The Wasted Passion of Aaron Bushnell

He died for a lie. We must speak the truth.

“Have you ever had the chance to be a hero in real life? What happened?”

The four-year-old Reddit post has hardly any answers. The poster has username “acebush1.” “Ace” refers to a flying ace. “Bush” is short for Bushnell.

It has been a week and a half since senior U. S. airman Aaron Bushnell livestreamed his own death by self-immolation outside the Israeli embassy in Washington. Before Sunday, February 25, nobody knew his name. By Monday, it was a trending hashtag.

An independent journalist screen-recorded the video from Twitch, then chose to release a carefully blurred version after the channel was deleted. Not everyone was so discreet. The raw footage still lurks in some dark pockets of the Internet. But the censored version is bad enough.

Bushnell’s eerily calm introduction has now been circulated and quoted ad nauseam. Looking even younger than his 25 years, he explains that he’s an active-duty airman about to engage in “an extreme act of protest” on behalf of “people in Palestine,” condemning the “ruling class” who is complicit with their “colonizers” in “genocide.” After he puts down his phone and douses himself with accelerant, there’s an agonizing delay as he fumbles with the lighter. Off camera, someone notices him and asks, “Can I help you, sir?”

Once he finally ignites his clothes, he says “Free Palestine” once, quietly, then screams it several more times at the top of his lungs. He then goes completely silent and somehow stands at attention for nearly a minute before collapsing, as one officer rushes in with a fire extinguisher while another rushes in with a gun. “I don’t need guns!” the first officer shouts, “I need fire extinguishers!”

The officer does his best with the extinguisher, but it’s too little, too late. “Jesus Christ,” he repeats. “Jesus Christ.”

Aaron Bushnell was not the first American to self-immolate as an anti-war protest. Many have compared him to similar cases protesting the Vietnam War. Veterans who gathered to burn their uniforms in his honor no doubt saw themselves in a direct line from the young men who burned their draft cards in 1965.

But Aaron Bushnell was not a child of the 60s. He was a child of the brave new millennium, where beauty and horror fly with the same terrible speed from one end of the earth to the other. And so as soon as his last moments became breaking news, they became a meme—tweeted and retweeted, analyzed, mocked, worshiped. I can’t think of a more bleak encapsulation of our postmodern age that while multiple accounts were tweeting “Rest in Power,” other accounts were complaining that “Rest in Power” is reserved for BIPOC people only. Meanwhile, ruthless edgelords on the right turned him into a cartoon. Scrolling through Twitter whiplashed you from memes like this to images of his real face unironically plastered on posters from here to Asia to the Middle East, even the West Bank. Arab accounts have dedicatedly spread tributes and fan art around Twitter, like this drawing turning the flames around him into flowers. 

The most despicable tribute came from Hamas itself, in an “official statement” expressing “deepest condolences and our full solidarity” with his family and friends. The terrorists assured everyone that his memory would “remain immortal in the memory of our Palestinian people and the free people of the world, and a symbol of the spirit of global human solidarity with our people and their just cause.” 

If that was the most despicable, Cornel West came in at a close second, tweeting out a smarmy exhortation to “never forget the extraordinary courage and commitment of brother Aaron Bushnell who died for truth and justice!” (Though West does “pray for his precious loved ones!”) West has doubled down on this tweet in a new interview with Piers Morgan, continuing to wax eloquent, comparing Bushnell with famous ancient suicides like Cato. When Piers asks if he believes Bushnell was a “martyr,” West reflects that since “martyr” and “witness” have the same Greek root, and since Bushnell died attempting to “bring attention” to a “higher cause,” then “yes, he is a martyr, absolutely.” I confess, there is something impressive about West’s naked shamelessness. What must it be like to be like that, I wonder?

