Latest news with #antinatalism
New York Times
25-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
A Fringe Movement
The attack on a Palm Springs, Calif., fertility clinic last week surfaced some unsettling ideas. Guy Edward Bartkus, the 25-year-old suspect, had posted an audio clip explaining why he wanted to blow up a place that makes babies. 'I would be considered a pro-mortalist,' he said before detonating his Ford Fusion, killing himself and injuring four others. 'Let's make the death thing happen sooner rather than later in life.' Investigators called it 'terrorism' and 'nihilistic ideation.' Trump administration officials called it 'anti-pro-life.' Bartkus was indeed espousing an extreme ideology. But it belongs to a larger intellectual movement, still fringe for now, that is slowly gaining adherents. My colleagues Jill Cowan, Aric Toler, Jesus Jiménez and I have spent the past week reporting on what experts call 'anti-natalism.' Hundreds of thousands follow accounts and podcasts about it. It holds that procreation is immoral because the inevitability of death and suffering outweighs the odds of happiness. Today's newsletter explains. The idea The calculus is ancient — to be or not to be? A South African philosopher's 2006 treatise, 'Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence,' popularized the idea in its modern form. 'You're stuck between having been born, which was a harm, but also not being able to end the harm by taking your own life, because that is another kind of harm,' the author, David Benatar, told us. This perspective draws partly on utilitarianism, a discipline of philosophy that asks how to achieve the most good for the greatest number. But even there, anti-natalism is seen as marginal. Besides Benatar, 'I don't know any other philosophers who share it,' said Peter Singer, an influential utilitarian. Online, however, anxieties including climate change and artificial intelligence have given it traction — as has the yearning for connection, even among people with antisocial tendencies. Scores of anti-natalist discussion boards, influencers and podcasts now debate whether all creatures should stop reproducing, or just humans. The concepts have bled into pop culture. Thanos, the supervillain in two films from Marvel's 'Avengers' franchise, wants to eradicate half of the universe's living beings because there are 'too many mouths to feed.' The number of Americans who don't want kids is rising, with many young people saying they don't want to hurt the environment. A few variants are even more extreme. An offshoot known as 'efilists' — that's 'life' spelled backward — argues that DNA should also be destroyed. Pro-mortalism, the position Bartkus staked out, is less well defined. But it suggests that birth should be followed as soon as possible by a quick, consensual death. Bartkus was a vegan from a small town in the California desert whose estranged father called him 'a follower, not a leader.' As a child, the father said, he loved rockets and once nearly burned the house down. As an adult, he set off explosions in the barren wilderness. Online, he had grown close to a woman who died last month in an apparent assisted suicide. Taking action That woman, Sophie Tinney, 27, was shot three times in the head on Easter Sunday near Seattle, according to court records. Officials have charged her roommate with second-degree murder. But Bartkus's manifesto says she was a suicidal anti-natalist — and may have persuaded the roommate, an Eagle Scout who liked to play Dungeons & Dragons, to shoot her in her sleep. (He has pleaded not guilty.) Bartkus said online that Tinney's death might have prompted the clinic bombing. 'I don't think I really knew how much it was going to affect me,' said a manifesto posted with the audio on a pro-mortalism website. Social media posts tied to him indicate that he had attempted suicide at least twice since she died. Then he videotaped a dry run for the bombing, mixing chemicals in the desert that could blow up his car. An F.A.Q. appended to his manifesto includes a list of pro-mortalist and efilist figures; at least two of them have killed themselves in recent years. This week, the moderator of an anti-natalism Reddit forum with nearly a quarter-million members called the bombing 'unjustifiable, incoherent, immoral and disgusting.' Benatar, the author, said that his philosophy explicitly abhors violence, the restriction of reproductive rights and, in almost all cases, suicide. But ideas have a way of twisting and transforming online. One such adaptation seems to have found a young man who loved pyrotechnics and hated life. War in Ukraine Democrats Trump Administration Five Years Since Floyd Other Big Stories Republicans want to add work requirements to Medicaid. Is that a good idea? No. Work requirements bury eligible people under paperwork to prove that they meet the new requirements. 'The most vulnerable will be made worse off, all to fund a tax cut that most benefits the rich,' Pamela Herd and Donald Moynihan write for The Times. Yes. Work requirements improved the economy in the Clinton years, when people left welfare and went back to work. 'More workers in the economy will mean more people paying into Social Security and Medicare, preserving those programs for years to come,' Stewart Whitson writes for U.S. News & World Report. Zombie apocalypses are appealing because there's no better distraction from whatever currently ails you than something worse, Rachel Feintzeig writes. Here are columns by Maureen Dowd on Trump's crypto gala and Lydia Polgreen on the Oval Office meeting with South Africa's president. Believing: After childbirth put a woman into a coma, she forgot her husband and her faith. Read how she recovered. 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Read this week's magazine. Try a soul-nourishing Filipino chicken soup. Workout in 20 minutes. Watch these comedy specials over the long weekend. Know your charcoal before you start grilling this summer. In this week's Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter, Emily Weinstein suggests making a recipe she will have on repeat this spring: Melissa Clark's miso-chile asparagus with tofu. She also recommends lemon-pepper chicken breasts, a Somali coconut fish curry, and salmon and couscous salad. Here is today's Spelling Bee. Yesterday's pangram was expunging. Can you put eight historical events — including the creation of the laser, Mickey Mouse and Godzilla — in chronological order? Take this week's Flashback quiz. And here are today's Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands. Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. P.S. The Interview is off this weekend. It will be back next weekend. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Yahoo
The Dark, Nihilistic Philosophy Behind the IVF Clinic Bombing
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.
