Set back from a rural New Jersey road, 10 miles from Donald Trump‘s Bedminster golf course, the unassuming bungalow makes a strange setting for a death cult.
But, inside its walls, a long-haired 65-year-old is preaching a disturbing new philosophy – one that has already had deadly results.
For the past 25 years, Gary Mosher has been peddling the idea that all life – human or animal – is nothing but needless pain and suffering, and should be extinguished.
Mosher calls his creed ‘efilism’, the word life, spelled backwards; others refer to it as ‘pro-mortalism’.
Mosher’s beliefs, previously written off as too fringe to be worth noting, have recently found favor among Gen-Z online.
And his ideology – festering on Reddit forums and disseminated worldwide via TikTok – burst into the American public’s consciousness after a fatal explosion at a Palm Springs fertility clinic two weeks ago.
The dark doctrine drove the deeply disturbed Guy Bartkus, 25, to detonate a bomb at the American Reproductive Centers facility the morning of May 17, injuring four people and killing himself in the blast.
He left behind a manifesto along with a trail of potential online evidence that authorities have linked back to the ‘anti-natalist‘, who believed procreation is unethical, and he identified himself as ‘anti-life’.
Last week, Mosher attempted to distance himself from Bartkus’s ‘really stupid and pointless’ act, publishing a video on YouTube titled, ‘RE: The Bad IVF Thing’.
For the past 25 years, Gary Mosher has been peddling the idea that all life – human or animal – is nothing but needless pain and suffering, and should be extinguished.
Mosher attempted to distance himself from Bartkus’s ‘really stupid and pointless’ act in a video on YouTube titled, ‘RE: The Bad IVF Thing’
‘I had no knowledge, anything, about any of this stupidity,’ he said. ‘It’s certainly not my fault. I haven’t done anything wrong by having a philosophy that says that life is poopy.
‘It doesn’t mean you go out and try to assassinate the breeding machine, or the clinic. Anyone who does act up, it’s on them. You can’t blame the philosophy for what people do with it, or to it.’
Mosher did not respond to the Daily Mail’s request for comment.
But parents, psychologists and law enforcement are increasingly concerned about the insidious ideology. As the Daily Mail has learned, their alarm at its spread online seems entirely justified.
The concept of anti-natalism, in which believers also remain childless, has been pushed to an apocalyptic extreme and, for the most part, seems to be attracting – or targeting – young men.
‘It’s one of the strangest single-issue domestic terrorist movements I’ve ever seen,’ Hal Kempfer, a retired Marine intelligence officer who advises law enforcement agencies and private clients on counterterrorism, told the Daily Mail.
‘The intelligence agencies are going to start digging into it. The FBI will be looking, first of all, to who he was talking to. How big is this network?’ he continued. ‘They’ll bring in the psychologists and look at behavioral indicators to work out if it’s a one-off or if there are more of them.’
But the terrifying truth, according to Kempfer, is: ‘Nobody knows how big this thing is. There’s a lot of activity online but it’s difficult to figure out.
‘Sometimes you’ll find state actors, like Russians, stirring the pot, using their bots to create anarchy. But I think it’s too weird for the Russians, which is saying something.’
On Mosher’s website, he writes, ‘Life is Consumption, Reproduction, Addiction & Parasitism. It’s C.R.A.P.’
He argues that living is ‘an imposition’, and that we should not ‘play out the same tragic and tired Shakespearean snuff film’.
‘For whatever reason, Mosher continues, ‘the universe initiated, we don’t know why there’s something rather than nothing, but there is. The big bang occurred and aberrant science ran amok.
‘The universe, up until this point, was certainly violent, but benign – free of sentient creatures, and therefore free of suffering. But all that changed when the tragedy of abiogenesis occurred, and the first reproducing cell was produced.
‘And then, the most pitiless step in our evolution – the arrival of suffering: The First Ouch.’
With language like that, it is tempting to dismiss Mosher as a fringe lunatic. But in thousands of hours of YouTube videos, he calls for pregnant women to be pushed down stairs, absolves convicted British baby killer Lucy Letby, supports the drowning of kittens, and denies the existence of Nazi gas chambers.
‘There’s no real gas chambers,’ he says in one clip. ‘There’s no historically pristine gas chambers. Only “reconstructions”. All the hard evidence points to slow death through neglect.
‘You are the one with the theory that it was this deliberate, malicious effort to exterminate Jews. And I’m saying that the evidence in no f****** way adds up to that. Why did they let any of them out of the country then?’
Indeed, the extremity of his views has gone too far even for some of his once loyal followers. Several became so repulsed that, in August 2021, they published an open letter emphasizing just how dangerous he was.
They wrote: ‘We are genuinely frightened that the violent rhetoric coming from the Efilist community will lead to someone getting hurt.’
One of the letter writers, who did not wish to be named, told the Daily Mail that Mosher was ‘a crank’ and a ‘sad and angry old man, very clearly exhibiting symptoms of mental illness’.
