• joaomarrom [he/him, comrade/them]
    ·
    4 months ago

    When you scramble this many ghouls to check every single detail of a person's life history, you can make even the most well-adjusted person seem like a complete fringe lunatic. This is a concerted effort to make this guy seem as deranged as possible, just a wild crazy man, or a poor victim of online radicalization, depending on what tone you want for your think piece.

    You can turn the ultimate protest into a cautionary tale about the seductive rhetoric of the violent online left or a mental health awareness month-style unheard cry for help.

    • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
      ·
      4 months ago

      When you scramble this many ghouls to check every single detail of a person's life history, you can make even the most well-adjusted person seem like a complete fringe lunatic.

      Or just drag the truth out like taffy - a visit to a music festival becomes "attended orgies regularly" while enrollment in a university becomes "taught by Marxist professors". Or outright lie.

      This is a concerted effort to make this guy seem as deranged as possible

      Curious to see they've lost all the pictures of him in a military uniform. I've never seen the media describe a soldier's death with so few pictures in full dress.

      • IzyaKatzmann [he/him]
        ·
        4 months ago

        gosh i wish my university had more than 1 marxist prof, even just relegated to teaching marxist stuff

    • EelBolshevikism [none/use name]
      ·
      edit-2
      4 months ago

      Every detail I’ve heard about this man makes him seem more reasonable and relatable. I don’t mean that it isn’t an effective way to silence him, just that even under piles of selective bias he still sounds cool

  • dead [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    4 months ago

    I was looking at his reddit account yesterday and the posts of the reddit account match the information of the article. Maybe the intent of the article is to smear him. I don't think that him being an anarchist or previously a radical christian devalues his action.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/02/26/israeli-embassy-airman-fire-death-gaza/
    https://archive.ph/flTlp

    His username on twitch was lillyanarkitty when he streamed himself self-immolating. It was found that he had previously changed the name from "acebush1" using twitch moderator tools. I tried to use the tool and it said I had to buy a subscription. I'm posting the link anyway. If you have a subscription, you can see it. https://twitch-tools.lolarchiver.com/username_changelog?name=lillyanarkitty

    The username acebush1 matches his real name. Aaron BUSHnell. AceBUSH1

    On instagram, the account for acebush1 has 0 photos, 28 friends, and says "Aaron Bushnell" on the profile page. https://www.instagram.com/acebush1/

    On soundcloud, an account called acebush1 uploaded a single audio track 10 years ago. It says like: Hi I'm aaron bushnell welcome to my podcast. https://soundcloud.com/acebush1

    Based on all of that information. I believe that this was his reddit account. https://old.reddit.com/user/acebush1/

    acebush1 posted in many anarchist subreddits, posted in airforce subreddits, etc.
    2-3 years ago he posted about being a radical christian, which aligns with the headline of the article.
    He posted about hating Marxist-Leninists a few times.
    He has many posts in the airforce subreddit telling people that airforce members should be able to use their airforce healthcare for gender affirming care, ie gender transitioning. Some people on hexbear and twitter were suggesting that he might be interested in transitioning based on the username lillyanarkitty. I don't know.
    He has many posts on different fantasy series subreddits, such as LoTR. I'm mentioning this because the WAPO article also says that he loved LOTR.
    He also had posts saying that he had read anarchist literature, so he probably didn't become an anarchist from reading memes.

    Is the washington post article trying to smear him? maybe. probably yes.

    Was Aaron Bushnel an anarchist? based on his twitch username that he streamed himself being named "lillyanarkitty" and his alleged reddit account. I would say he was an anarchist.

    Does this devalue his message at all? No. He is correct about Gaza.

    edit / It looks like reddit has deleted all his posts or shadowbanned him or something. You can still see the posts on the profile but if you click "permalink" on any of his comments, it says deleted.

    • Sickos [they/them, it/its]
      ·
      edit-2
      4 months ago

      Repeating stuff I've posted elsewhere, but it's relevant. Here are my own observations from the account.

      Looks like he lost a job during early COVID and joined the military because people gotta eat. Nobody is immune to propaganda.

      His turn toward leftism was rooted in his Christianity; it appears to have started with getting properly acquainted with the real MLK.