Times
21-05-2025
- Health
- Times
Antinatalist philosopher: The Palm Springs bomber proves my point
A philosopher whose beliefs on procreation are thought to have inspired the suspected bomber of a fertility clinic in Palm Springs told The Times the attack only 'underscored his point' that suffering is inevitable. David Benatar, a South African academic and author of one of the so-called antinatalist movement's most influential books, claimed suffering like that caused by Saturday's blast was a natural consequence of humans being born into 'misery'. Authorities in California are working to learn more about Guy Edward Bartkus's motives for the bombing, but have said the 25-year-old left behind nihilistic writings that suggested he held antinatalist views. In a manifesto published on his now-deleted website, Bartkus said he was going to bomb an in-vitro fertilisation clinic because he was angry
The Guardian
21-05-2025
- The Guardian
‘A rabbit hole of paranoia': what an IVF clinic bombing tells us about young men and online extremism
Experts say an online ecosystem that allows lone actors to latch on to fringe viewpoints is bolstering violent extremism in the US, following an attack over the weekend on a fertility clinic in Palm Springs, California. Investigators are combing through the writings of a 25-year-old man killed in a large explosion outside the American Reproductive Centers, an IVF facility, that was heavily damaged in what they've described as an 'intentional act of terrorism'. The suspect in the bombing, Guy Edward Bartkus, left behind writings that appear to hold fringe theories of 'antinatalism' and nihilism, ideologies that oppose procreation and have a general sense of the meaninglessness of life. Officials are still looking into the beliefs behind the attack and if Bartkus can be linked to a website bolstering those viewpoints. But in the meantime, experts say the nihilistic worldview the suspect possibly adhered to is part of a growing trend of people finding smaller, niche ideologies rather than movements linked to jihadist violence that have drawn followers for decades. Brian Levin, the founding director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism and a professor emeritus at Cal State San Bernardino, described antinatalism as one of the more obscure theories he's tracked. The concept generally circles around the notion that reproduction is cruel and that more children should not be brought into a harsh world. A manifesto published online before the bombing included a hope to sterilize the planet 'of the disease of life', although it has not yet been linked to Bartkus. But rather than the motivations behind antinatalism specifically, Levin said online spaces now allow those with lone wolf mentalities to use 'what they find in the online space as kind of a hand in glove for their own idiosyncratic perspectives'. 'I think that there are a couple of things that are often left out, the role that psychological distress plays, as well as how the internet can aid and abet antisocial, aggressive or suicidal behaviors,' Levin said. 'When one's grievances, paranoia, despair are amplified and then twisted into an anger that is part of a continuum, this rabbit hole particularly for these unstable folks is very easy for people to go down.' The extremely online nature of modern life, Levin said, has only exacerbated the ability of lone actors to find motivation and validation, when in the past those ideas may have existed in their own silo, without an on-ramp to violence. '[Now] the anger and grievance can find a philosophical home in an online community, with a skill acquisition component, which can make people even more violent than they were before,' Levin said. 'When psychological self-destruction has its own community, online space, and identification of legitimate targets for this aggression, that's what you get.' Javed Ali, an associate professor at the University of Michigan and a former senior counterterrorism official for the US government, agreed. He said attacks like the one in Palm Springs are part of a growing pattern of lone wolf tactics, and that investigators are now faced with the difficult task of homing in on obscure individual motivations. Ali, who spent decades working for the FBI and Department of Homeland Security, among other agencies, said there is no single profile or dominant ideology investigators can look to in hopes of stopping violent attacks. That can be difficult for officials, who in the past were more accustomed to looking at links to trends in jihadist ideologies and now have to wrangle 'this whole diverse spectrum of extremist beliefs out there'. Often, that can mean a potential attacker isn't on law enforcement's radar – until they are. He pointed to an attempted car bombing in Times Square in 2010. The wannabe attacker, Faisal Shahzad, built a homemade explosive device, placed it inside his SUV and drove the bomb to New York City, where it failed to detonate. 'He put a car bomb together in his garage, completely not drawing the attention of anybody and drove 30 or 40 miles to New York,' Ali said, adding he was often shocked people like Shahzad were able to put together 'really sophisticated' devices by themselves. 'A lot of times those people are previously not subjects of FBI investigations, they move pretty seamlessly in this world from radicalization to mobilization and they're able to conceal or not reveal those steps that probably would get you on the radar screen,' he said. 'It's so hard to stop them,' Ali added. 'It's so hard to identify them in the first place because things are very fuzzy.' Levin went on to say while Americans are largely afforded great freedoms under the first amendment – with even sociopathic viewpoints largely protected – the state of the internet and social media had left a vacuum into which those in psychological distress can fall into. Safeguards like notifications on search browsers alerting people to help and support could be a vehicle to help counter that black hole. 'You're not going to be able to eliminate this,' he said. 'But what we can do is offer off-ramps and help that can hopefully be a choice for people who are otherwise careening without any speed bumps towards a violent or suicidal demise.'
