Polarization and The Need for a Heart-Led Heterodoxy

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The week the country argued about something again

On January 13, 2026, the United States does not argue about immigration policy in the abstract. The United States argues about a dead woman in Minneapolis, a surge of federal immigration enforcement in Minnesota, and street-level confrontations that now function as a national Rorschach test.

Reporting describes a rapid escalation after an ICE officer fatally shot Renee Nicole Good, age 37, during an operation in Minneapolis. Federal officials defended the shooting and characterized Good’s behavior as a threat; Minnesota leaders disputed those claims and pointed to video evidence that complicates the official narrative.

Minnesota—joined by Minneapolis and St. Paul—filed suit to halt or limit the federal surge, while demonstrations and clashes expanded across multiple cities, including the use of tear gas during crowd confrontations.

I do not write this to litigate a single use-of-force decision from a single frame of video. I write because the ICE conflict now reveals something broader and uglier: the country’s fracture has reached a stage where a non-tribal person can name broken dynamics and still get rejected by both sides for naming them.

That pattern signals success—for every internal and external force that benefits when Americans treat politics as a blood sport instead of a truth-seeking process.

How the machine converts facts into loyalty tests

The Minneapolis killing illustrates the modern sequence:

1. Officials and influencers issue maximal claims at maximal speed.

2. The public sorts those claims into tribal bins before investigations conclude.

3. Each coalition uses the incident as moral fuel.

4. The impact of polarized policies sought on both sides is not given due consideration by either side.

In that environment, a reality-based sentence becomes radioactive.

• Say, “An officer can face a real threat and still make a wrong decision” — one side hears treason.

• Say, “A viral clip cannot substitute for an investigation” — the other hears evasion.

• Say, “Law matters and human dignity matters” — both sides hear weakness.

This is the point where the country stops arguing about what happened and starts arguing about what we are allowed to notice.

Polarization does not behave like a normal disagreement

Political polarization is not just disagreement. It’s a social identity war.

Jost, Baldassarri, and Druckman (2022) describe polarization as an “us versus them” mentality shaped by ego-justifying, group-justifying, and system-justifying motives. These motives make neutrality feel like betrayal and dissent feel like treason.

That is why partisanship no longer acts as voting preference. It acts as substitute religion.

One solution to having your amygdala on fire is rational thought processes. Or to realize that you are using gasoline, not water, to douse a flame. Or to realize that you are a patsy and you once swore to yourself to never become a tool for polarizing politics.

More connection can create more fracture

Thurner et al. (2025) modeled opinion formation in connected societies and showed that more connectivity can cause more polarization. They mapped the rise of polarization to the emergence of social media. Once a certain threshold is crossed, interaction accelerates divergence.

This matters because America has already crossed that threshold.

Everyone carries a broadcasting device. Everyone swims in algorithmic feeds. Everyone can join a digital crowd in seconds. The same tools that enable shared reality also enable synchronized outrage and refusal to revise beliefs.

You are consuming information now that is an outlier: We address polarization as corrosive. We call not for unity, but for study, regard, discipline and respect.

Even “exposure to the other side” can backfire

Bail et al. (2018) conducted a Twitter randomized experiment. Republicans who followed a liberal bot became more conservative. Democrats showed slight, statistically insignificant shifts. The point: polarization is not an information deficit. Exposure is not the cure.

Content becomes ammunition, not illumination.

Division has beneficiaries

Simchon, Brady, and Van Bavel (2022) showed how trolls exploit polarization with targeted rhetoric. Domestic influencers do the same. Outrage scales. It converts into donations, votes, followers, power.

Polarization spreads because someone profits.

The independent problem, quantified

Gallup (2025): 45% of Americans identify as political independents.

Pew (2025): 25% say neither party represents them even somewhat well.

These aren’t outliers. They are a suppressed majority. But the duopoly treats independence as illegible.

Why I refuse “safe harbor” politics

I am neither a Democrat nor a Republican.

Not because I reject every tenet from either party—but because I reject laundering conscience through a party filter.

