Americans die in great numbers every day from causes that rarely occupy the nightly news for months on end. Murders of innocent people hollow out neighborhoods. Drunk drivers kill families on our highways. The opioid scourge takes over 100,000 a year. These deaths are not trivia; they are a steady hemorrhage. Yet Capitol Hill treats them like weather—tragic, inevitable, inconvenient—until the political class itself feels threatened. Only then do politicians who can command a microphone anytime they want, and the media eager to provide it, manufacture the appearance of crisis.
Yesterday's Isolated Acts vs. Today's Industry
There is precedent for political violence that rises from individuals: the Unabomber, the Atlanta bomber, the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Those attacks were monstrous and consequential, but they were scattered—acts of isolated people with warped grievances. They were horrifically personal departures from a broader social script. That is not what we are watching now.
What makes the present different is scale and intention. For the past three decades a profitable ecosystem has learned to weaponize outrage. Politicians realized they could convert hatred and grievance into votes; media entrepreneurs realized they could convert hatred into clicks and subscriptions. A cottage industry of contempt took root: pundits, campaign managers, and donors all earn if the nation stays perpetually furious. Rage is no longer a byproduct of grievance; it's a product line.
The Unabomber wasn't responding to an atmosphere deliberately created by politicians trying to win elections or influencers trying to monetize their audiences. His violence emerged from personal pathology, not from a system that rewarded inflammatory rhetoric. Today's political violence grows from different soil entirely. When the famous English bank robber Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he reportedly said "because that's where the money is." Well, now the money is in stoking rage—and like any industry where there's profit to be made, the supply grows to meet demand.
When Words Become Weapons
When you manufacture grievance as a strategy, you don't just stoke tempers—you reshape norms. The screen between rhetorical excess and physical harm becomes tissue paper. Repeatedly telling a population that opponents are monsters, traitors, or existential threats does not exist in a rhetorical vacuum. It rewires how people see one another. It makes extreme steps feel rational to the aggrieved.
Selective Outrage
Politicians respond differently depending on who is at risk. A child killed by a stray bullet in a poor neighborhood is quickly catalogued and then forgotten. A town mourns and goes on. But when a member of Congress gets a threatening note, the cameras converge and committees convene. That asymmetry reveals a cruel arithmetic of political attention: the powerful are concerned about what effects them.
Profiting from Contempt
The political class benefits from that imbalance. There is real money and influence to be made in professionalizing rage. Fundraising emails that scream for donations. Cable panels that stoke paranoia. Social-platform algorithms that favor the loudest ire. These incentives do not operate evenly across society; they concentrate influence in the hands of those who already have microphones. And those microphones broadcast a steady diet of dehumanization, which is the fuel of violence.
Social Media and the Internet
Yes, social media and the internet amplify these dynamics in ways we've never seen before. But let's not pretend this is the first time transformative technology has rattled society. When rock and roll appeared 75 years ago, critics were convinced it would destroy youth and the very fabric of civilization. There are always growing pains when something fundamentally changes how people communicate.
The AI revolution will create a whole new set of dilemmas for society, just as the printing press, radio, and television did before it. But the current problem isn't caused by teenagers in Reddit chatrooms or random people posting angry memes. It's caused by mostly adults—politicians trying to get elected, media figures building audiences, influencers monetizing outrage—who discovered they could capitalize on the reach and speed these platforms provide.
This isn't about shadowy left or right-wing movements plotting in secret. It's simpler and more banal: individuals and political groups saw an opportunity to profit from division, and they took it. The platforms didn't create the appetite for hatred; they just made it easier to feed and more profitable to satisfy.
Context Matters
I am not saying rhetoric alone is a sufficient cause of homicide. People have always committed unthinkable crimes for personal reasons. But context matters. A culture that normalizes contempt as a political tactic lowers the bar for the next step. If you live in an environment where demonizing an outgroup is routine and rewarded, the leap from invective to action becomes shorter, and the pool of people who might "take matters into their own hands" grows.
The Tipping Point
We have already seen the consequence of that lowering. Incidents that once would have been outliers now look like small waves in a rising tide. The January 6 insurrection wasn't a spontaneous outburst in a vacuum; it was the summation of months and years of sustained delegitimization. The shooters and bombers of the past were often loners acting on private obsessions. Today's climate offers a chorus in which loners can feel endorsed, and even organized.
The Reckoning Ahead
The cynical will say this is naiveté—that outrage is a reliable engine for turnout and donations, and that those who benefit from it will not voluntarily surrender it. Maybe. But if politicians keep doing these things and the public continues to demonstrate an appetite for it, then this kind of political violence will not just continue—it will grow and likely accelerate. Which is why the rest of us must call the bargain what it is: a trade in which short-term political advantage and monetary profit is paid for with long-term civic risk.
We have choices. We can continue to treat political violence as an occasional freak storm—something that happens to other people until it happens to us. Or we can recognize the pattern: a marketplace that trades in hatred will eventually produce catastrophes that cost not just headlines but lives. If we want elected officials to stay safe, we must start by making everyone else safer—and by making demonization a losing business model, not a profit center.
Until then, the violence will not confine itself to Washington. It will spill across zip codes, into classrooms and cars, and into living rooms. And when the next act of political violence finally shocks the nation, don't be surprised if someone looks around and says, "Who could have guessed?" The answer will sit in the click metrics.