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Establishment Press Hails Big Money Crushing a Black Progressive Ari Paul ([link removed])


Election Focus 2024 A white establishment centrist using racist tropes (City and State, 6/13/24 ([link removed]) ) and backed by a whopping $14.5 million from the Israel lobby (Axios, 6/26/24 ([link removed]) ) has ousted a Black progressive congressmember from New York. Establishment newspapers are very pleased.

Two-term congressmember Jamaal Bowman was the target of the most expensive House primary in history, with almost $25 million total spent on advertising, a 798% increase over Bowman's 2020 and 2022 primary races combined (AdImpact, 6/24/24 ([link removed]) ). Westchester, N.Y., county executive George Latimer and his dark money allies outspent Bowman's campaign by more than 7-to-1 (CNN, 6/26/24 ([link removed]) ).

Unsurprisingly, the Wall Street Journal editorial board (6/25/24 ([link removed]) ) celebrated Bowman's defeat in the July 25 Democratic primary. “Mr. Bowman is part of the Squad, an uberprogressive faction in Congress, and his defeat could prompt similar challenges,” the paper wrote hopefully. It called Bowman's defeat "an act of political hygiene.”

Ignore for a moment the implicit racism that calls a monied white man ousting a Black man who supported other marginalized people a form of “hygiene.” Focus instead on the board dismissively quoting socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders: “The defeat of Bowman…would be a message to every member of Congress that if you oppose corporate interests, the billionaire class will take you down.”

That is the problem here: Thanks to the Citizens United ([link removed]) ruling, money rules politics and monied interests can essentially buy elections (FAIR.org, 6/11/24 ([link removed]) ). The Wall Street Journal is a right-wing paper, so of course it would be fine with that. But it wants readers to think Bowman's loss was about "voters reject[ing] his antagonistic progressive politics," and the so-called guardians of democracy in the rest of the free press fell in line behind the Journal.


** 'Veered too far left'
------------------------------------------------------------
WaPo: Jamaal Bowman was a Democratic Trump. Now he’s gone.

Dana Milbank's evidence (Washington Post, 6/25/24 ([link removed]) ) of Jamaal Bowman's "bigotry" included doubting dubious ([link removed]) reports of mass rape on October 7 and criticizing apartheid in Israel—as leading human rights groups ([link removed]) do.

The Atlantic (6/25/24 ([link removed]) ) said Bowman “veered too far left.” Lloyd Green at the Daily News (6/27/24 ([link removed]) ) said Bowman’s defeat was "a stinging rejection of left-wing politics and a reaffirmation of suburban centrism."

Then there’s Dana Milbank ([link removed]) of the Washington Post (6/25/24 ([link removed]) ), who all but ignored the outside spending and equated Bowman with former president Donald Trump under the headline, "Jamaal Bowman Was a Democratic Trump. Now He's Gone." Milbank wrote that both politicians were "scoundrels" and "extremists," with "a history of bigotry, bullying, law-breaking, promoting bogus conspiracy theories, engaging in obscene public rants and playing the martyr."

The impulse to brand anyone on the socialist left as a mirror image of Trump ([link removed]) is both superficial and dangerous (FAIR.org, 1/24/20 ([link removed]) ). Milbank's parallels are either trivial—both men use swear words in public!—or anything but equivalent. For instance, Milbank likened Bowman’s misdemeanor guilty plea, for pulling a fire alarm, to Trump’s 34-count felony conviction, which is truly grasping at straws. (Will we next hear about Bowman's parking tickets?) As for bullying, Bowman shouting "freaking cowards!" at Republican politicians is not in the same ballpark as evoking Hitler by calling your enemies "vermin," or being found guilty ([link removed]) of rape in court. Trump isn’t an outlier in US politics because he curses on camera, but because he
is actively and openly seeking to undo basic democratic guardrails (MSNBC, 2/29/24 ([link removed]) ).


** Egregiously misleading
------------------------------------------------------------
NYT: Jamaal Bowman Deserved to Lose

For New York Times columnist Pamela Paul (6/25/24 ([link removed]) ), if you're critical of AIPAC dumping more than $14 million into a House primary race, you must hate "the Jews."

At the New York Times, columnist Pamela Paul ([link removed]) (6/25/24 ([link removed]) ) dismissed criticism of the infusion of Israel lobby cash as little more than antisemitism:

We’ve heard plenty about the outsize funding for Latimer, particularly from AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group. The question said aloud by Bowman supporters has been, “Why so much money from a foreign government for a local congressional candidate?” The unspoken question has been, “Why are the Jews funding this candidate?”

