On the morning of May 17, 2025, Guy Edward Bartkus loaded his vehicle with explosives and drove from Twentynine Palms to Palm Springs, California, where he detonated a car bomb outside the American Reproductive Centers fertility clinic. The 25-year-old died in the blast and injured four bystanders. He’d been trying to livestream the attack.

One month before the bombing, Bartkus’s closest friend, Sophie Tinney, died in Fox Island, Washington, after allegedly convincing her boyfriend, Lars Eugene Nelson, to shoot her in the head while she slept.

“I’ve never related to someone so much, and can’t imagine I ever would again,” Bartkus wrote of Tinney in his virtual suicide note and manifesto, hosted on promortalism.com. He added, “IIRC we had agreed that if one of us died, the other would probably soon follow.”

In a 30-minute audio recording accompanying the note, he explained his reasoning with the practiced inflection of a content creator. “Basically, it just comes down to I’m angry that I exist and that, you know, nobody got my consent to bring me here.” He listed his intellectual touchstones, including radical veganism; Sandy Hook gunman Adam Lanza; and efilism.

Despite the collection of strange names and obscure terminology, it was efilism that stood out most to people.

The Palm Springs bombing was initially, and baselessly, believed to be the act of right-wing extremists. But efilism — “life” spelled backward — emerged from the highly online community of antinatalists, not pro-life conservatism. While traditional antinatalists focus on the decision not to have children, efilists advocate for something far more extreme: the elimination of all sentient life on Earth.

Though this “e-deology,” to borrow a word from podcaster and artist Joshua Citarella, remains little-known — I am among the only journalists to have covered it, and the only one who’s done so at length — it has long been a source of controversy within online antinatalist communities. It’s been linked, sometimes tenuously, to violence, including both completed and attempted suicides and homicides. (Bartkus, Tinney and her boyfriend were all efilists.)¹ Within antinatalist circles, questions about and criticisms of efilism are both pointed and frequent.

I first encountered the man who calls himself “Inmendham” — the inventor of efilism — while researching Adam Lanza’s digital footprint. Lanza had allegedly absorbed efilism before breaking away to create his own contradictory philosophy, “eulavism,” which rejected not just sentience but the very concept of values. (“Eulavism” comes from “value” spelled backward.)

My first direct contact, however, came in a furious email after I published an article in 2023. Efilism, and thus Inmendham, received a brief mention. How dare I use his government name! — freely available online, but apparently sacred. Inmendham demanded that I remove it. Perhaps too readily, I acquiesced and asked the editors to replace his legal identity with his username.

Now, two years later, Inmendham has agreed to speak properly, provided I promise not to “quote mine” him. I’ve kept that promise, along with the arguably ridiculous journalistic vow to avoid revealing his actual identity entirely. He prefers one of his best-known YouTube handles, which literally means “in Mendham, New Jersey” — his hometown and broadcast location.

Across thousands of videos — his most devoted archivists claim he’s published over 15,000 — Inmendham films in what appears to be a basement, or crowded bungalow. The background is ever-changing, like a stage set shifting between multiple productions. In some videos, he sits before cluttered shelves packed with books and equipment, natural light streaming through a small window behind him. In others, he’s positioned against plastic tablecloths and a variety of prints, among them brick walls and ferocious lions. Sometimes, we get a glimpse of a crooked lampshade or a string of Christmas lights. His shoulder-length, glam-metal-blonde hair frames a face that often appears tired, squinting slightly at the camera as he launches into lengthy monologues.

He is somewhere north of sixty-one, though his face, animated by manic intensity, could belong to someone much younger or much older. Despite his unconventional appearance and rambling, schizophrenic style, there’s something oddly charismatic, even attractive, about Inmendham — though perhaps in the way certain movie monsters possess a compelling grotesqueness that makes it impossible to look away.

Inmendham has devoted this eccentric vitality to a curious project. For the past eighteen years, he has been making YouTube videos about why all life should cease to exist.

Like the constantly shifting backdrops on his myriad YouTube accounts, Inmendham’s virtual sanctums match his chaotic temperament. His main site, inmendham.com, along with his physics work, are dense walls of text with garish color schemes and stream-of-consciousness rambling that recall Gene Ray’s infamous Time Cube website of the late nineties. Inmendham’s “draft physics” theories propose radical reinterpretations of science, claiming that mainstream physics has gotten basic concepts wrong. In hundreds of videos, he makes bold claims like, “space-time is a rubbish idea” and “conventional physics doesn’t understand kinetic energy.”

