
Self-immolating serviceman Aaron Bushnell is an alarm for the online radicalization of American kids
NY Post
In February, Air Force serviceman Aaron Bushnell self-immolated in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC.
A recent profile of the 25-year-old, who died hours after setting fire to himself while screaming “Free Palestine,” reveals a disturbed backstory replete with radicalism and activism. It’s a cautionary tale about where falling prey to ideological narratives can lead.
And the subsequent celebration of him as a martyr reveals the derangement of his fellow pro-Palestine extremists.
Simon van Zuylen-Wood, writing for New York Magazine, traced Bushnell’s history in chilling detail.
Raised on a Christian commune in Cape Cod, where individual egos were meant to be broken down and children separated from their families, Bushnell was steeped in extremism and radical selflessness from an early age.
But his political trajectory, propelled by social media and internet rabbit holes, is one that young men can fall into online.

Imagine if Allied intelligence had located Adolf Hitler in late May 1944 and killed him before the Normandy invasion. Imagine that in the same hour, strikes eliminated Hitler’s designated successor, the head of the German Armed Forces High Command, the chief operational planner of the war effort, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, responsible for defending Western Europe, and the rest of Germany’s field marshals and senior commanders.