      The works of MLK pushed him further into theory, and the hatred of the military hierarchy they were forced into cemented them as an anarchist. Some of their more recent posting history was trying to educate other enlisted on getting conscientious objector status.

      I didn't particularly get the vibe that he was an egg (from anything other than the twitch handle), but he definitely was a loud supporter of trans rights. I assume that that led to a lot of disillusionment with his faith.

      Also, his posting history makes it clear that he has fairly recently realized his childhood was abusive.

      07

    • Awoo [she/her]
      ·
      4 months ago

      He posted about hating Marxist-Leninists a few times.

      Doing this while being in the airforce is so weird.

      I will still support and go to bat for him/her but come the fuck on.

      • Rom [he/him]
        ·
        edit-2
        4 months ago

        His comments on reddit seem pretty based otherwise. One of his comments wrt ideology:

        I would say if I have to work with non-anarchists, I would rather work with less ideologically committed folks than with dogmatic adherents of any hierarchical ideology. The “I just think social services and wealth redistribution is neat” social democrat is better (in some ways at least) than the “THE PROLETARIAT WILL BE SAVED BY THE VICTORY OF MY IDEOLOGICALLY PURE PARTY” ML. By the same token, the casual “I just like reading Lenin” ML can be better than the “Revolution is an immature and uncivilized idea, capitalism is the best system actually and just needs a few tweaks” social democrat. The difference lies in the potential for the less ideologically committed individuals to participate in anarchistic tactics and be radicalized in a libertarian direction.

        I think if he had a few more years he would have probably cooled off on the ML hate, even if he wouldn't have become an ML himself. We all figure these things out at our own paces.

        • Awoo [she/her]
          ·
          4 months ago

          I just don't particularly understand how you can be part of the strictest hierarchical structure that exists, understand how efficient it is and what we are fighting, and then somehow lambast MLs for wanting a strict hierarchical structure for the revolutionary party because we understand what we're fighting against.

          It's just so contradictory.

            • Awoo [she/her]
              ·
              4 months ago

              Maybe you can think "this isn't efficient" but anyone who thinks about it for a few minutes can see how it's more efficient than nobody taking or giving any orders at all.

              Doesn't have to be efficient, just has to be more efficient than the alternatives.

              If someone can come up with something more efficient I will immediately switch to it.

              • CatoPosting [comrade/them, he/him]
                ·
                4 months ago

                Maybe efficiency isn't everything. Maybe you could try to see how, having grown up under one hierarchical boot, and then working inside of another, they could feel that hierarchy will always be oppressive and therefore should be struggled against.

                • Awoo [she/her]
                  ·
                  4 months ago

                  Efficiency is everything in a zero-sum war between capitalism and revolutionaries.

                  You either do shit better than them or you lose. It's really as simple as that. The revolutionary forces need to become strong enough to overcome the defence forces of capitalism.

                  There are two ways to this:

                  1. Building a more efficient revolutionary army than the army of the state.
                  2. The army of the state becoming so resource-stretched that it becomes weaker than the revolutionary army.

                  Or most likely: A combination of the above.

                  You can try and be completely disorganised and just hope that the state collapses so fucking hard that it can't even fight a leaderless revolution with no hierarchy. But seriously consider that that isn't going to be allowed to happen by foreign capitalists who WILL intervene when the moment of collapse occurs if things get that bad. More likely things wouldn't ever get that bad too, which is why you need the vanguard to begin with, to push things truly over the edge, to place a thumb on the scales.

                  • marxisthayaca [he/him,they/them]
                    ·
                    4 months ago

                    I think the work you are looking for is effective. You really don’t understand military structure if you think they will be more efficient than your cells.

                • zed_proclaimer [he/him]
                  ·
                  4 months ago

                  Efficiency is everything because if your system is less efficient you will be destroyed by the more efficient one

                    • Awoo [she/her]
                      ·
                      4 months ago

                      The soviet union was less efficient in that it allowed compradors to take power and end it. It was a less efficient proletarian-dictatorship than the rival bourgeoise-dictatorship. Its principle mistake were structural mistakes allowing the liberals into power.

