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/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.
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.
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.
He might have had a lemmy account but I think he probably didn’t have a hexbear account because he disliked chapo.
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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
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)
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The “journalist” class must be liquidated at the first opportunity
The AI will become the journalist class. Perform a forward assault on news servers???
It took three cowards to dare squeak up and voice their worthless thoughts about a hero
Hollow ass ghouls
