Last Wednesday, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., former Army officer and a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, sent a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin asking why and how the Pentagon could tolerate an airman like Bushnell in its ranks. Calling his death “an act of horrific violence” that was “in support of a terrorist group [Hamas],” Cotton goes on to ask about the Defense Department’s internal efforts to address extremism and whether Bushnell was ever identified as exhibiting extremist views or behaviors.
Though Bushnell’s suicide was intended to demonstrate his anguish over the plight of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, he also embraced anarchism, or at least a present-day articulation of anarchism that is a general rejection of established authority. Bushnell’s posts on Reddit and other social media platforms before his death reflected this embrace of anarchism, and he chose the anarchist symbol as his profile picture for the Twitch account he used to livestream his self-immolation. His Facebook page also followed and liked pages for several anarchist groups. The anarchist collective CrimethInc. also said in a blog post that Bushnell had emailed the group shortly before his death.
The AGAAVE threat, the FBI says, “includes anarchist violent extremists, militia violent extremists, sovereign citizen violent extremists, and other violent extremists.” FBI data reveals that 31 percent of its investigations relate to AGAAVEs and 60 percent of all investigations include cases categorized as AGAAVE and “civil unrest.” Most of that focus since January 6 has been on groups that participated in the protests at the Capitol and supporters of Donald Trump.
Behind the scenes though, according to congressional testimony reported here for the first time, the FBI maintains a program specifically for combatting anarchists, called the Anarchist Extremism Program. In Senate testimony, the FBI says that it had increased its targeting of anarchist “violent extremists” across the country by using both human and technical sources to spy on them. Since the nationwide protests after the death of George Floyd in 2020, the bureau has tasked field offices to tap confidential informants to develop better intelligence about anarchists. In 2021, the FBI more than doubled its domestic terrorism caseload; and Wray told Congress that arrests of what the bureau calls “anarchist violent extremists” were more numerous in 2020-2021 (the months around January 6) than in the three previous years combined.
An internal FBI threat advisory obtained by The Intercept defines Anarchist Violent Extremists as individuals “who consider capitalism and centralized government to be unnecessary and oppressive,” and “oppose economic globalization; political, economic, and social hierarchies based on class, religion, race, gender, or private ownership of capital; and external forms of authority represented by centralized government, the military, and law enforcement.”
At a press briefing last Thursday that discussed Bushnell’s ties to anarchism, the Pentagon appeared to hint that his death might be considered an act of extremism.