By any measure, in the world of public safety, 2025 has already been a brutal year. Mass shootings, targeted assassinations, religiously motivated attacks—with each tragedy providing shock for a day, trending for a week or so, and then receding into the next in a now all too familiar pattern. Yet if we look beyond the headlines we begin to see an even more insidious pattern. Across countries, ideologies, and belief systems, we are witnessing how the rise of a culture of grievance—a global phenomenon in which personal anger and perceived injustice are amplified by digital echo chambers—becomes hardened into ideology, and is far too often expressed through tragic violence.

Of course, grievance has always existed. But what’s new is the speed and scale at which it now circulates and metastisizes. Once confined to small circles of like-minded individuals or localized communities, grievance today spreads instantly across algorithmic platforms designed to maximize engagement through clicks. And the more emotional, divisive, or extreme a piece of content is, the more likely it is to be shared, liked, and monetized.

Social media algorithms, once hailed as tools of modern connection, have become amplifiers of alienation and rage. They feed users a steady diet of outrage and validation, creating a closed feedback loop where anger is rewarded, empathy is eroded, and violence can start to seem like the logical conclusion to a moral crusade.

Political Grievance in Minnesota

In June, Minnesota was rocked by one of the most brazen political assassinations in modern American history. Vance Luther Boelter, armed and dressed as a police officer, went house to house targeting state legislators. Senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette were shot multiple times in their home. Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark were murdered in theirs.

Boelter carried a list of dozens of additional political targets—lawmakers, judges, and public figures he associated with abortion rights and progressive governance. His motive was clear: he viewed the political establishment as corrupt and irredeemable.

This was not spontaneous rage. It was personal, political grievance transformed into violence, no doubt exacerbated through the consumption of polarizing narratives online. By impersonating law enforcement, Boelter cloaked his vendetta in the guise of legitimacy—a vigilante act masquerading as justice.

The Charlie Kirk Shooting

Just weeks later, another act of politically motivated violence made headlines: the fatal shooting of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk during a speaking event in Orem, Utah.

While the precise motive has not yet been definitely established, investigators believe the shooter spent months immersed in online spaces filled with vitriol toward conservative figures, and saw Kirk as a symbol for everything he hates. The shooter’s digital history over the past year appears to point to a building crescendo of rage and grievance spiraling into obsession.

While the Minnesota and Utah attacks came from opposite ends of the political spectrum, they share the same psychological architecture. In both, grievance evolved in digital isolation, metastasized in echo chambers, and culminated in symbolic violence.

Religious Hatred in Michigan and Manchester, England

In September, the same pattern reappeared in Grand Blanc, Michigan. Thomas Jacob Sanford rammed his truck into a Latter-day Saints chapel, opened fire on worshippers, and then set the building ablaze. Four people were killed, eight wounded.

Sanford’s hatred for the LDS Church was years in the making—personal disappointment twisted into theological hostility. Acquaintances recalled his obsessive rants against Mormonism, many of which echoed the conspiratorial language found in online anti-religious communities.

Again, a personal grievance found resonance in digital extremism. The line between private resentment and public massacre has never been thinner.

Only days later, across the Atlantic, worshippers leaving a synagogue in Manchester were attacked on Yom Kippur. The assailant drove into pedestrians before stabbing congregants, and two other congregants lost their lives in the melee. Investigators quickly labeled it a terrorist act with ties to Islamist radicalization.

Though the cultural context differs, the mechanism is the same: alienation meets amplification. The attacker’s sense of grievance—against Jews, against the West, against imagined oppressors—was not born in isolation. It was nurtured by the digital ecosystems that now span borders and languages, reinforcing every bias and magnifying every rage.

A Global Pattern of Self-Reinforcing Grievance

What connects these acts—from the church in Michigan to the synagogue in Manchester, from the killings in Minnesota and Utah—is not ideology but architecture. The modern architecture of grievance is a globally connected ecosystem.

Every grievance, no matter how fringe, can now find a home somewhere online. Every echo chamber only serves to breed its counter-echo chamber. Every act of violence serves to inspire a new thread of digital martyrdom. The many platforms that host our online discourse—Facebook, X, TikTok, Telegram, Discord, YouTube—these are not neutral spaces. They are engines of reinforcement, where algorithms favor the sensational over the substantive and outrage over understanding.

In this environment, grievance becomes identity. Identity becomes ideology. And ideology, untethered from reality, becomes justification for violence.

We see this not just in the West, but globally: sectarian riots in India, political assassinations in Latin America, attacks on Christian churches in Nigeria, mosque bombings in Pakistan, far-right and far-left terrorism in Europe. The specifics may differ, but the same pattern repeats: grievance amplified, dehumanization normalized, violence rationalized.

The Feedback Loop of Violence

Each act of violence now feeds the next, with the violent actors often finding inspiration and motivation from those that came before them.

News coverage amplifies the spectacle, social media magnifies the rhetoric, and extremists—whether religious, nationalist, or ideological—mine each tragedy for validation. Attackers often cite their predecessors, echo their language, even mimic their tactics. The feedback loop between outrage and violence becomes self-sustaining.

Crucially, the multiple digital platforms—driven by engagement metrics—rarely slow this process. Their code is designed to reward anger, polarization, and emotional volatility because these generate clicks and the resulting profit. What the world experiences as radicalization, the algorithm sees as “user retention.”

Staying Ahead of Hate

So, what to do?  To stay ahead of hate, while it’s helpful and necessary to understand the motives behind each of these incidents, we have to think beyond the individual attacker, as this challenge is systemic.

  • Technology companies must treat radicalization as a design problem, not a public-relations issue.
  • Governments and civic institutions must invest in early warning systems that recognize online-to-offline escalation.
  • Faith and community leaders must build spaces for grievance to be expressed and defused before it metastasizes into violence.
  • Media outlets must learn to report responsibly—exposing hate without amplifying it.

Above all, societies must confront the fact that the culture of grievance thrives when truth itself is fragmented—when every group, every believer, every citizen can live inside a custom-made universe of resentment.

If social media is the soil in which grievance grows unchecked, then we must confront the environment in which these ideas grow. The alternative is a world perpetually primed for violence—a world where every ideology believes itself under siege and every outrage demands retribution.

The stakes could not be higher.

Headshot of John Gill, Executive Vice President of Business Development at Kaseware.

Author
John Gill
Executive Vice President of Business Development