CONSPIRACY CLAIM #16

As we saw in Claim #07, Freemasons do not conspire for world domination, and a Freemason who breaks the law answers for it, both to the courts and to his Grand Lodge. So why does this accusation keep coming back? To answer that, we first need to understand who, or what, “Q” is, and where the idea of a “New World Order” came from.

Who is “Q”?

On 28 October 2017, an anonymous user calling himself “Q Clearance Patriot” began posting on 4chan, an anonymous internet message board. The name implied that he held “Q clearance”, a top-secret security clearance in the United States Department of Energy, and that he was leaking inside knowledge of a secret war. He soon moved to a second board, 8chan (later renamed 8kun). His cryptic messages became known as “Q drops”, and his followers as “QAnon”.

The core belief of QAnon is that the world is secretly controlled by a “cabal” of Satan-worshipping child abusers, who hide behind politicians, the media and Hollywood. Nothing Q foretold ever came to pass: the promised mass arrests, known as “the Storm”, never happened. When predictions failed, Q simply replied that “disinformation is necessary”. The Australian psychologist Stephan Lewandowsky has described the theory as “self-sealing”: every piece of evidence against it is taken by believers as further proof that it is true.

As for who Q really was, in 2022 two independent teams of forensic linguists compared the posts’ writing style and concluded that they were written mainly by a South African message-board moderator, Paul Furber, and later by Ron Watkins, who helped run the 8chan site. In other words, no one with security clearance was involved.

QAnon is not harmless fun. In the United States it quickly moved from internet message boards into mainstream politics: followers began appearing at political rallies in August 2018, and in May 2019 an FBI field office identified QAnon-driven extremists as a potential domestic terrorism threat, citing arrests linked to the movement. In October 2020 the US House of Representatives passed a bipartisan resolution condemning QAnon by 371 votes to 18, and on 6 January 2021 many QAnon followers were among the crowd that stormed the US Capitol.

Its reach is wide. The Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), which surveyed Americans across 2021, classed 16 per cent of them as QAnon believers. Twenty-two per cent agreed that “there is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders”, and among white evangelical Protestants the share of believers rose to almost one in four. Nor is it only an American problem. A 2020 study by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found that Australia was the fourth-largest producer of QAnon content in the world, after the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada.

Why do people believe it?

Many QAnon followers are ordinary, intelligent people, and American psychiatrists and psychologists have spent years trying to explain why it captures them. Dr Joe Pierre, an American academic psychiatrist at the University of California, described QAnon in 2020 as “part conspiracy theory, part religious cult, and part role-playing game”. He noted that its apocalyptic story of good against evil “serves as a kind of ‘hook’ for evangelical Christians”, and that followers resist leaving because “they’ve finally found something that’s bigger than themselves”.

Writing in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law in 2022, the forensic psychiatrist Dr Brian Holoyda explained how social media links people “susceptible to conspiracy thinking with a community of like-minded individuals”, and how closed online communities that reject mainstream news provide “fertile soil for the growth of conspiracy thinking”. A 2023 review in the American Psychological Association’s journal Psychological Bulletin, led by the Emory University psychologist Shauna Bowes, combined 170 studies covering more than 158,000 people. It found that belief in conspiracy theories is linked to deeper needs: to make sense of a confusing world, to feel safe, and to belong to a group that feels special.

Q fed all of those needs. He never gave answers; he asked questions and told followers to “Follow the White Rabbit” and do their own research. The American game designer Reed Berkowitz has compared QAnon to an alternate-reality game with no puzzle and no solution, one that rewards players for finding patterns in random noise, a tendency psychologists call apophenia. Every “discovery” a follower makes feels like their own, which is exactly why it is so hard to talk them out of it.

An old playbook: Operation Trust

To understand how Q worked, it helps to go back a hundred years, to one of the most successful deceptions in the history of espionage.

After the Russian Civil War, a great many anti-Bolshevik “White” Russians lived in exile in Paris, Berlin, Prague and beyond, longing for the day the Communist regime would fall. In 1921 the Soviet secret police, the Cheka (later the GPU and OGPU), gave them what they longed for. It set up a fake underground resistance movement, the “Monarchist Union of Central Russia”, known in code as “the Trust” and hidden behind a front company, the Moscow Municipal Credit Association. The secret police did not even build it from scratch: they found real royalist sympathisers left behind in Russia, and instead of arresting them all, quietly steered them into an organisation the police controlled.

The Trust’s public face was Alexander Yakushev, a genuine former official of the Tsar’s Ministry of Communications who now worked for the Soviet trade commissariat, a post that let him travel abroad. Arrested for his contacts with the exiles, he was turned by the secret police officer Artur Artuzov and sent back out with a thrilling message: a powerful secret organisation of patriots, reaching high into the Soviet government itself, was preparing to bring the regime down from within. All the exiles had to do was trust it.

