On June 6, 2020, some 500,000 Americans turned out across over 500 cities and towns for the single largest day of protest over the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man. Over the course of that month, somewhere between 15 million and 26 million people participated in public demonstrations, making Black Lives Matter possibly the largest protest movement in U.S. history.

Later that month, Bronx middle school principal Jamaal Bowman won a Democratic congressional primary election against incumbent Eliot Engel in New York’s 16th District, becoming the first BLM-affiliated member of Congress. (Bowman had become a fixture at protests, sharing his story of having been beaten with a nightstick as a preteen and, later, of having been detained for failing to use a turn signal while driving.) Six weeks after Bowman’s primary win, a second activist, St. Louis’ Cori Bush, won a Democratic primary in Missouri’s 1st District. (She had become an organizer and protest leader after the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson.) Bush became the BLM movement’s second congressional rep.

Now, just over four years later, both Bowman and Bush have been routed out of Congress, thanks to a historic deluge of big-money spending against them. They battled challengers in the most and third-most-expensive congressional primaries in American history, respectively, and each was outspent roughly 4–1. In both races, the overwhelming majority of that money came from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the conservative, pro-Netanyahu lobbying group that has........

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