Category File
Hidden Power
5 documented theories filed under this subject.
- The BouléSigma Pi Phi, founded in Philadelphia in 1904, took only men already established in a profession and spent most of a century declining to be written about. That combination produced a theory: a Black Skull and Bones, deputised by white power to manage Black America. Its membership roll is published, its papers are open at Emory, and the argument underneath the theory is a real one about class that Du Bois was having in print in 1903.
- Who Paid for the Scofield Reference BibleThe 1909 Scofield Reference Bible did more than any other book to make American evangelicals Zionists, and a claim circulating since 1988 holds that a Zionist financier paid for it. The claim's author wrote "we assume"; the club's own membership book, the project's own historian and the dates all point elsewhere. The interesting part is the thirty-eight-year chain by which an assumption became a citation.
- FreemasonryThe oldest continuous subject in conspiracy literature: a fraternal order said to direct governments from behind them, to have planted its symbols in national iconography, and to teach initiates a doctrine at odds with the one it professes. The order is real, old and unusually well documented — its rituals have been in print since 1730, its constitutions and officers are published, and the charge that it conceals a hidden doctrine has twice been tested in public, once by a French writer who announced in 1897 that he had invented his own evidence. What the record carries instead is the opposite relationship to power: the craft was suppressed by the Nazi regime, criminalised by Franco and banned across the Soviet bloc.
- Opus DeiA Catholic institution founded in 1928 and treated in conspiracy literature as a secret order inside the Church: a disciplined cadre placed in governments, banks and the Vatican itself, recognisable to most readers through a 2003 novel that gave it a murderous albino monk. Opus Dei has no monks. It is a personal prelature of about 93,000 people, some 2 per cent of them priests and around seven in ten married laypeople with ordinary jobs, and its statutes, institutions and prelate are public. What it does not publish is who belongs — and the most serious allegations against it, now before an Argentine federal court, come from former members rather than from outside.
- The Trilateral CommissionA private body founded in 1973 to bring together senior figures from North America, Europe and Japan, and treated in conspiracy literature since the late 1970s as the committee that actually runs Western policy. The overlap it is accused of is real and was never hidden — a founding member became president in 1977 and filled his administration from the membership — and so is the document most often quoted against it, a 1975 report to the Commission arguing that American governance suffered from "an excess of democracy". What has never been produced is a mechanism: the Commission publishes its members, its reports and its accounts, and nothing in them instructs anyone to do anything.
- The Vril SocietyVril was invented by Edward Bulwer-Lytton for his 1871 novel The Coming Race. The society said to have pursued it in early twentieth-century Germany — psychic contact with Aldebaran, female mediums, subterranean beings, antigravity discs built for the Nazis — was assembled out of that fiction by later occult and conspiracy writing.
- Strawman TheoryRoger Elvick, the North Dakota farmer who assembled the strawman theory, was sentenced to five years in federal prison in 1991. No US court has ever ruled for anyone on this basis. The claim is that the state creates a second, corporate ‘you’ at birth, identified by the capital letters on official documents, which holds your debts and is backed by a secret Treasury account the right filing can reach.
- The Forced Resignation of Benedict XVIOn February 11, 2013, Pope Benedict XVI announced in Latin that he would step down, the first papal renunciation in roughly six hundred years. Several theories hold that he did not go willingly, pointing variously to a secret dossier compiled after the Vatileaks scandal, to financial pressure on the Vatican's bank, and to internal factions. Benedict maintained until his death that he resigned freely, and canon law requires that a renunciation be made without coercion. The claims remain unproven and disputed.
- Deep State OriginsA theory that the creation of the CIA in 1947 was not simply an administrative reform of U.S. intelligence after World War II but a quiet seizure of foreign-policy machinery by Wall Street-connected lawyers, bankers, and corporate strategists. In this interpretation, the new intelligence system institutionalized a private governing layer—later called the “deep state”—that could influence or direct foreign policy beyond normal democratic accountability.
- The Nazis Kicking Out Freemasons and the Occult from GermanyThis theory focuses on the Nazi regime’s campaign to purge Germany of independent esoteric, occult, and fraternal networks—especially Freemasons, astrologers, occultists, spiritualists, and related secretive circles. In conspiratorial interpretations, the purge was not simply ideological housekeeping, but a struggle for control over hidden knowledge, symbolic power, and underground influence. Some versions argue the Nazis wanted to destroy rival secret societies and occult authorities so that only state-controlled mysticism, racial mythology, and regime-approved esotericism would remain.
- Admiralty Law Governs AmericaThe “Admiralty Law governs America” theory claims that the United States is not truly governed by constitutional common law, but by maritime or admiralty law disguised as ordinary civil government. In conspiracy and sovereign-citizen circles, this idea is used to argue that courts, contracts, taxation, policing, and even personal identity are administered under a hidden commercial regime tied to shipping law, international commerce, and emergency powers. Supporters often point to courtroom symbols, legal terminology, capitalization conventions, and the growth of federal administrative systems as signs that Americans are being governed under a maritime-commercial code rather than the original constitutional order.
- United States Became a Corporation in 1871The “United States became a corporation in 1871” theory claims that the original constitutional republic was covertly replaced when Congress passed the District of Columbia Organic Act of 1871. In conspiracy interpretations, this act allegedly transformed the United States from a sovereign nation into a corporate entity controlled by financial interests, foreign creditors, or hidden elites operating under commercial law. Variations of the theory connect the act to claims about the loss of constitutional rights, the rise of federal control, secret debt arrangements, maritime or admiralty law, and the existence of a second, illegitimate government centered in Washington, D.C.