Daily Mail
20-05-2025
- Daily Mail
Dad makes bizarre revelation about what IVF clinic suicide bomber son hated
The suspect in the California fertility clinic bombing was not a 'terrorist' or 'anti-life', but instead was 'anti-test tube baby', his father has claimed. Guy Edward Bartkus, 25, detonated a car bomb that rocked the American Reproductive Centers building in Palm Springs, east of Los Angeles. None of the facility's embryos were damaged in the attack, which the FBI has called an act of terrorism. Authorities said Bartkus, who died in the explosion, left behind nihilistic writings that indicated views against procreation, an idea known as anti-natalism. But his father Richard Bartkus has challenged that description, suggesting his son is not a killer or terrorist, but should instead be called a 'suicide bomber.' 'A terrorist is out to kill people, destroy life. He wasn't there to destroy life,' he told FOX 11. 'He was there against test tube baby. He was not anti-life, he was anti test tube baby.' Richard said his son, whom he described as a 'bright kid' and 'computer', believed that 'people who had test tube babies they would never really love the child as their own'. He also claimed that he does not believe Bartkus acted alone in the plot, although authorities have not released any information confirming that theory. Saturday's explosion gutted the clinic and shattered the windows of nearby buildings along a palm tree-lined street. Passersby described a loud boom, with people screaming in terror and glass strewn along sidewalks of the upscale desert city. Bartkus' body was found near a charred vehicle. Authorities are working to learn more about Bartkus' motives. They haven't said if he intended to kill himself in the attack or why he chose the specific facility. His writings communicated 'nihilistic ideations' that were still being examined to determine his state of mind, said US Attorney Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in the area. In general, nihilism suggests that life is meaningless. Investigators claim that Bartkus appeared to hold anti-natalist views, which include a belief that it is morally wrong for people to bring children into the world. The clinic he attacked provides services to help people get pregnant, including in vitro fertilization and fertility evaluations. Akil Davis, the assistant director in charge of the FBI's Los Angeles field office, called the attack possibly the 'largest bombing scene that we've had in Southern California.' 'This was a targeted attack against the IVF facility,' Davis said Sunday. 'Make no mistake: We are treating this, as I said yesterday, as an intentional act of terrorism.' Authorities executed a search warrant in Bartkus' hometown of Twentynine Palms, a city of 28,000 residents northeast of Palm Springs with a large US Marine Corps base. Bartkus lived at home with his mother and sister, and reportedly hadn't seen or spoken to his father in several years. His neighbors told FOX 11 that the suspected bomber mostly kept to himself, with one community resident alleging 'that was probably the way he wanted it.' 'You know a lot of times when people do stuff like this they kind of stay away from the public eye, stay away from attention,' the neighbor added. However, the FBI says that Bartkus tried to livestream the explosion, but the attempt failed. Authorities haven't shared specifics about the explosives used to make the bomb and where Bartkus may have obtained them. Scott Sweetow, a retired ATF explosives expert, said the amount of damage caused indicated that the suspect used a 'high explosive' similar to dynamite and TNT rather than a 'low explosive' like gun powder. Those types of explosives are normally difficult for civilians to access, but increasingly people are finding ways to concoct explosives at home, he said. 'Once you know the chemistry involved, it´s pretty easy to get stuff,' Sweetow said. 'The ingredients you could get at a grocery store.' The images of the aftermath also showed that the explosion appeared to blow from the street straight through the building and to the parking lot on the other side, something that could have been intentional or pure luck, Sweetow said. A part of the car was also blown through the building and landed in the back by a dumpster.
