>>512189541 (OP)I think they started out as good guys but became fairly corrupted by the 1800s. George Washington and many founding fathers were Freemasons. This was at a time when saying you didn't believe literally everything your local preacher said at Church was enough to get you ostracized from your local community at best, and at worst, potentially killed. Freemasonic lodges allowed high IQ men to come together and discuss things in a free manner without worry of social pressures. There may have been ancient mystical teachings involved but if they did anything it was just a slight ego death like a much milder version of a psychedelic drug today. All Freemasons shared in the initiatory experiences are were basically the humans of their day that could see beyond "the matrix" of the quaint Christian society of the time. This is why guys like Thomas Jefferson thought that Christianity would completely die out amongst whites by the mid-1800s.
But ultimately that's not what happened. There was a Christian revival movement in full swing by the 1820s, and I think what happened is that a lot of Freemasons realized that the normies would forever be retarded, only a small number would ever see the light, and so they kinda decided that they were just going to engage in corrupt business practices, smuggling, and various aspects of criminality to enrich themselves at the expense of the normies. Then some midwit normies figured this out in the mid 1800s and the Anti-Masonic party was born and freemasons gradually became "exposed".
Today I'm not sure how much power they have. It seems like most freemason lodges really just are old guys having fundraisers for charity and stuff.