The idea that a shadowy cabal of unelected bureaucrats secretly runs the US — against the demonstrated will of the people and without their knowledge — used to be the stuff of conspiracy theories. But on Wednesday night, The New York Times seemed to confirm it.

"I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration," says the headline of an anonymous op-ed article in The Times, whose author was identified only as a senior official in the Trump administration.

A subheadline written in first-person further said the author and some colleagues "

The author essentially argues that Trump is an amoral and dangerous president and that, without this network, the nation would be much worse off.

But rather than publicly move to oust a president characterized in the article as antidemocratic, the author suggests the anonymous group has instead quietly labored to deregulate markets, issue a large tax cut, and increase military spending.

In the author's view, it is apparently worth keeping Trump as president to advance these classically Republican causes.

The official's stated purpose in writing the article is that "Americans should know that there are adults in the room."

But just who these adults are, what they want for the country, and how much power they actually wield remains a secret. What is clear is that these people's names appeared on no ballots, and they're Republicans.

Fringe media and the far-right have long argued that a "deep state" holds the real power in government, and that the US public has been fooled into thinking they live in a legitimate democracy.

In the Times on Wednesday, that "deep state" introduced itself formally, but said it would rather be called a more generous term: "The steady state."

Mainstream US media has consistently used opinion columns to call the "deep state" a conspiracy. CNN, MSNBC, The Washington Post, and the New York Times itself have all dismissed the concept as fantasy, conspiracy, or propaganda from right-wing pundits disconnected from reality.

On Thursday morning, these same newsrooms will scour the text of the op-ed looking for clues for who wrote it. A telling vocabulary choice, the use of the word "lodestar," has persuaded some that Vice President Mike Pence, who frequently uses the obscure word, wrote the article.

But maybe somebody else wrote it and used "lodestar" as a false flag? With the Times' publication of the op-ed, mainstream US media and conspiracy theorists have now converged on a hunt for the deep state mastermind.

Trump responded to the bombshell op-ed with a single word Tweet: "TREASON?"

While the op-ed likely doesn't meet the legal definition of treason, it does clearly spell out that anonymous actors believing themselves justified, yet justifying themselves to no one, have subverted the normal rule of the US government.

It's unclear whether the adults of the US have been reassured by this op-ed, which promises steady leadership and open mutiny in the White House.

US presidents derive their authority from elections, where the US public participates in democracy to choose a leader. According to this op-ed, the country's real leadership has little to do with democracy, and a lot to do with an anonymous group advancing a Republican agenda.

In doing so, it also gave a huge boost to conspiracy theorists that had long spoke of a deep state boogeyman, which on Wednesday stepped out of the shadows and said: "Hi."