The Fall of Jamaal

By Jeffrey Blehar

Tuesday, June 25, 2024

 

Jamaal Bowman has been on tilt for years, a Humpty Dumpty drunkenly and deliriously rocking back and forth atop a much higher and narrower precipice than he realized. Now the winds have caught him unawares, and he has finally come tumbling down. Few political falls in recent memory have been more well-earned.

 

The fire alarm–yanking, rape-denying, would-be Torah scholar of New York’s 16th district has been soundly defeated in his Democratic Party primary by Westchester County executive George Latimer, and while this D+20 congressional district will never elect anyone whose politics resemble my own, it at least will no longer be sending an antisemitic conspiracy theorist to Washington, D.C. It is bizarrely somewhat of a bittersweet night for me on a selfish, writerly level. (The man was a content factory, after all.) It is an undeniably good night for everyone else — not only the residents of Westchester County and the Bronx, but for America as well.

 

The reasons for Bowman’s defeat are overdetermined. The list of his failures I briefly mentioned above could be expanded into a sober editorial, as the Editors did this morning, or it could be the subject of a long-running series of increasingly bemused comedic riffs, as I have been cycling through since last year. (And boy has it ever been fertile territory: I didn’t even mention the 9/11-truther slam poetry he wrote and published on his blog while still a school principal back in 2011.) But to summarize, Bowman was a radical progressive who got to office in 2020 (tellingly, post–George Floyd) by catching 16-term incumbent Eliot Engel asleep at the wheel in his primary. He promptly took his seat alongside the rest of the “Squad” — ultra-progressives such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cori Bush, and Ayanna Pressley — in the Democratic caucus looking to shift the Overton window to the left with their TV and social-media rhetoric, rather than by doing any legislative work.

 

He might have remained there indefinitely — although he was always an awkward fit for the 16th district, which includes part of the Bronx but also a sizeable chunk of suburban Westchester County — were it not for October 7. The Hamas surprise massacre of Israelis revealed Bowman’s truly corrupt, suppurating antisemitism. It was then that he took to lecturing his Jewish constituents about how he was the one who truly understood Judaism and not them, by “centering humanity” and calling for an immediate condition-free cease-fire in Gaza. It was then that he denied Hamas atrocities (including rapes and the slaughter of babies) as “lies” and “propaganda.” It was then that he began to fulminate about all those inconvenient clusters of Jews living in his district, how “there’s certain places where the Jews live and concentrate.” He ended his protracted campaign at a rally this weekend by shrieking about “motherf***ing AIPAC” coming after his family, while wearing a skintight chartreuse T-shirt and doing twitchy jumping jacks onstage with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. (Some downward slides are clearly telegraphed; the signals for this one came in well over half a year ago.)

 

So while I’ll miss Jamaal Bowman’s search for the truth about aliens and his interest in whether black people really built the pyramids, I’m glad to see him gone. Lamenting his loss merely because I’ll have less fodder to write about in the future feels shamefully flippant. There’s something facile about treating a man like Bowman as mere vicarious entertainment, an embarrassment for the Democratic Party to live and deal with, when in fact the poison he spouted — and his position of media and political influence as a Squad member — affects us all. Cleansing him from Congress is an act of political hygiene, and we don’t have the Democratic Party to thank for it, either.

 

For I have seen a number of comparisons being made between Jamaal Bowman and George Santos — the Republican Party’s answer to the challenge “Find me the most embarrassing New York congressman you can” — and while on one level there is a spiritual connection, the analogy is inexact. It was the House GOP who voted collectively to expel Santos (at great cost to their ability to govern as a majority), after all. Meanwhile, it took the Democratic voters of Bowman’s own district collectively saying “enough” to get rid of a man who had already criminally disrupted congressional proceedings before descending into foul antisemitic tirades. The Democratic Party itself seemed to be okay with Bowman — House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries sent out a robocall for him this very morning. His voters, as it turns out, were not.

 

The analogy that instead comes to mind is that of Steve King, former Iowa congressman and constant thorn in the side of decency from the other direction. His own district’s voters finally had enough of a representative more interested in musing lustily about the “cantaloupe-sized calves” of young illegal-alien drug mules and kicked him out in favor of Randy Feenstra, an actual legislator. In the same way, George Latimer will be a standard-issue Democrat voting the party line, but that’s a more than acceptable trade for a man pouring poison into the ears of all with ears to hear. The Jamaal Bowman inspired by George Noory’s Coast to Coast AM was an amiable lunkhead, a harmless clown even despite the fire-alarm stunt. But the Jamaal Bowman who denies Hamas atrocities and rails against the pernicious Jewish conclaves within his voting district is a very different proposition. An adviser of his reports that “he is a Briahna Joy Gray-type at heart.” Are you aware of what Briahna Joy Gray (Bernie Sanders’s former press secretary) has been up to lately?

 

An even more vivid analogy comes to mind as well. I awoke this morning with a piece to write about the end of Jamaal Bowman’s political career, and attending it was the same lingering image that has randomly appeared unbidden in my head (and sleep) for months now: I am sitting bored in my high-rise apartment on the 30th floor when suddenly Jamaal Bowman plummets past my window on his way to the ground. I catch his attention. He is not at all disturbed. In fact, he smiles, flashes me a giant thumbs-up, and shouts, “Lookin’ fine so far, bro!” as he recedes down into the distance, before I even have the chance to shout “aim for the bushes!” And now Humpty Dumpty has landed, with a thudding eggshell crack, leaving a trail of runny yolk. It’s all over, and my God, what a mess it is.