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PALM SPRINGS (LifeSiteNews) — The suspect in the weekend suicide bombing of a California “fertility clinic” allegedly acted out of a nihilist hostility to bringing any new life into the world, according to a manifesto he left behind.
Forbes reports that on Saturday, an explosion rocked downtown Palm Springs, damaging the American Reproductive Centers Palm Springs IVF facility and several other buildings, injuring four people, and killing only one; 25-year-old Guy Edward Bartkus, the apparent perpetrator. All the victims have since been released, and officials say that none of its staff were hurt, nor were any frozen embryos destroyed.
Bartkus “had nihilistic ideations and this was a targeted attack,” according to Akil Davis, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office.
Barktus took credit for the attack in a manifesto attributed to him. In it, he identified as a “promotalist,” longing for society to begin the “process of sterilizing this planet of the disease of life. Life can only continue as long as people hold the delusional belief that it is not a zero sum game causing senseless torture, and messes it can never, or only partially, clean up. I think we need a war against pro-lifers. It is clear at this point that these people aren’t only stupid, they simply do not care about the harm they are perpetuating by being willing agents for a DNA molecule. This should not be seen as tolerable to any intelligent and caring person.”
He aligned with “Negative Utilitarianism, Efilism, Abolitionist Veganism, basically, philosophies that have realized religion is retarded, but that there is objective value in the universe, and it lies in the harm being experienced by sentient beings. So, although it all may seem ‘dark’, it’s the polar opposite of nonsense like nihilism.”
Barktus also declared his atheism, signaled his support for “satan,” and posited that “maybe the bible is just slander against satan,” that he had “known for a few years now I wasn’t going to allow myself to make it past my 20s,” and was finally pushed “over the edge” by the suicide of his best friend.
“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 said. Barktus added in an audio message linked in the manifesto, “I’m very against [IVF], it’s extremely wrong. These are people who are having kids after they’ve sat there and thought about it. How much more stupid can it get?”
In an interview with KTLA, the perpetrator’s grieving father, 75-year-old Richard Bartkus, described his son as a “smart, good kid” yet troubled since childhood, having burned down one family home. “I was too strict for him, so he wanted to stay with Mom until the divorce came through. Mom was lenient.” As he grew, he was a “follower who was easily influenced by others,” and maintained his fascination with fire in the form of model rockets and smoke bombs.
While targeting an IVF facility initially led some to assume the attack was the work of so-called “anti-choice extremists,” given pro-lifers’ opposition to the embryo-destructive in vitro fertilization process, the true ideology at work was an opposition to bringing life into the world by any means. Seeing life as a burden is aligned with the likes of population control, euthanasia, and eugenics rather than with the pro-life movement, which holds all human life as sacred.
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