Image courtesy of the author's father.

Amanda Bynes’s reign of Twitter terror ended two weeks ago when authorities placed her on a 5150 psych hold for setting a fire in the driveway of an old lady rocking a bowl cut. Doctors have allegedly diagnosed her with schizophrenia, which would explain her proclivity for twerking on gym machines, calling Degrassi star Aubrey Graham ugly, and flitting around New York in a menagerie of tragic wigs. But this hasn't stopped a faction of the internet from believing Amanda is actually a victim of monarch mind control, an Illuminati practice widely used by the Walt Disney Corporation and Teen Nick to monetize and sexualize young starlets.

Supposedly developed in its current form by the C.l.A. to subdue American citizens, monarch mind control is being used by the Hollywood industrial complex to micro-manage child stars. The monarch mind control victims are called kittens and the executives and managers that control them are known as handlers. Supposedly, the handlers take a precocious kitten, such as an All That era Amanda Bynes, and subject her to mental and sexual abuse until her personality fractures and separates like a horcrux, making her unquestioning and compliant. The handlers then conclude the abuse with a weird Adams Family Values summer camp punishment, where the kitten watches _The Wizard of Oz _over and over again till submitting to her handlers gives her true happiness. After she turns 18, the handlers repeat these steps to transform her from a manageable performer into a highly profitable object of fantasy.

Usually—and rather shockingly—this goes off without a hitch. But in some cases, the young performer can’t stand the confusing transition from tween star to men’s magazine cover girl and starts to malfunction like the robot she has essentially become. This, of course, resembles the 2007 meltdown of Britney Spears.

Did Disney Channel mind control techniques turn Britney Spears into a bald, cockney maid?

Like Amanda, Britney shaved her head and dressed oddly. (Where Amanda rocked an Alvin Ailey shirt and blue wig to court, Britney decided shoes at gas stations were malarkey.) Britney was eventually placed on a 5150 hold in 2008 and has been under a conservatorship ever since, which isn't that different than having a handler. Amanda's mother hopes to place her daughter under a similar conservatorship. When these parallel lives are held against each other, monarch mind control seems legit.

The problem is once you pick up the monarch mind control hammer, everything begins to look like a nail.

For instance, researching monarch mind control made me worry about Mariah Carey. I remembered Mariah's spectacular Glitter breakdown, where she pushed an ice cream cart around the TRL set, striped off her t-shirt, and repeated Carson Daly’s name like a sexy automaton. I easily traced Mariah's meltdown to Mimi's first attempt at emancipation—her divorce from “handler” Tommy Mottola. Mariah has been open about Tommy abusing her and controlling her career, but she didn't return to happiness till she was “safe” in the loving arms of her husband Nick Cannon, the chairman of Teen Nick.

"You're my therapy," Mariah said to Carson Daily.

But this theory falls apart when you realize almost all of Hollywood’s supposed kittens are female. For example, many conspiracy bloggers have accused Katy Perry, who hasn’t had a public meltdown, of being a kitten without questioning if the Illuminati practice was behind Justin Bieber’s summer of pissing in buckets and spitting on fans.

But this isn't surprising. Conspiracy theorists rarely see that male celebrities suffer too. In the 2000s, beefcake R&B god D’Angelo had a public break from sanity, staggering around Richmond suburbs and asking cops for sex because of the sexual objectification stemming from the sexy video for “Untitled (How Does It Feel).” Yet the conspiracy theorists never considered D’Angelo as a monarch mind control victim. His breakdown’s pubic account is taken at face value because he is a man, although Hollywood handlers sexually exploited D'Angelo as they mistreated Britney Spears and Amanda Bynes.

Monarch mind control theorists claim they want to expose an Illuminati dystopia of shadowy handlers, but they’re really claiming that every successful Hollywood starlet—regardless if she has or hasn't been placed under a 5150 hold—is managed by a powerful male handler. After all, what would be a more attractive theory to a bunch of male nerds sitting behind computers than the idea that all powerful women are actually passive, mind-controlled sexbots?

There’s the real conspiracy.