Last night Missouri Rep. Cori Bush became the second member of the anti-Israel “squad” to lose her Democratic primary election this summer. And not a moment too soon, since her concession speech was a deranged menu of half-intelligible threats against those she blamed for her loss: the pro-Israel Jewish community.
“AIPAC, I’m coming to tear your kingdom down!” Bush yelled, to cheers from her crowd of supporters.
AIPAC did indeed spend money to oppose Bush, though she lost to a progressive activist-turned-prosecutor who rose to fame after the riots in Ferguson, Mo., in 2015.
But in a roundabout way, the discourse around AIPAC and Israel did play a role in Bush’s downfall, just not the one she thinks. There was no Jewish hypnotism at work here, or whatever she believes in the darker corners of her weary mind. It’s just that Bush’s handling of the Israel issue, and specifically of AIPAC, provided a window into the fact that the congresswoman had become untethered from reality and was therefore unconditionally unfit to represent the people of St. Louis.
An incident at a late July fundraiser, organized with several anti-Zionist groups, brings this point into focus. Bush recounted a story that supposedly showed how open-minded she was—a story revealed to be a weird fabrication.
It went like this: At an event earlier that day, a woman fainted. “I did what nurses do, take care of the person that was in need,” Bush told the videoconference. She “didn’t care that this is the person that brought [AIPAC] to my doorstep.”
The upshot was that Bush will take care of even the people trying to destroy her.
But when St. Louis Magazine looked into the story, they found that Bush had taken some artistic license when retelling it. The woman in the story was actually Debbie Kitchen, who is neither Jewish nor AIPAC-affiliated. “It just blew my mind,” Kitchen told St. Louis. “Then to find out that she raised $30,000 that night—I was livid.”
According to the magazine, the background is as follows: “Kitchen says she and Bush know each other well because she was active in Indivisible St. Louis, which endorsed Bush in 2020 and 2022. The progressive-leaning group is endorsing Bush’s opponent Wesley Bell in this year’s August 6 Democratic primary, and Kitchen is a very vocal backer of Bell, too.”
This was not an innocent mistake, then. It was an egregious lie told to manifest Jews as the enemy in any situation in which Cori Bush faces opposition.
In addition, Kitchen explained what actually happened at that event: She tripped over a cooler, and two men helped her up. Then Bush came over to ask if she was OK too. Kitchen wrote on her own blog that “the whole ridiculous lie sounded like one of Trump’s delusional ‘Thank you sir, he said, with tears in his eyes’ stories.”
It was unfortunately, according to Kitchen—a local progressive activist, let’s remember—par for the course for the person Bush has turned out to be.
This is what voters have seen and is indicative of the kind of nonsense that likely cost Bush her seat in the House.
It’s easier in retrospect to see this, in part because Bush has let the mask slip completely. Now that she’s been tossed out of the House, she says, the gloves are off. In that same concession speech (if ever the term “concession” were used generously, it is here), Bush ranted: “As much as I love my job, all [AIPAC] did was radicalize me and so now they need to be afraid.”
Just as with fellow defeated Squadnik Jamaal Bowman in New York, Bush made it clear that she’s obsessed with a conflict thousands of miles away to the exclusion of everything else, including local issues. For a member of Congress, that’s just not going to cut it.
Nor is assuming your opponent must be in thrall to Jewish money. In fact, Wesley Bell made it clear that in his support for Israel over Hamas, he was standing with his party’s own president, Joe Biden. And both Bell and Bush rose to fame in the district because of their Ferguson activism and their perception as change agents at a time when the public’s appetite for it was strongest.
They both saw themselves, and were seen by their community in Missouri, as civil rights activists. The difference is that this view of Bush faded when she was revealed to be the kind of opportunistic activist who shows up to tie any event to their pet cause. Bell has come to be seen as a bit less progressive since Ferguson, if only because he opposed calls to “defund the police.” But he has never been seen as prioritizing anything over his own constituents.
Bush, meanwhile, appears ready to go to war with her soon-to-be-former constituents. Good thing they’ll have a decent representative in Congress going forward.
