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.
Get first access to my works in progress each month. Join my elite neopatrons now to read the first draft of The Burned Book as it’s written.
Join on Patreon or SubscribeStar now.
One of the themes with my recent posts is about adjusting to the fact we’re not in the 2010s anymore. Internet atheism died out ages ago as anything other than a boomer-esque “leftist meme” reposting industry rehashing the same arguments to the same people who refuse to process any new information.
What you’re seeing with cases like this and the Nashville shooting is the full flowering of a society taught to hate itself and its neighbors, and reaching the obvious conclusion (that was always there, just snarked about with rolled eyes by people who are now true believers) about how the path to Utopia is achievable if the right enemies are sacrificed. That includes yourself. But don’t expect to get any glory for dying–you deserve death and your body exists for little reason except to give your high priests the blood they need.
What’s happening now is that this is getting near the end of the road, as far as discourse and civility goes. This either gets dealt with and fixed, or cases like the above become the “New Normal” until Utopia is forcefully achieved.
Online evangelism have always been really behind the curve (As an example, I had to look into nu atheism myself to see it was a pile of garbage, the Christian refutations felt like they were written in another language), and even now they’re still talking about folks like Dawkins, as if anyone takes him seriously at all anymore. Not even atheists of the non-fedora variety themselves do. The issue they should be tackling is the high priest death cult pagan/gnostic insanity currently ripping people apart. It’s not one political issue or disagreement–it’s an entire belief system.
Christians need to be up to date and at the front of this. We can’t afford to keep being late to the party, or repeating old slogans to virtue signal to our cohort. It’s going to be tough, but we were never promised it would be anything else.
Yes, we’ve turned a corner as a society. The repercussions promise to be as substantial and long-lasting as those of the Sicilian Expedition, the assassination of Julius Caesar, the Magna Carta, the Protestant Revolt, the Treaty of Westphalia, the storming of the Bastille, the Battle of Fort Sumter, the sinking of the Lusitania, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The difference in this highly atomized and decentralized age is that pinning down one big inflection point will be difficult. Instead we’re getting an escalation cascade that comes in fits and starts.
The hardest part about reading this is it gives the impression of his death being that of the good person turned useful idiot for some mustache twirling villain sitting in his chair laughing that another martyr was made for the cause.
God have mercy on his soul.
Let’s all say a prayer for him.
I think the hardest part of combating the Death Cult (or whatever you choose to call it) is coming to grips with it in the first place, recognizing what you’re dealing with. Atheists say they’re atheists and you can argue with their propositions directly. (I just posted a video doing exactly that.) But the proponents of this new moral system are commonly unaware they’re anything of the kind. They just think they’re good people. They don’t have the awareness to question their moral framework.
This includes many whom, in charity, I must assume are sincere Christians who have accepted the egalitarian beliefs of the Death Cult. Antiracism is deadly. And preaching that “racism” is a sin is putting words in God’s mouth in violation of the second commandment. But many Christians today accept that.
And like the Death Cult, many will say I’m a bad person, even not a Christian at all, for disagreeing with them. Maintaining charity in a case like that is difficult.
That’s when the Witch Test comes in handy.
“Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after justice. It’s in the Beatitudes.”
“But what about the other seven?”
“What *about* them? Anyway, Jesus was a Palestinian martyr lol.”
” They just think they’re good people. They don’t have the awareness to question their moral framework.”
Witness how often they define their positions as “basic human decency.”
Also their unwillingness/incapacity to offer basic definitions.
“Okay, what do you mean by ‘racist’?”
“I don’t have to explain that to you.”
This is the first I’ve heard of Death Cult. It’s interesting and I need a more simplified explanation please. All I can say, in order to set one self on fire, demons are involved. We desperately need the gift of discerning of spirits and more exorcists and deliverance ministers in the Church.
In the words of sci fi grandmaster John C. Wright, “They want to die, but they want you to go first.”