While they’ve both enjoyed the pseudo-celebrity status that comes with being a member of “The Squad,” their time in Congress, at least for now, is over.

Both progressives suffered primary defeats to more moderate opponents in 2024.

Bush fell in early August, losing her race to St. Louis County prosecutor Wesley Bell in Missouri’s 1st Congressional district.

Bowman lost to Westchester County Executive George Latimer in the Democratic primary for New York’s 16th Congressional district in June.

While their inflammatory brand of progressive politics earned them brownie points with the Democrat’s far-left constituency, the party at large appears to be souring on their extremism, analysts told the Daily Caller.

“I just think people are tired of it,” Ian Rowe, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told the Daily Caller. “They’re just tired of anything that smacks of this idea that everything has to be viewed through some racial or group identity, for or against, kind of the oppressor versus oppressed framework.”

“They’re tired of DEI. They’re tired of the campus protests. They’re tired of our cities being burned down by Antifa every summer. They’re tired of Jewish students on our college campuses being prevented from going to their classes by campus racists,” Gregg Keller, a Republican political consultant and founder of the Atlas Strategy Group, told the Daily Caller.

Bush and Bowman did not respond to the Daily Caller’s request for comment.

George Floyd And The Racial Reckoning

When George Floyd died in 2020, in the midst of rampant social unrest spurred by inequalities exposed and exacerbated by the Covid lockdowns, his death catalyzed a movement that Reilly called a “racial reckoning.”

“Following the death of George Floyd, there were a couple of years of what I would define as pretty close to hysteria, like in that classic Dutch sense,” Reilly told the Daily Caller.

The Art Institute in Chicago fired all the docents, who Reilly describes as “nice old white ladies,” so they could hire expensive “minority grad students to talk about the same works of art from a POC leftist perspective,” Reilly explained.

Squad members like Bush and Bowman are products of that environment, Reilly said, noting that Bush is heavily associated with the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement stemming from the 2014 death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

The backlash against candidates like Bowman and Bush is to some degree a backlash against BLM, according to Reilly.

Bush, Bowman and their ilk say it’s necessary to defund the police for the safety of the black community.

“For those who are upset about our calls to ‘defund’: Is saving those funds more valuable than human life? Will you shed tears for him while advocating for militarized police forces? This is about humanity,” Bush tweeted in 2020.

Bowman alluded to police as government programs that “actively terrorize Black and brown people” in a 2021 tweet.

Despite these claims, evidence points to the contrary.

Reilly used data to make the case that the Black Lives Matter movement has actually catalyzed further violence and murder and done very little to reduce black deaths.

“Many cities cut police budgets and reduced the number of officers. In addition, for myriad reasons including at times the negative reputation of police, departments attracted fewer applicants for posts,” Reilly wrote in a February paper he co-authored with Robert Maranto and Patrick Wolf.

“These changes resulted in fewer patrols, fewer stops of suspects, and perceptions that police had less control of the streets. Such ‘de-policing’ in turn was associated with higher homicide rates, concentrated among young African Americans, a serious inequity,” Reilly wrote.

“The reduction of police budgets didn’t lead to any significant decrease in the number of young unarmed black men shot by cops,” Reilly said, partly because the number was already so small.

In 2021 and 2022 murders surged above 20,000 per year for the first time in decades. Numbers from the CDC and Statista show 2021 was the first year that over 20,000 deaths were recorded in America since 1995.

While Reilly initially believed the chaos would ensue long-term, he said that Americans summarily rejected it.

He pointed to viral content of mass protests spreading online and videos of old people being assaulted as “stuff that people really aren’t going to tolerate.”

“I don’t know what people in Bowman’s individual district thought about a George Floyd or something like that, but that has to be part of it nationally. You saw those attitudes get extremely, extremely intense and then fade away.”

The Downfall Of A Cottage Industry

The sociological and political conversations that followed the nation’s racial reckoning fueled the acceleration of a cottage industry that sprang from the BLM movement.

Race-focused lecturers like Ibram X. Kendi and revisionist historians like Nikole Hannah-Jones saw mainstream Democrats elevate their statuses as their books became required reading in left-wing circles.

The phenomenon captured no area of American life more so than it did higher education.

Colleges and universities across the land poured resources into building out DEI departments. Some of the most powerful administrators of legacy institutions like Harvard and Yale wrote their seminal dissertations on the premise of ideas that Kendi and Jones popularized. One such example is Harvard’s Claudine Gay.