Though Inmendham doesn’t confess any to me, he has the kind of sweeping certainty that suggests either deep wounds or mental illness. When someone declares that every authority figure — from Nobel laureates to neighborhood priests — has fundamentally misunderstood reality, the question becomes less about physics and more about psychology. What kind of life produces such wholesale rejection of received wisdom?

When I asked Inmendham about his upbringing, he was characteristically blunt.

“Very briefly, none of the important questions had reasonable answers, so I have spent my life seeking those reasonable answers.” People lied, he realized, about everything: “Santa, the Easter Bunny, and silver linings.” From these revelations, a worldview crystallized.

Here was a man who had weaponized his disillusionment into an all-consuming philosophical crusade against existence itself. Watching him in those videos — the hair, the manic certainty, the absolute conviction in his own revelations — I recognized something familiar. Inmendham was Generation X distilled to its essence: someone who had absorbed all the broken promises of the Reagan era and transformed them into a philosophy, broadcasting decades of accumulated grievance to the world from a webcam, a one-man theater of cosmic pessimism.

Though Inmendham claims to have always felt misanthropic, the intellectual origins of efilism trace back to 2006, when South African philosopher David Benatar published “Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence,” which coined the term “antinatalism” and established the philosophical scaffolding for its modern, digitally-native subculture. Benatar’s key insight was what he called the “asymmetry argument”: while the presence of pain is bad and the absence of pain is good, the presence of pleasure is good only if someone exists to experience it, while the absence of pleasure is not bad if no one exists to be deprived of it. Therefore, he concluded, it is always better never to have been born.

These ideas might have remained confined to philosophy journals and graduate seminars if not for the internet. In the mid-2000s, YouTube was still a raw, ungoverned space for anyone with an internet connection and an opinion. It was in this environment that figures like Inmendham began sharing their misanthropy with anyone who would listen.

The early community of YouTube antinatalists was a collection of dissidents, New Atheists, and other intellectual misfits. Among them was Kirk Neville, who went by DerivedEnergy and introduced the term “antinatalism” to YouTube in a two-part 2011 video series titled “A Defence of Antinatalism.” But Kirk’s approach differed significantly from Inmendham’s more emotional philosophy. Where Inmendham advocated for ending all sentient life to prevent suffering, Kirk took the position that humans should simply stop reproducing and let nature take its course.

“He was an antinatalist for what I consider to be completely irrational reasons,” Inmendham recalls in the podcast Exploring Antinatalism, an episode that would prove controversial within the antinatalist community. In that same conversation, Inmendham goes on to dismiss Kirk as “a nihilist who didn’t give a fuck about anything’s welfare,” presumably suggesting that true antinatalism required genuine compassion for suffering beings rather than abstract logical exercises.²

Yet, according to those who knew the pair, beneath the public sparring was genuine affection.

When Kirk was imprisoned in Indonesia’s notorious Cipinang prison after taking the fall for his girlfriend’s marijuana possession, Inmendham and other community members tried to secure his release through a petition. For sixteen agonizing days, no one knew where Kirk was or whether he was alive. He was eventually transferred to a drug rehabilitation facility, where he died under circumstances Indonesian media called suicide but which those who knew him believe was an accident — he drowned while trying to bathe in a basin of water.

Inmendham was devastated.

Among those who joined the desperate rescue effort was Amanda Sukenick, an unlikely convert to efilism, who would go on to become the community’s second-most prominent member. Sukenick has a teacher-like warmth, not quite maternal but close, that makes conversations about suffering and consciousness feel both informative and unexpectedly comforting. With her wire-rimmed glasses and loose, gray-flecked ponytail, there’s something disarming about her.

Where Inmendham’s efilism comes wrapped in righteous anger, Sukenick delivers the same philosophy with the soft voice of someone who might spend her afternoons as a children’s librarian, reading picture books to toddlers before retiring to an evening of tabletop roleplaying games.

