Killing for Nothing: The Bizarre Logic of the Palm Springs Bomber

On May 17, a man bombed the American Reproductive Centers’s fertility clinic in Palm Springs, California. The attack captured national media attention not just for its brutality, but for the confounding ideology that allegedly inspired it—one based on despair, misanthropy, and a radical rejection of life itself. While the bombing injured four, the only fatality was the suspect, 25-year-old Guy Edward Bartkus, who the FBI says carried out the bombing “with nihilistic ideations” as a final act of protest at the very notion of his existence, intent on “sterilizing this planet of the disease we call life.” Within his purported manifesto, Bartkus identified as a “promortalist”—a fringe ideology related to antinatalism and efilism that advocates for the eradication of life as the only morally justifiable means to ending human suffering.

As the public grapples with the attack’s symbolism and investigators attempt to make sense of the ideology behind it, this incident has become emblematic of a troubling category of attacks that defy traditional classification. Rather than fitting into established extremist frameworks like white supremacy or jihadism, such attacks emerge from obscure online subcultures where violence is embraced as a means of affirming the perceived futility and cruelty of existence itself. The Palm Springs bombing and others are just the latest examples in a disturbing pattern of ideologically diffuse but inherently misanthropic acts of public violence—what some reports increasingly describe as “nihilistic violent extremism,” or “NVE”—presenting a complex challenge for researchers, law enforcement, and policymakers trying to understand and prevent this evolving form of violence.

Violence for the Sake of Violence

Since at least 2021, the rise of online communities that merge a deep-seated admiration for school shooters, serial killers, and the sexual exploitation of minors—such as the shadowy transnational network known as 764, or “the Com”—has created a fertile environment for radicalization rooted in existential contempt. Court documents from one of the FBI’s most recent publicized cases describe 764 as “a network of NVEs … that work in concert with one another towards a common purpose of destroying civilized society through the corruption and exploitation of vulnerable populations, including minors.” David Scott, head of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, recently confirmed that each of its 55 field offices is currently investigating more than 250 cases related to 764, which the Department of Justice is referring to as NVE.

Among 764’s many offshoots and splinter groups, perhaps none is more influential on the emergence of the nascent NVE classification than “No Lives Matter,” or “NLM.” Embodying the very essence of existential and moral nihilism, NLM’s amalgamation of neo-Nazi aesthetics and propaganda with the veneration of non-ideological mass shooters by the True Crime Community (TCC), NLM’s appeal to its disaffected adherents lies in its complete and total moral rejection of life itself. Unlike its militant accelerationist counterparts in Terrorgram and other extremist networks, NLM’s followers do not seek power in the hopes of resurrecting a racially pure and homogenous polity in its place but rather have the aim of societal collapse and total annihilation.

In Bartkus’s supposed moral quest to bring an end to human life, his attack joins a growing list of incidents—including the recent school shootings at Abundant Life Christian School and Antioch High School, and now the bombing of a fertility clinic in Palm Springs—that have defied straightforward ideological classification. In both the Abundant Life and Antioch cases, the perpetrators—Natalie Rupnow and Solomon Henderson, respectively—left behind digital footprints revealing a toxic fusion of racial hatred, existential despair, and heavy influence by previous mass killers, all in the hopes of joining their ranks. So great was their desire to be revered by the legions of online fanboys calling for debased violence that Rupnow wore a KMFDM shirt similar to that of Columbine shooter Eric Harris. At the same time, Henderson proclaimed “NO LIVES MATTER” in his manifesto.

Canadian extremism researcher Marc-André Argentino maintains that NVE is inherently misanthropic, with anti-humanist motifs celebrating mass casualty events and references to mankind as a “cancer” littering the movement’s literature, making it clear that Bartkus’s actions were not mere aberrations of madness, but the logical endpoint of a movement that glorifies the oblivion of all sentient beings.

Bartkus’s manifesto reflects this ethos. His embrace of a promortalist ideology that yearns for death mirrors the NLM worldview in some aspects: Life as suffering, procreation as unethical, and ending life as a moral imperative.

What Is Promortalism, and Why Does It Matter Now?

While NLM is best understood through its aesthetic glorification and rhetorical embrace of mass shooters, its underlying worldview shares some similarities with radical strands of antinatalism, including an obscure ideology known as efilism.

South African professor David Benatar is widely recognized as pioneering the moral ethics of antinatalism, a philosophy that argues procreation is morally problematic because of the inherent asymmetries in life between pain and pleasure. In a 2018 article for the New Yorker titled “The Case Against Kids,” author Elizabeth Kolbert profiles Benatar’s assertions that this asymmetry makes it better to have never been born. Using one of Benatar’s thought experiments, according to Kolbert, “Even the best of all possible lives consists of a mixture of pleasure and pain. Had the pleasure been forgone—that is, had the life never been created—no one would have been the worse for it. But the world is worse off because of the suffering brought needlessly into it.”

Ecofascists hold similar positions, asserting that humanity is a virus that needs to be eradicated to protect the environment. However, Benatar vehemently denies any association with the more fascist elements of the antinatalist movement, expressing his disdain for them in a 2021 interview with Medium.

But some within the antinatalist camp take Benatar’s ideas a step further, progressing toward “efilism.” Coined by inverting the word “life”—supposedly first done by a fringe YouTuber named Gary Inmendham—efilism expands the tenets of antinatalism beyond humans to all sentient beings. Efilists argue that because suffering is inherent to life, it is ethically preferable for all life to cease. Despite outward appearances, efilism is not nihilistic. Argentino explains that efilism claims that one has a moral imperative to destroy sentient life because it eliminates suffering, while nihilism removes morality and objective meaning from life, leaving an individual to invent or ignore purpose or ethical guardrails.

Beyond even the efilist realm lie the promortalists—those who espouse the tenets of efilism but believe it is morally better for sentient beings to die sooner rather than later, whether voluntarily or involuntarily. This is the crowd with which Bartkus aligned himself. In his manifesto, Bartkus directly echoed promortalist sympathies, claiming that death should be “preferably peaceful rather than some disease or accident”—ironic given the injuries, damage, and trauma caused by his attack. Bartkus also left links to several sources that espouse efilist and promortalist sentiments, such as antinatalist subreddits, YouTube videos, and curiously, a transcript of Sandy Hook Elementary School shooter Adam Lanza’s YouTube videos.

What began as a philosophical critique of procreation has, in the darker corners of the internet, congealed into a moral justification for extinction—first through nonexistence, then through death. This convergence of misanthropic despair and supposedly moral violence helps explain how fringe ideologies—combined with ostensibly benign attempts to answer ethical questions surrounding continued procreation in the face of ecological decline—can lead to the emergence of new motivations for violence.

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The Palm Springs bombing is yet another reminder that evolving iterations of violent extremism can no longer be confined within traditional ideological lines. As movements like NLM and twisted philosophical constructs like Barktus’s promortalism continue to gain traction among their alienated disciples, they give rise to a new breed of violent actors—those who see violence not only as a tool for political gain but as a moral obligation to end suffering through harming others. Understanding the emerging currents of “nihilist” acts of violence requires moving beyond our conventional frameworks of extremism and understanding why vulnerable individuals might turn to converging moral structures that devalue life in favor of pain.