Gay, who worked her way up from a professor of African American studies at Harvard to the president of the school, wrote her 1997 Harvard PhD thesis on how black electoral success affects American politics at large. The problem? She might have plagiarized.

In December 2023 Gay, who was already facing a groundswell of criticism for her inability to condemn antisemitism on Harvard’s campus during a Congressional hearing, stepped down from her role as Harvard’s president. Her resignation followed an exposé from Manhattan Institute senior fellow Chris Rufo and former Daily Caller News Foundation reporter Chris Brunet. They accused her of plagiarizing in her thesis and other published works.

While pundits, including Rufo himself, often credit Brunet and Rufo’s joint exposé with taking Gay down, Brunet originally reported on her in March 2022, describing what he says was a scheme to suppress data fraud. He followed up his report with an April article titled “The Curious Case of Claudine Gay,” in which he expanded on Gay’s alleged role in suppressing the data fraud. He also outlined what he described as an alleged separate cover-up of her predecessor’s involvement with Jeffrey Epstein.

While Brunet’s original work wasn’t enough to take her down — Harvard actually promoted Gay from Dean of Social Sciences to President in December 2022 after Brunet’s original exposé — the pressure from her Congressional testimony combined with mounting plagiarism scandals was enough to do her in.

This, Reilly argued, was a sign that Americans were pulling back from the woke revolution.

“Murder count is down. Attitudes are shifting. You’re also starting to see … people like Chris Rufo make real inroads against this stuff. Rufo has been holding up these social science dissertations … just putting them through turnitin.com and revealing that like a tenth of them are just straight plagiarism,” Reilly told the Caller.

While on the face of it it would appear that good faith criticisms of Gay and her alleged plagiarism are well in-bounds, many, including Gay herself, casted the criticisms as a racial attack on her.

“Those who had relentlessly campaigned to oust me since the fall often trafficked in lies and ad hominem insults, not reasoned argument. They recycled tired racial stereotypes about Black talent and temperament. They pushed a false narrative of indifference and incompetence,” Gay wrote in a New York Times op-ed following her resignation.

Reilly casted her defense as “hilarious.”

“People are asking, ‘Why are you attacking black women?’ I’m not. I’m going through the people who are at the top of these DEI offices. I think they’re morons. A lot of them just happen to be black women,” he said.

It became difficult for people to take the diversity movement seriously when figures as prominent as Gay were outed as plagiarizers, Reilly noted.

This, Reilly said, was the recession of the racial reckoning.

Kendi and Gay did not respond to the Daily Caller’s request for comment.

Down Goes Kendi

Another casualty of the downfall of the racial reckoning is Ibram X. Kendi. Kendi became a darling in left-wing circles after he published his 2016 book “Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America.” The book spurred the creation of a Netflix documentary and a follow-up book, “How to Be an Antiracist.” 

Kendi’s emergence as the authority on antiracism prompted lucrative speaking tours. He charged public colleges like Arizona State University and the University of Virginia anywhere between $20,000 and $35,000 per gig to lecture their students on racism.

He’s the recipient of a National Book Award and the McArthur “Genius” Grant for “transforming how many people understand, discuss and attempt to redress America’s longstanding racial challenges.”

But his celebrity academic status peaked in 2020 when he founded The Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University. The Center received over $50 million in donations. Donors included Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and corporations like Peloton and Stop & Shop.

But the entire basis of Kendi’s antiracist thesis is wrong, according to Reilly.

“I think Dr Kendi’s ideas are pretty obviously wrong. He strikes me as just a typical guy who was in college. He did complete the PhD, but he would have been a history prof or a math teacher had this particular moment not arisen. And I say that with no hate or hostility, but his basic idea is just like, what a lot of brothers make it to within the barbershop,” Reilly claimed.

Reilly went on to describe Kendi’s thesis as essentially a binary view of success, or lack thereof, for different racial groups in America.

“The only possible explanations are genetic inferiority or racism. And Kendi says this really, really openly. This is page 12 of ‘How To Be An Anti Racist.’ The options are either — the way he puts it is almost eloquent: There’s something just deeply and permanently wrong with one of the groups, or there’s racism somewhere in the system, no matter how subtle. It’s got to be one of those things,” Reilly said.

Kendi’s movement, while well-funded, has not necessarily produced success.

