On May 17, 2025, a car bomb exploded in the parking lot behind the American Reproductive Center in Palm Springs, just a few miles from my home. Four bystanders were injured. One person died: the man who built and detonated the device, 25-year-old Guy Bartkus of Twentynine Palms, California.

American Reproductive is a fertility center—the only full-service IVF facility in the Coachella Valley—and is known for welcoming the region’s LGBTQ+ parents-to-be. When the news broke, speculation was swift. Some assumed the attacker mistook it for an abortion provider. Others believed it was targeted for supporting LGBTQ+ family-building.

But the truth didn’t fit either narrative.

Bartkus wasn’t religious. He wasn’t part of a political movement. He wasn’t trying to regulate reproduction. He wanted to eradicate it.

Bartkus subscribed to efilism—“life” spelled backwards—an extreme form of anti-natalism that sees existence as inherently harmful. Efilists argue that bringing sentient life into the world guarantees suffering, and that the only ethical act is to stop creating it.

On his now-archived personal webpage, Bartkus wrote:

“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.”

This wasn’t hyperbole. It was doctrine. IVF, to him, wasn’t hope or healing—it was a factory of suffering.

His site wasn’t a traditional manifesto, but it offered a glimpse into a belief system built on the rejection of life.

A central figure in Bartkus’s writing was Sophie Tinney, a 27-year-old woman from Gig Harbor, Washington, who had been shot and killed just weeks before the bombing. Police charged a man she lived with—described in media reports as her boyfriend—with her murder.

But Tinney’s own writing tells a different story, suggesting the man who pulled the trigger was likely a platonic or like-minded companion—nothing more.

She identified as asexual, a radical feminist, and an efilist. She rejected sex, her family, and society. She expressed hatred for men and frequently talked about her wish to die. Her public Tumblr was a digital archive of extremism—anti-natalism, conspiracy theories, militant veganism, and fatalism. She claimed hunting season was a staged event, with “factory deer” imported for sport. She believed parents who have children should be imprisoned. She hated her parents for being “carnists.”

Bartkus claimed in his writing that the two had agreed: if one died, the other wouldn’t stay long. He believed she had orchestrated her own death.

“She got the guy she was living with to shoot her while she was sleeping, her preferred method.”

Whether that’s true or posthumous revisionism is unclear. What matters is that Bartkus believed it—and acted accordingly.

Efilism doesn’t mobilize. It doesn’t recruit or campaign. It circulates quietly—through blogs, forums, private servers. It rewards isolation. It values moral purity. It doesn’t aim to fix society. It seeks to end it.

Within this logic, extreme veganism isn’t about animals or the planet. It’s about refusing to contribute to a cycle of suffering. Reproduction is violence. Nonexistence is mercy. Activism becomes abstention. Purpose becomes collapse.

Bartkus and Tinney’s views defy conventional political categorization and expose internal contradictions. Tinney endorsed lesbian and gay rights while portraying trans women as predatory men. Bartkus called for “a war against pro-lifers,” while maintaining that any act of reproduction—regardless of politics—was a moral violation. Despite their rhetorical aggression, neither pursued institutional change or political power. Their aim was not reform, but eradication—nonexistence framed not as nihilism, but as moral clarity.

We’re trained to spot extremism by its symbols—flags, slogans, uniforms. But some ideologies don’t perform. They isolate. They loop. They feed on withdrawal.

Bartkus didn’t bomb a fertility clinic just for attention. He believed it was doing harm by creating life in a world that shouldn’t exist. Reproduction, in his view, wasn’t a right. It was a crime.

These ideas don’t need movements. They don’t scale. They thrive in both obscure and mainstream corners of the internet—blogs, comment sections, encrypted threads—where alienation is mistaken for insight and despair is echoed back as truth. In these spaces, loneliness becomes logic, apathy becomes moral certainty, and violence becomes an act of principle.