The daughter of a Jungian psychoanalyst mother and an advertising executive father who was also an oil painter, Sukenick grew up in a household that encouraged intellectual curiosity. But she pursued art, and amateur toy reviewing, rather than philosophy.

Discovering antinatalism “was like being hit by lightning,” she recalls in a conversation with Mark Laita, the man behind Soft White Underbelly (an interview series with what can only be described as outcasts — sex workers, drug addicts, the homeless, and the ideologically strange). Growing up, Sukenick was a fan of monster movies and horror stories, sensing in them a critique of procreation.

“Maybe Dr. Frankenstein should not have created that monster. Maybe playing Prometheus wasn’t such a great idea.”

But it was Inmendham — himself, at times, resembling a monster — who really made Sukenick come alive.

“I was absolutely blown away by Inmendham’s videos, and deeply inspired creatively and intellectually by what he had to say,” she told me. But lacking confidence that she, “a fat little toy reviewer with no philosophy background,” could contribute meaningfully to these ideas, she turned to what she knew best: art. Using her sculptural skills, Sukenick created an elaborate tribute, a diorama of Inmendham and his world, complete with miniature details of his setup and intellectual environment.

In 2016, Sukenick created a short film: “The Efilist.” The film opens with a fairytale premise: once upon a time, there lived Dr. Frankenstein, “an evil, sadistic, shithead of a fucktard who delighted in creating and imposing life on as many beings as possible.” In Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory are two buttons, a green one that creates happy creatures (along with some hideous monsters) and a red one that would end all existence.

Given the inevitable suffering that life produces, would it be ethical to press the red button? Inmendham justifies this idea with a concept he calls “CRAP,” an acronym for Consumption, Reproduction, Addiction, and Parasitism or Cannibalism.

“Efilism is knowing that life is an imposition,” Sukenick states in the film. If consciousness creates the capacity for suffering, and if suffering inevitably outweighs pleasure, then the most compassionate response would be to eliminate consciousness entirely.

The distinction between efilism and more traditional strains of antinatalism matters more than it might initially seem. Both Sukenick and Inmendham have attempted to clarify these distinctions, though their explanations reveal different levels of engagement with the academic literature.³

Sukenick says there are four distinct but overlapping philosophical positions that must be understood separately:

• Benatarian antinatalism, which argues it’s better never to have been born

• Efilism, which extends antinatalism beyond humans to all sentient beings, arguing humans have a duty to prevent the continuation of all sentient life

• Promortalism, which originally meant extinction advocacy but has since devolved into a confused and dangerous philosophy often associated with suicide advocacy⁴

• Antinatalism proper, which serves as an umbrella term for dozens of related movements questioning the ethics of creating new life

The key difference between the first two positions comes down to intervention. Benatarian antinatalists believe humans should stop reproducing and let animals inherit the earth naturally, while efilists argue humans must take responsibility for ending all sentient suffering before human extinction occurs.

Inmendham dismisses much of this academic parsing.

“I don’t even know what promortalism is. I don’t much like the term natalism. I am clearly anti-creation, anti-imposition, and anti-silly fables,” he told me. For him, the distinctions matter less than the core insight that sentient life, both human and animal, produces unnecessary suffering that should be prevented. This approach leads to positions that even many antinatalists find extreme.

When I asked him what policies he’d advocate if society embraced efilist conclusions, Inmendham suggested, “Efilism is about prevention [...] Some easy social improvements would be removing all the financial subsidies provided to procreators. Force them to pay the freight for their ‘pets.’ I envision an efilist future as a graceful decline in human population and then the last few, of the last generation, gracefully disinfect the planet.”

That sounds passive, but Inmendham’s rhetoric often employs extreme language that creates confusion about what efilists actually advocate.

“I have absolutely no ethical problem personally with every fucking poor person who has a kid being shot in the fucking head,” Inmendham states in one video that’s often cited by his critics, like the YouTuber Praminder Talks and efilism’s most vocal detractor, Steve Godfrey.⁵

In another video, Inmendham claims he’d murder a hypothetical woman who was pregnant with his child. In yet another, he claims he would watch a — again, hypothetical — movie of pregnant women being killed. This pattern — extreme, edge-lording rhetoric that’s only occasionally followed by practical disclaimers — has created reputational problems for Inmendham.

I asked Inmendham about this, and he acknowledged that it was a problem.