                    • zed_proclaimer [he/him]
                      ·
                      edit-2
                      4 months ago

                      Yeah having all of their cities and a quarter of their population destroyed will do that.

                      Under Stalin and Lenin it was extremely efficient, growing and developing the economy at extreme rates unseen in human history up that point until the German invasion of WW2. The destruction of WW2 and the Liberal-revisionist take-over of the post-war government after Stalin's death led to liberalization and stagnation right at the time where they needed to recover the most via command planned economy. Kruschev's social imperialism and revisionism led to the Sino-Soviet split.

                      There was a failure there, a failure in purging out the social-imperialists and revisionists like Krushchev and his ilk.

                    • EelBolshevikism [none/use name]
                      ·
                      4 months ago

                      Yeah assuming that the better system always wins out is pure ideology. Everything is circumstance. A bunch of crabs that recently learned how to make spears and developed minor mathematical capabilities could defeat a nuclear nation given the right circumstances. And whoever is the Victor is not automatically correct.

                      AES is in many ways a good term, especially because it reminds us we should materially support the projects that actually currently threaten global capitalism, but the implicit ideology that “survival = more morally correct” is incorrect at it’s core. I’m an ML because I actually think the vanguard party is a good idea from a theory perspective and a historical perspective, not because the vanguard party winning all the time is morally right. Morality has nothing to do with it. And if you were to bring morality into the equation, I would actual agree with anarchists because the society they describe is both possible and better than one that is newly socialist, I just don’t think it’s possible right now.

            • zed_proclaimer [he/him]
              ·
              4 months ago

              Regardless it’s very evident it would smear every anarcho-commune on earth in a millisecond if it felt like it. You cannot compete with organized imperialism with rifles and a can do attitude.

          • mar_k [he/him]
            ·
            4 months ago

            I mean he clearly regretted joining and felt guilty about being part of that structure, considering some of his last words were "I am an active-duty member of the United States Air Force, and I will no longer be complicit in genocide"

          • HexBroke [any, comrade/them]
            ·
            4 months ago

            The transition to anarchism seems to have happened while he was in the military, I'm sure few months with leftist orgs on the outside would have shown the value of ML

            • LesbianLiberty [she/her]
              ·
              4 months ago

              Yeah, I only became ML after actually doing real shit; I don't think he had the chance.

          • SubstantialNothingness [none/use name]
            ·
            4 months ago

            Not everyone fundamentally believes that vertical hierarchy is inherently superior than horizontal organization. One could have a theoretical basis for this or hold the opinion out of pure reactionism. And it could be a strong or soft opinion. I'm not going to argue one way or another, but seeing how strong an enemy is does not mean one must believe that enemy wields perfect power.

        • ProletarianDictator [none/use name]
          ·
          4 months ago

          this dude was maybe a year or two off from being an ML. Once you're at this stage of opinion, things tend to snowball. Shoulda popped onto his stream and paid him in Twitch currency to read Blackshirts and Reds

      • zed_proclaimer [he/him]
        ·
        4 months ago

        Americans really just can’t help themselves but be anti-communist. It’s so deep in their bones

      • dead [he/him]
        ·
        edit-2
        4 months ago

        Anarchist is a bad word in America. Americans think Anarchist means "chaotic and violent". Usually when the US media calls somebody an Anarchist, they mean that the person is an enemy of the US government, not that they read Kropotkin or something.

        The other narrative angle that the media tries to push is that he switched from one "extreme ideology" to another. The headline mentions that he grew up on a christian compound. This terminology "christian compound" is associated with cults. Americans also believe that anarchism is an extreme ideology because they can't imagine a society without the state and they think Anarchy is chaos. The implication of the headline is that he was prone believing extreme ideologies and therefore not a logical actor.

        • SubstantialNothingness [none/use name]
          ·
          4 months ago

          The comment reads like it agrees with the opinion that anarchist is a bad word - as if the redeeming feature of his anarchism is that he was correct on Gaza. At least that's the way it reads to me and I assume u/EelBolshevikism.

