Minneapolis ICE Protests Through the Left v. Right Brain Lens

Finding Balance in an Unbalanced World: Part 3

Minneapolis, MN. January 14, 2026 — photo: Ryan Murphy/Reuters via CNN

In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.

So said Soviet dissident Alexandr Solzhenitsyn in his masterwork The Gulag Archipelago. It’s one of my favorite quotes and these days that last line feels haunting. When I was sorting through the haystack of facts and claims regarding the Minneapolis ICE protests, it resonated strongly as it became apparent that there is plenty of truth to go around, as well as plenty of spin. Plenty of right and wrong, good and evil, on both sides.

Let me say for context: I am not a centrist. I consider myself primarily conservative but politically “unhoused” in our current polarized landscape. I support those who promote small government and small business interests against the corruption and encroachment of Big Government and Big Business, as those latter are now ubiquitous due to institutional and regulatory capture by globalist corporations. When it comes to making sense of events, I prize sources who offer candor and context. I’ve developed an allergy to anything that smacks of a tidy narrative, especially a righteous one with Good People and Bad People delineated by partisan loyalties. As a result I distrust all news media, whether “mainstream” Left or “alternative” Right, since both deliver propaganda (often unwittingly, I think) rather than parsing all the angles and pursuing hard facts wherever they (may inconveniently) lead. I follow independent investigative journalists—including those who occupy the so-called “fringe”—who are open about their biases and bring reliable receipts. I also listen to whistleblowers whose claims withstand scrutiny, and legal experts and political insiders who have access to the halls of power and the courage to speak truth there. I wouldn’t say I reflexively trust everything these sources say, but I do find they offer more dependable information and perspective than is typically found in partisan media circles since they aren’t molded to protect a fixed Narrative. If I had to articulate a single litmus test for who is worthy of my trust it would be: Are they willing to call balls and strikes regardless of party?

So … those are my biases.

It may seem strange I’d take up a hot political topic when I’ve deliberately steered clear of such imbroglios, having quickly burned out in my foray¹ into current events a year ago. But I think the controversy surrounding ICE enforcement in Minneapolis provides an opportunity to look at our political dynamics not through a moral lens, but rather through that of brain hemisphere differences, examining the clamor of competing claims to see more clearly how we think and—hopefully—to catch a truer glimpse of the world as it is.

Regular readers will know that I’ve been writing recently about the research of Dr. Iain McGilchrist on the divided brain and the differences in how our right and left hemispheres see and engage with reality. A fundamental truth underlying his work is that the way we attend to the world around us—where, and how, we place our attention—determines what we see. And what we see shapes how we experience reality, as well as the values we validate and cultivate in ourselves and in society around us. Dr. McGilchrist thus declares plainly: “Attention is a moral act.”

Thinking about the implications of that, I would put it this way:

Our attention is our most personal, effectual, and spiritual resource; how we deploy and direct it determines how we understand, move in, and contribute to this world.

Last essay, I wrote about my week of falling into the well of internet debate over events in Minneapolis—a fraught and compelling drama to be sure. A facet of that essay was looking at how my own brain’s left hemisphere kicked into gear, being hooked by its instinct to sort the data, define the villains and heroes, catalogue and prioritize the competing claims, and construct an air-tight analysis that would convince any reasonable person of how right and righteous my conclusions were. But here I’d like to offer a perspective that demonstrates (hopefully) the ability of the holistically-oriented right hemisphere to provide a more nuanced view—one we might call the awareness of truth as a double-edged sword.

For the benefit of new readers, though, I’ll first review how the divided brain functions when our minds are balanced. From last essay:

In my [first] essay I noted that Dr. McGilchrist uses the analogy of a master and his emissary (the title of his first book on the topic) to illustrate how the divided brain operates in a healthy mind: the right hemisphere serves as the wise master who sees the big picture, who understands nuance, perceives implicit meaning, recognizes the importance of context and inter-relationships; he values openness to new information or ideas and is comfortable with contradictions and paradoxes. The left hemisphere serves as the detail-oriented, data-driven emissary who excels in acquiring and organizing information and things, analyzing and managing knowledge out of context by compartmentalizing, cataloguing, and mapping; he values what is explicit and quantifiable and is comfortable with what is predictable, definable, and known.

You can see that in a balanced mind, these two hemispheres interact harmoniously to provide not just for well-being, but flourishing. In a healthy mind the right hemisphere depends on the left [… and] the left provides its useful service all while knowing it is assisting the right […].

