In this Flannel Panel, Cy Kellett is joined by Joe Heschmeyer and Catholic Answers President Chris Check to discuss a shocking and tragic event: an anti-life extremist bombing a fertility clinic.
Transcript:
Cy: I want to share about this 25-year-old young guy. And you all read the story. Blew himself up outside a fertility clinic in Palm Springs. And God have mercy on his soul and help his parents. But the distortion in this young man’s mind is extraordinary. I don’t know what to say about it. It’s terrifying. And other people share it. So when a fertility clinic gets blown up or attempted to be blown up, do you do the same thing I do? Who was this? Like, you know what CNN wants?
Joe: Oh yeah.
Cy: They just can’t wait for it to be one of us. But it’s hard to know, like, who is this? And it turns out, according to the Associated Press, this is the article on Associated Press. Authorities say the suspect in the California fertility clinic bombing left behind anti-pro-life writings. A 25-year-old man the FBI believes was responsible for an explosion that ripped through a Southern California fertility clinic left behind an anti-pro-life writing before carrying out an attack investigators call terrorism. The young man was identified by the FBI as a suspect in an apparent car bombing detonation.
It’s not just that he’s anti-pro-life though, because pro-life people, if they’re consistent in being pro-life, would agree with this young man that what’s going on in that fertility clinic is an evil. There are human beings who are in frozen suspension there.
Joe: Although we would disagree on why we thought it was evil.
Cy: That’s right. Right, right. And we would disagree on the method of how you address that evil, clearly.
Chris: Is he a population controller?
Cy: It’s even worse than that, Chris. He’s an antinatalist. He believes no human being should be born because life is suffering and nobody asked for it. And you don’t have the right to impose that suffering on another person by bringing them into this world.
Joe: Can I just throw out that he is the logical conclusion in a lot of ways of the pro-choice arguments? Now, I want to be very clear. I’m not saying most pro-choicers agree with him or anything like that. I’m not saying that. But I am saying if your entire argument about why abortion should be legal involves just consent and everything else, then it does seem like, well, no one consents to being brought into the world and everyone is subject to a lot of suffering when they’re brought into the world.
And so if suffering in a thing you didn’t consent to is an evil that has to be avoided just by itself, well then he would be right. That life itself would be the enemy and we would want to have no more life.
And I’ve posed this to people before who think about things in terms of utilitarianism. You know, we got to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people and maximize pleasure and avoid suffering and all this, especially on the avoidance of suffering, to just say, okay, so hypothetically, if there was like a painless poison gas that would just wipe out the entire human population in a few seconds, no one’s left behind to grieve. It only kills humans. So animals are fine, whatever. Is that good or bad?
And on a utilitarian framework, you have to try to measure out, well, how much pleasure is there in life, how much pain is there in life in all of human civilization, all over the world? And in future generations, if you can’t just say, like, obviously annihilation is bad, you’ve got a bad moral philosophy. And so I would just point to that and say a lot of the ways we morally reason leave us open to this kind of insanity.
Cy: And it is, when you call it insanity, I think again, I’ll go back to Chesterton. I think it was Chesterton who said the insane is not illogical, but is logical.
Joe: Yeah, he’s lost everything but his logic.
Cy: Right. So like there’s…
Joe: Most of us will have a gut sense of like, yeah, I can see how this argument might logically lead to here, but that would be a crazy place to go. So I’m not going to go there, even though I don’t know why it’s wrong. And I think that’s where most pro-choicers are. They wouldn’t go so far as to say human extermination is good, but maybe they don’t have the philosophical framework or the moral framework to be able to tell you why it’s inherently evil.
Cy: I do want to not just remain in the difficult issue though, but to go back to the horrifying issue actually of the mental state of teens and 20-year-olds these days who are…
Joe: Yeah, can I talk about a couple angles of that?
Caller: Yeah, please.
Joe: Unless you have something really particular you were going to head to.
Caller: No, no, please go ahead.
Joe: I sort of suggested a lot of his thinking seemed intellectually consistent with certain aspects of like utilitarian thought. And it turns out he was a member of the Reddit community of efilism, which is “Life Backwards” as an anti-life community, and it had 12,000 members. Reddit just shut it down in response to this guy’s manifesto where he talks about how it inspired him to commit this act of intentional attempted murder.
And it’s adjacent to… It’s the more extreme wing of the antinatalist movement, which has like 230,000 users, and the child-free movement, where people are just volunteering that they will never have children, which has 1.5 million users. So there is a growing… Now, those are small numbers in the global scheme, I suppose, but when you think about people subscribing to movements that just say, like, life is evil and we should violently stop it, you would want that number to be closer to zero.