Not to be outdone, Pulitzer-winning journalist Chris Hedges decided to take things up one more blasphemous notch with a Substack calling Bushnell’s death “an act of divine violence.” “As an active duty member of the U.S. Air Force,” Hedges writes, “he was part of the vast machinery that sustains the ongoing genocide in Gaza, no less morally culpable than the German soldiers, technocrats, engineers, scientists and bureaucrats who oiled the apparatus of the Nazi Holocaust. This was a role he could no longer accept. He died for our sins.”

Hedges is the most high-profile commentator to explicitly make Bushnell a Christ figure, but numerous fan accounts have done the same. One posted a picture of Christ on the cross and sarcastically wondered whether perhaps we should speculate that Jesus was mentally ill, as many have done for Bushnell.

But did Bushnell see himself as a Christ figure? Nobody has cared to ask. He makes a convenient Christ figure for their purposes. What more do they need?

*

It’s been widely reported that Bushnell grew up in the Community of Jesus, an ecumenical community in the Benedictine tradition whose members hold resources in common and can choose to bind themselves with vows. It’s not the only community of its kind. You can look up the Bruderhof for an example of something healthy and flourishing in a similar vein. But Community of Jesus has been condemned as a cult by ex-members who’ve shared old horror stories about abuse and “mind control.” These stories have been vigorously denied. It’s also not clear what light they shed on Bushnell’s still largely hidden experience in the community. He appears to have been an active member, musically talented, running IT support for their publishing company Paraclete Press. Friends have said he left in 2019 after choosing not to take binding vows. They also mentioned that he later sought therapy for some unspecified “trauma.” But nothing more specific has emerged, though he seems to have been estranged from his parents. His mother has commented briefly that he was “not well” at the end, and they were begging him to get help.

She also lamented that he “fell victim to propaganda” and emphasized that the family is “100% pro-Israel,” which was immediately used as proof that nothing she said could be trusted. But based on what’s been uncovered from Bushnell’s digital paper trail, “propaganda” is putting things kindly.

It didn’t take long for Reddit screenshots to begin making the rounds on social media, allegedly captured from the archives of the user “acebush1.” This appeared to be Bushnell’s account, which people claimed had been linked from his Twitch page with the same username. Within a few days, it was suspended, a pretty clear sign that people had identified it correctly. Before the suspension, I spent a day trawling through pages of the account’s history on Old Reddit—long enough to accumulate overwhelming circumstantial evidence that it was a match. In numerous biographical and professional particulars, these posts aligned with Bushnell’s public profile. This was the kid. These were his words. His strange, sad, sometimes ugly words.

There was one much-circulated screenshot that was fake, saying that “Palestine won’t be free until all the Jews are dead.” I didn’t fall for it. I could tell it wasn’t his voice anyway. His posts were typically long and verbose, like that one annoying guy you knew in college who latched onto a topic and just would not let go. He never said anything as blunt and unadorned as the fake screenshot. Instead, he would rant for paragraphs on end about how Palestinians had the right to do whatever they wanted as a “colonized” people—yes, even the mass murder of civilians on October 7. As far as he was concerned, there were no innocent Israeli civilians. This category didn’t exist for “colonizers.” Other people might “clutch their pearls” over the fate of the young Nova partygoers, but not him. If they didn’t want to get killed, they should have thought about that before dancing next to the border of a “concentration camp.” (See multiple comments archived here and here.)

I independently verified multiple other posts that made the rounds, including various comments mocking the deaths of soldiers and policemen. He was a regular in r/ACAB — “All Cops Are Bastards.” Meanwhile, he offered to help people looking for a pathway out of the military, though he himself had decided to stick it out until the end of his contract. But in response to a post in r/AirForce asking veterans if they would do it all again, he commented, “Absolutely not. I have been complicit in the violent domination of the world, and I will never get the blood off my hands.”

It was like this for archived page after page, archived shitpost after shitpost. All the sort of banal, dorm-room stuff you would expect from a frustrated 20-something who had watched hours upon hours of anarchist YouTube—railing against the police, the military, the government, any government, any authority. Including Jesus.

