Last week we pondered the riddle of the Pop Cult.
Today, we have occasion to observe the ethic of the Death Cult, courtesy of the late Aaron Bushnell.
Aaron Bushnell — the Air Force engineer who died hours after lighting himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in DC on Sunday — was a 25-year-old IT engineer-in-training who hailed from a tiny Massachusetts town.
Bushnell live-streamed his gruesome final moments — chilling footage that included him calmly walking to his final destination outside the embassy’s gates before dousing himself in a flammable liquid and lighting it, sending him up in flames.
The steely-eyed serviceman, dressed in his camouflage uniform, said in the video, “I will no longer be complicit in genocide [in Gaza].
“I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest,” he added before repeatedly screaming, “Free Palestine!’’ as fire engulfed him and he eventually collapsed.
Speculation as to Bushnell’s political leanings has been rampant online, but a few key pieces of evidence have emerged.
Aaron liked two Ohio-based anarchist groups — Burning River Anarchist Collective and Mutual Aid Street Solidarity — on his Facebook page.
He also gave the thumb’s up to an account belonging to the Kent State University chapter of the radical pro-Hamas group Students for Justice in Palestine.
The framing of Bushnell’s final message also gives us some hints.
“Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now,” he wrote.
It’s not my place to speak ill of the dead, much less judge them.
None of us can know what was in Bushnell’s head and heart when he made his fateful, irrevocable choice.
What we can see from his comments and behavior is that the mental categories he used align with the radical egalitarian creed and foundational mythos of the Death Cult.
Again, I’m not saying Bushnell was a death cultist. It sounds like he had a decent Christian upbringing.
That doesn’t mean we can’t evaluate his words and actions in light of the Death Cult’s inverted ethics, though.
The main example being his final act, which is a pretty unequivocal inversion of Christian martyrdom.
Which is why it’s a religious, not an ideological, lens that needed to view this sad event in the proper context.
All of the normieCons on Facebook gloating “He was a Lefty, but the Lefties are still hating on him anyway!” have missed the point.
Members of the Death Cult aren’t swayed by their own side’s abuse or hypocrisy.
A Death Cultist presented with the former just stuffs the contradiction down the memory hole. Confronted with the latter, he bows to the consensus and self-flagellates while vowing to do better going forward.
Yet again – I am not asserting that Aaron Bushnell was a member of the Death Cult.
Millions of other young adults out there are, though. And the self-hating, Christianity-desecrating ethic of the Death Cult has no prohibitions against desperate acts like this.
Bushnell remarked that “This is what our ruling class has decided, will be normal.’’
Ushering in a “new normal” is the Death Cult’s inversion of Christian evangelization, and once more, I’m not saying that’s how Bushnell meant it.
One doesn’t need to be conscious of propaganda permeating the culture that’s absorbed by osmosis.
Thinking that the Death Cult has a central command that hands down marching orders to the rank and file is another Conservative error.
The Cult leaders don’t need a linear chain of command. They’ve had full control over academia and the media for almost a century. They just broadcast the latest firmware update and let the conditioning do the rest.
That’s the most insidious aspect of the Death Cult. Only 20 percent of Americans are willing members. But almost all of the remaining 80 percent adopt Death Cult ethics, mental categories, and attitudes to some degree.
All without thinking about – or even being aware of – what they’re doing.
Christian author Michael Sebastian had a good point on X yesterday.
He pointed out that a lot of Christians’ online apologetics efforts are targeted at the wrong groups.
And he’s got a point. Internet atheism is over. Online pagans are an insignificant fringe of oddballs and LARPers. Neither have any real power or resources.
It has to be admitted that a major reason why the Death Cult has been running roughshod over the West is that Christians have allowed it to.
- Too many popular influencers are stuck in epistemic closure mind prisons
- With all filial respect, a lot of hierarchs approach “dialogue with Modernity” like it’s still 1974
- And lay randos like me waste time dunking on self-sabotaging nuAtheists
The house is on fire. We should have all hands on deck pumping water on the blaze; not arguing with ingrate houseguests who insist we should pour gasoline on it.
Because when all is said and done, the Death Cult is a Christian heresy. And only the Church has ever defeated such heresies.
If we got our act together and got Nestorian or Arian-level serious about combating the Death Cult’s errors, we’d have this sewn up overnight, in historical terms.
For now, get ready for the situation to get weirder than you ever thought possible.
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