Illuminati stay winning. If you were anywhere near the internet last weekend during what was not only the most watched football game of the year, or the decade, but America’s most watched television event since the 1969 moon landing, you know — more surely than you know the moon landing never actually happened — that the Chiefs would not have won the Super Bowl without the government’s help. Welcome to the hottest new conspiracy theory this side of gay frogs: Taylor Swift is a Deep State asset. Long story short, “the elites” coordinated Taylor’s sham romance with Chiefs’ star Travis Kelce, drumming up months of celebrity-obsessed hysteria and raising Taylor’s profile to the stature of national demigod. Then, they assisted the Chiefs in each of the team’s games up to and finally including the championship, which culminated in a live kiss between America’s newest most beloved couple. Now, at the zenith of Taylor’s celebrity, she is expected to endorse Joe Biden for the presidency. This, we are told, is how the Democrats will defeat Donald Trump, who is apparently unstoppable but for the influence of this single American pop star (and for what it’s worth, Trump does seem worried). Following our shadow government’s tremendous success, Biden publicly declared victory for the conspiratorial power grab, a rare bit of humor from our nation’s senile leader with which I’d credit the man were he not so obviously asleep when it was posted by his social media team. In any case, and all joking aside, nearly one in five Americans presently believes some version of this story. Should we be worried?

Here, the casual “disinformation expert” would have you fear the proliferation of wrongthink on the internet, ignoring the fact that Americans have always been a little crazy, and obfuscating what appears to be an uncomfortable law of culture: at any given moment, regardless of their veracity, popular conspiracy theories accurately signal the coordinates of power. This, at the very least, makes them useful. But in pointing to laser-eyed Joe and Deep State Taylor, the increasingly goofy aesthetics of our popular conspiracy theories also seem to signal the decay of American power. Of course, nothing has signaled this decay as loudly, or as obviously, as the overreaction of power’s mouthpiece in the press to the prospect of its youthful replacement — a sort of photo negative of the normie nobody in a tinfoil hat — which brings us to our third and final revelation. Throughout the dying media, in increasingly dramatic fits of hysteria, the Old Elite have effectively anointed their replacement by declaring their most hated enemy: the shitposting gods of tech.

New paradigm incoming? Well, it’s either that or collapse, and I’m too optimistic for the latter. But before we get to the New(er) World Order, we need to briefly talk about the Demon Bowl, because through these “dark plots and secret explanations” the world has always revealed itself in parable, if not — or at least not always — in fact.