Dem Socialist Candidate Outed by Own Family for Being Nothing But a Fraud
Another day, another democratic socialist candidate revealed as a complete joke.
And no, we’re not talking Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her lack of geopolitics knowledge here. The stakes are slightly smaller here — but the joke here is way bigger.
As it turns out, everything about Julia Salazar — a self-described democratic socialist running for New York state Senate — is a complete fraud. And she was outed by her own family.
Salazar has gotten a lot of media coverage as of late, at least for someone running for the Democrat nomination for a state Senate seat in Brooklyn. Part of it is her unique Jewish background and her alleged working-class roots.
“She was born in Colombia, and her father was Jewish, descended from the community expelled from medieval Spain,” a piece in the left-leaning Jewish periodical the Forward reads.
“When her family immigrated to the United States, they had little contact with the American Jewish community, struggling to establish themselves financially.
“Now that identity has propelled her into politics. The 27-year-old is now running for a New York State senate seat as a Democratic Socialist, one of a new generation of politicians who are racing to the left in the Trump era. Most of these young guns are taking aim at Israel as criticism of the Jewish state becomes increasingly expected from progressives. In this, Salazar may have been ahead of her time. She’s been there, done that and moved on.”
They were referring to her time with anti-Zionist organizations like pro-BDS Jewish Voice for Peace and left-leaning blog Mondoweiss, according to The Washington Free Beacon. But now she’s firmly back in the fold and supporting Israel. She’s also Latina and Jewish — a kind of amazing two-for in the identity politics cauldron of Brooklyn.
There’s a slight problem with this, however: at least half of that is a bald-faced lie.
Another Jewish periodical, Tablet, took a closer look at Salazar’s background. They began to find some, ahem, inconsistencies in her story.
“Social media postings, various articles, and the recollections of people who knew her at Columbia University show that in her early 20s Salazar was a right-wing pro-Israel Christian. In 2012 and into 2013, she was the president of Columbia Right to Life, the campus’s leading anti-abortion group.” She also appeared on Glenn Beck’s show to denounce some Columbia professors as anti-Israel.
And then there was her family, who may have provided the best clue to who Salazar really is.
“A 2009 funeral notice for her father, a former commercial airline pilot named Luis Hernan Salazar, indicates that the service was held at the Prince of Peace Catholic Church in Ormond Beach, Florida,” Tablet reported.
“When reached by phone, Alex Salazar, the candidate’s older brother and the operator of a number of Florida mango farms, said that one of their father’s brothers was a Jesuit priest. (He also seemed to know very little about her campaign and seemed surprised when I told him she stood a good chance of winning.)
“There was nobody in our immediate family who was Jewish … my father was not Jewish, we were not raised Jewish,” Alex Salazar said.
“Their mother, Christine Salazar, indicated in a public September 2012 Facebook post that she planned on attending services at the Brooklyn Tabernacle, a nondenominational evangelical church in downtown Brooklyn. Although the candidate goes by Julia Carmel Salazar — and sometimes just Julia Carmel — in her professional life, her given middle name is Julia Christine Salazar, a discrepancy that makes it trickier to track down public records of the would-be state senator … This past July, the New York Daily News reported that Salazar had only registered as a Democrat ‘a year ago.'”
Oh, and then there’s that “working-class Colombian immigrant” thing, which is what The Intercept reported about her. She claimed she “immigrated to the US from Colombia when I was a baby” to Jacobin, a socialist magazine. There are all sorts of piffle about how she was a working-class girl who “was a nanny” and “cleaned apartments” during her college years.
Right, so about that. “Salazar’s mother grew up in New Jersey and attended West Morris Central High School in Chester Township, according to her Facebook page,” Tablet reports. As someone who grew up in that part of the world and is intimately familiar with West Morris Central High School, let me note that it’s not exactly what one would describe as “working-class.” For all I know, things went downhill for the Salazar family after that, but I somehow doubt a Columbia University Republican from that background was cleaning apartments and nannying while she was attending temple services.
Also, her claim that “I was raised by a single mom who didn’t have a college degree. My father didn’t graduate from high school” — again false, her mother has a degree in psychology. While money was occasionally slightly tight, her family says that her campaign website’s claim that she was “working at a local grocery store when she was 14 to help make ends meet” is also garbage.
Her brother also disputes Julia’s claim that “my mom ended up raising my brother and me as a single mom, without a college degree and from a working-class background.” We already proved the last two were false, but Alex Salazar said that their father made six figures as an airline pilot and was always there with the child support payments.
“We were very much middle class. We had a house in Jupiter (in Florida) along the river, it was in a beautiful neighborhood,” he said.
So, all right — I think we can safely verify that Salazar is a fraud of epic proportions. But perhaps the biggest takeaway ought to be what it demonstrates about the democratic socialist movement.
Individuals like Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders are put forth as outsiders who are immune to the predations of the current system. They’re different liberals than Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama — they’re really about hope and change this time.
Except they almost certainly aren’t. Leaving behind the failures of socialism and (in Ocasio-Cortez’s case) the failures of knowledge, this is just another group of people who desperately want power, can read polls and know how to play the media.
Ocasio-Cortez’s story isn’t as invented as Salazar’s, but both are still variations on what the voters want to hear, divorced from any reality.
Yes, this is worse than that “girl from the Bronx” nonsense. But ask yourself how much worse — and what it says about how the Democrats are trying to market themselves.
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