This story focuses on Elon Musk of course, as the news tends to focus on every X post or reply he makes.

If you read this story, you may have noticed that it quotes Scott Adams' reaction to a previous story about the idea of issuing $5,000 "DOGE dividend" checks, questioning why we would do that when we are facing such massive budget deficits and an enormous national debt. Elon responded to that stating that he thought we needed to balance the budget first.

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This isn't the only story written about this.

What it doesn't state is that my post about the $5,000 DOGE check idea is what prompted this whole conversation. 😎

https://x.com/OwenGregorian/status/1892184391717384462

It's also notable that the whole thing started with an X post from James Fishback (@j_fishback) that included a letter he wrote with a detailed proposal about the idea:

https://x.com/j_fishback/status/1891933120313663493

It's still a trip to think that an ordinary person like me can have even a small impact on the national conversation.

Don't underestimate the influence what you do on this platform could have. And thank you for your support, and for coming along this strange journey with me.

Just 10 percent of Americans oppose President Donald Trump’s promise to deport illegal migrants with criminal records, according to an Ipsos poll for the New York Times.

In contrast, 87 percent support the deportations strongly or “somewhat,” so providing a broad consensus for a national enforcement campaign.

And just 19 percent of Americans — fewer than one in five — strongly oppose “deporting all immigrants who are here illegally,” the Ipsos poll also showed. Fifty-six percent support the deportations strongly or somewhat.

The post-election collapse of tolerance for illegal migration was spotlighted Saturday when the newspaper posted its early-January poll of 2,128 citizens and residents that confirmed recent polling trends.

The broad shift in political opinion — dubbed a “preference cascade” by academics —  was likely caused when Trump’s campaign and November win showed Americans how many other Americans oppose migration.

The new numbers will help Trump and his deputies begin the careful, low-drama, and gradual removal of millions of wage-cutting, rent-spiking migrants from U.S. society.

A patient and popular enforcement campaign will also help shift the political attention to the even bigger impact of legal migration on Americans.

Already, the rising public demand for less legal migration was spotlighted over Christmas when Twitter erupted in a furious debate over white-collar migration via the H-1B visa program. That drama was ignored by the poll but is expected to rise as the nation draws closer to the 2026 election.

Pro-migration groups, however, hope the Trump enforcement is chaotic and rushed because any tactical mistakes will help their media allies paint the repatriations as cruel and counterproductive.

The newspaper’s coverage of the poll downplays the drama, saying:

Many Americans who otherwise dislike President-elect Donald J. Trump share his bleak assessment of the country’s problems and support some of his most contentious prescriptions to fix them, according to a new poll from The New York Times and Ipsos.

The new poll includes much evidence that GOP voters are leading Democrats away from their politically disastrous support for the quasi-open borders policies put in place by President Joe Biden’s pro-migration, Cuban-born border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas.

For example, only 16 percent of Democrats oppose the deportation of criminal migrants, and only 34 percent of Democrats now “strongly” oppose the deportation of “all immigrants [emphasis added] who are here illegally.”

Overall, 55 percent want all migrants to be deported, and 87 percent want crminal migrants to be deported.

These numbers — and the approaching 2026 midterm elections — help to explain why a critical share of Senate Democrats are expected on Monday to support the Laken Riley bill that would allow the detention of criminal migrants.

Similarly, 56 percent said the Mayorkas migration has caused more crime. Just 38 percent — including 63 percent of Democrats, said the migration “doesn’t have much impact on crime.”

The poll said that 41 percent of Americans, including 68 percent of GOP voters — say “immigrants today are a burden on our country because they take our jobs, housing and health care.” However, the “forced choice” question did not offer alternative answers, so it prodded 56 percent of respondents to say immigrants “strengthen our country because of their hard work and talents.”

There is much evidence that legal and illegal migration makes ordinary Americans poor and less productive.

Elsewhere in the poll, Ipsos asked if there were too many or too few legal migrants.

Thirty percent said too many, and just 24 percent said too few. But the plurality of 43 percent picked a middle option — “the right number” — likely because the respondents do not know that Biden’s deputies imported roughly one migrant for every American birth since 2021.

Read more:

https://www.breitbart.com/immigration/2025/01/18/poll-shows-post-election-crash-in-public-tolerance-for-illegal-migration/

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Getting political on social media could have its upsides, but the downside is that you can hurt the trust of your audience.

