NEWSWEEK
Representative Jamaal Bowman was found to have promoted conspiracy theories about the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in an old personal blog, which he has now said that he regrets.
Bowman has represented New York’s 16th District since 2021, winning office after campaigning as a progressive Democrat. Previously, Bowman worked as an educator, serving as the principal for Cornerstone Academy for Social Action, a Bronx public middle school.
On Tuesday, the Daily Beast published a report about a blog Bowman maintained during his days in education, on which “he published poems and brief essays there on personal, political, and pedagogical concerns through 2014,” according to the outlet. While the blog’s contents were deleted in full sometime prior to February 2016, the outlet was able to find back-ups via a web archive, through which it turned up a May 2011 post titled “Recapitulate.”
The 137-line free verse poem starts as a recollection of world events before transitioning heavily into meditations on various 9/11 conspiracy theories, generally focused on claiming that they were not terrorist attacks but rather planned by some other entities to precipitate the U.S. “war on terror.”
Newsweek reached out to Bowman via email for comment on Tuesday.
Bowman himself disavowed the post when contacted by the Daily Beast, saying that he regrets it and highlighting his record as an elected official as proof that he does not currently hold conspiratorial views, though he did not touch on whether or not he believed them at the time the poem was written.
“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.
