The claim
CLAIM #9:
Walt Disney was a 33rd Degree Freemason?
FALSE
ANSWER:
Walt Disney was never a Freemason, let alone a 33rd-degree one. He joined DeMolay as a teenager, and the famous “33” is the address of a restaurant.
Walt Disney was not a 33rd-degree Freemason. In fact, there is no record of him being a Freemason of any degree, in any lodge, anywhere in the world.
So where did this come from?
The story was spread mainly by two sources. One is Janet Ossebaard, a Dutch film-maker whose online series “The Fall of the Cabal” promoted a long list of conspiracy claims. The other is the “Q” movement. Q was an anonymous online poster, and the movement around it is headed by what is called “Qanons”: its most active followers. Both have spread claims that were shown to be false, many of them hateful. In this case, the claim is that Walt Disney — who died in 1966 — is somehow still running the Disney media empire, and that he personally slipped sexual images and Nazi symbols into children’s cartoons.
First of all, the claim is nonsense — and because it’s such an eye-catching one, plenty of people online have already debunked it. It’s no secret. Take one example. Janet Ossebaard claims in her documentary “The Fall of the Cabal”, that the Cartoon film, “101 Dalmatians”, contains a scene with a Nazi swastika ‘secretly’ drawn on one of the Dalmatians’ backs. It doesn’t. The picture below puts the doctored image next to the real frame, and the video lets you watch the original scene for yourself.
So what about the photo at the top of this page, with the number 33 in the top right-hand corner? And what about Walt Disney’s involvement with DeMolay?
First, there is a photo, and there are records, showing that Walt Disney was a member of DeMolay International: he joined its original “Mother Chapter” in Kansas City in 1920. But DeMolay doesn’t award anyone the 33rd degree, or even the 3rd degree. DeMolay is a youth fraternity with Masonic connections, not a Masonic lodge. You’ll find the full details about DeMolay in the Other Rites section of this website here: DeMolay.
The photo here shows Walt Disney with other members of DeMolay, a youth organisation dedicated to preparing young men to lead successful, happy and productive lives.
There’s nothing sinister about that: it’s a registered fraternity. The claims made against the fraternity and against Walt Disney are baseless. They are false statements, and they damage the good name of a man who died in 1966 and can no longer answer them.
And the number 33 on that photo?
It has nothing to do with any Masonic degree. It refers to Club 33.
According to Disney, Club 33 is named after its address: 33 Royal Street in New Orleans Square at Disneyland.
It is not a Masonic lodge, and it has nothing to do with the 33rd degree of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry.
Sources:
https://www.waltsapartment.com/club33/
http://www.disneylandclub33.com/History.htm
https://www.disneytouristblog.com/club-33-disneyland-photos-history-review/
“Club 33, Royal Street was Walt Disney’s vision of a private dining club where he could bring dignitaries, celebrities, business partners, clients, and friends. Sadly, Walt never got to have a meal here, as he passed away before it was completed”.
“Club 33 opened on June 15, 1967, almost a year after New Orleans Square was dedicated, and just six months after Walt Disney died. True to his original vision, the club was an elegant success. Walt enlisted set designer Emile Kuri to develop its look”.
Another claim found on QAnon websites is that the photo here shows Walt Disney in his Masonic regalia. It doesn’t.
Without a shred of evidence, people promoting QAnon claim that Walt Disney was a Freemason. He wasn’t.
Points to note:
• The man in the photo is not Walt Disney.
• Walt Disney had a moustache; the gentleman in the photo does not.
• And no, Walt Disney’s moustache was not removable.
• There is no record of Walt Disney being a member of, or even visiting, Caledonian Lodge No. 392.
• The gentleman in the photo looks nothing like Walt Disney.
• None of the claims made by Janet Ossebaard and the Q movement on this subject stand up.
