Regeneration through Violence

How America's mono-myth fuels a death cult

Charlie Kirk’s killer, Tyler Robinson, dressed as Pepe the Frog, the Groyper mascot.

I felt mixed emotions to discover that Charlie Kirk was shot by 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, a Far Right “Groyper” who grew up in a gun-loving, Trump-loving Mormon family in Utah. Under the leadership of FBI director Kash Patel, a former extremist podcaster and conspiracy theorist, the FBI flubbed their investigation, failing to find the shooter, despite many clues. Robinson’s father, a minister, figured out it was his son from the photos caught by security cameras, and turned him in.

For those who still don’t know, Groypers are an ultra-radicalized group of primarily young White men led by rabid extremist Nick Fuentes, a 28-year-old podcaster who screeches, cackles, and spews contempt like a tormented goblin. Notable statements from Fuentes include: “I am just like Hitler”; “Being Right-Wing is all about ‘hating women, being racist, being Antisemitic;’” and the ever-popular “Your body, my choice.” Unfortunately, we are seeing the ongoing mainstreaming of hate speech in the U.S., which ultimately leads to stochastic terrorism, vigilanté violence, and may get much worse.

On one level, Groypers like Fuentes want the U.S. to become a Christian theocracy under an absolute dictator, where minorities have no rights and poor people get treated with cavalier cruelty. Such ideas are becoming increasingly mainstreamed by the Right (a Fox News announcer just mentioned that he thought homeless people should be given “involuntary lethal injections,” i.e. mass-murdered). Fuentes first gained prominence by attacking Kirk — an ultra-extreme neo-Fascist — for being too moderate, pro-Israel, and not anti-democratic enough.

But another element in the Groyper ideology is pure nihilism. Groypers see themselves as “black pilled.” To get “black-pilled” is to reach complete pessimism: Society is irredeemably broken; total collapse is inevitable. Coming out of the Incel and Doomer subcultures, “Black-pilling” twists the “red pill” idea of confronting hidden truths (The Matrix) into absolute fatalism. Nothing can be fixed. If all efforts to improve the world are pointless, you might as well accelerate the forces of destruction. The engravings on the shell casings used in Kirk’s assassination refer to black-pill subcultures. The murder itself was a symbolic “shit-post,” an extreme form of trolling.

Learning that Kirk was killed by a MAGA-loving White Christian Groyper and not a Latino purple-haired trans person or Gen X anarchist, I felt a great sense of relief. My nervous system relaxed a bit. I am seriously alarmed by the vitriolic hatred from Right Wing influencers against “the Left,” which, for them, includes the county’s 45 million Democrats. Many Right Wing influencers demanded retaliatory violence against progressives and liberals, threatening civil war, “air strikes” against Blue cities, and so on. They blamed “the Left” for the killing — even before anyone knew who did it or what their motive was.

In the immediate aftermath of Kirk’s murder, Elon Musk — one of the wealthiest men in the world, in control of a massive corporate/technocratic empire — called for mass violence against “the Left” to his hundreds of millions of followers. “We have to fight,” he wrote. “The Left is the party of murder.” Last weekend, Musk told a UK nationalist leader that the Right in England should destroy their own government and disband Parliament. Musk is seeking to incite civil war in the US and Europe to destroy Democracy and institute Fascist technocracy. He has become very unhinged, posing a real danger to humanity’s collective future.

Trump, predictably, called out “the Left” as responsible for Kirk’s death. It seemed the Right intended to use Kirk’s death as their Reichstag Fire incident. They were ready to take their hatred to another level, revoking whatever civil rights we might still possess, ending free speech for their political opponents, and perhaps imprisoning their perceived enemies, or worse. The technique of the Right is to intensify the threats against liberals and progressives as they look for an opportunity to take the next step toward martial law and/or genocidal violence, which requires hyping themselves into a kind of trance state. The liberal mainstream response has been pathetically tepid.

Anyway, as I said, I had mixed emotions: While I feel relief that the shooter’s identity derails the histrionic narratives demanding apocalyptic violence against liberals and Leftists, I also feel sad for the deluded, entranced, deeply lost and confused MAGA men — young men like Tyler Robinson, who come out of an American reality that I don’t know well. The same day Robinson ended the life of the (let’s be honest) despicable Charlie Kirk, another teenager who was apparently radicalized by the Far Right, Desmond Holly, 16, critically injured two students at Evergreen High School in Denver before killing himself. This is so frequent at this point that the media covers it summarily before passing on to the next traumatic nightmare. And of course, despite the Right Wing echo-chamber decrying the Left as the party of violence, we know the overwhelming majority of these acts come from Right Wing extremists.

By saying I feel sad and sorry for these deluded young men and teenage boys who end up destroying their lives to commit senseless acts of homicidal violence, I should also say that I feel sad and sorry for all of us who are strapped in this “civilization” or planetary suicide machine with them. Our information ecosystem is utterly polluted by primitive, evil, and false ideologies. These seem to be propagating like viruses, becoming more infectious.

