A popular and versatile collection of conspiracy theories are predicated on the idea that a secretive group of elites are privately orchestrating a plot to unify the world under a single government.

That government, controlled by this elite and their ilk.

The specifics about who these people are, why they're doing what they're doing, how they're doing it, and what

their endgame, their desired outcomes are. Very, depending on who you talk to, though. Part of why

this is such an appealing concept is that it allows us to bring seeming order to an otherwise

confusing jumble of moves and counter moves by folks who run various aspects of modern society.

It's also appealing because it allows us without evidence to position whomever we don't like

as the big bad guys who are nefariously conniving and shifting pieces around the chessboard,

which serves the double purpose of demonizing some other ethnic group,

economic class, political party, or specific individuals who we sometimes don't like because of

who they are or who we don't like because they're part of another political party or ethnic group,

and so on. Just as humans have been known to blame the weather on gods and spirits,

we're also prone to blaming wars, plagues, economic upheavals, and other such events on people

who we perceive to have godlike power. Famous people, rich people, powerful politicians,

and anyone else who shows up in the news or in public discourse

are common targets of folks who cleave to some permutation of this conspiracy theory.

And the narratives underpinning these theories are really fascinating, as some of them are massively

complex, which is part of why they're fun to engage with and think about, spanning

all of human history, and in some cases beyond human history. Sometimes they involve secret

organizations like the Illuminati and Freemasons. In others, it's secretive, at times immortal

Nazis who survived World War II, and who are now taking a different approach to world

domination under the auspices of what's often referred to as the Fourth Reich. In some cases,

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