      • cosecantphi [he/him]
        ·
        edit-2
        4 months ago

        I think it would because most Americans don't actually know what anarchism is. The average person off the street will give you the dictionary definition of anarchy and say it's when you have no laws and can do whatever you want. When they hear this guy was an "anarchist" they'll instantly write him off the same way we instantly write off libertarians.

      • dead [he/him]
        ·
        edit-2
        4 months ago

        I wanted to find out if he had posted on Hexbear. I saw a post where he said that the chapotraphouse podcast were assholes. He had posted some stuff about lemmy when reddit disabled the API last year but I can't figure out if he had a lemmy account.

        Reddit is starting to delete his posts or something. This is a screenshot from duckduckgo cache, I blacked out text that was a different redditor. This is the comment where he said that chapo were assholes.

        Show

        https://old.reddit.com/r/BreadTube/comments/ye4h8l/what_why_how_and_who_is_the_forward_party_some/itwnwej/

        He might have had a lemmy account but I think he probably didn't have a hexbear account because he disliked chapo.

    • BovineUniversity
      ·
      4 months ago

      Something really jarring about how he's talking about video games and TV shows less than a week before he killed himself. Like it's so casual and unrelated. Wonder if he'd planned back then what he was going to do?

      • GenderIsOpSec [she/her]
        ·
        4 months ago
        cw: discussion of suicide and suicidal ideation

        a friend of mine killed himself 17 years ago or so, it was decently planned and obviously meant as a fuck you considering where he did it. I remember going through his posts from a day or so before and they were completely normal stuff, he had even answered in a thread questioning how you would like to die, precisely how he did die.

        also from my own experience when you have the plan in place you can just focus on being normal, it's not a thing that you think about constantly anymore

      • Self_Hating_Moid [he/him]
        ·
        4 months ago

        I was gonna do some stupid shit when i was younger and the days leading up to my planned date all i did was build shit in minecraft as if i wasnt planning yo do something heinous in a few days

  • VILenin [he/him]
    ·
    4 months ago

    The “journalist” class must be liquidated at the first opportunity

    • Angel [any]
      ·
      4 months ago

      Of course they do, anarchism is an evil, chaotic, and rabidly violent ideology that is centered around its one extremely harmful principle:

      NO RULES

      Right?

      /s

  • CyborgMarx [any, any]
    ·
    edit-2
    4 months ago

    It took three cowards to dare squeak up and voice their worthless thoughts about a hero

    Hollow ass ghouls

  • the_post_of_tom_joad [any, any]
    ·
    edit-2
    4 months ago

    i hope all three of them one day grow to possess 1/10 of the conviction and class this man had, or barring that i just hope their necks grow longer.

    His social media post about 'what would you do if x' kept me up last night. it was a lonng, long night of reassessing my own convictions and finding myself lacking

    • WashedAnus [he/him]
      ·
      4 months ago

      finding myself lacking

      Just remember that there were only like two cases of successful adventurism for the hundreds of attempts over the last ~150 years. (Gavrilo Princip and yamagami )

      • Awoo [she/her]
        ·
        4 months ago

        I think we're rapidly approaching a tipping point where a lot of individual adventurism is about to come back into fashion. One ecoterrorist or anti-genocide bomber will spark off an absolute shit tonne of copycats.

        • EelBolshevikism [none/use name]
          ·
          4 months ago

          That sounds like a tipping point that could become an actual movement, though, if you can intercept all of the prospective bombers before they do something and get them in contact with one another in an actual community. A single bomber is adventurism, a thousand bombers is a guerilla warfare unit. But that means we should all focus on organizing rather than being the bombers.

          • Awoo [she/her]
            ·
            edit-2
            4 months ago

            I mean sure. But the question is how do you identify and reach and organise the would-be adventurist bombers beforehand?

            Find the answer to that question and I guarantee you you're in the process of creating the most revolutionary group the US has seen since the panthers.

            Arguably the Panthers successfully intercepted would-be adventurists who would have died shooting cops. Some of them still did, but they did organising in the most revolutionary party the US has seen first.

            You find the people that are going to die fighting the state and manage to connect with them before they do it in a disorganised way and you're heading in the direction of a revolutionary force.

