FIRE ALARM PULLED: ‘Squad’ lawmaker in danger of losing primary as Dem-led attacks pile up.
A progressive “Squad” Democrat could see his career in the House of Representatives end after New York’s congressional primaries next Tuesday.
On one side of the contentious primary race in New York’s 16th Congressional District is Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., a former middle school principal who is backed by the progressive left, including self-described Democratic Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.
On the other side is Westchester County Executive George Latimer, a more moderate candidate who has scored backing from Hillary Clinton, the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and former Rep. Mondaire Jones, D-N.Y., who is vying to get back into Congress himself.
The fight is part of a wider fracture within the Democratic Party caused by Israel’s war in Gaza.
The recent socialist “It Girl” herself has weighed in: We Can’t Have an Election, We’re Democrats!
Liberals claim to be in favor of democracy–or, at least, Our Democracy™️–but if someone actually runs against them, they take it as a personal offense. Consider this tweet by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whom I take as a good exemplar of contemporary liberalism:
People everywhere need to understand how disgusting and abnormal it is for special interests to dump nearly $15 million to unseat a member of Congress in a primary.
This is corruption. It is a core threat to American democracy. It also fuels Trump.
Support Jamaal Bowman. https://t.co/HAWJjKICr7
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 16, 2024
There is nothing shocking about $15 million being spent on a Congressional race. In the 2022 cycle, a number of House races drew more than $40 million in total spending. And Ocasio-Cortez herself knows how to spend money: she spent $18.9 million on her own 2020 House race.
In May, the left-leaning Daily Beast noted: Squad Rep Jamaal Bowman’s YouTube Page Is a Conspiracy Theorist’s Dream.
Old (internet) habits die hard.
When The Daily Beast revealed in January that Rep. Jamaal Bowman had promoted 9/11 conspiracy theories on his blog while working as a public school principal, the New York Democrat maintained it was just a bygone phase, and that his days of marinating in the nether-swamps of online paranoia were long over. But his personal YouTube account, where he continued to follow new channels and create playlists as recently as last month, indicates his taste for fringe content has endured into his tenure on Capitol Hill.
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Bowman has publicly identified himself in the past as a frequent YouTube user. At a panel discussion held at an Islamic center in the city of Yonkers in January, the Democrat described himself as “starstruck” to introduce the incendiary academic Norman Finkelstein, whom he said he knew from online videos.
“I watch them all the time on YouTube,” said Bowman, who subsequently had to denounce Finkelstein’s praise of Hamas’ bloody raid into Israeli territory on Oct. 7.
Sure enough, several of the pages Inner Peace follows—including DiEM25, Real News Network, Free Will, PoliticsJOE, TRT World—feature interviews with Finkelstein.
Moreover, a number of the accounts Bowman has subscribed to are of recent vintage: more recent, even, than his own ascent to power in 2020. For instance, one called Afripost—where recent video titles announce “Vatican Angry as PUTIN Declares Russia will Only Worship THE BLACK JESUS” and “African Historian Reveals hidden Secret: God did NOT CREATE WHITE: The Bible is all about BLACKS” (capitalization original)—was created in April of last year, just a few months after Bowman started his second term.
The previous month, the Washington Free Beacon reported: As a Principal, Jamaal Bowman Objected to Teaching About ‘White’ Figures Like George Washington, Honoring Cop-Killers Instead: Bowman celebrated an anti-Semite and cop-killers on ‘wall of honor.’
However, also a principal, Bowman presumably knew how his school’s fire alarms worked, which leads us to Bowman’s showstopping moment in Congress in October: Jamaal Bowman: I Pulled the Fire Alarm Because…Republicans Are Nazis?
The coda for Bowman’s scramble to win reelection is quite the summation of where the far left in general have positioned themselves in recent decades: “In late spring of 2022, Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) reached out to a local Jewish leader in Westchester County to ask for an unusual favor as he prepared to defend his seat in an August primary against two Democratic challengers who were each gaining support from the district’s sizable Jewish community. ‘Do you have pics of us?’ Bowman texted the Jewish leader, with whom he had previously maintained a cordial if uneasy relationship, according to a screenshot of the message shared with Jewish Insider. ‘So I can show the world I’m friends with Jewish People.’”