(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) Yuri Dashevsky—a prominent New York City activist and pro-MAGA webcaster—has the unique distinction of having been the conservative challenger to Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the Democrat incumbent in New York’s 8th Congressional District, during the 2022 election.
Although the race wasn’t close (Dashevsky lost by 60,019 votes, or a 43.4% margin in the deep-blue district) it was a personal battle for the Uzbekistan native, who grew up in the totalitarian USSR and is passionate about preventing his adopted country from turning into a communist regime.
The leftist rhetoric from figures like Jeffries, who went on to become the House minority leader after his re-election, rang all too familiar to someone who spent time steeped in Soviet propaganda.
“[Even] if we [immigrants from USSR] do not realize it ourselves, we are suspicious of power, suspicious of the government,” Dashevsky said in an exclusive interview with Headline USA.
“Whatever they tell us, [we don’t believe that],” he added. “… We love the flag. We love the American Constitution.”
He ran his campaign without any help from the Republican National Committee, which had written off the seat as a bad allocation of resources.
Aside from a few volunteers, and a man who designed the website, posters and flyers, Dashevsky said he personally was the one doing nearly everything for his campaign.
Even though Jeffries never bothered to acknowledge him and most conservative outlets never helped get his message out, Dashevsky said his one brush with fame came after local leftists attacked him in one of their mass mailings over his support for reforming the broken education system.
“It was very short. It was very quick,” he said wryly of his fleeting moment as a local celebrity and person of notoriety for Democrats.
An acquaintance sent him a digital photograph of the flyer, which featured Dashevsky’s photograph alongside pictures of former President Donald Trump and former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.
“I asked him to bring me the original just for my personal ‘museum,’ but he said that he threw it away. So I don’t even have the paper copy,” Dashevsky lamented.
Nonetheless, he said he was glad to see “his arrogant mug in a MAGA cap” in the same frame as Trump and DeVos.
From early on, Dashevsky may have been destined for a career using media to deliver important social critiques and messages, but his path to becoming a right-wing pundit and politician was far from conventional.
Before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Dashevsky earned his master’s degree in architecture and established himself as a documentary filmmaker, becoming a member of the SSSR Kinematograflar uyushmasi, the Soviet cinematographers union.
After immigrating to the United States in 1996 and eventually settling in Brooklyn, in 1999, Dashevsky worked as a web designer and, later, a language interpreter. However, like many others in the Big Apple, the city’s draconian COVID-19 policies brought his professional opportunities to a sharp halt. This led to Dashevsky becoming a conservative political blogger.
In addition to his views opposing communism and the Marxist indoctrination of American schoolchildren, Dashevsky highlighted abortion as one of the core values about which he cared most passionately.
“I am pro-life,” he said. “I hate seeing human beings suffer. I’m all for the happy continuation of human life. That’s my position.”
While praising last year’s abolishing of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court, he added that the issue should be left to the individual states and not resolved on the federal level with legislation (or future court rulings) that would impose either a blanket abortion ban or mandate.
Dashevsky also expressed his support for both Ukraine and Israel in their respective wars with Russia and Hamas, both of which he condemned.
Although Dashevsky offered high praise to former Fox News host Tucker Carlson on many of his domestic political views, calling him “prophetic” and “effective” about what’s going on “within the borders of the United States,” he criticized Carlon’s well-known skepticism surrounding the Ukraine war effort and its underlying motives.
He further accused Carlson of lying about what’s going on in Ukraine, including his past assertions that Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had the banned Russian Orthodox Church because Ukraine is anti-Christian.
Carlson has questioned Zelenskyy’s commitment to religious freedom and tolerance in the broader context of claims that the war for Ukraine is a fight to defend “democracy,” noting also that Zelenskyy has suspended democratic elections in the country pending a decisive military victory over Russia, which Ukraine is not likely to see given the numerical odds against it.
Carlson has accused corrupt U.S. officials of waging a proxy war with Russia for their own vindictive purposes and using Ukrainian soldiers as cannon fodder in the conflict, which might easily have been averted through diplomatic means but for the Biden administration’s needless provocations.
While he is now a staunch supporter of former President Donald Trump, the current 2024 GOP frontrunner, Dashevsky admitted he was suspicious, at first, of the Manhattan business mogul when he announced his run in 2015.
But he changed his mind after seeing the personal sacrifices Trump was willing to make for the sake of the country—how the elite establishment that had once counted him as one of their own had turned against him as soon as he announced that he would run for the GOP nomination, and how no person in his position would subject himself to such hate from every institution in the country without having sincere motives.
“If you’re so rich, why would you [allow yourself] to get dragged through the dirt by the dirtiest people in the world, like Letitia James, Adam Schiff, Joe Biden and most of the Democratic Party—spineless, poisonous, nasty jellyfish?” Dashevsky asked.
He said that this solidified his belief that Trump was the only man in politics who would “drain the Swamp.”
“I felt that this country needs to hire somebody to fix it. And Trump was in the business of fixing things,” he said.
In the end, Dashevsky added that if conservatives want to save the United States, they must reelect Trump, become more politically active, stop the influx of illegal immigrants, restore Trump’s energy policy and, generally speaking, do anything else to make America a strong country again.
While it may seem a daunting directive—like challenging a powerful Democrat incumbent in a deep-blue district, Dashevsky sees no other choice but to try. Otherwise, he warned, the world will change in a not-very-pleasant way.
“If America sneezes, the rest of the world has a heart attack,” he said.
