Here Are the Socialists Dems Are Nominating in NY: Likely US Rep Says She'd 'Abolish Pre-Check,' Nationalize Airline Industry
Someone who will likely be a U.S. representative for the party of John F. Kennedy for the city where the hellscape known as John F. Kennedy International Airport is based wants you to know that she wants to make your experience at JFK even worse than it is now — because, socialism!
Meet Claire Valdez, the newly minted Democratic nominee for New York’s 7th Congressional District. She’s one of three Democratic socialists endorsed by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani who managed to score upsets in Tuesday’s primary.
Valdez’s win was arguably the least surprising; unlike the other two, she was facing off against an establishment candidate to replace a retiring Democrat in a deep-blue district, not an incumbent.
It was also the win that made the fewest headlines on its own, in part because one of the winners endorsed by Mamdani was a former rival of his in the race to secure the Democratic nomination for mayor a year ago, former city comptroller Brad Lander, and the other — Darializa Avila Chevalier — holds positions so thoroughly insane they shouldn’t just be politically disqualifying but listed psychiatric conditions in the DSM-5.
As such, Valdez has kind of flown under the radar, even though she’ll almost certainly be a congresswoman come next January. Which is problematic, because apparently, one of her signature ideas is to make flying in the United States even worse than it is already.
To anyone who hails from the New York City area, this should also be disqualifying. Between JFK, Newark, and LaGuardia, the city that never sleeps has three airports where it seems pretty much everyone working there has found a way to drift off on the job. Not only that, two out of three are decrepit monstrosities and have been since disco was an emergent musical genre — and the only reason the third isn’t is because, after decades of being the worst of the trio and thoroughly unsuitable for jet-age air travel unless you got knocked on the head and were under the concussed misapprehension that you were flying out of Libya, LaGuardia finally got a major overhaul.
Anyhow, mentioning the mere act of trying to board a flight in NYC’s major airports is possibly the most triggering thing you can tell someone who lives in the area, at least that doesn’t involve a relative or pet dying.
Therefore, it’s a bit curious that Valdez’s plan to improve air transport is … abolishing TSA PreCheck and nationalizing the airline industry. The only reason she won, I can surmise, is that too few people in the 7th Congressional District saw the clip from a podcast named (sigh) “The B****uation Room” in May.
“My hot take is that we need to abolish PreCheck,” she said, referring to the TSA program that allows low-risk, pre-vetted travelers to speed through the security process. This makes it easier not only for them, but for everyone else in line.
If you’ve ever been in the winding, endless security line at Kennedy, as I was just last week — which is why this perhaps resonates with me more than the average dimwit socialist winning a Democratic primary — you know that this program is what the late business efficiency author Stephen Covey liked to call a “win-win situation.” Not for Valdez, apparently. In Soviet New York, situation win-win you.
It gets worse, somehow.
“I’ve got like, a million beefs with the airline industry and the process of having to fly,” Valdez continued. “We need to, like, nationalize the airline industry.”
Democrat nominee for NY-7 Claire Valdez says she wants to abolish pre-check and nationalize the entire airline industry. pic.twitter.com/MXnIOwB3P1
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) June 24, 2026
You can see that even someone willing to host a program titled “The B****uation Room” was aghast at this, and I’m assuming she hadn’t run the numbers. The market capitalization of just the two biggest American-based carriers — Delta and United — is well over $100 billion, first off. And that’s just if the government buys these airlines out, which would probably end up being more expensive unless they were seized at gunpoint. (This is unconstitutional, naturally, but I don’t think Valdez has thought that — or any of this — through.)
And of course, market cap is hardly the only problem with the government running an airline. There are the associated costs, for one thing. Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Atlantic, is famous for saying that “if you want to be a millionaire, start with a billion dollars and launch a new airline.”
Planes, fuel costs, slots at airports, services, maintenance, catering — those all now become government responsibilities. And if you think the phenomenon of the government effectively negotiating with itself when public-sector unions, like those that represent teachers or agency staffers, is bad, wait until that spreads to pilots, flight attendants, and ground crew.
And this isn’t even noting the most effective deregulation measure in recent American history, the Airline Deregulation Act, signed into law by (prepared to be shocked) Jimmy Carter’s administration. If you want to have someone to thank for being able to fly affordably, you can thank Mr. Malaise for allowing airlines to not just fly where the government told them they could and what prices they would charge for it.
Now, Valdez not only wants to undo the one good piece of President Carter’s agenda, she wants to go one step further by nationalizing American air carriers.
Sure, she might not have been the worst candidate to win a primary on Tuesday. But if Valdez ever gets near real power in the Democratic Party, she’ll have a shot to make Jimmy Carter’s signature piece of legislation, JFK’s eponymous airport, and every other bit of American air travel exponentially worse. If this is the future of the left, we’re going to be sent more than a half-century into the past in a hurry.
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