‘He was a cult figure for some very foolish people who became emotionally attached to him and thought he was worth defending and we wanted to stop that from happening,’ they said.
‘It was never supposed to be about hate or spreading the idea that it’s OK to inflict suffering on anyone.’
In a profound paradox, the manifesto that Bartkus left before he blew up the fertility clinic and himself with it made reference to a hope for the ‘peaceful’ demise of humanity.
In the document obtained by The Intercept, the online news organization, he wrote: ‘All a pro-mortalist is saying is let’s make it happen sooner rather than later (and preferably peaceful rather than some disease or accident), to prevent your future suffering, and, more importantly, the suffering your existence will cause to all the other sentient beings.
‘The end goal is for the truth (Efilism) to win, and once it does, we can finally begin the process of sterilizing this planet of the disease of life.’
Mosher preaches his ‘efilism’ doctrine on YouTube to more than 14,000 subscribers.
A deeply disturbed ‘anti-natalist’ Guy Bartkus, 25, detonated a bomb at the American Reproductive Centers facility on the morning of May 17, injuring four people and killing himself in the blast
While Mosher has denied any connection the Palm Springs explosion, a whistleblower told the Daily Mail that any pretense he promoted peace over violence was exactly that – a pretense
But according to the cult whistleblower, any pretense that Mosher promoted peace over violence is just that – a pretense – and the Palm Springs attack was the violent harvest of the ideology that he sowed.
‘Mosher is simply lying, again, when he claims he has never promoted violence,” said the insider. ‘He has promoted violence many times and is on record as having done so. His abhorrent views should not be tolerated and his attempts to downplay them are pathetic.’
Connor Leak, a morality philosopher who studied anti-natalism as part of his PhD, told the Daily Mail that Mosher’s beliefs were ‘not widely held’ but added that anti-natalism was ‘a growing and serious discussion’.
The concept of anti-natalism is certainly not new.
From the 1750s onwards, the Shakers forbade having children and survived only through recruitment. The last active Shaker village in the world, at Sabbathday Lake in Maine, is now home to only two people, aged 67 and 86.
In 1968, Stanford University professor Paul Ehrlich wrote ‘The Population Bomb’ forecasting an apocalyptic future of famine and misery.
The idea was given renewed momentum by a South African academic, David Benatar, in 2006, who wrote ‘Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence’.
Benatar is cited by many anti-natalists and pro-mortalists, including the Palm Springs bomber but is seen by Mosher and his followers as too moderate.
The vast majority of the thinking is, indeed, personal and inoffensive. As a counterpoint to the pro-natalism of Elon Musk and others – the idea that it is our duty to have as many children as possible – many are looking the other way, citing sustainability and ethical concerns.
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, for instance, have said that they would not have more than two children, for environmental reasons.
But such personal decisions and the rationale behind them are a world away from the warped and extreme mindset that the letter writers insist is exhibited by Mosher or behind Bartkus’s violent act.
‘The end goal is for the truth (Efilism) to win, and once it does, we can finally begin the process of sterilizing this planet of the disease of life,’ Bartkus wrote in a letter obtained by The Intercept
Leak said: ‘You have to separate the theory from violent and extremist acts. There’s obviously the potential to frame it in this way – to say I have a duty to kill someone. But that’s not in the idea itself.’
Reddit’s decision to ban the anti-natalism forum after the bombing was ‘disproportionate’, he said, adding, ‘Nihilism is wide-reaching, but it doesn’t say that people can do what they want and harm others. People can take a religious view, a fundamentalist view, and do something violent with that.’
Parents should listen to their children but talk to them about their feelings rather than advocate for the shuttering of online forums, Leak said.
‘If a parent feels a child is engaging in this, I’d say their duty is to listen. If they feel regret they were born, they are clearly struggling with something and need to be helped to navigate it.’
British filmmaker Jack Boswell spent months with anti-natalists for his documentary ‘I Wish You Were Never Born’, released in December. He agreed with Leak that the ideology itself was not harmful.
‘Everyone I spoke to was clear that it was non-violent,’ Boswell said. ‘I didn’t get the impression it was dangerous.
‘My general belief is that any ideology has extremism around the edges, and young people are always going to look for provocations. It’s such a cliché, children saying they wish they weren’t born, and it’s the old argument about violent video games. I think it comes down to parenting and the environment, rather than the inherent danger of the theory.’
But the trouble with Boswell’s assertions is that the scale of this extremism is simply unknown and, with its capacity for carnage evident in Bartkus’s act of violence, it would seem foolish to downplay the potential for real and present danger.
Indeed, the authors of the letter insisted that Mosher was a risk. They said: ‘He should have been de-platformed from YouTube and elsewhere long ago.
‘His followers tend to be angry young men, and certainly no philosopher or educated person is likely to view it as legitimate.
‘If something good comes out of this and the extremists are pushed out of mainstream discourse, I will be happy.’
