The Beginning of the End for the Squad?

Jamaal Bowman, the Representative for New York’s 16th congressional district, has lost his primary election. Bowman was defeated by Westchester County Executive George Latimer, a Democrat, to be sure, but one a little more in tune with the policy preferences of his affluent soon-to-be constituents. This makes Bowman the first member of the infamous “Squad,” a cadre of far-left Democrats including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to lose his seat. If we are lucky, perhaps this is the beginning of a positive trend. Bowman was a rising star in progressive politics, known for willfully pulling a fire alarm in the Cannon House Office Building in Washington, D.C. to delay a budget vote, for which he was formally censured.

More recently, Bowman has been in the spotlight for embodying another time-honored Progressive tradition: deliberately antagonizing his own constituents to score political points online. Specifically, Bowman has been one of the most vocal anti-Israel and anti-Jewish politicians in Congress, in a district with a rich and powerful Jewish community. Roughly 9% of his district is Jewish – a small, but politically engaged demographic. Bowman found that out the hard way.

Bowman’s flop campaign might reasonably lead one to assume he was running in Gaza. To understand why Bowman lost, let’s start from the beginning.

The Capitol Building. Credit: massmatt/Flickr

In the days after the attacks on October 7th, when the world was still reeling from the senseless tragedy, Bowman took time out of his busy schedule to call reports of Hamas terrorists raping Israeli women “propaganda.” Bowman posted a TikTok video in which he said, “There was propaganda used in the beginning of the siege… There’s still no evidence of beheaded babies or raped women. But they still keep using that lie [for] propaganda.” Bowman posted this video in November just days after lawmakers viewed a 45-minute video of the attacks on Israel. Bowman only began to backtrack on these claims once the evidence became unquestionably clear. Nonetheless, Bowman only apologized for the remark last week in a vain attempt to stem any further vote hemorrhaging.

Also in October, the House passed a resolution with near-unanimous support declaring that the United States "stands with Israel as it defends itself against the barbaric war launched by Hamas and other terrorists." Exactly ten members of Congress voted against the resolution, nine of which were Democrats, including Bowman. The resolution condemned Hamas and demanded the terrorist group release all hostages immediately.

Bowman has also called Israel’s actions “genocide.” He’s described Israel as a “settler-colonial project.” And he believesHamas’ attacks were not unprovoked, claiming “If we’re calling this an unprovoked attack, that means we’re going to ignore 18 human rights organizations calling Israel an apartheid state, and we’re gonna ignore 75 years of military occupation…or several hundred thousand settlers expanding into the West Bank.” He followed that up with, “I am not justifying the killing of civilians by Hamas on Oct. 7, there is no justification. It’s just an explanation of what the circumstances were that led to Oct. 7… If you want to end extremism, then we need a free Palestine.”

So far, this is all par for the course for recent Progressive politics: blame Israel for everything while condoning, equivocating, or covering for terrorists and their sympathizers. Of course, as should be familiar to all of us by now, scratch the contemporary Progressive and you will often find an antisemite. Bowman is no different. Many of his bizarre claims about Israel and his dismissive actions towards his own constituents expose his thinly-veiled antisemitism.

Jamaal Bowman Campaign Button. Credit: Mpls55408/Flikr

In January, Bowman took the honor of introducing Norman Finkelstein to a panel on the Israel-Hamas war in his home district. Finkelstein is notorious for his book The Holocaust Industry, which claims that Jews are exploiting memory of the Holocaust for their own benefit. “I’m a bit starstruck,” Bowman said, and he thanked the panelists “for being here and coming to Yonkers and delivering the truth to us.”

In April, Bowman called Jews in his district a “segregated” community. He said, “Westchester is segregated. There’s certain places where the Jews live and concentrate. Scarsdale, parts of White Plains, parts of New Rochelle, Riverdale. I’m sure they made a decision to do that for their own reasons… but this is why, in terms of fighting antisemitism, I always push — we’ve been separated and segregated and miseducated for so long. We need to live together, play together, go to school together, learn together, work together.”

