Originally published Dec 12, 2025 for our weekly Issue of Mindful Intelligence Advisor. Subscribe to get weekly issues.
By Paul Gordon Collier, Editor
“We become more polarized, and more polarizing, when we start spending our time in polarizing environments. I have seen it in myself, and I have watched it in others: when we’re going for retweets, or when our main form of audience feedback is coming from partisan junkies on social media, it subtly but importantly warps our news judgement. It changes who we cover and what stories we chase. And when we cover politics in a more polarized way, anticipating or absorbing the tastes of a more polarized audience, we create a more polarized political reality.” – Ezra Klein (Why We’re Polarized)
In our first ever Bellwether Deepdive, we saw the descent into social-driven ideologies across three nations. One of those nations, England, gave birth to the Lockean world of “liberalism,” the notion that bad action should be given free reign until it harms others.
This liberty is allowed for the sake of good action being able to freely take place as well (for no “expert” can perfectly define what “good action” is in the first place).
The other two nations, America and Canada, are direct descendants of the first, the mother nation, Britain. In Canada, they mostly followed the Common Law path like Britain in pursuit of individual liberty. In America, we followed a Constitutionally buttressed Rule of Law. One dramatically slowed down gun confiscations, the constitutional one, and the other two surrendered their guns as soon as the first wave of fear hit the public after a mass shooting event.
In the constitutional republic, while America is the mother of wokeness (with the Europeans building the seed that made wokeness possible), Canada and the UK have fallen far more profoundly than the source for wokeness has.
The ability to dramatically alter government power is an incentive to use mass hysteria manipulation to create more government power at the further cost of liberty. Wherever great power exists, in any institution, the incentive to offer grand promises increases, leaving well-intended, virtuous players with the difficult decision of surrendering their integrity or losing the contest altogether.
Great power attracts just the kind of people who are good at playing such games, psychopaths and psychotics, people less inclined to hesitate in their self-empowering actions even it means hurting, or even killing thousands, or even millions of their neighbors.
Even within America, corporate power centers have created de facto nations within America in which their powers are easily enhanced with a little mass hysteria manipulation. The left and right in America, for instance, are regularly begging the corporate state to censor their opposition on social media platforms.
For a while, this was inordinately a “leftist” problem, but its increasingly a rightist problem as well. The internecine war within the right over Israel alone has produced the same anti-American spirits in them as they originally fought against in the left.
To some degree, both left and right in America are becoming increasingly social-driven in their values as opposed to individual driven. This is happening to some degree in the UK but not so much in Canada. In the UK, the “right” effectively has no voice, but an emerging “Britain for the British and England for the English” group is emerging.
Though the conservatives and reform seem to be unevenly dividing the spoils of the Britian for the British crowd, neither party is remotely engaging pragmatically with the existential occupation of the country by an anti-UK party. The party of the British has yet to be identified, though there are many contenders. The leaders, reform and conservatives, are effectively woke-captured, if not woke themselves.
In Canada, the right is a pause that gives an increasingly small number of Canadians the illusion of enfranchisement. The fecklessness of the right leaves it with no real power to quibble over, though it too is effectively woke-captured. The “Canada for Canadians” crowd forming is not a strong as the “Canada become America” crowd forming in the Western Provinces.
The one who offers gold and blood gets the votes where the state has the power to attempt to deliver it.
In America, the state was bypassed by the corporate state, who then normalized anti-Americanism in the socio-cultural products and services it provided and how it managed the help.
As anti-American “values” become normalized, they become more accepted in our schools, which are also dominated by these same social-driven ideologies, the “woke.” Though it started in the schools, it was only AFTER the corporate state adopted it that it started to inflict real harm on the American republic and the innocent lives of Americans.
Unlike Britian and Canada, ironically, the American corporate state was able to lead the worldwide vanguard of wokeness because it could change its corporate governance the easiest. The same unaccountable power was first found in the universities, where “wokeness” first gained its real territorial foothold.
In an institution with unchecked power, the leaders are those that offer heaven and threaten hell, those that offer gold and blood. Social-driven ideologies are tailor-made for such narratives. It is hard to generalize in individual-driven narratives, for good or for ill.
Initially, the American corporate state was the incubator for social-driven ideologies writ on human flesh at a large scale, but once wokeness infiltrated the governments of Canada and the UK, they became even more powerful incubators. The woke institutions went from indirectly having government guns (through the protections government offered these infiltrated insurrectionist institutions) to having them directly.
