CONSPIRACY CLAIM #30

This is a page about a painful subject, so a word first. Every attack mentioned here killed real people, and their families are still grieving. We do not name the killers on this page, and we do not repeat the details of what they did. What we look at is the story that appears online within hours of almost every mass shooting: that it was secretly staged by Freemasons, as a ritual or as a “false flag”, and that the number 33 hidden somewhere in the news proves it.

How does the claim work?

A “false flag” originally meant disguising who you are in war or espionage. Online, as the fact-checkers at Logically Facts explain, the term has been co-opted to brand tragedies such as school shootings as hoaxes staged by the government or by shadowy organisations. The Freemasons are a favourite choice of shadowy organisation, and the “proof” is almost always a number.

Three examples show the pattern. After the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, in May 2022, a Facebook post the next day blamed the CIA and announced that “Freemasons abound”. After the shooting at the Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, in March 2023, posts pointed out that three adults and three children had been killed and that a “33” appeared on the church sign, and claimed, in Logically Facts’ summary of the posts, that “33 is Masonic Code”. After a shooting in an office tower on Park Avenue, Manhattan, in July 2025, people on X fixed on the fact that the gunman had gone up to the 33rd floor. One of them wrote: “What’s New York in gematria?… 666! Rudin? 333! Holy psyop.”

What did the investigations actually find?

In each case, nothing that points to Freemasons. On Uvalde, the fact-checkers at Lead Stories noted that police believed the gunman acted alone, and concluded: “There is zero evidence that he worked on behalf of the CIA, Freemasons or any other organization.” On Nashville, Logically Facts rated the false-flag claim false and called the “33 is Masonic Code” idea part of “the broader conspiracy theory that the Freemasons control world governments and orchestrate global events to establish a New World Order”, which we deal with in Claim #16. On Manhattan, the Daily Dot reported that the gunman had blamed the NFL, whose offices are in the same building but not on the 33rd floor, and that the authorities had said nothing at all about the floor number.

None of this is new. Lead Stories put it plainly: “The false flag claim is common in the wake of mass shootings.” Logically Facts went further: “False flag conspiracies surface around every mass shooting, but they are unfounded.” The same story is told about every attack, whoever carried it out and whatever their reasons, which is a good sign that it is not based on the facts of any of them.

And to be completely plain about it: Freemasonry does not promote, condone or excuse violence of any kind. Its rules make breaking the law a Masonic offence in itself, and its Old Charges tell every Mason to be “a peaceable subject to the civil powers, wherever he resides or works, and is never to be concerned in plots and conspiracies against the peace and welfare of the nation”. We set out those rules in Claim #07.

So what does 33 really mean to a Freemason?

Much less than the internet thinks, and what it means depends on which rite you ask. Both rites below are optional bodies that a Master Mason may join after the three degrees of the lodge.

In the Scottish Rite, the 33rd is an honour, not a step you climb to: the 33rd degree, Inspector General Honorary, is given to a small number of members in recognition of outstanding service. It is not a rank of command over other Masons, and it cannot be earned by study or bought. In the Northern Masonic Jurisdiction of the United States, for example, the Rite confers the 4th to the 32nd degrees, and the 33rd is conferred on top of them at the Supreme Council’s annual meeting. The Rite’s first Supreme Council was opened in 1801 at Shepheard’s Tavern in Charleston, South Carolina, and the number is inscribed on the front of the Rite’s headquarters in Washington and explained on its own websites.

In the Ancient and Primitive Rite of Memphis-Misraïm, the 33rd is not an honour at all. It is simply the next degree in the sequence, between the 32nd and the 34th, on a ladder of degrees that carries on well past it. So the same number is an honour in one rite and an ordinary step in another. A secret signature it is not. (We look at the 33rd degree in more detail in Claim #21 and Claim #09.)

Why does 33 turn up everywhere?

Because the people looking for it never agree in advance what they are going to count. If floors count, and dates count, and victims can be added together, and the letters of a street name can be turned into numbers by any of several “gematria” systems, and 333 and 666 also count, then the number is guaranteed to appear. As the Daily Dot put it, “Online, the number 33 has long carried symbolic weight.” That weight comes from the counting, not from the event. Run the same method on a shopping list and you will find the Freemasons there too, probably near the eggs.

The method also has a cruel side. A claim that a shooting was staged means that the dead did not die and the mourners are acting. Logically Facts recorded how, after Nashville, a survivor of an earlier shooting who spoke at a press conference was branded a “crisis actor”, and noted that such claims often accuse victims, witnesses and their families of being hired performers. Blaming a secret society for a crime is not only wrong about the society; it takes the attention away from the people who actually suffered, and from the questions that could actually prevent the next attack.

Conclusion: Freemasons do not stage mass shootings, as rituals or as false flags. Fact-checkers who examined the claims after Uvalde, Nashville and Manhattan found no evidence of any Masonic involvement, and the “33” was found each time by counting floors, victims or letters until the number appeared. To a Freemason, 33 is just a degree number: an honorary degree in the Scottish Rite, inscribed on the front of its headquarters, and simply one more degree in the Rite of Memphis-Misraïm. The victims of these attacks deserve the truth about what happened to them, not numerology.

And there is a pattern worth naming. The “33” attack comes again and again from the same place: the fundamentalist and evangelical fringe that has made anti-Masonry part of its preaching. One evangelical exposé of Freemasonry, sold through Christian bookshops, is simply titled 33 Degrees of Deception (Bridge-Logos, 2010), and after the 2025 Manhattan shooting one widely reported post claimed that 33 is “a calling card for the Freemasons. They use this number to mock the age that Jesus was when He was crucified.” Turning a degree number into a mark of the devil, and then pinning it on the victims of a mass shooting, is deeply offensive to Freemasons around the world, many of them devout Christians. It is extremist rhetoric, and it should be exposed for exactly what it is.