Things became nasty when Bowman turned his ire to AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. When Jewish activists, organizers, and leaders successfully encouraged Latimer to challenge Bowman in the primary, everything became about AIPAC. On Latimer’s entry into the race, the Bowman campaign released a statement saying, “Congressman Bowman's focus remains first and foremost on delivering for the people of his district and standing up to powerful special interests in Congress. It's not a surprise that a super PAC that routinely targets Black members of Congress with primary challenges, and is funded by the same Republican mega-donors who give millions to election-denying Republicans including Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and Ted Cruz, has recruited a candidate for this race.”

In a campaign speech earlier this month, Bowman screamed into a microphone that, “because I am fighting against genocide, I am being attacked by the Zionist regime we call AIPAC.” In May, at a campaign event in the sliver of the Bronx in his district, Bowman told volunteers, “They are so afraid of us — those who oppose the working class, multiracial, multieconomic, multicultural democracy that we are trying to build… They’re spending more money in this race than they have ever spent in the history of any race. That’s how afraid AIPAC is.” In his concession speech Tuesday evening, Bowman spared no invective. He said that “We should be outraged. We should be outraged when a Super PAC of dark money can spend $20 million to brainwash people into believing something that isn't true… They spent a record amount of money, the most in US history, to beat this Black man.”

When jews in his district are the driver of “segregation,” when they are told they are brainwashed by AIPAC, when the contrast is between a Jewish neighborhood and a “multiracial, multieconomic, multicultural democracy,” any sane Jewish voter would be justified in thinking Bowman might have lost his marbles. And lost his marbles, he did. Bowman’s personal social media is a treasure trove of conspiracy theories and deranged technobabble. His recently uncovered YouTube page reveals Bowman’s engagement with 9/11 truthers, flat earthers, and theories of CIA time travel devices, alien technology, and secret elite communication frequencies. In other words, Bowman was already primed to believe antisemitic conspiracy theories well before he ever got to Congress.

Two Wrongs Do Make a Right

Bowman was right about one thing, however: AIPAC was working behind the scenes to tank his campaign, it just wasn’t as important as he thought. In targeting AIPAC, Bowman exposed his two incorrect assumptions: that his opponents were nothing without AIPAC, and that all external money was pouring into his opposition. In reality, neither of these are correct. Yes, AIPAC invested $14 million into the race, but AIPAC funding did not sink Bowman’s campaign. As othershave already pointed out, polling indicated that Latimer was up by double-digits well before AIPAC had contributed a single dollar to the race. (I note in passing that AIPAC’s funding is justified given the Antisemitic vitriol spewed by Bowman and his campaign.)

Meanwhile, only 10 percent of Bowman’s own funding came from contributions inside his district. The remaining 90% is from outside sources. Conversely, half of Latimer’s donations came from within the district. If you want to see dark money in action, look no further than the Bowman campaign.

Bowman failed for entirely predictable reasons: he lost touch with the real, specific needs of his constituents. Bowman came to care more about what radical progressives online thought and less about his district. He pandered to a rabid political coalition that was organized only in Gaza, on Twitter, and in the tent encampments scattered across a few dozen elite universities. At the same time, he became obsessed with a shadowy cabal of Jews masterminding his takedown, a theory which slotted neatly into his pre-existing conspiratorial mindset. Latimer, on the other hand, was a seasoned politician who had been working the area for decades before Bowman ever showed up. He could be seen at nearly any local event and he knew the district very well. The irony of Bowman treating the race like a proxy-war for the Israel-Hamas conflict is that Latimer rarely talked about the issue. The campaign ads that AIPAC funded almost never touched the subject. Bowman was playing to an issue that everybody else wanted to go away. It takes two to tango, and Bowman was dancing all alone.