Ossebaard’s documentary made many other claims, and QAnon followers have promoted them widely. They don’t survive a basic check. Here are a few:
• Ossebaard opens the documentary with overturned cars and other “anomalies” left behind by the wildfires in 2019. But fire tornadoes are a well-known, widely documented phenomenon. Thirty seconds of research into these kinds of fires would turn them up.
• This site is no fan club for Mark Zuckerberg or Facebook, but fair’s fair. Ossebaard shows a “tweet” from Zuckerberg about orgies with children and ingesting adrenochrome. It’s an obvious fake: the image was copied from a genuine post about his anniversary in Maui, with new text pasted over the original. It’s easily checked and debunked, yet many of her viewers and QAnon followers believed it.
• She includes a scene from the cable TV drama The Royals and the narrator presents it as the naked victim of a sex crime escaping from Buckingham Palace. It’s a scene from a TV show. https://vimeo.com/122030669
• Ossebaard says that Fiji Water is bottled “on the island of Wakanda!”. Wakanda is a fictional African kingdom from Marvel comics. Few of her viewers seem to have noticed.
• Ossebaard claims Abraham Lincoln was opposed to the Federal Reserve. Lincoln died in 1865; the Federal Reserve was created in 1913. You don’t need to be Einstein to do that sum.
• The documentary says Q’s first post was merely a series of tripcodes, and crops out the rest of that first message. What was cut? The prediction that Hillary Clinton’s passport had been flagged so she couldn’t flee her impending arrest, which would take place on the morning of 10/30/17, and that the U.S. National Guard had been mobilized to handle the organized rioting that would follow. None of it happened.
• Ossebaard says Trump’s name is not listed on the Epstein flight logs. It is: the logs released through the courts list him on flights in the 1990s. (Appearing on a flight log isn’t evidence of wrongdoing; the point is simply that her statement was wrong.)
• Many of her examples of inappropriate images hidden in Disney cartoons are known photoshops. They aren’t in the original clips or pictures.
• One of the Pizzagate emails shown on screen (the Hillary-to-Obama “When we began the pizza arrangement” email) is a well-known fake, one of several. Anyone who has looked into Pizzagate carefully already knows this. You can’t find that email by searching WikiLeaks, because it doesn’t exist.
A more in-depth analysis is in the following claim, which goes through Janet Ossebaard’s claims one by one, with a detailed source list for every claim in both the first documentary and the sequel. To read that page, click here.
For anyone who would like sources that debunk the Walt Disney images and videos:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/disney-sexual-messages_n_6452666
https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2022-04-12/fact-focus-posts-maligning-disney-lack-evidence
How did Ossebaard and Q get away with it so easily?
Throughout her productions, Janet Ossebaard relies on a tactic called “Shifting the burden” — that is, shifting the burden of proof. Many of the extraordinary claims in her documentaries come with no evidence at all, and, as shown above, some are simply false. Instead, viewers are invited to believe them unless they can prove them wrong.
Many people, caught in a moment of shock or disbelief, will believe claims like these at first, especially if the production is slick and the viewer is already angry. The steady stream of hostile messages from the Q movement’s ‘Q-drop’ websites and from several Telegram groups had prepared exactly that state of mind in many viewers, and the documentaries played straight to it. That was the audience these films found.
Who was Janet Ossebaard?
Janet Ossebaard, the creator of “The Fall of the Cabal” and “The Fall of the Cabal Sequel”, was a Dutch writer best known, before her films, for her books on crop circles. She died in Sweden in December 2023. The screenshot here comes from a promotional video in which she read from her crop-circle book while completely naked in the snow.
In conclusion: a documentary that accuses others of evil, leaning heavily on sexual allegations about them, sits rather awkwardly beside its maker’s own promotional video using nudity to sell books, as shown above. That contrast speaks for itself. More importantly, the evidence on this page shows that the Walt Disney claim is false. Walt Disney was never a Freemason, let alone a 33rd-degree one, and the burden of proof now sits with anyone who says otherwise. Good luck with that.