I think your perspective on this matters a lot less than that of the researchers. Their perception is that what’s happening at Harvard and NSF is fascism.

The perception is that we have a gestapo in ICE arresting mayors and judges, an admin talking about suspending habeas corpus, going after scientists who come to conclusions they don’t like, and just gutting funding for research in general.

You can say, “oh this is hyperbole” and “these people are wrong to leave,” but all that really gonna matter is that they were terrified and left.

> respectfully disagree on several points.. if "public opinion" is only legitimate in 240 characters or less, then you have doomed yourself.

I have very bad news for you re: the last ~70 years of research on voter behavior in democracies.

The story of the field is, if I may paint it a bit poetically, researchers hiding under their desks and rocking back and forth going "it can't be that bad... it can't really work like that..." until they gin up the courage to look again, find it's even worse than they thought, and repeat the cycle.

is it knee-jerk if certain highly influential people have direct ties to the Nazi party?

You might want to read about why the Musk's moved from Canada to South Africa, and also the orgins and links of some of the ideologies that family continues to associate with.

Given support to extemist far right parties, given nazi salutes ... the knee jerk "ref to nazi is inappropriate" thing is not convincing anymore.

> respectfully disagree on several points.. if "public opinion" is only legitimate in 240 characters or less, then you have doomed yourself.

That's the problem of the tiktokification of public discourse. Attention spans of the wide masses are really, really low, everything longer than a tiktok or youtube short just gets dismissed as "too long, didn't read". Trump, for all his faults, is a master of that - each of his speeches is not designed to be appealing to the audience, but to be cut into very short "soundbites" that just convey the core message.

This is not a knee jerk mention of Nazis, it is a well known fact that after world war II the US changed strategy to invest in research and pull the best talent from around the world. That was in part motivated by German scientists fleeing Nazi Germany.

I'd say the swing in Federal powers comes from the real income dropping for most Americans over the last 30 years. Nobody wants to be told "this is great!" when it is not. Especially when it's "Macroeconomists say this is great!".

Bread and circuses -- the prior administrations, regardless of political camp, have delivered neither the circus nor the bread. People want to try something else.

That's in my opinion totally orthogonal to the aims of those digging in Federally right now; those aims are fairly diverse in my opinion, if themed.