Opinion | Trump and Musk Are Suffering From Soros Derangement Syndrome

During the 2020 protests over the killing of George Floyd, a major refrain from the political right was that this was the work of outside agitators and saboteurs. “80% of the RIOTERS in Minneapolis last night were from OUT OF STATE. They are harming businesses (especially African American small businesses), homes, and the community of good, hardworking Minneapolis residents who want peace, equality, and to provide for their families,” Trump wrote at the time, adding: “It’s ANTIFA and the Radical Left. Don’t lay the blame on others!”

Some individuals and groups on the right claimed that George Soros, the Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor and billionaire philanthropist, was directly funding the protesters. Rudy Giuliani even went as far as to suggest that there was “coordination” and a “guiding hand,” turning his attention to Soros and, like Trump, “antifa,” in a conversation with Sebastian Gorka, a fellow Trump adviser and conspiracist, then out of the government. And some conservative groups purchased online ads that called on law enforcement authorities to “investigate George Soros for funding domestic terrorism and his decades-long corruption.”

For conservatives possessed by the conspiracy theory that the protests were the orchestrated work of a secretive billionaire, there was no way that a nationwide uprising against police brutality could be an organic response to a horrendous event. It had to be the work of nefarious outside forces, leveraging everything they had to take Trump down.

In the present, if you explore the depths of the right-wing world, you will continue to find a belief in the immateriality of popular political opposition to Trump — a sense that it is less the response of ordinary people with agency than it is a plot by outside agitators. To this point, there is a popular meme, recently shared by Musk, that portrays the attitudes and beliefs of liberal Americans as nothing more than the programming of nefarious elites. The meme is a visual representation of the idea that most people in the world are nonplayer characters, or NPCs, a term taken from role-playing games to refer to those characters who behave according to a script. They run on a loop, of sorts, capable only of what they’re written to do.

(Let’s set aside, for a moment, the fact that the playable character is also shaped by written direction and exists within the confines of the game’s code or the game master’s script.)