We’ve talked about your endorsements. And I would like to talk in particular about Darializa Avila Chevalier, who ran successfully against Adriano Espaillat, the head of the Hispanic caucus. He’s a former undocumented immigrant. He has strong progressive credentials: dismantle ICE, supportive of Medicare for All. Did you privately promise him that you were going to support his re-election campaign during your campaign for mayor? I told him that I appreciated his support when he endorsed me in the general election after I won the Democratic primary. And the promise that I made to New Yorkers was to use any tool that I had to further that affordability agenda. And in Darializa, I see a congressional candidate, soon to be a congresswoman, who really has built a campaign on a vision of babies, not bombs. And I think that that speaks to what it means to invest in affordability, and also reckons with the bankruptcy that has typified a lot of our politics, especially when it comes to our foreign policy.
You were asking me earlier about political capital. I think the point of political capital is to spend it to deliver material change. And these are not intellectual arguments. When it comes to Darializa’s district, this is one of the poorest congressional districts in the United States of America. And as I walked that district with her, we were discussing the amount of money that our federal government sends, billions of dollars, to the Israeli military, and as we were doing so, a man came out of a bodega with his hands full with two packages of Huggies. And you see what the priorities are of people living in the district, and yet you see what the priorities are of the federal policy that represents the district. And you see this chasm. And the more that you tolerate that kind of chasm, the more you tell people that politics is something to tune out, as opposed to something to be a part of.
Is the reason you didn’t endorse Espaillat his relationship with AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby, his longtime support of Israel? I think these are all important factors. I think the need for moral clarity in our politics, to quote Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez, is something that also applies to our foreign policy when it comes to the funding of the Israeli military. And you saw, in the final weeks of that race, AIPAC spending a significant amount of money to try and stop Darializa. It’s hard to explain to a New Yorker why their needs are not even being discussed, and yet we have billions of dollars to kill civilians halfway across the world.
I want to understand your point of view on what political weight you give the Israeli issue. You are very clear about where you stand. But I’m wondering how you apply it to how you look at other political actors. The left-wing streamer Hasan Piker recently said: “Someone who will not say the truth about Israel’s genocide will not stand with you and fight for you, for your health care, for your housing. It’s that simple.” Do you agree with that? I think what we have seen from New Yorkers, what we’ve seen from Americans, when we talk about this hunger for a new kind of politics, it’s a hunger to move beyond the bankruptcy that characterizes a lot of politics today. And it is hard to find a more bankrupt policy approach than what our country has done to Gaza and to Palestine and how it hasn’t been specific to any one party. It’s been, again and again, an insistence to tell New Yorkers, and to tell Americans, that what they are seeing is not something they should in fact either be concerned by or believe in. It is hard to then turn to another issue and say, Believe me here. And too often you’ll find that there are far more congresspeople who will privately tell you that something is a genocide than publicly announce it to be so. And so long as there’s an understanding of a difference in what people believe and what they’re willing to say, there will be a skepticism and, frankly, a despair among those considering whether or not to engage themselves in politics.
So should the litmus test for a politician who wants to be part of your coalition be their views on the Gaza war and their commitment to calling it a genocide? I think it’s an important part. I wouldn’t say that there’s a specific litmus test as to creating a cookie cutter of a person that I would endorse in any one seat. What I would say is that you have to have a clear vision of being able to describe things as they are, and being able to fight for that which working people have been denied.