Oh sure, Jesus might seem to be a “half-decent role model.” But look closer and you’ll see he’s really demanding that humanity must “contort itself into some patriarchal distortion,” must “conform” to “inhuman divine standards.” So at the end of the day, “Jesus can fuck off with his demagoguery, his ‘I am the way the truth and the life’, his ‘love the lord your god with all your soul, with all your heart, and with all your mind’, and his ‘give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to god what is god’s’.” (Source.)

Well, there’s your Christ figure, I thought bitterly.

But I scrolled further. I dug deeper. This kid, this death, haunted me. For all his rancid shitposting, I couldn’t stop thinking about that baby face, that deadly earnestness. I thought about people who didn’t know him as a lefty Reddit troll. They just knew him as a shy kid who loved karaoke and loved his cat and bought blankets on his own dime to pass out to the homeless.

Who were you? Who were you?

His Reddit account might have been suspended, but the Internet is forever. You can find anything, if you know how to look. You can raise ghosts.

If I asked the search engine to show me everything with the keyword “Jesus,” or everything with the keyword “Christian,” what would I find? What would I raise from the dead?

2014: Aaron is fifteen years old. He describes himself as “a former skeptic but now hard-core Christian.” He’s articulate, intense, sincere. He spends a lot of time on r/Christianity, but he’ll sally forth on r/atheism to say he doesn’t appreciate it when atheists mock the Bible, which is “sacred” to him and other Christians. At the same time, when an atheist finds his way over to r/Christianity, Aaron encourages pricklier Christians to handle his questions more gently. This guy had the courage to come over to the Christianity sub after all. Be fair. Be respectful.

One lengthy, earnest comment explains how his faith and the faith of other Christians he knows is reinforced through personal experiences—of “Divine Aid, redemption, or sometimes just the overwhelming sense of God’s presence and love all around you.” How does the atheist know the world exists? It makes itself real to him. He senses it, all around him, every day. In the same way, Aaron believes he can know God exists, even while he acknowledges it could all be “some sort of matrix-like illusion, or a trick of the mind.” But “they are so profound and strongly felt that I have no choice but to believe that the christian God does exist and so I live my life accordingly.” 

Someone claims that a pastor tried to have him arrested for being homeless. “Jesus wasn’t treated any better by his own people,” Aaron encourages him, “and remember he didn’t promise us an easy time. God bless!”

“I will pray that you let Jesus into your heart,” he tells someone else. “God bless!”

January, 2020: 21-year-old Aaron has left the Community of Jesus, but he’s still a Christian. Except now he’s a “radical” Christian, hanging out in r/RadicalChristianity. He likes his new friends, but sometimes they make him uncomfortable by constantly “putting down” Christians to their right. Aren’t they just being like the Pharisee in Jesus’ parable, he asks? The one who thanked God he wasn’t like the tax collector? “Being the change we want to see in the world means turning inwards to identify the evil we abhor that nonetheless exists in each and every one of our own hearts, like the tax collector.”

“The world is in need of God’s Word,” he exhorts in another earnest plea for Christian unity, “and His Body lies in broken pieces.”

In spring and summer, I find little vestiges of the plague year. In April, a post sharing some sacred music recorded by people at “the church I used to go to,” so everyone can listen at home. In May, a picture of his dad “suited up” to hug him goodbye as he leaves for BMT. He explains that his parents live with at-risk elderly people and don’t want to take any chances.

Meanwhile, in the main “Christianity” forum, he regularly pops up with encouragement for people who sound lost, lonely, or confused. “Jesus Christ sacrificed himself on the Cross for YOU,” he tells someone suicidal who’s posted a cry for help. “You have the unbreakable love and power of Almighty God behind you. Nothing and no one can cut you off from that. You are LOVED and you will be BLESSED.” Responding to a single pregnant mom who asks how she can expect anything from God again, he writes, “My dad calls thoughts like that ‘lies from Satan,’ trying to make you believe that you could ever be cut off from God’s love. Regardless of what is right or wrong in your situation, I believe that God’s love is infinite and NOTHING you can do could ever make Him abandon you.” He signs off with an Old Testament farewell blessing he likes to use, familiar to many Christians: “May the Lord bless you and keep you; may he make his face shine upon you and give you peace.”

