Was ‘efilism’ the extreme ideology behind the Palm Springs fertility clinic bombing?

On a quiet Saturday morning in southern California, a bomb detonated outside the American Reproductive Centers fertility clinic. One person is dead. Four others are injured.

The alleged perpetrator, 25-year-old Guy Edward Bartkus, left behind a manifesto drenched in nihilistic rage. Humanity, he wrote within it, should not exist at all. Bartkus has been named by the FBI as their prime suspect in the bombing and is believed to have died in the explosion.

Bartkus has been described as a “pro-mortalist,” with possible links to a belief system known as “efilism” — a radical offshoot of antinatalism that asserts not just that humans should stop reproducing, but that all sentient life should be extinguished to prevent suffering. Efilism, so called because “efil” is the word “life” spelled backward, pushes beyond conventional antinatalism.

Traditional antinatalists argue that procreation is unethical due to the inevitability of suffering, efilists see eradication of life itself as a moral imperative. Online, these ideas thrive in grim corners of Reddit and YouTube, spaces often cloaked in philosophical debate but increasingly interwoven with hate speech, death threats and calls for sterilization of the human race. Even the language used to discuss children in such places — which has gone from referring to children as “crotch goblins” to using the term “cum pets” instead — has moved over the past few years toward the more angry and extreme.

The now-defunct r/efilism subreddit, shut down by Reddit administrators just hours after the Palm Springs bombing, had over 12,000 members. While that number is small compared to broader childfree or antinatalist spaces (r/childfree has over 1.5 million members; r/antinatalism over 230,000), the echo chamber effect in these niche communities is potent.

The man who appears to have coined the term “efilism,” niche YouTuber Gary Inmendham, has spent the past 20 years ranting online about how animal cruelty is justified and human life is supposedly so precious that it should be ended because suffering is inevitable. Inmendham has 14,400 followers on YouTube and his latest video, uploaded six months ago, is a bizarre mishmash of thoughts about how smart people should know they shouldn’t go on rollercoasters, why liberals have supposedly lost their way and why the world of work proves life isn’t worth living.

Inmendham was mentioned by name in Bartkas’s online manifesto. He also linked to a number of YouTube channels that encouraged suicide and murder on the supposed basis that all life is suffering.

By Sunday, a replacement subreddit for r/Efilism — r/Efilism2 — had appeared, with a clarification that its philosophy did not encourage violence against others. That message didn’t seem to have gotten through to a lot of people, since only a few hours later a post was made titled “An introduction to extinctionism — In favor of abolishing suffering” that led to another newly created subreddit, r/AbolishSuffering, whose community information stated: “All life suffering matters and must be made extinct most thoroughly and quickly as possible.”

Those who frequented childfree or antinatalist spaces when they were not extreme have been calling attention to the danger for a while. Eight months ago, in an offshoot subreddit made for antinatalists who do not hate people with children, someone shared a screenshot where other antinatalists were discussing how parents should be sent to concentration camps or murdered.

If the manifesto currently circulating online is to be believed, Bartkus was an isolated and disturbed individual. In the aftermath of the Palm Springs bombing, his father said he had had no contact with his son in over 10 years, and claimed that Bartkus had burned down the family home when he was nine years old. Such online spaces cater to the lonely, convincing them that their isolation is a moral and political choice — and then convincing them that, because they exist on the fringes of society, they alone can see the “truth.”

An ideological collision course

Antinatalist sentiment is far from fringe. In 2019, The New York Times’ Style magazine asked: “Given the state of the world, is it irresponsible to have kids?” In 2019, actor Sarah Silverman delivered a TED Talk in which she said that the only ethical choice in parenting was to adopt because “population in the world doubles every 40 years” and “I understand people want to have a baby, they want to have a little version of themselves that they can do it right this time or whatever… When my friends are pregnant, I’m so excited but it’s hard to think that it’s not total vanity to give birth when there are so many children out there to adopt.”

In 2024, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control announced that the birth rate had hit a “historic low,” while recent studies have shown that as high as a quarter of millennials and Gen Z aren’t planning to have children. The most frequently cited reasons are environmental reasons due to population overgrowth and lack of finances.

On TikTok and Instagram, antinatalist content often comes packaged in memes, jokes (“My favorite body mod is my vasectomy!”) or sardonic adolescent commentary (“I exist without consent!” is now the battle cry of those who 20 years ago would have declared, “I didn’t ask to be born!” before slamming their bedroom door in their parents’ faces.) The sentiment may be exaggerated for clicks, but it also normalizes the idea that life is a burden best avoided.

This is happening against the backdrop of a growing pronatalist movement, one that actively encourages childbearing, family formation and the continuation of human life. The pronatalist subreddit, r/pronatalism, is a relatively modest community with around 14,000 members, but it’s part of a wider ideological push from figures in Silicon Valley, academia, and conservative politics. Indeed, pronatalism even has multiple connections to the White House: Miles B. Collins, who works for the Elon Musk-headed Department of Government Efficiency agency, was the recent owner of a number of fertility clinics along with his wife, Brittany.

Collins is the brother of Malcolm Collins, who along with his wife Simone are the main public faces of pronatalism in the U.S. Simone drafted the executive order for the White House that called for a “medal of motherhood” for women who had birthed over six children. In the aftermath of the Palm Springs bombing, Simone told me that she regularly receives death threats from antinatalists when she appears in the media and because of that, “we increasingly worry about our safety and that of our children.”

“We may expect to see more antinatalist acts of terror going forward, as well as conflict between those who believe in humanity (the pronatalists) and those who would see humanity eradicated (the antinatalists and eflists),” Simone wrote in an email.

Musk himself has talked openly about pronatalism and his aim to have as many children as possible on a number of occasions. Most memorably, he stated that “civilization is going to crumble” if people don’t have more children to “solve the underpopulation crisis.”

When it all comes back to wombs

Birth and the politics that surround it are highly politicized issues in the United States. Increasingly radical anti-abortion legislation has been passed in a number of states since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade and removed the federal right to terminate a pregnancy. American reproductive health clinics have been bombed many times in the past by anti-abortion terrorists. In an apparent reference to those attacks, Bartkus’s manifesto stated “I think we need a war against pro-lifers.”

The Palm Springs clinic has said that all IVF embryos are safe and the lab inside the clinic did not sustain damage in the bombing, which mainly damaged infrastructure. But it’s interesting to consider how the reaction might have played out if embryos had been damaged. In another state — such as Alabama, which last year gave “fetal personhood” rights to frozen embryos — someone who killed 100 stored embryos would not have been legally responsible for destruction of property but for mass murder.

For years, the antinatalist-pronatalist debate has played out in podcasts, Reddit threads, and obscure philosophical circles. Now, it seems it may have spilled into the real world, with deadly consequences. As the climate crisis worsens and economic inequality deepens, ideologies that frame reproduction as immoral or the human species as inherently parasitic are gaining ground. Rage-bait as internet currency — and trolling as a political choice among the far right — have exacerbated growing division.

Both the anti-abortion (“pro-life”) movement and the extreme ends of the antinatalist movement are also obsessive in their discussion of gender roles, misogyny and misandry. They share a common aim, which is to force their value system onto people who do not share it, by violence if necessary.

In the face of all this, the choice for many looks stark: to believe in the future, or to believe there should be no future at all. The fact that so many have chosen the latter — even as an online thought experiment — is an alarming trend that needs to reckoned with, urgently.