And above all, they had to wait. General Alexander Kutepov, one of the most determined White commanders, had been planning armed action against the Soviet state. The Trust persuaded him to hold back and wait for the forces inside Russia to do the work. To keep hope alive, the secret police even arranged a supposedly secret trip into the Soviet Union for the prominent exile Vasily Shulgin, watched at every step. Shulgin came home and wrote a book, Three Capitals, reporting that Russia was reviving and that the Bolsheviks would probably soon be removed from power.

The people who believed paid the price. In August 1924 the revolutionary Boris Savinkov was lured back to Russia, arrested in Minsk and put on a show trial; he died in the Lubyanka prison in May 1925. In September 1925 the British secret agent Sidney Reilly, the “Ace of Spies” and one of the models for James Bond, crossed the Finnish border to meet the Trust’s leaders, who turned out to be secret police officers. He was executed in a forest near Moscow on 5 November 1925. The operation ran until 1927, and its files are said to fill 37 volumes; the historian John Costello, one of the few Western researchers to see them, described a tangle of double agents and deceptions with “the complexity of a symphonic score”.

Now set the two side by side:

• A secret insider. The Trust claimed to be patriots hidden inside the Soviet government. Q claimed to be an insider with top-secret clearance inside the US government.
• Trust. The operation was literally called “the Trust”. One of Q’s best-known slogans was “Trust the plan”.
• Sit back and wait. The Trust told the exiles to hold back because the patriots inside had everything in hand. Q told his followers to “Enjoy the show”, that “Nothing can stop what is coming”, and that the Storm would sweep the villains away.
• Good news that never arrived. Shulgin was shown a Russia on the brink of liberation, and it never came. Q predicted mass arrests again and again, and they never came either.
• The believers paid. Savinkov and Reilly walked into the trap and lost their lives. QAnon followers who acted on what they read have ended up arrested, prosecuted and imprisoned, while the author of the posts stayed safely anonymous behind a screen.

Since 2021 a number of writers have pointed out that QAnon follows the Trust’s playbook almost step for step. No document has yet surfaced to show whether Q’s author studied the operation and copied it deliberately, or simply stumbled on the same method. But the method is the same: invent a hidden ally, give it the language of trust, feed believers hope, keep them passive, and let them spend their energy chasing enemies of your choosing. In the Trust’s case those enemies were real opponents of the regime. In Q’s case one of the enemies chosen for them was Freemasonry.

What Q said about Freemasons

Q rarely named his targets outright. Instead he pointed his followers at symbols and let them draw the conclusion themselves. As early as November 2017, in one of his first few hundred posts, he told them to hunt for symbols worn by celebrities and politicians, and added a line that became a QAnon catchphrase: “Their need for symbolism will be their downfall.” The message to his followers was simple: you will know them by their symbols. And among the symbols they went looking for, the square and compasses of Freemasonry was always near the top of the list. QAnon videos, slideshows and memes have put it alongside the imagined “cabal” more times than anyone could count.

On 28 June 2018, Q dropped the hints and said it directly. Under a close-up picture of a Masonic square and compasses, he wrote:

“Why are Freemasons on the scene of most shooting locations? Openly giving interviews or in background shots? Symbolism will be their downfall.”

Q drop #1630, 28 June 2018

When a follower replied with a photograph, Q answered “Everywhere!” and added his own: a television news still from the 2015 San Bernardino shooting, showing a local man being interviewed while wearing a cap with a square and compasses on it. Later that evening he hedged (“Most all powerful organizations have sinister components … not all are bad apples”), and an hour after that he told his followers to “Find paper articles re: Freemasons”.

Consider what that “evidence” amounts to. Q posted on the evening of the Capital Gazette shooting in Annapolis, in which a gunman killed five newspaper staff over a grudge about an article the paper had published on him in 2011. Freemasonry had nothing to do with it. The rest of the case is a man in a baseball cap. Freemasons are ordinary members of their communities, so of course some of them live near places where terrible things happen, and some of them talk to reporters. A man who wears the square and compasses on his cap while speaking on television is not hiding anything; he is doing the opposite of keeping a secret. Q’s hedge about “bad apples” is a familiar trick: make the accusation, then step back from it, and let the audience do the rest.

An old story with a new name

Q did not invent the secret “cabal”. As researchers of the movement point out, QAnon has its origins in older conspiracy theories and stitches many of them together. The oldest thread, the one that pulls Freemasons into the story, goes back more than two hundred years.

In 1797, shaken by the French Revolution, two writers published almost at the same time: the Scottish professor John Robison, with Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, carried on in the secret meetings of Freemasons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies, and the French Jesuit Abbé Augustin Barruel, with his Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism. Both argued that the Revolution had been plotted in secret by Freemasons and by the Bavarian Illuminati.