Another comment finds him responding to a long, disjointed post by a young father struggling with his faith: “That’s a lot to carry, man. Don’t be afraid to ask for help. We are not meant to handle this life alone and I hope you have a good community you can rely on. I’m just a young single guy, not an expert on life or anything but it sounds like counseling might be a good option as well.” But he knows this much: “Jesus came for the lost and the broken. He is the Good Shepherd who will venture as far as he needs to find the one sheep that needs to be saved. May the Lord bless you and keep you, and make his face shine upon you and give you peace.”

January 2021: Aaron has decided to leave the “radical Christianity” sub. All the memes about “stupid evangelical Christians” were just getting to be too much. But he’s still active in the main Christianity sub. Under one poster’s “epic Christian songs” recommendations, he shares some of his favorite mellow worship music, including artists I recognize.

But tension has crept in over election season. In November, he was rolling his eyes over his parents voting for Trump. Now he’s worried about Christian Nationalism, which “is anathema to everything my Lord and Savior teaches.” Yet he’s at pains to clarify that “I also love my country (USA) and do my best to serve it and help it be successful and there’s nothing wrong with that.”

In June, I find yet another encouraging word for yet another lonely person. He responds to a post titled “I was a prostitute for 4 years. I could use a friend.” I resurrect that OP and others to piece together this woman’s sad little story. She says she was kicked out of her house at age 14 and sold herself for years. She still wakes up with nightmares. But she’s finally seeking help for her mental illness now, which he encourages her to keep doing. “If you seek Christian fellowship, make sure it is a church with people that respect you and won’t shame you for what you’ve been through. You are worthy of love.” Then his usual sign-off, only now it’s slightly different: “May God bless you and keep you, and make her face shine upon you and give you peace.”

December 2021: Someone is asking if anybody can explain the Christian gospel in a way he can understand. Aaron says he’ll give it his best shot, “from the perspective of my former Christian self.”

Why did Jesus have to die? It’s all about sacrifice, he explains at some length. The whole ancient Judaic religion is based on it, and then along comes Jesus, “the ultimate sacrificial lamb. The sacrifice to end all sacrifices.” Which redeems all humanity, basically.

So then what’s the point of the Resurrection? “Well I mean, it’s basically the ultimate flex on Satan and death itself.” It might have looked like Jesus lost when he got crucified, “but Christians read into that a whole 3-dimensional chess match going on on a spiritual level.”

Anyway, he realizes this whole explanation is “very oversimplified,” but he hopes it helped, even if he technically doesn’t believe any of it anymore.

April 2022: He’s arguing with someone about the “reappropriation” of Jesus, “a revolutionary middle eastern man,” by “white powers.” “Jesus has been ‘white washed’ for centuries and it’s truly harmful.”

June 2022: Somebody is asking if Jesus was a commie. “I know this is gonna sound really post-modernist and whatever,” Aaron says, “but Jesus is whatever you want him to be.” Personally, he wouldn’t say Jesus was a communist in the classic sense, in that he didn’t “organize or advocate resistance,” although he was definitely “class-conscious.” “Mostly he just didn’t care about the upper class. He had a message for the masses about how to be human and love God and your neighbor. Everything else was extraneous to him.”

My search tool finds nothing for 2023. Then in February 2024, there’s the comment I already found, the one telling Jesus to “fuck off with his demagoguery.” It is the last result in the search.

*

What killed Aaron Bushnell? Was it insanity? Was it buried trauma? Was it the Reddit echo chamber? Was it our society’s political dysfunction?

