Regarding Freemasonry: Everything You Wanted to Know About Masonic Conspiracies, Read Online Free Page A

that appears online and take it as gospel. 
     If you go on any number of websites, you will see the following people held up to be Freemasons or members of some other nefarious, world-dominating group.  The justifications for these insinuations is so convoluted that you’d have to be a complete jello-head to give them any credence, and yet…well, there must be a good amount of jello-heads out there. 
     Some are pretty obvious as to why people like to claim they are Freemasons, such as:
    Tony Blair, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Bill Clinton, L. Ron Hubbard, Barack Obama, Colin Powell, and Ronald Reagan
    Nearly any controversial or powerful modern political figure is associated with the Fraternity, normally as a way of justifying their popularity.  Normally, the people asserting that so-and-so must be Freemason is on the other side of the political fight from the person their accusing.  It’s basically a way of saying, “This complete moron could not possibly have risen to power unless they had the support of Illuminati behind him.  I mean, the guy is hardly smart enough to tie his own shoes.” 
     Some of the more amusing allegations of Freemasonry are leveled against modern celebrities, with my all-time favorites being
    Sean (Jay-Z) Carter and Kanye West
     The reasons for this are so completely crazy that it would take a whole book to psychoanalyze the paranoid, misinformed goofiness that goes into them.  Essentially, it can be boiled down to a few things.  Both men are rich, successful, and powerful in their respective fields. 
     I’ve seen countless articles that claim to have proof of their connection to either Freemasonry or the Illuminati based on their jewelry, t-shirt designs, hand gestures and lyrics to their songs. 
     It is like claiming certain rock groups are encouraging people to worship Satan by spinning their albums backwards.  Complete silliness. 
     Unless we are talking about Simon and Garfunkel.  For some reason, when I hear their music, I want to run screaming through the city streets.  They either have hidden messages in their music or I just really can’t stand them. 
     Incidentally, do you remember the scene in Fight Club when Tyler Durdin asks who you would fight out of anyone in the world if you had a chance?  Mine would be Simon and Garfunkel.  I have the battle plan worked out in my head, where I go for Paul Simon first because he’s smaller and looks sneakier. 
     You’re still with me on this one, right?  I can’t be the only person having these thoughts. 
     And finally, the two funniest names of people I found who are “accused” of being Freemasons on the internet are:
      Leonardo da Vinci and Williams Shakespeare
     I’m not even sure what to really say to that.  Poor Leo sure does get dragged through the mud a lot these days.  Whether people are claiming he painted himself as a woman in the Mona Lisa or he somehow stole all of his ideas from aliens who abducted him, it’s somehow fashionable to discredit the man. 
     As for Billy the Bard, your guess is as good as mine.  I would think that in between rewriting the King James Bible and stealing all of those works of literature from Christopher Marlowe or his wife Anne Hathaway, he’d have been too busy to be a Freemason.
     And just for the record, that’s the Anne Hathaway he married, not the actress. 
     Although, I’m sure if we really put our minds together, we can cook up a whole new conspiracy theory that brings all of these wonderful elements into play.  Perhaps during his alien abduction/time travel escapades, Leonard da Vinci picked up William Shakespeare and whisked him all the way to modern times where he found nubile Anne Hathaway slaving over a series of unproduced movie scripts.  He stole the plots from the movies, and da Vinci stole the space age technology that appeared in them.  Each of them went back to their separate times and carried on like they’d