Despite the $50+ million funding boon, the Center for Antiracist Research laid off more than half of its 36 employees in 2023. Further allegations from former staffers laid out severe mismanagement, though Boston University investigated the center and said they did not find any issues regarding its finances.

The center was so dysfunctional that it failed to even establish an antiracist study program at all, a former employee for the center, Phillipe Copeland, alleged in a Daily Beast op-ed.

“The rumbles of discontent were turning into an earthquake and people kept leaving. No matter how hard people tried, things didn’t improve,” Copeland wrote.

He described how the one positive of his time there, an antiracist fellowship he created, ultimately became a negative as he was fired from the position. “I’m also still waiting for someone to explain how taking a fellowship away from the Black faculty member who created it is ‘antiracist,’” Copeland wondered.

“I came to the Center for Antiracist Research with hope and passion. I left with nothing but grief and exhaustion,” Copeland wrote. “The center that so many believed in is now effectively dead.”

Reilly framed Kendi as a well-meaning but ultimately under-qualified figure whose success was more about the luck of opportunity than anything.

Kendi, Reilly argues, became popular because of the racial reckoning moment.

“Here was this guy who was almost like a white liberal librarian’s fantasy of a black activist. Not threatening, but a good looking brother. He had dreadlocks. He dressed professorly … It fit a moment,” Reilly observed.

Kendi’s suggestions of implementing equity, which really means proportional representation regardless of performance, conveniently fit the moment, Reilly said.

Kendi’s is yet another chapter in America’s post-George Floyd racial reckoning. While the center is still active, its current public list of employees is down to just fifteen. The downfall, while likely attributable to Kendi’s and others’ mismanagement, may also signal the waning of the intensity and interest in racial politics that defined the months after the death of George Floyd.

Just Plain Bad

The undoing of Kendi, like that of Bush and Bowman, may be attributable to their broader affiliations with BLM and other radical elements, but Reilly and other analysts argued that Bowman and Bush also weren’t the best examples of their movement.

“They are also just pretty bad candidates,” Reilly said. “Jamal Bowman was involved in that fire extinguisher scandal, where, I mean, most people can tell the difference between a door and a fire extinguisher,” Reilly continued, referring to the September 2023 incident where Bowman pulled a fire alarm right before the House voted on a stopgap bill to avoid a government shutdown.

Reilly pointed to Bowman’s behavior, calling it “consistent silliness.”

“I think a lot of people decided maybe this was not the best candidate.”

Rowe corroborated that assessment. “Bowman lost largely due to his vulgar, childish behavior unbecoming of an elected official. More broadly, voters are rightly fed up with maniacal, progressive ideologues that see every issue through a racial oppressor framework that Bush and Bowman embody.”

Bush had a whole host of other problems.

While publicly decrying the police as an anti-black neo-fascist element and demanding they be defunded, Bush was spending thousands of dollars in campaign funds on private security. (RELATED: Democrat Strategist Says Cori Bush’s ‘Hypocrisy’ Is ‘Pretty Outrageous’)

Bush’s use of campaign funds prompted three separate probes from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) and the House Ethics Committee.

Watchdog organizations like the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (FACT) and the conservative Committee to Defeat the President (CDP) had filed complaints over Bush’s purported use of campaign funds to pay her husband.

Bush paid her husband, Cortney Merritts, thousands of dollars in payments that were classified as security services, despite the fact that Merritts was not a licensed security guard in Washington D.C. or in St. Louis, Fox News reported.

The Bush campaign changed the classification of the payments from “Security Services” to “Wage Expense” in April, according to FEC filings.

The Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) issued a recommendation in September to the House Ethics Committee to dismiss the campaign finance complaints connected to the payments to Merritts. The complaints, however, hardly represent the only red in Bush’s ledger.

In her autobiography “The Forerunner: A Story of Pain and Perseverance in America,” Bush describes a number of instances in which she healed serious life threatening injuries through supernatural means.

In one chapter, she writes about a child who couldn’t walk due to a brain bleed she incurred at birth: “I carried the child from the prayer room in the back of the church out into the sanctuary . . . ‘Walk,’ I said gently to the three-year-old girl, ‘you will walk.’ And this girl took her first step. Then another, and another. She walked.”

The Bush and Bowman defeats were a combination of their individual terribleness as well as an American disillusionment with neo-Marxism, Reilly and Rowe said.

