Squad member Rep. Jamaal Bowman promoted wild conspiracy theories about 9/11 on his personal blog during his previous career as a middle school principal, The Daily Beast has discovered.
After being asked about his writing, the New York Democrat disavowed it—saying in a statement Monday that he “regrets” his posts and does not believe in those theories.
“Well over a decade ago, as I was debating diving into a doctoral degree, I explored a wide range of books, films, and articles across a wide swath of the political spectrum and processed my thoughts in a personal blog that few people ever read,” Bowman said, though he did not address whether he gave credence to the conspiracy theories at the time.
ADVERTISEMENT
Web archives show that while Bowman was a 35-year-old educator running the Cornerstone Academy for Social Action in the Bronx, he maintained an online journal at Relentless-Strongback.Blogspot.com, where he published poems and brief essays there on personal, political, and pedagogical concerns through 2014.
Every entry was deleted some time before February 2016, but the compositions preserved in archives included 137 lines of free verse from May 2011 entitled ‘Recapitulate.’ What begins as a meditation on a decade-plus of world events, recollecting anxiety over Y2K and controversy around the 2000 Florida recount, swiftly delves into the world of 9/11 trutherism.
“2001/Planes used as missiles/Target: The Twin Towers,” a stanza on the terror attack begins. “Later in the day/Building 7/Also Collaspsed [sic]/Hmm.../Multiple explosions/Heard before/And during the collapse/Hmm…”
Bowman there invoked a favorite, disproven trope of the paranoid fringe: that the collapse of Building 7 was the result of a controlled demolition. In fact, the National Institute of Standards and Technology determined that Building 7 buckled and fell after debris from its taller peers struck it and ignited a blaze inside, undermining its structural integrity. The agency found that none of the details of collapse, from the manner in which the building’s windows broke to the sounds reported in the area, were consistent with the massive blasts a controlled demolition would have required.
The poem then pursues even more obscure conspiratorial musings.
“Allegedly/Two other planes/The Pentagon/Pennsylvania/Hijacked by terrorist [sic]/Minimal damage done/Minimal debris found/Hmm…” he wrote.
That would appear to allude to Flight 93 and Flight 77, both of which left behind considerable debris, including black boxes and human remains. The strike on the Pentagon led to part of its outer wall collapsing, resulting in 125 fatalities within, and the deaths of all 59 people aboard the plane.
“We blamed Osama/Went to war in Iraq/Captured Saddam/Killed him,” Bowman’s poem reads. “Bin Laden is Afghan/So we went to war there too.” In fact, Bin Laden, who openly took credit for the Sept. 11 attacks, never held Afghan citizenship and was born into a billionaire Saudi family.
In the poem, Bowman also points to the source of the falsehoods he is propagating—”Watch Loose Change/And Zeitgeist,” he exhorts.
Loose Change is a viral “documentary” which has become an international laughingstock for positing that the U.S. government carried out the Sept. 11 attacks, based on a range of debunked and nonsensical assertions.
Zeitgeist, similarly a product of the message board and chain email margins of the aughties web, is a 2007 film that goes beyond preposterous fantasies about the 2001 hijackings and argues that a ring of globalist bankers controls the Federal Reserve and periodically contrives national tragedies to compel the U.S. government to embark on wars and take out greater debt. The movie rehashes a ‘90s-era conspiracy theory about an alleged plot to merge the U.S., Canada, and Mexico into a single country, and eventually to dissolve all national governments into a single planet-spanning regime. It also questions whether Jesus actually existed (nearly all historians agree that he did).
Both Zeitgeist and Loose Change were favorites of mass shooter Jared Loughner, who killed six people and injured 13 more, including then-Rep. Gabby Giffords, in a rampage in Tucson, Arizona in January 2011. And both productions enjoyed the backing of arch-conspiracy hawker Alex Jones: He served as executive producer of the “final cut” of Loose Change, and declared he agrees with “90% of Zeitgeist,” further claiming that the movie drew from his own work.
There can be no mistaking that these are the subjects of Bowman’s poem: He even refers to Zeitgeist director Peter Joseph by name.
“Shout out to John Perkins/William Cooper/Michael Moore/Peter Joseph/And Adam Curtis,” Bowman wrote.
John Perkins is the author of the book Secrets of an Economic Hit Man, and William Cooper was a radio host and hero of the militia movement—and of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh—known for fevered ramblings about aliens, the Illuminati, and the supposed man-made origin of HIV/AIDS. Cooper died in a shoot-out with law enforcement in November 2001. Michael Moore and Adam Curtis are both left-wing documentary-makers.
In his statement Monday, Bowman said: “I don’t believe anything that these cranks have said, and my life’s work has proven that. As a Congressman, I’ve written a Congressional Resolution condemning a dangerous conspiracy theory, I’ve stood up to MAGA extremists, and I’ve called out the endless bullshit of the far-right.”
He added that he has “learned how misinformation spreads” since the time of the blog post and “I regret posting anything about any of these people. Anyone who looks at my work today knows where I stand.”
Since entering Congress in 2021, Bowman has repeatedly commemorated Sept. 11—bemoaning both the lives lost and hatred toward Muslims provoked, but never advancing the sort of narratives he favored in “Recapitulate.”
He has also called for a “9/11-type commission” to investigate the 2021 Capitol riot.
