Yep, I smoke Cubans with em from time to time. 
Some good friends of mine are Shriners.
I don’t know how their internal politics work, but mainstream masonry accepts black people now and Prince Hall Masonry is being normalized across the entire US. I know the Grand Lodge of New York has normalized relations with Prince Hall, but I don’t know about the Shrine.
Actually I guess I do recall hearing that now that you mention it. But trying to infiltrate and radicalize Masonry kind of fits the definition of conspiracy.
Birds of a feather, and that. Who are they more likely to have an affinity with?
When private individuals are able to attain obscene wealth, and fund private armies if they wanted, I’d never discount anything as ludicrous. It’d only need a few of them to share the same perverse dream.
Well according to a guy I hung out with at Burning Man a few years back who was a career steward on fancy yachts, him. He said none of these guys had any friends and as such he ended up becoming their best friend while he worked with them. Sure there were parties and girls and all that, but no real friends. Also all those girls they get to lounge around in bikinis around the pool, do you think those are generally the daughters of the wealthy and privileged? Maybe some of them are.
And it would only take a few of them to oppose the same perverse dream.
That’s why these Alex Jones ideas are so ridiculous. Rich people are not the borg.
There are many powerful people who are connected, it is true, but ISTM it’s more of a consolidation of power as a protection of one’s own self interest and mostly among big business rather than some shadowy society. People who have much in common tend to attract each other; networking among the top 1% can hardly be an exception. After all, if I ran a multi-billion dollar business, I wouldn’t be partnering up with the hot dog vendor downstairs and the local credit union.
We have this shadowy group of people who want control and work on infrastructure to keep control but don’t really exhibit control except to make sure they keep it, but we don’t believe it because they don’t want us to believe it so we live precisely as if they didn’t exist anyway, except they have control, lather rinse repeat… what a lovely Klein bottle.
People with lots of money and power run the world. This is as it has always been. By definition, there is a small number of these people. Also as it has always been. I don’t really need to ascribe to their actions any evil motive, but I think the ones described here are … well, really, a bit far fetched. Are there those who believe themselves part of some “secret” organization? Yeah, sure. I don’t have any trouble buying that. Amazingly, people who breathe rarified air are just as likely to succumb to that kind of thinking as, say, a computer nerd who makes less than $45K a year. The only difference is, they’re more able to indulge themselves in those fantasies.