidemic we have on our hands: dudes with fake
jobs.
What is a fake
job?
A fake job is one
that requires more than 30 seconds of uninterrupted speech to describe, is full
of ums and ers, and relies on vague metaphors to describe, like,
“we’re like if Palantir was Wendy’s” or “Chief Vibes Officer.” Ideally, you
should be able to describe your job in one sentence, like “I build airplanes,
or “I teach children algebra”, or “I operate the Tower of Terror at Magic
Kingdom.” If [I] were to ask you what you do and you started talking about
synergy or “maximizing shareholder value” or whatever the [f***] verticals
are, I’m going to freak out and ruin everybody’s night. Your job is fake, and
you are a spy.
You know, a fake job, like “aspiring congressional
candidate backed by the Democratic Socialists of America.”
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