I became independent long before the slogans MAHA or MAGA. I adopted a creed: logic, reason, and reality-based knowledge. I did this for the next generation and for the one after that.

The left shifted toward intolerance for heterodox inquiry. The right shifted toward performative certainty. Neither side can understand how they do this. Rather, rach side claims to fight authoritarianism while practicing it.

I have refused to provide safe harbor to either.

The ICE moment as a stress test for national character

ICE is now a symbol.

• To some: law, order, border integrity.

• To others: state violence, fear, and dehumanization.

The Renee Good case in Minnesota shows what happens when the symbol swallows the human story.

Federal officers claimed threat; Minnesota officials challenged the claim. The state’s own investigators withdrew, citing blocked access to evidence. Meanwhile, federal expansion continued: 12,000 new officers, reduced training, oversight staff cut.

They Served, Became Infected Vaccinated, and Died. Most Were Vaccinated.

No one points to the 79 fallen ICE officers who died in the line of duty, 19 of which died since 2020, all but three whom are alleged to have died from work-related exposure to the SARS-CoV-2 virus (COVID-19) without any investigation into whether they were vaccinated or not.

All who died after December, 2020 were vaccinated (per ICE mandate).

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) employees were subject to a mandatory COVID-19 vaccination policy as part of a government-wide mandate for federal employees. The mandate was implemented via Executive Order 14043 in September 2021. This mandate was formally ended when President Biden issued Executive Order 14099 on May 9, 2023,

There was never a mandate to vaccinate individuals in ICE custody.

Families of ICE members lost “to COVID-19” acquired in the field while serving might want to study #PathogenicPriming and start asking questions.

This is not just about immigration.

This is about equal concern for deaths and counting human beings as human beings whether they attack ICE, or being held in custody by ICE, or are ICE employees.

When policy maps 1:1 to biased concern for life in categories of people based on roles, the heart is disconnected from the mind.

The heart-led heterodoxy

“From the heart” means moral seriousness, not sentiment.

It starts with three refusals:

1. Refuse to turn humans into symbols.

2. Refuse to outsource your epistemology and disregard inconvenient facts.

3. Refuse to confuse power with legitimacy.

Then it affirms:

- Evidentiary humility. Know what you know. State what you do not. THEN proceed.

- Procedural dignity. Due process even for people you dislike.

- Moral reciprocity. No double standards.

- Accountability without hysteria.

Applied to ICE

• Demand full investigation. No premature moral verdicts. This is baked into ICE policy. No soft peddling any officers’ incorrect behavior. The cost? You might find no wrong-doing in spite of your priors.

• Demand oversight. Hiring without training and oversight is governance failure.

• Reciprocity on behavior. Except citizens interacting with ICE officers to protect their rights, too.

• Demand civil protections. Constitutional rights don’t pause during surges.

• Reject dehumanization on all sides.

This is not neutrality. This is allegiance to process over power.

Conclusion

The machine will find another flashpoint next week. The only immunity is civic adulthood:

• Law matters.

• Human beings matter.

• Truth-seeking processes matter.

A new heterodoxy must rise. Not from the left. Not from the right. From the heart. From you.

Because the heart guiding the mind to reason first can still insist that truth and love belong together—and only that insistence can break the spell of tribal hatred.

Citations

1. Jost JT, Baldassarri DS, Druckman JN. Cognitive-motivational mechanisms of political polarization in social-communicative contexts. Nat Rev Psychol. 2022;1(10):560-576. doi:10.1038/s44159-022-00093-5. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-022-00093-5

2. Bail CA, Argyle LP, Brown TW, et al. Exposure to opposing views on social media can increase political polarization. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2018;115(37):9216-9221. doi:10.1073/pnas.1804840115. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1804840115

3. Thurner S, Hofer M, Korbel J. Why more social interactions lead to more polarization in societies. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2025;122(44):e2517530122. doi:10.1073/pnas.2517530122. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2517530122

4. Simchon A, Brady WJ, Van Bavel JJ. Troll and divide: the language of online polarization. PNAS Nexus. 2022;1(1):pgac019. doi:10.1093/pnasnexus/pgac019. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgac019