An explosion outside a fertility clinic in Palm Springs, California, killed one person and injured four others Saturday morning in what the FBI has called an act of terrorism. The suspect in the bombing, 25-year-old Guy Edward Bartkus, was the lone death from the blast, and it seems apparent he held anti-human views. Now Reddit has banned a subreddit tied to the suspect’s ideology.
Bartkus is believed to be the person who detonated a bomb at the Palm Springs American Reproductive Center, which offers services like IVF, because he was aligned with the pro-mortalist and anti-natalist movements—the idea that humans should not continue to procreate. Bartkus appears to have been posting to various subreddits, including r/Efilism, which advocated for violence. Reddit has now banned r/Efilism for violating its terms of service.
“Violence has no place on Reddit,” a spokesperson for the platform told Gizmodo over email. “Our sitewide rules strictly prohibit any content that encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence. In line with these rules, we are removing any instances of the suspect’s manifesto or recordings and hashing to prevent reupload. We’re also closely monitoring the communities on our platform to ensure compliance with our rules.”
Proponents of Efilism (the word “life” spelled backwards) are often known as anti-natalists, which is a more common name for the ideology, though Bartkus described himself as pro-mortalist in his 30-minute audio manifesto. Anti-natalism is a philosophy that advocates for people not to procreate, while pro-mortalists go beyond those anti-natalist ideas to advocate for death in all forms under the theory that because life is suffering it’s ethical to end your own life and even those around you in the process.
Bartkus posted an audio file to his website explaining why he was targeting the clinic, filled with logical inconsistencies and general incoherence. Bartkus said he wanted to begin “sterilizing this planet of the disease of life,” but mentioned the recent suicide of his best friend affecting him deeply. Bartkus wrote on his personal website, “It’s just too much of a loss when there’s nobody else you really relate to significantly.” He was clearly struggling with personal issues beyond whatever philosophy to which he was supposedly swearing allegiance. That website has now been taken offline.
There are other anti-natalist forums beyond r/Efilism on Reddit that haven’t been banned and some, like r/circlesnip—which includes a description reading, “The Vegan Antinatalist Circlejerk”—put out statements denouncing the attack on the IVF clinic.
“It has come to my attention that the individual responsible for today’s bombing in Palm Springs
namedropped our communities in their suicide note. Though they struggled with personal grief and
mental health issues, their act of terrorism was unjustifiable, incoherent, immoral, and disgusting,” the statement reads.
The moderator went on to say that their version of anti-natalism is “explicitly one of non-violence” and said that it should be up to each individual to “make their own reproductive decisions.”
“The philosophy we represent is explicitly one of non-violence,” the moderator continued. “We believe it is up to each individual to make their own reproductive decisions. We hope that the Palm Springs American Reproductive Center can rebuild and resume operations.”
Other anti-natalist subreddits run by the same moderator, r/Vystopia and r/antinatalism, posted the same statement condemning violence. The r/Efilism subreddit had about 12,000 members before it was banned, according to The Independent, which is certainly not large by Reddit standards. The biggest communities on Reddit have tens of millions of members.
The term Elifism was reportedly coined by a fringe YouTuber named Gary Inmendham, who Bartkus mentions by name in his audio manifesto. Inmendham posted a video after the bombing saying that Bartkus had done something “really stupid, dumb, pointless, and even show-offy,” referring to it as a “dumbass act of violence.” Inmendham said that he’s even “against protesters” so he’s “obviously against terrorists.”
Bartkus, who sounds deeply insecure about his philosophy in his audio manifesto, said that he was driven to commit the bombing because he couldn’t find people to connect with online to discuss things anymore because spaces like YouTube and X were being censored of anti-natalist content. Bartkus also insisted that while the internet is being “manipulated,” he was immune to the manipulation.
Bartkus also said in the recording that he was a vegan and seem fixated on the welfare of animals, referring in his audio recording to “animals raped on farms,” but then going on to say that nature itself was horrifying in a way that even surpassed the suffering caused by humans. All life was suffering that needed to end, in his book.
A YouTube account associated with Bartkus, which is now offline, reportedly contained explosions tests, according to ABC News. The size of the Palm Springs blast was considerable, stretching about 250 yards, with Akil Davis, assistant director at the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office, describing it to NPR as, “probably the largest bombing scene that we’ve had in Southern California.”
The FBI released a report last month about Nihilist Violent Extremists (NVE), though the definition is so loose that it can be applied pretty broadly to all kinds of ideologies. In this case, however, nihilism does seem to fit well as a descriptor for a philosophy grounded in destroying all of humanity for nebulous ends.
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