Blue grotto, Capri Island, Italy (ca. 1890–1900) | Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsc-06435 / PD US
On May 17, 2025, Guy Bartkus drove out to a fertility clinic in Palm Springs, California, and set off an explosive that killed himself and injured four others. Learning of this news, Bartkus’s father told media that the man who attacked the clinic was not the person he remembers. In 2019, he said, Bartkus had worked on a school bus for children with special needs: “He tried to help people.”
Bartkus’s act of violence was rash and not well thought-through, spurred by the death of a close friend. But he had also acted out of conviction for an elaborate moral philosophy. In the voiced manifesto he left behind and on various postings on his own website and beyond, he made references to such ideologies as antinatalism, efilism, pro-mortalism, negative utilitarianism, and veganism. A utilitarian impulse to reduce suffering in the world lies at the core of it all, he believed, and to that end, it is best not to be born, and second best, to die sooner rather than later. His antilife philosophy explains his choice to target an IVF clinic, where those who should not have been come to be.
This was not an isolated incident. Bartkus’s act of violence was the second high-profile crime committed this year by individuals in the name of moral philosophy. In January, a confrontation between US law enforcement and the group widely known as the “Zizians” led to the death of a border patrol officer. Members of the group are linked to numerous crimes in the past three years, including three homicides. “Ziz” LaSota, the leader of the group, has additionally been unwilling to deny that her teachings have driven some of her followers to suicide.
Associated with the rationalist and effective altruist communities in Silicon Valley, the group described themselves as “vegan anarchotranshumanists” who sought to protect all sentient life from AI. After the group was arrested in 2019 while protesting against the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) for alleged sexual misconduct, they grew increasingly alienated from rationalism. Believing their efforts at saving the world to be hindered by both rationalists they now reviled as evil and Bay Area society at large, the group adopted increasingly violent rhetoric, allegedly murdering a Californian landlord testifying against the Zizians in court along the way.
While it is easy to dismiss Bartkus and the Zizians as a product of niche ideologies and online radicalization, they represent a larger current of fringe moral movements that have emerged in recent decades and attracted a demographic of mostly young, mostly white, mostly online adherents seeking to do good (indeed, seeking to do the most good).
It’s equally tempting to add that Bartkus and Ziz LaSota were, as Rolling Stone described Bartkus, “despairing and isolated.” This designation is useful if understood as a symptom of how moral practice functions today. As both descended into increasingly bespoke philosophies meant to help them distinguish right from wrong and good from bad, they became estranged from the world and from others who might be recipients of their ethics. In other words, even if Bartkus and the people who would become the Zizians had once been lonely individuals, rather than self-conscious participants in a larger moral movement, their loneliness worked in concert with an isolating logic of modern moral movements—one that ultimately undermined their hopes, however sincere, for doing good.
Bartkus, for one, considered his idiosyncratic mix of ideologies to be “not complicated ethics.” Life is suffering, and those who chose to create new people subject the unborn to this immiserated condition without their consent. Most people, however, could not understand this simple ethics. People were either “too fucking stupid,” he said, or “they’re being dishonest.” Bartkus’s feelings of ideological isolation was compounded by a persecution complex. “I think,” he explained in his manifesto, “people who have control over the internet are censoring these topics by shadow banning people … I can’t find people anymore on the fucking internet because they completely goddamn censored it.”
Bartkus’s 27-year-old friend Sophie Tinney was the only person who seemed to ‘get it,’ but a month before Bartkus’s bombing, Tinney had allegedly asked her partner to shoot her in her sleep. Writing about the loss of his close friend on his website, Bartkus lamented: “I’ve never related to someone so much, and I can’t imagine I ever would again. We were both antisex … misandrists, VegAntinatalists [vegan antinatalist], negative utilitarians …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.”
Bartkus’s writings display some of the hallmarks of the “paranoid style,” a term first coined by the American political scientist Richard Hofstadter in the wake of the McCarthyite purges. Hofstadter described an increasing tendency in America to engage with politics as though one had seen a dangerous but immutable truth—and a world designed specifically to hide it. Noninitiates to this worldview were either ignorant to this truth, indifferent, or actively hostile. The paranoiac’s mode of reasoning is, in this way, isolationist.
What’s new to Bartkus’s ideology is that one finds oneself apparently alone in possession not of a historical discovery (9/11 was an inside job) or a political revelation (the Illuminati control the media) but a highly rationalized moral philosophy.
Even in their academic forms, efilism and antinatalism retain much of this paranoid style. Finnish professor Matti Häyry and host of the Exploring Antinatalism podcast Amanda Sukenick argued in a recent publication that antinatalism’s history is marked by repeated suppression by representatives of dominant ideologies (Plato, the Roman Catholic Church, modern conservatism). In this view, that humanity still exists bespeaks, to quote one antinatalist writer, a pro-natalist “conspiracy against the human race.”
Among the subreddits Bartkus frequented was one called “Vystopia,” a portmanteau of “vegan” and “dystopia.” Invented by the psychologist Clare Mann to describe the “existential crisis experienced by vegans, arising out of an awareness of the trance-like collusion with a dystopian world,” members of r/Vystopia gather online to vent their frustrations and alienation from the outside world that does not share their values. One had recently written, “I have no vegan friends and nobody to share these feelings of total and utter despair and disappointment with humanity.” Vegans could feel no less alienated than antinatalists.
The Zizians, meanwhile, distanced themselves from a Silicon Valley rationalist community premised on the idea that a chosen few, guided by “normatively correct reasoning,” could protect the world from AI extermination. In a blog post detailing an interaction with another rationalist utilitarian, LaSota echoed some of r/Vystopia’s disillusionment. “I described my feelings towards flesh-eating monsters,” she wrote, “who had created hell on Earth far [sic] more people than those they had helped. That I did not trust humans’ indifference to build a net positive cosmos.” Like Bartkus, LaSota felt she “was basically alone with [her] values in the world.”
Ideological isolation meant that the enemy, for Bartkus as for LaSota, was unappeasable—people could not be convinced, only overcome. LaSota felt that her only solution was to turn right-thinking people like herself into what she called “Gervais-sociopaths.” By “giving up empathy and with it happiness,” LaSota and her followers could exercise power over “losers” and the “clueless,” thereby saving the world. “I would live the rest of my life completely alone … I had given up my ability to see beauty so I could see evil.”
Any momentary reflection could be conceivably countered by her simple proposition: “The difference is that I’m right.”
Such blinkered self-righteousness, alas, turns out to be murderous. In that case, the paranoia was right for all the wrong reasons. Sometimes, the world turns against you because you’re wrong.