            • EelBolshevikism [none/use name]
              ·
              4 months ago

              I’m not entirely sure how you would do it, obviously this is something entire orgs are probably discussing in person this very moment, but it would at least be poetic to have one of the most revolutionary groups in the US form for Palestinian liberation

              • Awoo [she/her]
                ·
                4 months ago

                Oh I'm not sure it'll happen that quickly lol. When I was saying "tipping point" I mean more like over the next 5 years.

                This kind of thing is like the start of it. Probably a slow trickle at first, stuff spaced out very far apart before becoming denser as the conditions get worse.

          • Hestia [comrade/them, she/her]
            ·
            4 months ago

            the problem with that is the various government entities that infiltrate any group that attempts to organize, and tears them apart from the inside or arrests/kills them. But the government aren't in our heads (yet)

            Sometimes the best organization is no organization: just individual sparks that eventually coalesce into a wildfire.

      • Mardoniush [she/her]
        ·
        4 months ago

        There were more. A lot of european noblemen had a bad time in the 1870s-80s

        • WashedAnus [he/him]
          ·
          4 months ago

          It's not about whether or not the specific dude got got, it's about the fallout from it. Generally, Propaganda of the Deed resulted in a backlash by the public against the socialist movements rather than support, whereas yamagami achieved all of his goals, and Princip achieved independence for his people from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

          • Mardoniush [she/her]
            ·
            4 months ago

            I know it turned public opinion against anarchism and was deadly to their movement.

            But in the long run it weakened the perception of the royals as untouchable, and created space for Leninism to grow and succeed.

            Which sucks because our anarchist comrades deserved a better go at things. But it's hard to see a 1917 without the death of Alexander II

      • PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmygrad.ml
        ·
        4 months ago

        Were those really that successful? WW1 would start anyway, they all were just itching for pretext anyway. And did Abe death changed anything at all?

  • Tankiedesantski [he/him]
    ·
    4 months ago

    Accidentally filed into "Local Crime & Public Safety" because the internal name for that column is "OOOOOHHHH SCARRRRRY SHIT, BE AFRAAAAAID".

    • Sickos [they/them, it/its]
      ·
      4 months ago

      I'm not one to give them the benefit of the doubt often, but this did happen in DC, and it's WaPo

      • Tankiedesantski [he/him]
        ·
        4 months ago

        Kinda makes sense, but also a little like NYT filing 9/11 under "local crime"

  • RyanGosling [none/use name]
    ·
    4 months ago

    Israel-Gaza war

    It seems that the WaPo has been infiltrated by hamas. Should we send a predator drone to its headquarters?

  • Hestia [comrade/them, she/her]
    ·
    4 months ago

    Holy fucking shit.

    You're telling me that a person who opposes genocide... Has a political perspective that opposes genocide?

    meow-anarchist

  • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
    ·
    4 months ago

    Its so fucking bizarre to see the bylines get longer and longer as the content gets more and more formulaic.

    What is this? Author, Editor, and Commissar?

  • ElChapoDeChapo [he/him, comrade/them]
    ·
    edit-2
    4 months ago

    I feel like there's a great "how many Washington Post reporters does it take to screw in a light bulb" joke in here but this really isn't the time comedian

    Seriously though, very hard not to fedpost right now joker-che

    Self medication is the only way to maintain even a fragile grasp on the last fragment of my sanity society

    • Nakoichi [they/them]M
      ·
      4 months ago

      Self medication is the only way to maintain even a fragile grasp on the last fragment of my sanity

      lt-dbyf-dubois

        • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]
          ·
          edit-2
          4 months ago

          I exercise at home and listen to music. I used to go on runs, but I've almost been driven over 5 times by now, there are no sidewalks to run on and South African drivers are terrible. I'm sure Americans that live in car dominant land can relate to that last part.

  • HexbearGPT [comrade/them]
    ·
    4 months ago

    All publicity is good publicity. I would say an article like this is better than his action just immediately being memory holed.

    But also yes fuck these journalists trying to smear him.

  • Evilphd666 [he/him, comrade/them]
    ·
    4 months ago

    Look these authors up on muckrack. You'll see the different syndications along with the syndicate author.

    I think they are setting it up to attack from the left as a mentally ill person and from the right as someone gone too woke. That's my guess.