The COVID-19 pandemic could have been a unifying moment for Americans — as we all learned to come together to face off with one of the greatest challenges of our lives.

But everything about the pandemic quickly became politicized — from who to blame for the deaths we suffered here in the United States to what kind of statement you were making to the world by wearing a face mask or not.

Part of that politicization came early on, when many of the same public health officials we were relying on to give us sound advice about how to minimize our risks decided that these risks paled in comparison to the need to protest against racism.

Many even urged people to ignore social distancing guidelines to join the demonstrations after the murder of George Floyd.

“We should always evaluate the risks and benefits of efforts to control the virus,” Jennifer Nuzzo, a Johns Hopkins epidemiologist, tweeted at the time. “In this moment the public health risks of not protesting to demand an end to systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus.”

I’m sure many of the public health advocates and scientists who promoted this stance really believed in what they were doing. They were leveraging their prestige as scientists to advocate for a compelling social cause.

But I always wondered whether there was a greater cost they were not factoring into their decision to become so openly political: what if they were harming their credibility among the broader public, who wanted objective scientific advice without a side helping of politics?

How the public feels about scientists getting political

It turned out that European economists and social scientists Eleonora Alabrese, Francesco Capozza, and Prashant Garg were wondering the same thing.

“In Italy during the pandemic, many virologists and experts they were also known to have expressed online their opinion on other stuff — could be redistribution, could be anything political,” Capozzatold me in an interview.

He noticed how these political expressions were coloring how other users perceived these scientists.

“Twitter users were kind of retweeting or mentioning — yeah you shouldn’t trust this guy because this guy is clearly a left-wing or right-wing or whatever person. So whatever he’s saying about COVID might not be completely neutral or helpful for society because he or she has displayed political bias in other posts

So he and his co-authors decided to do an experiment where they exposed both members of the general public and journalists to social media content from scientists to see how it impacted the view of credibility (as measured by how they view their profile and research and how willing they are to read their content).

The scientist’s profiles were constructed — meaning they weren’t real people — but were then filled with a range of political content. Some scientists expressed Democratic beliefs, others expressed Republican beliefs, and some expressed themselves in more neutral ways.

“What we find basically is that people rate the neutral scientist — the one who doesn’t express any political view — as the most credible. And any political expression in the way that we characterized it is penalized,” Alabrese explained.

They illustrated the effect in the following figure. Neutral statements, as you can see, cost the scientists nothing in credibility. But strong expressions of political belief, on the other hand, walloped them:

The more extreme the political statement — strong as opposed to moderate — the more your credibility takes a hit.

The effect of conservative political expression was particularly strong for how journalists perceived the scientists:

Why might that be the case? People in both groups tended to penalize scientists more for disagreeing with themselves — Democrats were more hostile to Republicans and vice versa.

But the researchers suggested that one reason this might be is that journalists tend to a left-leaning group.

Can we un-ring the bell on scientists getting too political?

A similar study to the one I described above was released in 2023. It found that when the scientific journal Nature issued a presidential endorsement for Joe Biden in 2020, it reduced the trust that Donald Trump voters had for the publication while doing little to impact voting intentions.

These studies add up the conclusion that being viewed as politically biased can limit the reach that scientists have on the world.

According to Pew polling, trust in scientists fell about twenty points from 2019 to 2023 among Republican and Republican-leaning adults.

This is a big problem because science is necessary for human thriving. Scientists have to have the trust of the public if they want us to do things that benefit society, like vaccinating our kids. If the general public thinks that scientists are only out to serve their political faction, they look less like neutral authorities and more like referees who are rigging the game.

What’s happening among scientist credibility is also not limited to that field. A broad array of American institutions have seen their credibility collapse in recent years, with wide partisan divides opening up all over the place. The center is not holding.

Does that mean there’s no reason for a scientist or someone else in a trusted profession to get political? I’d argue that there might be times when someone needs to take off their objective hat and become an activist for a cause they feel strongly about and where they could make a real difference.

But the broad politicization of entire fields is also making it so that big chunks of the public just don’t trust them anymore.

When public health experts told us that we have to isolate ourselves to protect ourselves from a pandemic but then told us that we should gather by the thousands to protest racism, we had good reason to ask: who’s really speaking now, the objective expert or the impassioned activist?

Read more:

https://www.theamericansaga.com/p/scientists-getting-political-on-social

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