“Torture is a very emotional subject...,” he began, ostensibly referring to the “torture” of life and of sentience. “It has taken many years for me to control those emotions enough to prevent unuseful emotional outbursts. The ideal of real can often be badly compromised by too many filters.”

The connection between efilist ideas and acts of violence has created a crisis among antinatalists, with many believing Inmendham’s inflammatory rhetoric contributes to the problem. This tension culminated in an open letter from an anonymous group of antinatalists several years ago calling out Sukenick and Inmendham for inciting violence.

The case of Adam Lanza — the Sandy Hook shooter who allegedly posted videos in dialogue with efilism — exemplifies these concerns.

“The Lanza case is, of course, particularly appalling,” Sukenick told me. Yet she questions whether Lanza was genuinely involved in these communities, pointing to suspicious circumstances around the discovery of his content.

“[...] why did the FBI never find these recordings until 2021? Why did the channel suddenly appear? How could these videos possibly have sat there undiscovered for 10 years?” she asks. The timing also strikes her as odd: Lanza allegedly posted his videos in September 2011, just days after Inmendham formally established efilism as a distinct philosophy. For someone supposedly influenced by efilist ideas, Lanza engaged with them remarkably early — when the movement barely existed.

The Bartkus case, however, presents a clearer link between efilism and actual violence. His manifesto explicitly cited efilism. Yet, even here, Sukenick points out that the connection is complicated by personal factors — the recent death of his closest friend, a history of mental illness, and what appears to have been monumental despair.

When confronted with the connection to the bombing, Inmendham posted a video insisting that the attack was “clearly not [my] fault.” He argues that his actual message has been consistently misunderstood.

“It’s pretty hard to make real philosophy child-safe,” he told me, when asked about his obligations toward viewers who might be in crisis. “People are fooled by scammers every day, and society doesn’t do much to prevent it. Watch some of the advertisements YouTube puts on videos ... It’s just shameless abuse of the stupid. The fact that the truth won’t set you free from your misery isn’t something I can fix. The fact that the truth might cause you misery is also something I cannot fix.”

Sukenick has spent over a decade in this community, and in that time has found herself intervening in several troubling situations. The most concerning involved what she now believes were fabricated threats — a story about an efilist supposedly threatening to kill his girlfriend that left the moderator of a Discord server in hysterics, though Sukenick suspects the entire incident was manufactured. There have been other situations: threats about hunting animals and threats of suicide.

Sukenick makes her feelings on the matter clear. “Fuck anyone who tries to harm others in the name of antinatalism or efilism.”

In the wake of Bartkus’s bombing, /r/efilism was banned for promoting violence, and /r/efilism2 spun up shortly after. Are efilists promoting violence, though? Sometimes, yes. But mostly, they appear content to simply discuss their ideas, at least in public and quasi-public forums.

In private Discord servers, there is little, if any, violent rhetoric to be found — just people talking. They talk about philosophy, mostly, but also art, veganism, and current events. They muse about whether or not they’d press the “red button,” as they did on Reddit, and as some antinatalists do in non-efilist forums.

There are YouTubers who talk about the fatalism of being and staying alive — occasionally, their own sadness — but their tone is remarkably detached. Violence is an aberration, not the rule. There is something so sterile — maybe “autistic” is the word I’m reaching for here — in efilist discussions, which is ironic, given how raw Inmendham is. Even discussions of suicide are surprisingly sparse, with the main Discord server boasting a rule that forbids such discussions — confusingly, or maybe just to cover their ass — “unless you are a doctor.”

When confronted with the philosophical question of whether “any means necessary” could be justified to end all suffering, Sukenick is nuanced. “[...] Yes, I think anything may very well be worth the end of suffering forever, if such a thing could be guaranteed. And I think this is a plain, naked fact — horrible, inconvenient, and unspeakable truth, with a huge information hazard attached to it.”

She adds, “there needs to be real separation made between overarching, horrific philosophical conclusions, and real-world prescriptive actions — they don’t have to, and should not in many cases, follow one another.”

Sukenick, despite her continued philosophical agreement with Inmendham, recently had a personal falling out with him that she describes as “relatively ugly.” In her communications to me, she shared that Inmendham “was, in fact, one of my best friends for many years — few have ever encouraged me more than he has,” and credits him with “opening [her] eyes to so much.”

