Cori Bush’s Pathological Concession Speech Reminds Voters Why She Had to Go

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, August 07, 2024

 

Immediately upon her primary defeat at the hands of her own Democratic constituents, outgoing Squad member Cori Bush went to work illustrating the wisdom of her voters’ verdict.

 

In a bizarre concession speech that was equal parts deluded and menacing, Representative Bush (Mo.) promised to continue the fight against Jewish interests that exists mostly in her own head.

 

She had not been beaten, she explained. “All you did was take some of the strings off.”

 

“Let’s talk about what it really is,” Bush continued. “All they did was radicalize me, so now they need to be afraid.”

 

“See, now they about to see this other Cori,” the ousted congresswoman continued. “AIPAC, I’m coming to tear your kingdom down.”

 

Let’s clear something up: There has never been some “other Cori.” The congresswoman on that stage is the same imprudent, highly ideological agitator who made herself a headache for her allies and a gift to her adversaries. The only Americans who are afraid of Cori Bush are the Democrats who fret that her defeat might not constitute the final stake in the heart of her political career. And they have reason for trepidation.

 

The far-left activists whose anti-Israel advocacy is too often indistinguishable from apologia for terrorism will be tempted to salve their wounded pride by blaming Bush’s defeat on Jewish money. After all, her opponent, St. Louis County prosecuting attorney Wesley Bell, benefited from over $15 million in outside spending.

 

For much of the campaign, Bush and her allies attempted to frame these contributions as an intervention into the race by “MAGA megadonors,” but there is no need for euphemisms anymore. As the New York Times reported, Bell’s campaign was “financed almost entirely by the pro-Israel lobby.” Armed with their very own Dolchstosslegende narrative and emboldened by their persecution complex, the far Left is primed for vengeance.

 

But Bell’s campaign was not conjured from thin air by a nefarious cabal of vaguely Hebraic interests. Indeed, it was Bush’s pathological fixation with Jewish influence over American politics that drew Bell into the race in the first place. “Bell had initially been running for the Senate, but he decided to challenge Bush in a primary a few weeks after the Hamas attacks on Israel,” NBC News reported. That decision was made in response to an organic groundswell of hostility toward Bush’s instinct to blame Israeli Jews for their own rape, murder, dismemberment, and immolation.

 

But if Bush’s defeat ends up emboldening progressives, that will be attributable to the same madness that led to her ouster in the first place. It cannot be that Bell was willed into this race as a result of sincere grassroots enthusiasm for challenging Bush. It must be that an exotic group of outsiders deployed ill-gotten gains in a mesmeric campaign of subterfuge. Quite unlike grassroots campaigns that result in progressive victories, those that spring up in opposition to their goals and objectives must be inauthentic. When a double standard is reserved for Jews and their allies alone, that is antisemitism.

 

Bush’s speech may succeed only in reminding voters that she suffers from acute main-character syndrome fueled by bigotry and self-delusion. But the efforts by her allies in media to absolve her of blame for her fate all but assures that she will have imitators. We may have seen the last of Cori Bush, but the disease of the mind from which she suffered is not going away.