The unfortunate glitch—what creates myriad conflicts within individuals and society (and me)—is that the left hemisphere’s limited vision, its inability to grasp the full picture, predisposes it to question the right brain’s lead role and try to co-opt it. Its impetus towards gain—getting, grabbing, grasping—skews naturally into an impetus to control. Thus, while the master appreciates and depends on his emissary, the emissary tends to dismiss his master as useless and seeks to assert himself as the smarter leader who should be making the decisions. And when it succeeds, it habitually mistakes its map—its mechanistic view—for the actual terrain, it misconstrues its reductive perception of reality for reality itself. And chaos ensues.

In other words, when we are thinking optimally, our left brain analyzes and provides data but defers to our right brain for synthesis of the information into a bigger, more complete and true picture—notably, one the left brain is incapable of seeing.

In the modern West, our unstinting pursuit of digital technology, our reverence for systems approaches to everything, and—especially—the replacing of God at the center of our human story with Rational Man has hyper-oriented us towards a management mindset (the instinct of the left brain towards power acquisition and control), and disoriented us away from a deeper, meaning-driven disposition (the realm of the right brain with its affinity for subtlety, complexity, and objectivity). The digital age and its algorithms feed the left brain’s penchant for narrowed perspective and decontextualized data. By design, they generate rabbit holes and hook into our hunger for certainty, satisfying our left brain’s desire for reductive black-and-white narratives that are un-muddled by contradictory facts or competing claims, much less by discomfiting moral ambiguity.

Regardless of where we stand on the political spectrum our brain’s left hemisphere will filter for our personal biases. That’s not news, I’m sure. We all can recognize our instinct to credit information and sources that confirm our beliefs and discredit those that contradict. But our right hemisphere can give us a different view, a literal overview. We just have to be able to recognize when our left brain is in its usurper mode, so that we can sit it down and shut it up. How do we do that, though? How do we recognize we are out of balance and what is the path to regain it?

Since one need only glance at social media in the last month to witness the left hemisphere dominating the debate, let’s consider how the ICE protests might appear when the right hemispheres leads the way.

Going in to my exploration of events in Minneapolis, which began with the death of Alex Pretti, my bias towards law, order, and accountability disposed me to sympathize with the ICE agents trying to enforce their mission, which is to say, do their difficult jobs. Watching the videos of Pretti’s shooting challenged that sympathy immediately as it appeared an extremely dubious use of deadly force given the specifics of the situation. Realizing that a “reasonable man” reading of the facts might align against my biases, I began examining the various claims and counter-claims not just in the death of Pretti, but in the overall standoff between ICE and protestors. And from there it grew clear that reality is not in the eye of the partisan beholder. In other words, two opposing fact-based claims can be true at the same time—something the right hemisphere instantly recognizes but the left hemisphere rejects.

To demonstrate what I mean, I compiled a series of examples which I acknowledge in no way cover the whole debate, and some could be broken down further into more specific competing claims, but I offer them as a basic illustration of the broad scope of reality:

• Alex Pretti had a Constitutional right to protest the ICE activity on that street and he was assuming serious risk by placing himself in the volatility of a hostile and unpredictable situation.

• Alex Pretti had a Constitutionally protected right to wear his legally permitted gun to the protest and he had a heightened responsibility (per his Minnesota concealed carry training) to avoid confrontations, especially with law enforcement.

• Protesting ICE activity by videoing and yelling insults and objections is protected free speech when it does not obstruct enforcement operations and protesters heighten the potential for being harmed when they intensify the stress and confusion under which agents operate as that increases the likelihood of errors, overreactions, or use of force.

• Videos of the Border Patrol agents engaging with Pretti show them escalating the encounter into violence and those agents, being totally untrained for it, should not have been tasked with hostile crowd control.

• Governor Walz and Mayor Frey invited chaos and harm with their rhetoric and refusal of local police assistance to apprehend criminal aliens and DHS Secretary Noem created chaos and harm by disregarding the advice of top immigration officials, including Tom Homan, to avoid operations in “sanctuary” jurisdictions because of the heightened risks to agents and civilians.

• Under the Constitution, ICE officers may forcibly enter private homes to arrest criminal aliens for whom they have signed judicial warrants and some ICE raids in Minneapolis were executed based on administrative warrants which do not authorize forced entry.

• Donald Trump is responsible for grievous avoidable harms to American citizens and migrants by pursuing reckless enforcement of his deportation policy and Joe Biden is responsible for grievous avoidable harms to American citizens and migrants by pursuing his reckless policy of open borders.

