Last weekend’s bombing of an in vitro fertilization clinic in Palm Springs, California, was not merely shocking for its violence. The arguably more disturbing aspect of this tragic event is the bleak anti-life worldview underlying the attacker’s motives. Twenty-five-year-old Guy Edward Bartkus detonated a car bomb outside the facility, killing himself and injuring four others, in an incident the FBI has designated a terrorist attack.
In a short manifesto and a rambling, half-hour audio recording posted online—both of which are believed to be authored by Bartkus—he struggles to articulate a deeply unsettling worldview rooted in nihilist despair. “Basically, it just comes down to, I’m angry that I exist,” he says at one point. “Nobody got my consent to bring me here.”
This sentiment, in which people express grim grievances for the lack of consent for their own birth, is the central premise of antinatalism, a philosophical position that argues procreation is morally wrong because life inevitably entails suffering. Efilism (life spelled backward), a more fringe offshoot of antinatalism, goes further by viewing all life as inherently harmful. In his manifesto, Bartkus describes himself as a “promortalist,” that is to say someone who believes that death is always better than life.
“All a promortalist is saying is let’s make it happen sooner rather than later (and preferably peaceful rather than some disease or accident), to prevent your future suffering, and, more importantly, the suffering your existence will cause to all the other sentient beings,” the manifesto reads. “The end goal is for the truth (Efilism) to win, and once it does, we can finally begin the process of sterilizing this planet of the disease of life.”
Bartkus, who discloses on his website that he was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, had long struggled with suicidal thoughts and the belief that he wouldn’t live beyond his twenties. But to dismiss Bartkus as a mere madman is to miss the larger, more unsettling picture. His actions, while horrific, reflect broader crises with which we haven’t fully reckoned. In a country where birth is politicized, life is unaffordable, and death is ambient, it’s not hard to understand how anti-life philosophies might take root and flourish.
In the manifesto, Bartkus traces the tipping point that pushed him “over the edge”: the suicide of his best friend, Sophie. “Recently my best friend Sophie killed herself (she got the guy she was living with to shoot her while she was sleeping, her preferred method), and I don’t think I really knew how much it was going to affect me,” he says. “I’ve never related to someone so much, and can’t imagine I ever would again.… We got along quite well and it was very nice, especially when you feel like you are in an apocalypse and nobody else seems to get anything.”
This wasn’t just an act of terror or mental illness. It was an extreme, mutated expression of a feeling many young people carry, and a sharp distillation of the anti-life undercurrents running through American culture. Climate change, debt, social isolation, and political disillusionment combine to form the background hum of everyday life. In this doomer environment, even the most grotesque ideologies can present themselves as the logical conclusions to a rigged existence.
According to a recent study, 60 percent of Americans currently can’t afford even a “minimal quality of life.” For an economist, these measures of economic precarity are just statistics. For many others, they are fertile soil for despair. Despite outspending peers on health care, the United States has the highest suicide rates among wealthy nations. A 2024 study found that one in five high school students had seriously considered suicide that year.
Against a backdrop of ongoing genocide and impending ecological breakdown, the idea that life itself is unlivable can begin to feel not just plausible, but logical. In this context, Bartkus’s ideology doesn’t arrive out of nowhere. It festers in the contradiction at the heart of American life.
On the right, we have seen a surge in pronatalist rhetoric—which, alongside the collapse of reproductive freedom in the U.S., suggests a future of forced birth by state decree—coupled with policies and beliefs that undermine the material conditions necessary to sustain life. In the post-Roe landscape, birth is increasingly mandated—evident in cases like the brain-dead woman kept alive under Georgia’s abortion ban—yet life after birth is systematically devalued. The Trump administration has floated the idea of $5,000 “baby bonuses” to incentivize Americans to have more children without addressing (or while actively exacerbating) crises in education, health care, and cost of living. It is within these contradictions that Bartkus’s warped philosophy takes root.
The fragmented, bleak worldview expressed by Bartkus reflects a growing sense of despair that’s particularly acute among young men, who are splitting away from young women along social, political, and religious lines, with many increasingly finding solace in toxic online subcultures promoting reactionary or violent belief systems. Men account for 80 percent of suicides in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In the manifesto, Bartkus briefly references Adam Lanza, the 20-year-old Sandy Hook shooter who killed his mother, six teachers, and 20 first graders before turning the gun on himself. Lanza too espoused a bleak, antinatalist worldview. On his YouTube channel, CulturalPhilistine, he described suicide as a way people have “freed themselves” from the burden of living.
“I’ve always had an immense hatred for culture,” he said. “I consider culture to be delusional values which humans mindlessly coerce onto each other, spreading it no differently than any other disease.” Lanza also expressed disgust at the idea of childbirth—“I think that you should say, ‘I’m so sorry for your loss’ whenever you hear that someone is pregnant”—and frequently returned to themes of childhood, control, and violence, including a fixation on pedophilia. His online footprint offers a disturbing case study in how alienation, untreated mental illness, and a toxic cultural and digital environment can fuse into something explosive.
Bartkus’s invocation of Lanza underscores a disturbing lineage of thought among disaffected young men who view existence as inherently cruel. Lanza’s beliefs have appeared in certain corners of internet subculture—Reddit threads, YouTube essays, Discord servers—where irony, rage, and fatalism coalesce into something that resembles belief. In the wake of Bartkus’s attack, Reddit banned the r/Efilism subreddit for violating its policies regarding self-harm, though other antinatalist threads remain on the platform. These aren’t organized movements. They’re more like moodscapes: ambient environments of digital despair that encourage withdrawal, contempt, and in some cases, violence toward self and others.
Bartkus appears to have seen Lanza as a figure who articulated what he himself struggled to express. Their shared sense of existential betrayal—of being brought into a world without consent and then left to suffer within it—gave their violence a warped logic. It’s not a cry for help so much as a declaration of war against life itself.
This attack needs to force a larger reckoning with the way our political leaders have been poor stewards of our present and have undermined our collective future. For America to effectively grapple with the toxic systems of belief that Bartkus, Lanza, and a simmering mass of others have come to embrace, it must confront the systemic failures that feed them. It must acknowledge the material and psychic conditions that make the idea of erasing life seem like a form of justice. That means rejecting the impulse to label attackers “lone wolves” and recognizing that these men are actually the pure products of a culture that celebrates birth but offers no real plan for life.
Bartkus believed life was a disease. He didn’t come to that belief on his own.