Indoctrinated by media and religion since birth, most people can’t think clearly for themselves. With their nervous systems wired into the instantaneous dopamine surges of electronic media from childhood, they easily get fixated on extremist delusions. Some start to yearn for cathartic, apocalyptic violence as the only way to address their deep sense of frustration and nihilistic despair.

I want to step back and explore how we reached this point in the U.S., particularly. Along with all of the obvious reasons for our degeneration (rampant wealth accumulation, hyper-individualism, consumerism, ecological decimation, gun fetishism, etc), I also think we need to understand the mythic causes — archetypes buried deep in the American Psyche, developed over centuries.

When I was at Wesleyan University, one of our Professors, historian Richard Slotkin, published Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier (1600 - 1860), and, later, Gunfighter Nation, where he looked at Hollywood Westerns as expressions of the American meta-myth. I never took a course with Slotkin, but his basic ideas stuck with me, and in the wake of Kirk’s killing, I keep reflecting on them.

In Regeneration through Violence, Slotkin argues that the pioneers who came to America brought with them a mythological structure which, over time, they had to change and adapt to their new conditions, along with other inherited ideas and social forms. “The English colonists had to remake their values, their concepts of law and religion, and their images of their role and place in the universe in order to survive in the wilderness.” He looked at the Daniel Boone myth of the solitary individual who conquers nature — and overcomes his own primal instincts — as the mythic archetype of the American hero.

Pre-conquest European mythologies often imagined the far West—the place where the sun set—as a liminal threshold, the way of passage to the realms of death, dreams, and hidden powers. In early Irish myth, the Otherworld lay across the western sea: in The Voyage of Bran (written in the 8th century), Bran sails west to Tír na nÓg, where “neither sorrow nor death nor decay can touch you”. He returns to find centuries have passed, marking it as a timeless land of the dead. Greek sources likewise placed the Isles of the Blessed and Elysium “at the ends of the earth… by deep-eddying Ocean” (Hesiod). Hercules must travel to the far West to the Garden of the Hesperides to seize the golden apples, a classic descent to the other world to bring back a boon. In Homer, Odysseus sails west to reach the land of the dead. In medieval Christian world maps, the western ocean was imagined as a demonic, death-haunted void, contrasted with the paradisal East. This symbolic geography was integrated into the Age of Discovery.

The West was the underworld—“the dark, hidden realm… where abide the forces that silently and inscrutably shape the destiny of men,” writes Slotkin. When Europeans turned toward the Americas, they were already primed to see westward conquest as a perilous descent into death, from which new life and power could be attained. Slotkin writes:

In the mythology of Europe, the West and its peoples were strongly associated with the kingdom of death and dreams, the underworld—in psychological terms, the unconscious. In the archetypal mythology of the heroic quest, which informs all accounts of the Age of Discovery, it is the journey to the underworld that is the essential, necessary action. In this dark, hidden realm abide the forces that silently and inscrutably shape the destiny of men, nations, and the physical universe.

Culturally and individually, the journey to the New World was a form of mythological and initiatory ordeal for English and later European colonists fleeing persecution or poverty, or seeking expansive wealth. The journey to the New World represented an archetypal initiatory passage for both individuals and society. As in all initiatory journey myths, the goal is to cross over into the other world of vision to attain power or win the magic talisman that transforms or redeems or regenerates the dying, depleted world which the hero leaves behind.

The New World functioned as the site of collective initiation for the constrained European psyche, suffering for many centuries under the yoke of monarchs:

The most striking quality of life in the New World was the relative absence of social restraints on human behavior, the relative ease with which a strong man could, by mastering the law of the wilderness-jungle, impose his personal dream of self-aggrandizement on reality. In Europe all men were under authority; in America all men dreamed they had the power to become authority.

The internalized mythology of taming and dominating an unruly or out-of-control nature — regeneration through violence — along with the sense of a limitless frontier of possibility helps explain why the United States became, in the 19th and 20th centuries, the locus of technological progress and innovation.

As Claude Levi-Strauss and Patrick Harpur, among others, have noted, myths are deep structures or “grammars” within the unconscious. Even the negation or inversion of a myth continues its underlying form, as variant. In The Philosopher’s Secret Fire, Harpur explores how scientific materialism is a mythological inversion of pagan, indigenous, and alchemical ideas of a spiritually animated cosmos. Materialism functions as a variant on those older myths, rather than a negation of them.

Modern American society held onto this mythological construct — the pioneer myth — of a wild nature that must be dominated, controlled, or “broken” by a new form of Europeanized society, industry, and technology too tightly. We took it too far. We transformed our beautiful country into a hideous sprawl of malls, golf courses, suburban housing, and Interstate highways, while trapping our people into electronic media-scapes that displace traditional forms of community connection with canned narratives and commercial vacuity.

We took the violence that the pioneers directed against the “other” of nature, as well as against the indigenous cultures which represented communion with nature as a spiritual potency, and we turned it against ourselves.