In a video compilation posted by one of her critics, Sukenick confesses that she was “obsessed with” Inmendham, referencing her username, “oldphan.” In her heart of hearts, that is who she is: a fan. The diorama, the careful construction of a miniature world in his honor, suggests something that runs far deeper than just fandom. Perhaps this explains why Sukenick has been so generous in sharing details about efilism with me. There’s an intimacy in her knowledge, a tenderness. I get the sense that Sukenick really loved — or still loves — Inmendham.

It is this detail about Sukenick that I find myself stuck on. There is something seductive about surrendering to those who offer the terrible relief of their certainty, no matter how delusional, and allowing it to displace your own doubt.

“It should be understood that educated humans are already behaving like efilists, regarding their birth rate,” says Inmendham, noting that birth rates in developed countries have been declining for decades.

Sukenick seems to agree. She explains in an old YouTube video, “I would prefer that human beings decide collectively in a more benevolent fashion to end themselves in a much gentler way and also to take responsibility for the rest of life on this planet.”

Today, efilism’s core ideas remain as marginal as ever, embraced by perhaps a few thousand people worldwide, if that. Yet the questions it raises — about suffering, consciousness, and moral responsibility — have begun to percolate into mainstream discussions about the ethics of having children in a world many believe is hurtling towards dystopia.

Inmendham continues his broadcasts from New Jersey, his audience neither growing nor disappearing but holding steady (something he tells me he views as a personal failure). They find in his message something that speaks to their experience of existence.

The red button of efilist imagination remains safely hypothetical, but the questions it represents are real. How much suffering is acceptable as the price of consciousness? What obligations do we have to beings who do not yet exist? These are not questions that admit easy answers, but they are questions that an honest engagement with existence cannot avoid.

The tragedy of Guy Bartkus suggests that some people, confronted with these questions, will find them unbearable. Whether that reflects a failure of the philosophy, the world it describes, or of the mind that dares to ask remains an open question.

—Katherine Dee

FOOTNOTES

¹ While writing this piece, a gentleman shared a disturbing YouTube stream with me, where a man claimed “efilism didn’t go far enough.” And then there’s efilist Tyler McCorvey, once known online as Rita McCloud, whose violent history and efilist beliefs raised red flags among observers. According to Steve Godfrey’s 2022 reporting, McCorvey had a documented history of violence, including a 2017 attack on Rae Pitt, a deaf autistic 19-year-old who entertained passing motorists by dressing up as “the Minneola Superman.” McCorvey’s rhetoric became increasingly violent and concerning over time. Despite claiming his violence was purely theoretical, McCorvey had a pattern of escalating behavior that concerned other members of the community.

² Inmendham and DerivedEnergy’s philosophical disagreements played out in lengthy video exchanges, sometimes devolving into surprisingly petty disputes: Kirk was a devoted Michael Jackson fan who insisted on the singer’s innocence, while Inmendham detested Jackson’s music and believed the allegations of pedophilia against him.

³ Sukenick co-authored an academic book about antinatalism with Finnish philosopher Matti Hayry in 2024.

⁴ Sukenick notes that promortalism has influenced suicides within these communities and emphasizes that antinatalism is an evolving philosophical landscape with many internal conflicts and variations that no single position can fully represent.

⁵ One of the most damning critiques of efilism comes from a man who goes by the username EZ-AXIS, a YouTuber who had extensive personal contact with Bartkus before the bombing and was himself deeply involved in these ideological communities.

In a video titled “My Encounter With Guy Edward Bartkus,” EZ-AXIS describes how he “talked online for hours” with Bartkus and found himself agreeing with a lot of what he believed. He characterizes these philosophies as fundamentally dangerous, “Especially pro-mortalism. I feel like I’m slowly dying because of it.”

EZ-AXIS reveals disturbing details about Bartkus’s behavior, including that he “offered to send [me] sodium nitrite” and told him, “I don’t understand why you haven’t killed yourself yet.”

“I was going to be the fucking next Efil Blaise,” EZ-AXIS says, referring to another prominent efilist YouTuber who died by suicide. EZ-AXIS’s account suggests these communities can create a pipeline toward self-destruction and violence, leading vulnerable people toward increasingly extreme positions.