Emily Masters Truth and Deception 2025

          The Illuminati was a real organization founded in Bavaria in the 1770s based on the idea of spreading enlightenment, as well as to oppose how much influence the church, particularly in Europe, had over governmental affairs.            Adam Weishaupt founded the organization as an alternative to the Freemasons, because he found them too exclusive and counter to modern ideas of merit and intellect. By the end of 1778, the organization had expanded significantly and drawn twenty-seven recruits. However, they reached a major decline in the 1780s in which they grasped for more power than was perhaps wise. Bavaria attempted to suppress the burgeoning organization, and was by most credible accounts successful.  However, conspiracies regarding the Illuminati have spread significantly to believe that they control the world. Many organizations concurrently claim to be the true descendents of the original Bavarian Il...

          If conspiracy perpetrators are as powerful as theorists claim, then it is unfathomable that so many theorists can survive posting their theories on TikTok under their own legal government names. If secret societies aren’t powerful enough to handle content creators exposing their evil schemes on the internet in easily-consumable short-form video content, then I am forced to question the societies’ ability to hide the existence of giants who built the Incan terrace farm ‘staircases’ from the whole planet. In short, if the secret societies are as skilled and ruthless as you claim, then you should never have heard even a whisper of their existence in the first place.  Inconsistent conspirator power scope aside, my question for those who believe in enormous, in-depth, world-spanning conspiracy theories is simple. Have you ever worked in a group project before?  Ultimately, what is a conspiracy other than a group project with an incredibly...

          Who would start a hoax? Who would lead a cult? What’s the difference between these two types of people, and what do they have in common?           Few things intrigue me more than parallels, so I intend to delve into the commonalities and contrasts between these two highly influential and highly deceptive personalities.            When researching the greatest hoaxes of history, it’s easy to become absorbed in the hoax itself, or the amount of money made off things like the Cardiff Giant, or the number of people fooled by the Piltdown Man or the Cottingley fairies. The names of the scam artists rarely rate the footnote of the general cultural consciousness.            Likewise, when it comes to cults and demagogues, the spectacle and the aftermath can prevent observers from focusing on the personality that brought it about. Admittedly, the conversat...

          Jeff Guinn’s discussion of demagogues got me thinking about the nature of power in isolated religious settings.            It is not lost on me that the most well-known instances of cults, religious or otherwise, over the last few years are all male-dominated and contain strong allegations of sexual abuse against women and/or children. In fact, child abuse allegations were one of the things that drew the eye and the ire of the federal government against the Branch Davidians in Waco, though the government didn’t act until the ATF stepped in over the Davidians’ stockpiling of firearms.  The question, in my mind, becomes whether men are more likely to grasp for power as a demagogue than women are, if people are more inclined to blindly follow male leaders than female, or if the presence of a strict religious setting leads to the emergence of a patriarchal hierarchy, given the Christian faith’s male-dominated po...

            My biggest takeaway from reading up on the Waco incident at Mount Carmel is how utterly avoidable and yet sadly inevitable it all was. The tragedy was created through a climate of intense religious faith and unshaking loyalty to a fallible human leader.  The Branch Davidian movement only existed through a trickle-down series of cults of personality, where people cluster around a charismatic faith leader promising either the key to salvation or intimate knowledge of impending destruction.  The Millerite Movement under William Miller started a directly-traceable pathway to the disaster of 1993. When Miller’s doomsday predictions proved false in the 1860s, one of the groups that splintered off from his followers ended up forming the Seventh-day Adventists. Key personalities behind the solidification of this new movement included Joseph Bates and Ellen G White. From there, the Adventists fractured in a way that allowed Victor Hout...

          The problem with punitive purity is that it aims to protect someone who doesn’t exist. Vice in the early 1900s wasn’t seen as subjective. Not only that, it wasn’t seen as natural. Vice, such as women consenting to sex work, was thought to be only possible through a secret ‘white slavery’ network.            The slippery slope that early twentieth century America fell into is easy to see and heartbreaking to watch. Shame eclipsed acceptance. Idealism eclipsed the harsh reality of women’s lives, particularly with limited rights and unequal work opportunities and pay rates.            The ideal target of the Progressive Era’s social reformers is a perfect young woman, imminently threatened with corruption but not complicit in any part of what’s happening to her, blameless in any ‘sin’ she’s been involved with, and eager to trustingly run into the arms of the first rescuers she enco...