There's an interesting Nietzschean angle to this delusion. The MAGA project is a return to Nietzsche's 'master morality' - we are the strongest, biggest, manliest, etc. The powerful should rule, might makes right. But deep inside, they want so badly to be persecuted. It's slave morality - even while declaiming how great and huge and masculine and powerful they are, they can't stop with delusions of how they're righteously persecuted. They are just little smol beans who the liberals are gonna bully and hurt. It's blessed are the meek, except the 'meek' are a bunch of alpha males weeping that a liberal they made up in their heads called them a name.

It's such an odd feeling that highly liberal writers are trying to tell me that Kirk was a guy who did politics the right way and sought honest engagement while Richard Hanania is going "nope he was a propagandist who didn't care about the truth at all"

This is actually a fantastic summation of Elon's approach to politics. He says "End the Fed!" with a smile on his face - not because he knows what it means, but because it's a meme phrase he's seen on Twitter. He "always wanted to say that'" His mind is shaped by memes, his only desire is to say the coolest memes in front of lots of people. "Why do we have so many people at the Fed? What do they do?" Crucially, he does not answer this question. He has no desire to provide an answer for his audience, and no real need to find the answer for himself. The question is simply tossed out as red meat, an excuse to stop thinking, with the assumption that the answer must be some form of deep state conspiracy.