Aaron Bushnell, Who Burned Himself Alive, Cheered Murder of U.S. Soldiers

“I work for the air force and would also have no right to complain about violent resistance against my actions.” 

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog 

When Aaron Bushnell, an Antifa member and Air Force Airman, set himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington D.C., Hamas supporters in this country made him into a martyr.

Cornel West praised Bushnell’s “extraordinary courage and commitment”, Roger Waters celebrated him as an “All-American Hero” and the media emphasized his military role.

In reality, Aaron Bushnell was a member of radical anarchist groups on social media, he wanted to leave the Air Force and cheered the killings of members of the U.S. military.

When three black Army soldiers were murdered in an Iranian-backed Islamic terror attack back in January, Aaron Bushnell posted it to the Antifa ACAB (All Cops are Bastards) Reddit group with a mocking “OhNoAnyway.jpg” meme.

“The cops are the domestic military and the military is the international police. They are bad for the exact same reasons,” Aaron Bushnell posted in the ensuing debate.

Bushnell believed that Islamic terrorists killing U.S. military personnel was justified, arguing that, “I work for the air force and would also have no right to complain about violent resistance against my actions.”

In a previous exchange he warned another user against joining the military and argued again that the murder of Americans was justified. “The US DoD is one of the most powerfully evil institutions to ever disgrace the face of this planet. You will have blood on your hands that you will never be able to wash off. There are many people who suffer under the imperial boot who would have every reason to wish you dead, and they would be justified. Don’t do it.”

When asked by another anarchist as to whether joining the military would provide him with the skills to conduct domestic terrorism, Bushnell appeared skeptical. “

It’s very unlikely that you get any kind of ‘proper training’ that would be useful in a revolutionary context,” he suggested. The military was “a neo-feudal institution plugged into the broader neoliberal system. It runs on nothing but coercion, toxic masculinity, and brainwashing.”

Aaron Bushnell’s comments reveal that he wanted out of the Air Force and believed it was evil.

“I joined thinking I was doing my part to make the world a better place. Then I realized we’re the baddies, and the only way to make the world a better place is to get out,”

Bushnell, who died in support of the Hamas war against Israel, not only supported the Islamic terror group, but also justified the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews.

“Israel is a white supremacist, ethnonationalist, settler-colonial apartheid state….It has no right to exist,” Bushnell argued. He claimed that all the Jews could be killed because “there are no Israeli ‘civilians’” and that Israel was “the closest thing the world has to the Nazis”. Exterminating Israelis “wouldn’t be genocidal but actually perfectly reasonable, as Israelis are settler-colonizers” and described Hamas as an “anti-colonial resistance organization”.

“Israel’s existence can’t be justified in the first place, it’s a colony of the US and UK. It has imposed apartheid, displacement, and extermination on the Palestinian people since its inception. No aggression against the Israeli colony can be condemned by non-Palestinians.”

The murdered Israeli families in nearby towns had it coming because they were “colonizers” and “I don’t get to claim it’s a violation of my human rights if some of those people come and kick me back out of that house or throw a molotov at it or kidnap me.”

Aaron Bushnell compared Hamas to the “diverse coalition in Star Wars” and dismissed people “clutching their pearls over” the killing and rape of young Israelis at the Nova music festival because there “are no innocent civilians in settler colonialism”.

“That music festival was happening just three miles from Gaza,” Bushnell contended. “Imagine a similar event happening in the early days of the colonization of North America. Can you or I really say that Indigenous people are wrong for retaliating against colonizers who are rubbing their domination in their face?”

Aaron Bushnell believed that the destruction of America was as justified as that of Israel.

How extreme were Bushnell’s views? We know that he was a member of multiple anarchist groups including those advocating violence. He at varying times defended Communism as an ideal and in a reply to “Are there any Marxist-Leninist here?”, commented, “I highly recommend The Bolsheviks and Worker’s Control to anyone interested in the history of Lenin’s praxis”.

“Communism is a stateless, classless, moneyless society, so whatever society you’re talking about clearly isn’t communist,” he argued. True Communism had never been tried.

In comments on a user’s celebration of his 99-year-old father’s military service in the Korean War, Bushnell argued that American pilots were war criminals and colonizers. He claimed that North Korea’s offensive was spurred by resistance to American colonialism.

Aaron Bushnell had started out as a radical leftist and, like many in anarchist spaces, had come around to viewing Islamic terrorists as resistance movements against American colonialism. When defending the Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea, he sneered, “as if a poor country committing piracy against imperial trade would be bad”.

Beyond geopolitics, Bushnell had adopted every possible radical belief from legitimizing crime to animal liberation. His Antifa associations led him to declare everyone else a fascist.

“Scratch a liberal, a fascist bleeds,” he wrote.

America was inherently bad and the only redemption for it was a violent revolution.

“Electoral politics is letting the fascists win,” he claimed. When responding to Biden’s senility, he posted, “I couldn’t care less about this ableist bullshit. He’s bad because he’s the President of the United States. That’s that.” Anticipating a violent civil war, he posted, “Our choices are not Biden or Trump. Our choices are genocide or revolution.”

He anticipated the day when “the power of the bourgeoisie will dissolve because they made the fatal blunder of profiting off of the working class.”

Despite being white, he loathed white people, declaring that, “whiteness needs to be abolished” and denounced “transphobia” and “TERFS” or women who oppose transgender men.

Aaron Bushnell claimed that “marriage is also mutually exploitative and coercive” and condemned “human supremacy which is destroying humans, non-humans, and the entire planet”.

“The idea of crime was invented by rich people to describe behavior they didn’t like,” he contended, and argued that “defrauding” a company is “morally superior to giving it money.“

Finally the man who set himself on fire to support Islamic terrorists who would have cheerfully killed him, with his consent, posted that, “sanity is a myth constructed to justify brainwashing and marginalization of people who cannot or will not conform.”

What happened to Aaron Bushnell to turn him into this? Like a lot of directionless but clever young men, he went down a rabbit hole of extremism that eventually led to violence. A review of his social media shows little in his life except radical politics and video games. Bushnell had grown up in an abusive leftist cult that wrongly described itself as “Christian”.

The experience appeared to have left him with a hatred of Christianity, so that he posted, “the Real Jesus™️ only looks like a half-decent role model compared to the monstrosity that his followers created… Jesus can fuck off with his demagoguery.”

Searching for some structure and direction, Bushnell joined the Air Force, but then was indoctrinated into anarchist leftist groups which provided him with his sense of identity. While pictures often show him in the uniform he wore when he killed himself, off-duty pictures commonly show him wearing red. And he began taking part in Antifa protests.

The Air Force under Biden had launched a campaign to root out “extremism”, but that meant extremists that the leadership and the administration disagreed with. Bushnell was one of a number of personnel who openly supported terrorism and hated America who stayed on.

Bushnell had been preparing to leave the Air Force and transition to civilian employment, and yet he decided to exploit his uniform by turning himself into a martyr against America.

Narcissism and emotional instability were certainly in the mix. But Bushnell had also been failed by his family, which raised him in an abusive elite liberal cult, by a society and a government which mainstreamed extreme leftist views and by a military which failed to intervene.

In the end, Aaron Bushnell spun out of control. Like other Islamic terrorist supporters, he might have opened fire at a military facility, instead he chose to martyr himself for Hamas.

His death will be used by Islamic terrorists and Antifa to recruit more young men like him.

The Bushnell case is a wake-up call about actual extremism within the military. Someone recruited him and someone encouraged him to kill himself. National security begins with finding and exposing the Islamic terrorists and extremists inside the United States Air Force.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.
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