On February 25th, 2024, a US Air Force active-duty member by the name of Aaron Bushnell walked to the front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC, and set himself on fire, while livestreaming the act on his Twitch channel LillyAnarkitty. Yes, he was a member of Antifa.
“Today I am planning to engage in an extreme act of protest against the genocide (sic) of the Palestinian (sic) people,” Bushnell had emailed various reporters and left-wing news activists prior to this stunt. Prior to this “extreme act of protest,” which claimed his life, Bushnell had been living in San Antonio, Texas, where, according to a friend, he was “living his anarchist principles in action.”
I bring that up for a reason: because there have been those – mostly on the Left, though not exclusively – who have tried to cast Bushnell as off-limits from criticism because he was in the military. While I’m usually sympathetic to that respect for the military, being an ex-servicemember myself you know who wasn’t sympathetic to respecting the military? Aaron Bushnell. His since-deleted Reddit posts (of course he was a Redditor) show a man who laughed about the deaths of fellow servicemembers, responding to threads about dead American soldiers with the dismissive “Oh no, anyway” meme. Moreover, despite working in intelligence with a security clearance, Bushnell often ranted about sensitive information like the locations of US troops in Gaza to his Leftist friends, according to the Hindustan Times. He was a loud and proud supporter of Antifa, and endorsed intimidation of elected officials, and even boosted a group – the “Stop Cop City” movement – which has been indicted on terrorism, RICO, and money laundering charges.
Moreover, it would be less accurate to call Bushnell a servicemember who happened to be part of Antifa than it would be to call him an Antifa fanatic who happened to be in the military. This, despite the fact that he had no business in that role, and would likely not have been able to join, had it not been for the fact that the military has pushed away its traditional recruiting base by trying to appeal to the woke cult who dominate elite America (and, indeed, the White House). Speaking of cults, Bushnell was raised in one, so it’s not surprising that he ended up falling for the same schtick from Antifa.
But I digress. According to The Intercept, Bushnell initially joined the military due to money troubles, but eventually became consumed with guilt over his participation in the horrible act of defending his country (gasp). As Bushnell himself put it, “I have been complicit in the violent domination of the world and I will never get the blood off my hands.” A particular focus of Bushnell’s ire was Israel, where he said in a since-deleted Reddit post that wiping out all the people would be “perfectly reasonable, as Israelis are settler-colonizers illegally occupying Palestinian land.” He added, “Israel is a white supremacist, ethnonationalist, settler-colonial apartheid state,” which “constantly attacks the Palestinian people to gain more lebensraum for its own people, who come from primarily white imperialist nations to settle there.” This sure sounds like excuses for genocide to me, but clearly I’m not enlightened enough to become a human Roman candle. And just in case you think Bushnell only hated the Jewish state, one of his last posts was about how “whiteness erases culture.” Because of course it was.
However, while a sane person might look at the sad case of Mr. LillyAnarkitty and see only a tragic story of a mentally ill man who was clearly unsuited for military service and whose death might’ve been avoided with a bit more medication and a bit less Reddit posting, that is not the conclusion drawn by the Left and Antifa. Rather, they seem to have decided that Aaron Bushnell was…wait for it…a hero.
And no, I’m not talking about random Twitter goblins when I say that. The academic and Leftist presidential candidate Cornel West has praised Bushnell for his “extraordinary courage and commitment,” and claims that he “died for truth and justice.” Former Pink Floyd band member Roger Waters has declared Bushnell an “All American Hero.” Owen Jones, the Left-wing socialist UK influencer, has bemoaned Bushnell’s death on the grounds that he “had too much humanity for a world run by people who don’t have any.” TIME Magazine even ran a piece linking Bushnell’s “radical act of protest” to that carried out by Christian martyrs. Yes, really.
In other words, not since the “supreme gentleman” Elliot Rodger has a group of social malcontents so quickly decided that a clearly insane person is a great mascot. In fact, the only pushback to the lionization of Bushnell that has come from the Left at all has come in sour responses to tweets like Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein’s, which reads “Rest in Power Aaron Bushnell.” Oh, not that those sour responses have anything to do with the sentiment expressed – rather, their complaint is that “rest in power” is a phrase that’s only supposed to be used about black people, and Bushnell was white. I suppose it’s at least clarifying to know that immolating yourself is not enough to earn the posthumous equivalent of an n-word pass.
But okay, let’s get serious for a moment, because not only is this all insane; it’s also deeply dangerous. Bushnell’s act was clearly intended to recall a similar act of self-immolation which started the Arab Spring, or as those of us not afflicted with neocon brainworms know it, or as those of us not afflicted with neocon brainworms know it, a bloody and merciless series of Obama Admin-backed color revolutions which ended with the Muslim Brotherhood in charge of Egypt, and which has ended with the self-immolator responsible now being cursed in his own country. In other words, Bushnell was imitating Islamist protest tactics. Which is not surprising, seeing as Antifa can best be described as Jihadis for the new Leftist religion. Of course they took inspiration from Islamists.
Now, just in case you’ve forgotten what Islamist protest tactics are, Palestinian activist Mohammed el-Kurd responded to Bushnell’s suicide with the following lament:
Which naturally leads to an important question: if Bushnell is a hero for doing one of the things on that ghoulish list, how long will it be before another Antifa mole in camo tries one of the others? How long before some crazy who should never have been allowed into the military suicide bombs the Israeli embassy? Or the State Department? Or the DC Metro? Or the Pentagon? Or the White House? How long before one of them hijacks a plane and tries to do the same thing? The Biden Department of Defense (DOD) obviously is doing nothing to investigate soldiers for the kinds of leanings that would lead to that behavior, largely because their staff are too busy trying to use Bushnell’s death as an excuse to protest for a ceasefire in Gaza. So why should we not expect more such “radical acts of protest” in the future, only this time with body counts beyond the Reddit-brained madmen involved?
And while we’re on the subject of Reddit brain, let’s speak frankly about what this act says about the mindset of Antifa, » …
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