Arguing for the latter, journalist Kate Aronoff makes an extended, admiring comparison to 60-year-old climate activist David Buckel, who left behind a long suicide letter before immolating himself in Brooklyn. Buckel writes that he has lived “a life of privilege,” and by ending it, he believes he can give life to others. He goes on:

A life of privilege requires actions to balance the harm caused, and the greater the privilege, the greater the responsibility.  For if one does not leave behind a world better for having lived in it, all that remains are selfish ends, sometimes wrapped in family or nation.  When in history selfish ends are wrapped in nation, the noble young among us often serve as soldiers and return home knowing they were used wrongly, honor squandered, asking “what was it all for?”  Seldom are we more despicable than when we misuse honor.  Not so when the noble are needed for an honest defense against human aggression.  But more vast than human aggression is human selfishness, and against it a larger army of the noble must stand.

Aaron Bushnell’s will remains mostly unpublished, but his friends have shared a couple of short excerpts. “I am sorry to my brother and my friends for leaving you like this,” he writes. “Of course, if I was truly sorry, I wouldn’t be doing it. But the machine demands blood. None of this is fair.” He says he doesn’t want to be buried, because his body “doesn’t belong anywhere in this world.” But “if a time comes when Palestinians regain control of their land, and if the people native to the land would be open to the possibility, I would love for my ashes to be scattered in a free Palestine.”

Aaron Bushnell was a man without a country. He was a man without a purpose. Fundamentally, and fatally, he was a man without a religion.

And yet, for all that he hated the creeds he had left behind, Aaron Bushnell needed a creed. And more, he needed to feel that he was part of that “larger army of the noble.” He needed something to die for.

Fifteen-year-old Aaron Bushnell would have died for Jesus. But by the time he was 25, Jesus was gone. And so, in the absence of Jesus, 25-year-old Aaron Bushnell died for leftism.

By way of counter-example, some might point to the 1965 self-immolation of Roger LaPorte, a 22-year-old Catholic Worker. Unlike Bushnell, LaPorte was a devout Christian at the time of his death, telling first responders he had attempted to kill himself as “a religious act.” What do I make of this?

I would reply that LaPorte’s self-immolation was a religious act, but not in the sense he thought it was. A religion did demand his blood, as it demanded Aaron Bushnell’s, but it was not the Christian religion. The week before his death, LaPorte sat in the audience while radical cleric A. J. Muste stood on a stage waxing eloquent about the similar suicides of Alice Herz and Norman Morrison, about their courage and nobility. But it was not the Holy Spirit that Muste was channeling that day. It was another spirit entirely.

It was this other, dark spirit that Thomas Merton said he could sense, writing angrily to withdraw his support from the Catholic Workers. He would soften his tone later, on receiving assurances from the leadership that they would have stopped LaPorte if they could and were working to stop copycats in his wake. Still, there is a dark streak in Dorothy Day’s reflection on the tragedy. On one hand, she duly acknowledges the Catholic teaching against suicide. On the other hand, she can’t resist a touch of the romantic. She can’t resist a touch of heresy.

Would that Day had written instead as A. M. Juster wrote in his sonnet “No.” Would that our chattering classes had the moral courage to speak that word now. I close with the full poem. Let it be an epitaph. Let it be a judgment.

No, not this time.  I cannot celebrate
a man’s discarded life, and will not try;
these knee-jerk elegies perpetuate
the nightshade lies of Plath.  Why glorify
descent into a solipsistic hell?
Stop.  Softly curse the waste.  Don’t elevate
his suffering to genius.  Never tell
me he will live on.  Never call it fate.

Attend the service.  Mourn.  Pray.  Comfort those
he lacerated.  Keep him in your heart,
but use that grief to teach.  When you compose
a line, it is a message, not just art.
Be furious with me, but I refuse
to praise him.  No, we have too much to lose.