A few months ago, the musician Patrick Cosmos shared a “new unified theory of American reality” that he called “everyone is twelve now”—an attempt to explain an executive branch that endorses AI-generated videos of the president dropping poop on protesters from a shiny jet, and that replies to official press queries with the words your mom . Everyone is 12 is a strikingly effective summary of contemporary politics, but it also helps us understand why a good amount of popular culture feels as