“Both things are true, because in the case of Bowman, he was a very flawed candidate. And I think people are fed up of these, of these kinds of ideologues who are just so obsessed with identity politics they can’t process anything else,” Rowe concluded.

A Generational Problem

Far-left progressives have long been bullish on racial animus, but a relatively new phenomenon, and one that has been dividing the Democratic Party recently, is a burgeoning tide of antisemitism.

“The beating heart, where all the passion in the modern Democratic Party is today, I think it’s largely centered around Jew hatred and the Palestinian issue,” Keller, who is also a board member of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), told the Daily Caller.

“This is a generational problem that they’re going to be dealing with for at least the next 25 years. They have these really radical socialist, Jew-hating members of Congress who are in line with the young, youthful, energetic base of their party and get elected from time to time,” Keller continued.

The candidates were not “emotionally or psychologically balanced people,” he noted, pointing out there’s only so long candidates like that can last without ruffling feathers.

Reilly expanded on that point, juxtaposing their inability to last with one of their more successful Squad counterparts, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The Congresswoman is getting much better as a politician, Reilly told the Caller.

“When you go into Congress as an edgy, good looking rebel, you can either buy a new hip scarf every so often and keep yelling on Instagram, or you can actually do what Congress people do,” he noted.

“You can either continue rebelling and stay on the back bench for the entirety of your term, which will be six years, or you can pick up what’s actually going on, and you can stick around for a very long time.”

Reilly called the issue of Israel-Palestine a “lodestone” that allows Americans to see where their leaders really stand.

Bowman has defended the “from the river to the sea” Palestinian rallying cry that Jewish advocates say is antisemitic. His staunch opposition to Israel is a non-starter for many voters, Reilly said.

AIPAC, the largest pro-Israel lobbying group in America, spent over $17 million in Bowman’s race and over $8 million in Bush’s, according to The Intercept.

Bush, in her concession speech, vowed revenge on AIPAC, claiming she was “coming to tear your kingdom down.”

AIPAC’s contributions to “The Squad” members’ opponents mark a serious problem for progressive politics, Reilly said.

Other analysts, however, don’t believe their losses signal an American disillusionment with progressivism. Political strategist Lane Koch pins their defeats purely on an opposition to antisemitism.

“I think there really is a very strong place for progressive candidates, and I don’t think that Americans are souring on the progressive movement,” Koch, a strategist who works with the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. campaign, told the Daily Caller.

There are still Democratic voters inclined to seek out and vote for progressive candidates, Koch noted. Bell, a self-described progressive, is not a moderate.

“Wesley Bell is a progressive candidate, but he’s one that reflects his district, and that’s the difference. Cori Bush doesn’t actually reflect the values of her progressive district,” Koch continued. “It’s not that Americans are souring on progressive candidates. It’s that really being so anti-Israel and anti-Jewish is not good politics.”

In Waltzes Walz

The left’s struggle to balance their far-left wing’s antisemitism with moderates reached a head in August, this time on the White House ticket.

After the Democrats bumped Vice President Kamala Harris to the top of the ticket, she narrowed her running mate selection down to two candidates: Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who is Jewish, and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. Harris ultimately selected Walz.

Critics casted Kamala’s passing over Shapiro as a concession to antisemitism in her party.

“When Kamala Harris chose Tim Walz over Josh Shapiro, you could have heard a pin drop amongst the Republican political operative class,” Keller told the Caller. “There was no explanation for it other than this was in response to the Jew-hating core of the Democrat Party.”

Keller noted that Walz, unlike Shapiro, doesn’t come from a swing state and doesn’t balance out the ticket from an ideological perspective.

“This is just doubling down on radicalism. And do all of us assume, I believe, with good evidence, that the only thing that motivated this was the fact that she can’t have a Jewish person on the ticket with her? Yeah, I believe that,” Keller concluded.

Members of Harris’ own party echoed those sentiments.

“Every potential nominee for Vice President is pro-Israel. Yet only one, Josh Shapiro, has been singled out by a far-left smear campaign calling him ‘Genocide Josh,’ Democratic New York Rep. Ritchie Torres tweeted in late July. “The reason he is treated differently from the rest? Antisemitism.”

Despite the objections, Harris chose Walz, a selection critics casted as a nod to Israel haters.

“Shapiro would have alienated the progressive/Israel hating wing of the Democratic Party,” Steve Eisman, the managing director at Neuberger Berman hedge fund and protagonist of the popular movie/book “The Big Short,” tweeted following the pick.