First, this blithely waves away the problem that monied organizations can simply buy an election, whether it’s AIPAC or any other lobby. But Paul (no relation) also invokes the antisemitic trope that the Israel lobby equals "the Jews," when many Jews are critics of Israel ([link removed]) and many non-Jews are a critical part ([link removed]) of the Zionist coalition. Bowman had many Jewish supporters, including Bernie Sanders and the left-wing organization Jewish Vote (JFREJ, 1/24/24 ([link removed]) ). Does that mean “the Jews” supported Bowman?

This is a continuation of a bad trend from a previous news piece (New York Times, 6/20/24 ([link removed]) ) about AIPAC spending on the race, where reporter Nicholas Fandos wrote that Bowman had “prais[ed] a writer many Jews consider an antisemite.”

The writer in question—unnamed by Fandos—was Norman Finkelstein ([link removed]) , a Jewish scholar and outspoken critic of Israel, whose father survived Auschwitz and whose mother escaped the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto. “Apart from his parents, every member of Finkelstein’s family, on both sides, was exterminated in the Nazi Holocaust,” openDemocracy (5/3/16 ([link removed]) ) noted. It is already journalistic malpractice to denounce criticism of the Israeli government as antisemitism, but it’s an extra twist of the knife to shove this insult onto Jewish victims of antisemitic terror.

Paul also said that Bowman “voted against Biden’s infrastructure bill, one of the administration’s key bipartisan successes and fundamental to Biden’s re-election.” It's a claim that was central to Latimer's campaign (Slate, 6/24/24 ([link removed]) ), but it's also egregiously misleading, suggesting Bowman sided with the Republicans and against both Biden and the public interest.

In fact, Bowman and several other members of the Squad voted against the bill in an effort to stop Republicans and conservative Democrats from decoupling it from Biden's original, more robust, Build Back Better plan that included social spending on things like childcare, paid family leave and healthcare (Spectrum News NY1, 11/9/21 ([link removed]) ; see FAIR.org, 10/6/21 ([link removed]) ). The progressives failed, but their vote "against" Biden's bill was a symbolic vote for his more ambitious plan.


** 'Pendulum swinging back'
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NYT: Bowman Falls to Latimer in a Loss for Progressive Democrats

The New York Times (6/25/24 ([link removed]) ) called Bowman's defeat "an excruciating blow for the left."

In its news coverage, the New York Times (6/25/24 ([link removed]) ) said:

The movement once held up Mr. Bowman’s upset win in a Democratic primary in 2020, just two years after Ms. [Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez’s, as proof of the left’s ascent. Now, with the pendulum swinging back toward the party’s center, he is the first member of the House’s “squad” of young, left-wing lawmakers of color to lose a seat—and may not be the last.

To the centrist corporate media, the pendulum is always swinging toward the center (see FAIR.org, 7/16/21 ([link removed]) ; Jacobin, 2/16/24 ([link removed]) ). Indeed, in an analysis article the next day ("What Jamaal Bowman’s Loss Means for the Left," 6/26/24 ([link removed]) ), the Times subhead argued that "in 2024, the center is regaining power."

The original published version of the article closed by noting that Democratic consultant Hank Sheinkopf, hardly a friend of the left, “suggested that moderates would be well advised not to view [Bowman’s] loss as a major setback for progressives, who have proven that they can win races.”

Perhaps editors realized Sheinkopf was undermining their preferred takeaway, as this quote was later removed from the story in the online version (though it can still be found at DNYUZ—6/26/24 ([link removed]) –and it is also archived ([link removed]) ). The revised piece now concludes by quoting two conservative Democrats, who unsurprisingly said that the “pendulum swing has come back a bit” toward the center and that "the Squad politics are on the way out, not the way in. There’s a swing from extremism to a more common-sense Democratic lane.”

The center-swinging pendulum assessment ignores not just the role of the record-breaking dark money spending for the centrist candidate. It also ignores the broader context of the New York primary races, in which most socialist and progressive incumbents handily protected their seats, and socialists even grew their presence at New York state level (City and State, 6/26/24 ([link removed]) ; Albany Times-Union, 6/26/24 ([link removed]) ). Once again, Bowman's race seems more of a lesson in the effects of money in politics than it does of any sort of rejection of progressive politics—but don't expect to see that takeaway in corporate media.


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