“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, and of liberals generally, because that’s even more alarming. For years now, conservatives have been warning that the quasi-Marxist woke worldview, with its endless demonization of resilience, strength, beauty, intelligence, and of redeeming qualities in general, along with its attempt to render such manifest social ills as mental illness, obesity, and crime unmentionable, is ultimately an anti-human worldview. What more obvious proof of that hypothesis can we have than that Leftists now celebrate suicide as a heroic act? That they regard it as something that should be livestreamed on Twitch – you know, for clout? If suicide can be done for clout, why not suicide bombing? Why not mass shootings? In short, if Leftists don’t plan to survive to see all the likes and retweets, then why not commandeer social media to make terrorism a clout-chasing venture? We all saw how they reacted to Osama bin Laden on TikTok.
Seriously. We know all too well what the logical endpoint of incel ideology – which is just as blackpilled and hopeless as Antifa – is. If the only thing you can do as an unlovable loser is try to strike back against an unjust system in whatever way you can, then violence is the natural conclusion, and has been in multiple shootings.
So let’s apply that logic to Antifa for a second: what is the endpoint for all those blue-haired they/thems who post endless about how they’re “so tired” of being subjected to “genocide” because someone didn’t call them by their pronouns princess/queen? Answer: Suicide. And not just suicide, but suicide as a form of protest. As a form of resistance. Which, naturally, leads to the conclusion that suicide by cop, or even suicide bombing is the only answer. Only instead of doing it for the chance of having 72 virgins in heaven, the Left will do it just to make everyone sorry they didn’t acknowledge 72 genders. Or, possibly, just to avoid “taking up space” as a white person, or even to avoid damaging the environment.
Look, it would be easy to laugh “don’t threaten me with a good time” in response to the idea that Antifa is deciding to spontaneously kill themselves out of exasperation with the rest of us. It would be easy, but it would not be responsible. If our fellow citizens are being gaslit into self-destruction, and possibly into using their self-destruction as a form of terror, by the dead PR campaigns of third world tyrants and an ideology of anarchist Antifa madness, that is a threat to America’s national security. That Antifa itself is aiding and abetting that threat simply proves that for them, the violence has always been the point. But for liberalism – real liberalism – this behavior is a test. Elon Musk has observed that the woke mind virus’s great flaw is that it prefers the weaker party even when the party wants to kill you. For too long, liberalism has been so consumed with its own claims to universalism that it has been unable to bring itself to reverence anything or anyone, even its own (Western) ideals, or the very (Western) people who believe in it. I cannot speak for all those on the Right, but if liberalism cannot defend the West from the mental illness of Antifa and its peers in left-wing Jihad (but I repeat myself), then the America First movement is reporting for duty.
