Nobody talks about The X-Files these days, but as a kid who grew up on the show it’s always heartening to discover that I clearly wasn’t the only ’90s-era teenager thrilling to the adventures of Mulder and Scully as they chased chest-bursting aliens and dodged sentient petroleum (look, it’s complicated). I say this, of course, for the most easily predictable reason: Jamaal Bowman is in the news again. If the Daily Beast’s reporting is anything to go by, it turns out that the Democratic representative from New York’s 16th congressional district is either an X-phile himself or (and, alas, sadly more likely) into some real weird scenes, my friends.

A brief recap, first: America presumably knows Jamaal Bowman best as the only federal elected official to ever plead guilty to intentionally yanking a House fire alarm in order to delay a key vote. (He is a former school principal; I’m betting he learned his game from hard experience.) Others may recall his brief stint as a Torah scholar, instructing Jews that “by me calling for a cease-fire . . . and centering humanity, I am uplifting deeply what it actually means to be Jewish.” But I prefer to remember him as the man who, during his school-principal days, was fond of writing 9/11-truther free verse. (Sample poetics: “Later in the day / Building 7 / Also Collaspsed [sic] / Hmm… / Multiple explosions / Heard before / And during the collapse / Hmm… / Allegedly / Two other planes / The Pentagon / Pennsylvania / Hijacked by terrorist / Minimal damage done / Minimal debris found / Hmm…”)

And now it turns out that Bowman has very active YouTube habits, subscribing to all manner of accounts under his old user name, “Inner Peace.” (“World Peace” was presumably taken by Metta.) Those accounts turn out to be — you guessed it — chockablock full of conspiracy-mongering, ranging from the merely wacky to the outright lunatic. To be fair, it’s hard to fault a man’s interest in some things; if I’m scanning through YouTube and find a video titled “This CIA Document Literally Explains Time Travel (practical steps included),” well, that’s definitely some need-to-know information for me and Jamaal both. And if “’100% Alien Technology’ — Something Big Being Hidden From Us” turns out to be true, then frankly, people, we’ve been running the entire 2024 election under a dangerously false set of premises.

I’ve written a lot about Jamaal Bowman in the past for the simple reason that he says and does memorably stupid things regularly. But I’m not sure how clean the hit on him is in this case. Bowman denies that he has ever seen any of the videos identified by the Daily Beast, and although he obviously had to, it is arguably a slim reed to equate subscription to a YouTube channel with proof of having watched every or any video on it, much less endorsing it. (I used to listen to George Noory’s Coast to Coast AM for kicks on insomniac nights, after all, and I doubt I’m the only one.)

What makes the Daily Beast‘s hit less tenuous is the simple fact that Bowman’s already been on the conspiracy beat for decades now — he certainly seems to have an abiding interest in this stuff — as well as the recency of some of the channel subscriptions, including several rather feral racist, Afro-nationalist accounts. You could forgive a man for being interested in whether aliens are really transdimensional demonic creatures who have struck a Faustian bargain with the U.S. government in return for advanced technology. (Wish I was kidding, but this is very much a niche wacko conspiracy theory.) No, instead he has recently moved on from relatively innocuous gateway-drug inanity like “9/11 might have been a hoax that didn’t actually happen” to the really hard stuff, content like “Vatican Angry as PUTIN Declares Russia will Only Worship THE BLACK JESUS” and “African Historian Reveals hidden Secret: God did NOT CREATE WHITE: The Bible is all about BLACKS.”

It is also instructive to note that electoral politics looms behind it all: The recent spate of hits on Bowman has been so brutal not just because he is the House Democratic Party’s greatest source of accidental humor but because he is in the midst of a bruising primary reelection campaign for his Westchester County–based House seat. County executive George Latimer is seeking to unseat him in an extremely expensive race by playing up exactly how out of tune Bowman’s “Squad”-ready views are with the district, from his unstinting rhetorical support for Hamas since October 7 to his unstinting support (one assumes) for getting to the bottom of the Philadelphia Experiment.

At this point I almost despair at the prospect of Jamaal Bowman’s losing his hotly contended primary race. Where else are we going to get all this incredible content? Nevertheless I hope he does, if for no other reason than the fact that the residents of New York’s 16th district deserve a congressman who will listen to their voices rather than those of extraterrestrials communicating in binary through the TV set. But even though the man has already said enough ridiculous things and pulled enough fire alarms to justify his firing, I find myself more concerned with the time he spends watching Norm Finkelstein or various angry Hoteps than with his interest in Roswell or time travel. Given Bowman’s year to date in the media, it’s safe to say he hasn’t gotten those flux capacitors working just yet.