These governments lacked first the constitutional bulwark, then the armed populace bulwark. These nations became woke paradises selling fake fear and false hope in exchange for real power they never intend on returning.
These social-driven ideologies imagine that a finite number of individuals can centrally determine truth for the overwhelming whole. They not only CAN but they MUST protect the unwashed from untruths. The promise is always part revenge and part Utopia.
Anything that offends the established preferred social identities is untruth in and of itself. The experts, who inform the state, should be our primary guides in evolving our understanding of what the perfect social is and how to assure the perfect social is protected from subversive action.
They are so certain of their possession of truth they are willing to lie, cheat, steal, assault, rape, and murder to assure their truth is affirmed by their neighbors. Not only are they willing to do it, they feel as if their neighbors deserve it.
As a matter of fact, to NOT support this punishment and to NOT participate in it, is a dog whistle that you belong to the evil outside group in secret.
Social media rose in the backdrop of a generation of college students being quietly “educated” in anti-American thinking, in social justice thinking. These digital entrepreneurs became the first real enforcers of a woke code that, without social media in the first place, would never have been so near-instantly, near-universally, enforceable.
And all it took was no more than a few hundred woke-manipulated college students to grow to become anti-American technocrats now fighting the other centers of woke power for hegemony in a post-world America they all hoped for.
Social media amplified and normalized the woke code not only through its content moderation governance and its algorithms that caused certain content to get promoted over others, but also through its content creators. These creators were incentivized to drive narratives through offerings of heaven and threats of hell, and promises of gold and blood, because strong emotions drive engagement, and engagement makes money.
How to make an agit-prop agent: Control the social media moderation team. Control the social media algorithm machine. Pay for clicks. Watch the agit-prop creators emerge. No training necessary. The algorithm will train them.
Social-driven ideologies are click-baith ideologies, always offering the grandest of statements about the evil nature of this social group and the noble nature of this social group. They always tell the dramatic lie of a dragon versus a small but brave and noble angel who needs corporate and state power to even have a CHANCE at defeating the great dragon who would otherwise consume us all.
Where power is unchecked, social-driven ideologies reign. Where power is checked, social-driven ideologies die. Social-driven ideologies thrive with great, fluid power, but wither within systems that move with the speed of a balance of power checked by individual liberty.
Ever since Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the social-driven ideology has fought to make it back into America, where it found unsafe harbor in a land still largely held in check by individual power. It found oxygen in the universities, who were allowed to thug on woke’s political opposition unchecked by simply shutting the hiring door behind them once they got in.
Once the gates were built, the wokeness spread throughout the departments, with the physical sciences even now boldly attempting to hold out, the last of a dying American age.
Had social media not come along, creating a network of dopamine need fiends dependent on platforms controlled by an elite woke few, perhaps wokeness would have died in American universities. Once it got out in the wild, once social media spread throughout the world, wherever governments had centralized power, wokeness took root like it still hasn’t here in America.
As always, history is complicated, but my somewhat simplified narrative is still essentially true: Educators created technocrats who created platforms where the clickocracy could reign.
Politicians who know that their customers will follow rage bait must either choose to remove themselves from the playing field or start screaming angels and demons and singing promises of blood and gold.
Otherwise, they have no chance in a clickbait world. With social media, and a corporate press to protect you, the woke politician has all the incentive in the world to drive heaven and hell, gold and blood narratives, truth be literally damned.
One could theorize that the clickopoly is the product of social-driven culture and also the perpetuator of it. The less power the corporation, the state has over the individual, the less effective click-bait narratives will be when attempting to manipulate the masses to do your dark bidding. The reverse of that is true as well, and we are living in that reverse world now.
From this reality of power in 2015, we see first the rise of Trump and all the other Trumpians that followed him, from JD Vance to Jasmine Crocket, all products of clickbait or die culture. Hillary Clinton, for instance, only turned to clickbait culture towards the end of her campaign, when she started to figure out what Trump was doing. That’s when she came up with the “basket of deplorables” line.
While Trump’s demon, the anti-American, child-sacrificing DNC, is very much real, his angel, MAGA, isn’t. And now, MAGA is already infighting over Israel, using the same angels and demons narratives against each other that the left once used on them.
As it stands today in America, the remnant is smaller than this writer imagined, but should we find one another, technology is on our side in building our own America within what is increasingly looking like a Progmerica of sorts about to emerge, but one that will be short-lived.
When their world collapses, our world will fill the void left behind and once again we shall resume the American experiment, towards liberty for all through a government OF the people, BY the people, and FOR the people.
But we must be building now to be the light for tomorrow’s coming dark clouds.
