Which facts. How does the world work, in your estimation.
Way I see it, you have two competing overarching theories, “spontaneous order” and “orchestrated order”. You look at the U.S./Western empire, with its totally hierarchical command structure, and a big “?” at the top above SCOTUS, Congress and the Presidency, who all inexplicably follow the same agendas opposed to the will and benefit of the people, it seems to me a perfectly reasonable conclusion that somebody is in control. I don’t think it’s the Freemasons - this was kind of an old trope throughout American history (see the early 1800s Anti-Masonic Party), but knocking out individual dumb theories for who’s in charge doesn’t disprove all of them.
IMO, “conspiracy theories” are a natural attempt to explain observed reality (inequality, mass conditioning/brainwashing, global militarism and empire, etc.). They can be informed by falsehoods and/or manipulated into harmful movements (MAGA for example), but again, doesn’t disprove the entire idea of society being controlled. The only way you get to such a disproof is by an exhaustive analysis of every social institution demonstrating it’s not being controlled. Going, “these things just happen on their own” without any further detail is hand-wavey.
Have you considered you can really accuse anyone you disagree with of “being idiots who can’t or won’t face the facts of reality”? Maybe reality is as hideous and our society as controlled as they say, and you’re the one can’t or won’t face the facts of it. That kind of discourse doesn’t get anyone anywhere.
Not attacking a strawman, I asked him to clarify and then talked about the context.
“Conspiracy theorists” often look at an event that’s heavily covered by the media, that serves a perceived state interest, and investigate it further. Particularly if it receives disproportionate emphasis, like the various mass casualty events that were referenced so often they’re just referred to by dates (“9/11”, “7/7”, “Oct. 7”, etc.). Sandy Hook served a perceived state interest (popular disarmament), and people perceived “weird things about it”, so to speak, so interpretations of the event differed. Sometimes people try to explain the formation of these theories in terms of fulfillment of an emotional need (“they can’t accept this would just happen so they need to pretend someone is in control”), which is just inaccurate. They have a mental model, whether accurate in a given case or not, where there’s an antagonistic power structure of some kind orchestrating events or narratives for its own benefit, and are simply applying that lens to understand new events and narratives.
At the end of the day, it is a fact that the U.S. government does things like this in general. You look at declassified CIA documents from the past, they are very open about overthrowing governments, manipulating public perception, and all sorts of other shady behavior. But they’re not open about them as they’re doing them. So we’re left with the difficulty of figuring it out for ourselves.