The ‘Airman’ Who Set Himself on Fire for Hamas was Former Antifa Cult Member

A former leftist cult member who hooked up with anarchist and socialist groups and then killed himself for their approval.

If you had told the average person that an anarchist or an airman had set himself on fire to protest Israel’s campaign against Islamic terrorists, you would get two very different reactions.

Unsurprisingly the media led with the data point most likely to produce a favorable reaction. And Aaron Bushnell cynically played the same game, wearing (the wrong) uniform to his Hamas suicide attempt rather than the Antifa red in which he had been previously photographed.

The Washington Post gets around to admitting that Bushnell was an “anarchist.”

Less than two weeks before Aaron Bushnell walked toward the gates of the Israeli Embassy on Sunday, he and a friend talked by phone about their shared identities as anarchists and what kinds of risks and sacrifices were needed to be effective…

Lupe Barboza, 32, said she met Bushnell in San Antonio in 2022 at an event for a socialist organization. She said they bonded over their politics …

“He was outraged, and he knew that no one who is in charge is listening to the protesters out there every week,” Barboza said. “He knows that he has privilege as a White man and a member of the military.”

But the Washington Post then misleadingly suggests he was raised in a Christian cult.

Bushnell was raised in a religious compound in Orleans, Mass., on Cape Cod, according to Susan Wilkins, 59, who said she was a member of the group from 1970 to 2005. She said that she knew Bushnell and his family on the compound and that he was still a member when she left in 2005. Wilkins said she heard through members of Bushnell’s family that he eventually left the group.

The group, called the Community of Jesus, has faced allegations of inappropriate behavior, which it has publicly disputed. In a lawsuit against an Ontario school, where many officials were alleged to be members of the U.S.-based religious group, former students called the Community of Jesus a “charismatic sect” and alleged that it “created an environment of control, intimidation and humiliation that fostered and inflicted enduring harms on its students.” The school, now defunct, disputed the allegations…

Wilkins also said it is common for members of the Community of Jesus to join the military, describing the transition as moving from “one high-control group to another high-control group.”

All of this prompts WaPo readers to think that the Community of Jesus is some conservative group. The reality is COJ was a leftist cult that appealed to high-flying liberals.

They were two overweight boozing housewives who hid their drinking, their harridan brawling and their lesbian affair from all but a few obeisant servants. They lived like royalty with a private plane at their command, a Jaguar, a Bermuda estate and a flat in England…

And having founded an ultra-authoritarian Christian community that attracted the wealthy, the successful and often the mind-bruised to their compound on Massachusetts’s Cape Cod peninsula…

As word of the community’s formation spread through New England and across the United States, a handful of single women became the first to join, followed by young academics and professionals, people from business and government, and the socialite elite, refugees from the drug culture and hippiedom, many carrying the wounds of troubled and unhappy childhoods and looking for certainty in life, for rules, structure and something to belong to…

A 1985 article in Boston magazine characterized the C of J members as a “roll call €¦ from the Social Register and Who’s Who” — executives or children of executives of major corporations, an ex-chairman of the global accounting firm that is now Ernst & Young and former president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, an ex-assistant defence secretary, a former senior editor from Doubleday, family scions of Texas oil and agriculture money, the daughter of a former president of the New York Stock Exchange, a Rockefeller heiress (Isabel Lincoln Elmer, self-styled Cinderella Rockefeller), celebrity Christians such as Jeff and Carrie Buddington, former hippie drug dealers featured in Life magazine…

COJ’s leading ladies appropriated Christianity to found an otherwise generic cult. They were not religious per se until they started to run a faith-healing operation. If you doubt their politics, look at the laudatory New York Times orbit and the fact that most of the critical stories about COJ have come from conservative media outlets like The Boston Herald and Canada’s Globe and Mail.

Who’s the sort of person who would commit suicide in a graphic public way for his politics? Aaron Bushnell was a former leftist cult member who hooked up with anarchist and socialist groups in search of an identity and then killed himself for their approval.

He graduated from a cult to a death cult.