There was a problem with that theory: the Illuminati no longer existed. The Bavarian government had banned the order by edict in 1785 and seized its papers, and there is no evidence that it survived. Even so, Robison and Barruel’s books gave birth to the idea of a secret society steering world events. Mackey’s Encyclopedia of Freemasonry gave this verdict on Robison:

“His theory is based on false premise and his reasoning fallacious and illogical.”

Mackey’s Encyclopedia of Freemasonry, “Anti-Masonic Books”

In 1903 came something far worse: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forged document produced in Russia that claimed to reveal a “Judeo-Masonic” plot for world domination. The British journalist Philip Graves exposed it as a plagiarised hoax in The Times in 1921, but the forgery had already spread around the world, and the Nazis later used it as propaganda (see Claim #13). Professor Andrew Prescott of the University of Sheffield observed:

“Since at least the time of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, antisemitism has gone hand in hand with anti-masonry.”

Andrew Prescott, Centre for Research into Freemasonry, University of Sheffield

QAnon follows the same pattern. Researchers describe it as rooted in antisemitic tropes, with its fixation on the Rothschild family and the financier George Soros, and one scholar has summed it up as, in part, “Elders of Zion antisemitic conspiracy theory” repackaged for social media.

“New World Order” or “New Order of the Ages”?

Many people who repeat the “Masonic New World Order” claim point to the back of the American one-dollar bill. Its Latin motto, Novus Ordo Seclorum, has appeared on the Great Seal of the United States since 1782. It means “a New Order of the Ages”, a reference to the birth of the United States as an independent nation. It does not mean “New World Order”; that is simply a mistranslation. There is also no published evidence that the men who designed the Great Seal were Freemasons, and the “all-seeing eye” and unfinished pyramid were common symbols far beyond the lodge in the eighteenth century.

Until the early 1990s, “New World Order” theories were confined to the fringes: the militant anti-government right and the end-times corner of fundamentalist Christianity. The phrase went mainstream after politicians used it in speeches at the end of the Cold War. The American televangelist Pat Robertson’s best-selling book The New World Order (1991) spread the idea widely in church circles. Scholars of QAnon note that evangelical media helped prepare the ground for it, through the same end-times and “spiritual warfare” themes and through New World Order theories that were already popular in those circles.

Why Freemasons could not rule the world, even if they wanted to

For a start, there is no world headquarters. Every Grand Lodge is independent and sovereign, so each one governs itself and none of them answers to the others. As the Masonic researcher Trevor W. McKeown has pointed out, they have no common agenda, and famous Freemasons have always held political views from right across the spectrum. There is no such thing as a “Masonic government”, because Freemasons do not even agree on what an ideal government would look like.

More than that, regular Freemasonry forbids politics in the lodge altogether. The United Grand Lodge of England sets this out in its Aims and Relationships of the Craft, a statement first made in 1938 and printed in its Book of Constitutions to this day:

“[N]either in any Lodge, not at any time in his capacity as a Freemason, is he permitted to discuss or to advance his views on theological or political questions. … The Grand Lodge has always consistently refused to express any opinion on questions of foreign or domestic state policy either at home or abroad.”

United Grand Lodge of England, Book of Constitutions

A fraternity that will not let its members talk politics at a lodge meeting is an unlikely candidate for running the world. R.W.Bro. Bharat V. Epur, Past Deputy Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of India, put it plainly:

“The conspiracies generally fall under three categories, viz. political – usually allegations of control of government by a so-called ‘New World Order’, religious – usually involving allegations of anti-Christian and satanic beliefs and practices, and, cultural – usually involving popular entertainers. Suffice it to say, that all these are either deliberate, self-seeking lies or misinterpretations of ideology and symbolism.”

R.W.Bro. Bharat V. Epur, OSM, “Demystifying Freemasonry: To the Profane and the Initiate”

And the “criminal activities”?

We have covered this in detail in Claim #07. In short, a Freemason is expected to be a law-abiding citizen. Breaking the law of the land is itself a Masonic offence, and a Brother convicted of a serious crime faces suspension or expulsion. The one notorious exception people like to cite, the Italian “P2” lodge, is the exception that proves the rule: its Masonic charter was withdrawn and its leader was expelled. Freemasonry does not protect criminals; it throws them out.

Conclusion: The “Q-Drop” claim is a very old accusation in new clothing. The idea of a Masonic plot to rule the world began with two books written in 1797 about a society that had already been abolished, was poisoned by a forged antisemitic pamphlet in 1903, and was revived in the 1990s and again online by an anonymous poster whose predictions never came true. Freemasonry has no world headquarters, bans political discussion in its lodges, and expels members who break the law. It does not rule the world, and it never has.