Obviously I can't speak to your exact situation but the perverse justification I've seen far too often is "if we don't denounce (aka attack) X group then those people will go to hell, so we must attack them and they'll either change and be saved or well know they're sent by Satan"

It's wild stuff for sure. The behaviors are troubling no matter what, but there's an established spectrum of behavior for people who take knives to things. A tendency to escalate that's inherent to the other stuff too, some of which has also been quite nasty.