Like the type to unironically think Freemasons are the top dogs that control every faucet of society and every other sinister organization bows down to them. The ones who think they’re very smart and woke by saying some shit like “the media is trying to divide us…” They’ll see some socialist quote warning about bourgeois domination of the world and agree with it, but then have zero interest in actually internalizing the material reality. It’s like their entire brain is just based on random quotes and simpsons clips with red circles.
It is so intellectually lazy that I get whiplash every time I see them in the wild because I forget people like this exist. At least with right wing nut job conspiracies will have convictions whether they’re racist or antisemitic or just projection about pedophilia. Centrist conspiracy theorists’ just post some vague “I told you so” in the comments of YouTube and Facebook.
Its not particularly centralised, more like a franchise system, so they vary a lot. There’s thousands of lodges still in the UK, like one in almost every town of a certain size, multiple in cities. They’re very secretive so membership is a guess.
A lot of them still don’t accept women in their cult. A lot of them have ties with Unions (as well as political parties/figures, and other power structures and institutions, mostly in the protestant world), including infamously police Unions.
I suppose a proto-union thing (there being a lot of stone building particularly in the gothic/European Imperial era like victorian/georgian times in the UK), with a somewhat absurd claim to be descendents of or inheritors of the secrets of the builders of Solomon’s Temple. But not too different from other guilds, like the Worshipful Company of Haberdashers for example, the sort of pirates, scammers, merchants, artisans, and monopolists who founded the East India Company and built the British Empire.
They might seem nice, and some probably are, but I don’t trust them at all - like I wouldn’t trust a Scientologist. Religion needs to be conducted in the open and publically by the masses, not in the shadows by cabals and cults or else they get up to all sorts of mischief.
edit: the builders of Solomon’s Temple incidentally were according to most accounts demons/devils/jinn, so its not a particularly endearing claim to most christians.
Yeah, not really the sort of crowd I’d fly with (were it on the table) but not really a group I’d consider my single biggest problem at any given time either.
I could get in because my grandpa was a mason but he left so was actually an ex-mason and he had nothing good to say about the organization, called it a pyramid scheme (which from what information I’ve learned about how going up in rank cost more and more money seems to check out)