I imagine many people reading those examples can find one statement in each pair that resonates as true and valid while the other elicits a “yeah maybe, but…”. (It’s also quite possible both may elicit “yeah, but” as these juxtaposed claims are hardly the only takes one could have on the topics.) The point here isn’t to parse which side is more correct or what is the whole truth of ICE enforcement and protests, but simply to recognize that people on either the pro- or anti-ICE side have claims based in fact that support their perception of a just and righteous cause. And it is possible to see truth in the various competing claims so that the complexity of the moral and political predicament posed by enforcement activity comes into focus.

We’ve noted that when the hemispheres are acting in healthy balance, the brain’s left hemisphere analyzes and organizes information for the right hemisphere to synthesize and integrate into a picture of reality. But we’ve also noted that the left hemisphere excels at handling decontextualized data, that its mode of attention is a narrowed focus in pursuit of precision and detail, and that it tends towards self-certainty and dominance. So it’s not hard to see how our biases end up bolstered. The information processing side of our brain is disposed to weed out whatever undermines its certainty, to insist on its vision such that when we lean on it for our understanding we get a distorted view of reality, one that may be strong on technical facts but arranged so as to miss the true picture. As I shared in my previous essays:

Left hemisphere view versus Right hemisphere view

How do we know, then, when we are misperceiving reality?

One of Dr. McGilchrist’s most striking revelations is that while we experience our emotions through both hemispheres of our brain, there is one emotion that “lateralizes” primarily to one hemisphere. That is anger, and it lateralizes to the left. Which makes perfect sense given how that hemisphere operates—prone to grabbing and getting, prizing certainty, inclining to control. The lateralization of anger fits because the left hemisphere seems predisposed to ego activity—something I’ve not heard Dr. McGilchrist explicitly emphasize, I want to clearly say. But he has specified that both hubris and self-righteousness arise in the left hemisphere, so it seems a small leap to notice that ego is evident in many of our left hemisphere traits. All of which leads me to conclude that over-reliance on our left brain predisposes us to feel rock-solid in our certainty and our righteous indignation.

Of course, this is not to say moral outrage can’t be a healthy, appropriate response—one need only ponder for half a second the infamous Epstein Files to know it can. But righteous indignation seems a persistent, even epidemic feature of our digital age. We seem stuck in a self-perpetuating cycle of feeding, and feeding on, the left hemisphere’s distorting mode of attention through our reliance on digital media and algorithmic news curation. Thus, one way I clue-in that I am stuck in my left brain is when I notice myself leaning hard into feelings of righteous certainty. About anything.

Other clues are anger that I’m targeting too broadly (for example, being angry at everyone who doesn’t think the way I do on the issues I care about); leaning into black and white, either/or logic and being annoyed by or resisting nuance; thinking of other human beings in terms of labels or categories rather than as complicated people with hearts that hurt (like mine) and minds that struggle (like mine); being absorbed by the chatter inside my head—the noise of ego … to name just a few. So when I notice any of the above I try to let go of the negativity by leaning the other direction, welcoming a different perspective, seeking out opposing views. And I pray.

And when my right hemisphere takes the lead I can feel it. There’s a perceptible pull of opening up into possibilities, shifting into a more gracious, open-hearted attitude. Indeed, the right brain is the mind’s center for humble curiosity, for agenda-free questions. It’s the quiet space where we recognize that wisdom is not in knowing a lot, but in knowing how little we know. It is the part of us that poetry, literature, and art speak to and move. It is the higher mind, the observer self that can root us in equanimity and trust in our Maker if we mindfully practice making the shift: letting go of our ego demands, quieting its reflex.

In a sense, the reality of our divided brain is what Alexandr Solzhenitsyn perceived, lying there on rotting prison straw. He understood it as a line running through all our hearts and he wasn’t wrong. But that division is mirrored in our minds as well, reflected in our higher and lower selves which are defined by our God-centered and self-centered instincts and choices. These take shape and play out, for better or worse, through the way we use our minds, in how we attend to the world around us. Which brings us directly back to Iain McGilchrist’s compelling assertion, so perfectly in tune with Solzhenitsyn’s perception of the line that separates good and evil running through every human heart: Attention is a moral act. Indeed. Let us live up to the truth of that.

1. See the archives from late October 2024 through early April 2025 (https://leahrose.substack.com/archive)