TL;DR: We’ll pause and take a look back at recent work on how the Salem Witches were behind Skull and Bones and the Opium Wars, and realize that conspiracy theorists are just never, ever going to get there.

Advisory: Yes, another long post, but if you read to the end and agree with the conclusions, you may be able to save yourself a quite a bit of time going forward exercising the discernment to recognize and skip material that will not be immediately productive.

I often like to start with how I came to a subject in the first place, and it’s usually something I noticed by happenstance. Well, Skull and Bones was mentioned in the very old “Ring of Power” documentary I was watching and I thought, “Crazy, but I just wonder if the Salem Witches were involved?” Well, most things are easy to find if they are there to be found in the first place and you know how to look.

The products of that effort were the last couple of posts, exposing that secret society and that “well-documented violent event” (as YouTube’s Community Guidelines would call it) as just another couple of the numerous initiatives of the Salem Witches:

“Skull and Bones” is just another project of the Salem Witches (conspiracies.win 8/6/2025)

The Salem Witches: Official Opium Sponsors of the Chinese Empire (plus another Parker) (conspiracies.win 8/8/2025)

Of course, there has been a tremendous amount of research in conspiracy theory circles on these topics. If you aren’t familiar with Skull and Bones and able to name a few Bonesmen, you are not leaving Conspiracy 101 with a passing grade. Here is a bit of that research that I came across in the preparation of those two posts:

Hegelian Dialectic as a Strategy for Modern Globalization: A Deep Dive with Antony Sutton (Winter Watch 7/23/2025)

Secret Society Kingpins Influenced, Financed 20th Century Upheavals for the Benefit of the New Underworld Order (Winter Watch 8/4/2025)

I actually noticed those only by pure happenstance as I was doing the research. Coincidences do happen, I suppose. Those articles are largely based on the landmark book:

America's Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull & Bones (Antony C. Sutton 1986 335-pages)

Also, this magisterial tome (look at the page count!) turned up in a search:

The New Underworld Order (Christopher Story 2006 749-page PDF)

Now, don’t read all that material just yet. In fact, if you read to the end of this post, you may not be very interested in doing so at all, or no time soon anyway. But slow down! That’s not to disparage or discount Russ Winter’s writing, or that of Antony Sutton on whose work those articles are based, or Christopher Story’s tremendous effort. My point is that I clearly recognized my work is from a different paradigm than theirs. Cross through the invisible membrane between the two paradigms and you can no longer look back into the former and see it with the same eyes.

The realization hit me so starkly that I had to pass it on, which is what I’m doing here. The point of all of my research posts is to try to convey to you “what is really going on” as efficiently as possible. Whether you accept the thesis at all and—if so—where you go from there is entirely up to you. I couldn’t begin to guess.

The basic state of mind that I picture is something like, “Okay, if this was just more shenanigans that the Salem Witches have been up to over the centuries, I can forget any thesis that it was driven solely by money or power, or what the specific geopolitical situation was, and all the ins and out and what-have-yous. All of that is downstream from this very unseen, very powerful, very long-running force manipulating human society." Well, that’s how I think about it, anyway.

If I had to characterize the “mainstream conspiracy” paradigm—that of the Winter Watch articles and Sutton and Story’s books—is something like, “If we carefully study the details, we can generalize to what is really going on”. Fair enough and it applies to many situations, but the problem is that a given paradigm will never point you outside itself to a new paradigm, if that is indeed what is called for. It is, in fact, the inherent fault that makes a paradigm a paradigm.

The paradigm we’ve been discussing concerning the Salem Witches is something like, “Now that we’ve identified the Small Club, I wonder if they are behind this particular thing? If so, all else is downstream, just supporting details of their fuckery.”

So the one paradigm starts with the details of the rich and the powerful and seeks to discern the structure and patterns. But ask yourself, seriously, is anyone going to come up with the Salem Witches from that? None have so far, demonstrably. The sole example is from a disinfo agent who (IMHO) was most certainly handed the tip.

The other paradigm is totally outside that. “Rich and powerful” are just means to an end but bloodlines—even to the extent of preserving names—are paramount. They also stay just outside the spotlight, not secret yet always unseen, not who “everyone is talking about”. I have come to call them “The Salem Witches” but, as a rule, they have no organizations, no societies, no self-identifications. All such things are merely fronts and utilitarian. Just like the Cool Kids in school, They know who They are and that is all that is important.

You see, what hit me was that out of all that detailed and painstaking research I linked above, do you know how much I used? Zero. I didn’t link to any of it and I didn’t find out anything new for the posts from all that material. I barely read any of it. I just used searches and found out the intersection was extremely small.

Let me give you a concrete example: Russ Winter reproduces a list of 25 “Notable Bones Families” that Sutton previously compiled. Only four have come up—and very tangentially—in my research and writing. Bush: Sarah Bush was Abe Lincoln’s step-mother. Dodge: I compiled a lot of links about the Dodge family but I thought it would be so mundane (relatively speaking) to readers that I never posted about them. Bundy: Mathis wrote that serial killer Ted Bundy was one of them but I just noted that down for future reference and never found reason to include it. Taft: Oddly enough, you saw my first brief discussion of them only because a Taft was one of the Skull & Bones founders. That’s it.

For a second example, Russ relates:

As one analyst wrote in July 1996, Yale is the place “where three threads of American social history — espionage, drug smuggling and secret societies — intertwine into one.”

He never mentions the Russell family in either article, and you saw what I had to say about the Russells and Yale and drug smuggling in the posts. You’ll also saw what I had to say about the Tafts, whom he mentions only in passing. Story says very little bit about the Russells and almost nothing about the Tafts and the Perkinses.

Now, you might think of those as holes in the research—flaws or faults—but there is a certain reason for it, which is the mechanism of the paradigm. Metaphorically speaking, an incorrect paradigm causes you to use a funnel upside-down. Not that it’s impossible for the material to get through, it’s just that you get a lot of spillage. Orient the funnel the correct way—use the appropriate paradigm—and everything flows a lot easier to the appropriate destination.

The point is, the outer fringes of Sutton’s work were too far outside what I consider “the action” to bother even writing about. Sounds insulting, but what can I say? Well, what I will say is this: once you’ve concluded to your own satisfaction that it was the Salem Witches once again at work, you may consider just bookmarking the Winter Watch articles and Sutton and Story’s books as detailed references documenting the shenanigans the Salem Witches got up to in these specific cases.

Hope you found this meta-perspective enlightening, or at least a refreshing change of pace. Thanks for reading, and now back to the regular grind….