About this site

We created this site to share and discuss the pamphlet “How to Overthrow the Illuminati”. We are also passing out the pamphlet in the ‘hood, and we aim to eventually produce a Youtube video based on it. You are welcome to print and distribute the pamphlet yourself – if you do, please let us know, and please link back to this site.

We are revolutionaries active in struggles in New York City and Seattle. We’ve spent a lot of time with youth from the ‘hood, talking about life and politics, trying to come together to fight white supremacy, police brutality, the prison system, deportation, and inequality in the schools. Over and over again, we’ve seen how these conversations and struggles get derailed when people start to say there is nothing we can do because the Illuminati controls everything.

We would take a bet that this “Illuminati theory” is probably the most popular political philosophy among youth in the ‘hood today. As we wrote in the pamphlet,

Illuminati theory helps oppressed people to explain our experiences in the hood. Society throws horrible stuff in our faces: our family members get locked up for bullshit. Our friends kill each other over beefs, money or turf. Our future is full of dead-end jobs that don’t pay shit. We struggle to pay bills while others live in luxury. On TV, we see people all over the world dying in poverty, even though we live in the most materially abundant society in history. Most people act like none of these terrible things are happening. Why does this occur? We start looking for answers, and Illuminati theory provides one.

We believe Illuminati theory is wrong, and we wrote this pamphlet to offer a different answer. We wrote this pamphlet because we know people who think about the Illuminati usually want to stop oppression and exploitation. They’re some of the smartest people in the hood today. Forty years ago, Illuminati theorists would’ve been in the Black Panther Party. Today most of them sit around and talk endlessly about conspiracies. This is a waste of talent.

We created this project for our friends and comrades in the ‘hood, to deepen our ongoing conversations and struggles together. We wrote the pamphlet based on feedback from them, and we welcome more feedback as we continue to revise and sharpen our arguments. To overthrow the Illuminati means to overthrow the helplessness and the alienation that we have all fallen into by living under this system. It is to recognize that we ultimately create and recreate this system through our activity – therefore, we can also overthrow it together.

We expect that some respectable intellectuals might think we have gone crazy or that we are wasting our time working on a project like his. We encourage them to spend some time with youth in the ‘hood and they’ll see why this is important. We wrote this pamphlet because none of them did. We were frustrated by conversations that had been derailed by conspiracy-theory-fueled hopelessness, and we didn’t know what to say to friends and comrades who were falling into this despair. We googled “Marxist analysis of the Illuminati” and nothing came up. That shows how out of touch the Left is with the youth who are developing these theories. We hope this pamphlet is one small step toward ending that separation.

What we do:

Will and Ba Jin are from New York and are part of a process of creating a local revolutionary organization. They were part of the Flatbush rebellion and they wrote this pamphlet about it.  Chino and Saudade are also part of Take Back the Bronx; they organize on the block against cops, landlords, and politicians. Mamos is a member of the Black Orchid Collective, a group of revolutionaries in Seattle. He is also part of Creativity Not Control, a group of teachers, students, and parents who want learning to be for life, not labor.

We welcome feedback as we continue to refine the pamphlet and as we develop follow- up pieces about related topics. Feel free to leave a comment here, or to email us at overthrowingilluminati@gmail.com