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.
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.
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/flTlpHis 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This assumes they see it as efficient. They hated it. They chafed under it.
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.
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.
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:
- Building a more efficient revolutionary army than the army of the state.
- 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.
Efficiency is everything because if your system is less efficient you will be destroyed by the more efficient one
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.
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"
Yeah, I only became ML after actually doing real shit; I don't think he had the chance.
The US military is subservient to civilian authority? What.
I mean they do serve the interests of oligarchy which are civilians, so technically correct.
The president famously never has any personal connections with the military
Such a laughably simple take it doesn't warrant a response.
In the case of a vanguard party, that strict hierarchical structure would be controlling the civilian population instead.
The vanguard party would be replacing the currently ruling bourgeois parties. It is a civil authority, but unlike the current system, it would represent the population.
There's no contradiction. The people are at the very top of the hierarchy, the people except the capitalists and oligarchs that is
The difference is that the US military is subservient to civilian authority. In the case of a vanguard party, that strict hierarchical structure would be controlling the civilian population instead.
Go back to sh.itjust.works.
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
Americans really just can’t help themselves but be anti-communist. It’s so deep in their bones
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.
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.
Great sleuthing, comrade! At times like this it's hard to cut through the mountains of bullshit out there
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.
Same, I went digging through hexbear, .world, kbin, blahaj, raddle, no luck
I saw a post where he said that the chapotraphouse podcast were assholes.
Based. The chapos would probs agree with him too.
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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?
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
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
posts from san antonio about a year ago and a couple from atlanta.
But who knows what distro he was living in.. I am seeing fedora, popOS, ZorinOS and linux mint. There is Gnome and XFCE.
And to keep it topical I just got an opportunity to recommend an anarchist book to a couple of MLs. What should I recommend? : AnarchistLiterature (no good answers)
Anarchist Literature
The Great French Revolution by Kropotkin was a favorite of Lenin. I'm also very partial to the works of Malatesta, the Italian Anarchist.
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The AI will become the journalist class. Perform a forward assault on news servers???
stabbing the databases with my bayonet to try and stop the new york times from making articles about my bombshell wife
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
It took three cowards to dare squeak up and voice their worthless thoughts about a hero
Hollow ass ghouls
Accidentally filed into "Local Crime & Public Safety" because the internal name for that column is "OOOOOHHHH SCARRRRRY SHIT, BE AFRAAAAAID".
I'm not one to give them the benefit of the doubt often, but this did happen in DC, and it's WaPo
Kinda makes sense, but also a little like NYT filing 9/11 under "local crime"
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
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
)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.
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.
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.
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.
There were more. A lot of european noblemen had a bad time in the 1870s-80s
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
achieved all of his goals, and Princip achieved independence for his people from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.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
I appreciate the sentiment behind your message brother. Thanks
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?
Abes entire faction in the party collapsed and the moonies are being rooted out.
Abes death was funny
claims to hate gays
gets back blown out by another man
Israel-Gaza war
It seems that the WaPo has been infiltrated by hamas. Should we send a predator drone to its headquarters?
Holy fucking shit.
You're telling me that a person who opposes genocide... Has a political perspective that opposes genocide?
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?
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
Seriously though, very hard not to fedpost right now
Self medication is the only way to maintain even a fragile grasp on the last fragment of my sanity
Self medication is the only way to maintain even a fragile grasp on the last fragment of my sanity
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.
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.
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.
