An Antinatalist Profile the FBI Should Be Looking At


While the FBI fixated on January 6 grandmothers, Guy Edward Bartkus was radicalizing online in plain sight.

While the FBI has spent the past four years pouring vast resources into surveilling grandmothers who wandered through the Capitol on January 6, a far more lethal ideological movement grew undisturbed across online forums, YouTube channels, and pseudophilosophical blogs.

On May 17, Guy Edward Bartkus detonated a bomb outside a Palm Springs reproductive clinic in a brutal act of ideological suicide meant to destroy others. His target was not random, and his reasoning, however grotesque, was systematic. He left a manifesto, created a website and even posted about his plans online. He belonged to a movement.

He was a promortalist.

Bartkus was not radicalized in the dark. He planned his attack in plain sight, through his writings, forums, and a disturbing digital trail that leads to one conclusion: America is missing the real threat.

Bartkus operated under the name IndictEvolution, a handle that appeared across multiple platforms, including a disturbing YouTube channel where he shared videos of explosive experiments, chemical handling, and materials related to pyrotechnics. Some of these experiments, including cast ETN detonations and flash powder reactions, appear to serve no recreational or educational purpose, they were merely rehearsals for what was to come.

On the forum SanctionedSuicide.net, Bartkus, again using the name IndictEvolution announced the date of his suicide under a thread titled “CO CTB tomorrow morning.” In that thread, he casually mentions carbon monoxide (CO) and formic acid—methods associated with both suicide and covert chemical weapon use—but also hints at “extra drama that I probably shouldn’t say.” He said it without fear of censorship, moderation, or intervention. No one called the authorities, instead, forum users wished him Godspeed.

This wasn’t just a suicide, it was ideological violence, a deliberate, symbolic act meant to punish what he viewed as the moral crime of procreation. The creation of life through fertility treatments to Bartkus and others like him, is the highest offense of all, life as the deliberate production of suffering in full awareness.

Bartkus’s personal website, Promortalism, makes no effort to disguise his beliefs. The core philosophy: life is a “rape,” existence is suffering, and reproduction is the original sin. Reproductive clinics, which help couples conceive, are painted as morally abhorrent institutions by promortalists. In his manifesto, Bartkus calls birth an act equivalent to sexual assault, insists on the right to a "graceful exit," and justifies murder-suicide as protest.

You cannot understand what Bartkus did without understanding Efilism, a radical, fringe extension of antinatalism that believes not just that life is painful, but that existence itself is a fundamental harm. Efilism inverts the word "life" to "efil" to signal a total philosophical opposition to the very phenomenon of living. It proposes that all sentient life, regardless of species or setting, is condemned to suffer, and therefore the moral act is not to preserve or protect life, but to extinguish it. As articulated in writings by proponents like Inmendham (Gary Mosher), whom Bartkus followed, Efilism holds that procreation is an act of violence and that the continuation of DNA is a tyranny, not a triumph. Bartkus wasn't just angry at the world, he believed the world should not exist.

This is a death cult, but is not fringe in the way people assume, it has lively communities supporting a dark undercurrent of advocating for mass extinction and violence as moral goods. Promortalism is a metastasizing online ideology that combines antinatalism, eco-nihilism, radical veganism, and apocalyptic resentment into a single, deeply toxic worldview. It has found homes on Reddit, YouTube, Discord servers, and suicide forums that thrive in the shadows of digital platforms that validate beliefs that echo far beyond the fringes.

The Hollow Certainty of Guy Bartkus

In his recorded manifesto, Bartkus speaks in a measured, casual tone, almost sedated, occasionally punctuated by slight scoffs that suggest not emotional pain but contempt. What emerges is not a man overwhelmed by despair, but someone underwhelmed by existence itself. "I just see existence as a kind of slavery to a DNA molecule," he says, as though the entirety of life could be reduced to genetic compulsion. This isn't the insight of a philosopher, it’s the voice of someone desperate to make the sacred seem stupid, to trivialize life so completely that his own rejection of it appears rational.

And yet, for someone who believes he understands the world, Bartkus demonstrates astonishing blindness toward himself. He accuses others of being insensitive while describing suicide methods with grotesque detachment. He brands procreation as the moral equivalent of rape, dismissing parents as "the real killers" for birthing children into a world of pain. There is no room for gratitude, joy, or love, only suffering, which he internalizes and inflates to cosmological scale. He claims to speak for all sentient beings, adopting their pain as justification for annihilation. He is arrogant without being sharp, emotionally stunted but intellectually grandiose. What he truly lacks is humility, both before God and before man.

Even Bartkus’ solution reveals how poorly he understands evil. He suggests mass shootings could be prevented if potential shooters were given the "graceful exit" of suicide. In other words, let the broken kill themselves before they kill others. This is not moral clarity, this is moral collapse. He believes that if no one is left alive to mourn, mass death is morally neutral. It’s the old nihilist’s game: reduce life to suffering, then argue that death is mercy.

But if Bartkus believed life was meaningless, he wouldn’t have blown himself up in front of a reproductive clinic. He wanted to make a point, and he wanted to harm. Like all ideological killers, he needed an audience. This wasn’t philosophy, it was vengeance disguised as ethics. And what makes him dangerous is that he found a community that affirmed every delusion. Online spaces like Sanctioned Suicide or YouTube channels filled with antinatalist logic aren't just strange—they are accelerants.

These men say there is no victory in being alive, that to be born is to lose. But the truth is simpler: they have lost the will to fight for anything worth living for—and they want the rest of the world to lose it with them.

We are living in a time of civilizational exhaustion, when hope is replaced by cynicism, family by atomization, and moral clarity by therapeutic relativism. In such a world, ideologies like promortalism can flourish. They promise meaning in annihilation, and offer a cause in place of a purpose. The promortalist does not have a philosophy, they have a pathology.

How did no one stop him?

The answer is as obvious as it is damning: because his ideology didn’t fit the bureau’s narrative of threat. Bartkus was not a white supremacist, he wasn’t religious, he wasn’t right-wing or left-wing. He was part of a growing wave of self-described rationalists who intellectualize murder and cloak death in pseudophilosophy. In the modern FBI lexicon, this made him invisible.

The modern FBI has spent the better part of a decade redirecting counterterrorism away from real threats like violent extremism, foreign-backed ideological networks, and decentralized radicalization, and redirected its resources toward wrongthink. The Bureau knows how to catch a protester wearing face paint. It has a harder time spotting a suicidal ideologue uploading bomb test videos under a philosophical veneer.

We need a government that understands evil exists and has the courage to name it. The question is not whether there will be another Guy Edward Bartkus. The question is how many more are already planning, and posting, right now. If federal agencies don’t stop obsessing over political theater and start confronting the real threats to life, order, and civilization, the next Bartkus is already online, and already building something worse.