Joe: So that’s one angle. A lot of this is people spending way too much time online. And the LA Times article about the bombing, I wanted to quote from it. Victoria and Austin Shoup, artists who moved from Century City to 29 Palms a year ago, said that when the suspect’s name was made public, there was an oddity. They’d never seen him nor had anyone else they’ve talked to.
Austin Shoup, who owns a music studio in the area called Yucca Man Records, said, “Yeah, it’s the kind of town where you go to the grocery store and you see everyone.” So this is someone who was spending way too much time online and was not engaging in his own community. And that is like, almost a perfect image of exactly how not to live life if you want life to feel fulfilling.
The thing that’s so depressing about this in one sense is this was easy to solve. Like, go outside and touch grass. Get to know your neighbors. Go to the grocery store.
Caller: There’s no grass.
Chris: I’m not gonna say that. I’m sorry. Yeah, I was stationed at 29 Palms for…
Caller: There’s Marines.
Chris: Yeah, they’re the Marine Corps.
Joe: Did you know your neighbors?
Caller: Yes, of course.
Cy: Yeah, it’s like really out there in the middle of nowhere.
Chris: It is at Joshua Tree. It’s by Joshua Tree and Yucca Valley. Yucca Valley is probably the biggest.
Cy: I think what you’re saying is right on, Joe. And I feel like sometimes we should almost, you know, like the young people who are going in for surgeries and to change gender or they’re taking hormones. You almost feel like the protocol should be not just like you need to go through a battery of tests or anything. Like you need to not be online for a year. You know, stay away from a computer for a year.
I think so many good things are happening online. It really is tremendous. Like, we’re online, we get people who call and they came into the Catholic Church because of what they found online. I’m not saying it’s evil, but there’s something that it does to the young mind that is so dangerous. And they start…
Joe: It’s a matter of quantity in no small part. But, yeah, I mean, someone who… Sorry, I was sitting with this recently. I was at the grocery store and saw a young woman there, I don’t know, maybe 20. And she looked like she had not been outside in a long time. I mean, yeah, I don’t know a nicer way to kind of put that.
And she was wearing a shirt that said something like, “Not today, Depression.” And so it was clear that, like, she was kind of advertising that she struggled with mental health issues. And I just thought, like, man, from one look of knowing nothing else about her, I wanted to just be like, your life could be so much richer if you got completely offline, if you went outside more, if you were really intentional about forming friendships, and if you were just really solicitous about serving others.
I didn’t know her at all. And so, I don’t know, maybe that was completely off base.
Caller: So the devil.
Joe: But that was the immediate reaction. And I think for many people, it’s true.
Chris: The devil is very clever. He’ll turn the strength against. So even, you know, potentially listeners to this program or followers of the work of Catholic Answers are vulnerable to what Joe has described, I think, really well, as in large part, a question of quantity.
And if you’re spending eight hours in theological chat rooms talking about, you know, the principle of double effect or the Christological heresies that Leo sorted out, and you’re not going to the grocery store or to touch…
Cy: Grass, as Joe put it, or working at the food bank as a volunteer to do some stuff like take communion to the homebound. Something that’s real, that’s the real world.
Chris: None of us are above the lure of wasting too much time on screens and having it have a very deleterious effect on us.
Cy: I would like to just add this on the other side of that, though, and that is like the Instagram people, the Facebook people, and then now the TikTok people. They’re geniuses. They are intentionally attacking your brain to addict you to their product. This is not like you… You have to understand.
Joe: You don’t mean Thomas Graff. You mean people behind the scenes making the actual…
Cy: No, the people who make those platforms. They intend for you to waste the next three hours and then the next three years and then the next 30 years. That’s how they are making their advertising dollar, and they’re really good at it. You’re not that smart. You’re not that strong. You’re not better than they are at this. They are better than you at this. And you have to admit that to yourself.
I can’t turn on the… whatever Instagram and click the app and start scrolling through because I will look up three hours from now and I won’t know what I did for the last three hours. You have to realize they’re better at this than you are.
Chris: There was a rumor circulating for a day and a half or so that Pope Leo was not going to have…
Caller: Oh, I saw that.
Chris: Yeah. A Twitter account or an X account. I thought… I almost went into X to see…
Caller: I know, because you…
Joe: Is that an X?
Chris: But can you imagine the effect that that would have had if he’d said, you know what? At a minimum, the Holy See’s just going to take a pause here for a year. We’re not going to have an exam. The effect that something like the moral effect would have had. A lot of people said, you know what? I’m going to shut off my X.
Chris: Can we go back to Twitter? X is a stupid name.
Cy: X is a stupid name.
Joe: It is a stupid name.
Cy: All right. On that we all agree. We’ll take a quick break. Right back with more Flannel Panel on Catholic Answers Live.