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Ready to soundtrack your summer with Red Bull Summer All Day Play. You choose a playlist that fits your summer vibe the best. Are you a festival fanatic, a deep end dj, a road dog, or a trail mixer? Just add a song to your chosen playlist and put your summer on track. Red Bull Summer All Day Play. Red Bull gives you wings. Visit Red Bull.com BrightSummerAhead to learn more. See you this summer. You can't reason with the sun. Trust us, we've tried. This summer, it's time to put that angry ball of fire on mute. Columbia's Omnishade technology is engineered to protect you from the sun's harsh rays that can burn and damage your skin. The sun is relentless, but so is our gear. Level up your summer@columbia.com to spend more time outside and less time slathering on aloe lotion. You're welcome, Columbia. Engineered for whatever? For over 150 years, the most powerful men in America have been meeting in secret, in a secret forest under the same rules. There's no recordings, no transcripts and no leaks. Until now. For the first time in the group's history, a membership list has actually surfaced. Over 2,000 names, including presidents, billionaires, Supreme Court justices, high ranking intelligence officials, all in the same place at the same time. And all of it off the record. And they opened it all with a ritual and robes and fire in this giant, weird stone owl thing and effigy that's burned in the dark. It sounds like a movie or something. But over the last several decades, evidence has been building and today we are finally going to lay it all out. Because the real question isn't what happens at Bohemian Grove or who's invited? The real question is what are they hiding? So sit back, relax, and welcome to camp. What's up people? And welcome back to camp. My name is Mark Gagnon and thank you so much for joining me in this tent where every single week we explore the most interesting, fascinating, controversial stories from around the world. From all time, forever. Yes, that is what we do here in this very tent. And I want to say thank you so much to you for tuning in every single week. I mean, the campers are growing strong. We got throngs of people that are tuning in and truly it's blowing my mind that the stuff that me and my mom used to debate about as like a 10 year old kid has this much interest on the Internet. It's, it's wild. But I just want to say thank you so much for clicking on the episode because every time you comment you like, you help keep the lights on, you know. You help, you know, keep the fire burning here at the campsite. And, of course, you help pay for all the lavish vacations my dear friend Christos goes on. Christos, how are you doing? Great. All right. Christos, I don't want to. I don't want to cut you off here. And I've been getting a lot of comments about people saying I should be nicer to you. And I'm gonna do that going forward. I'm saying the opposite. But not today. Not today. Today we're talking about Bohemian Grove, okay? If you never heard of this, well, you're in luck. You're in the right place. Because today we're gonna be laying it all out. We're gonna be going through the history of what Bohemian Grove is, how it started and kind of what it morphed into. And ultimately what's actually going on. This is something that has existed in, like, you know, Internet rabbit holes and conspiracy lore for decades. I mean, Alex Jones, like, kind of made his bones off Bohemian Grove. I'm pretty sure he was, like, one of the first guys to, like, crawl up to, like, the top of the break and look down in there to see what they were doing and, like, talked about it on radio, which was like, whoa, this is crazy. He has been right about a lot of things, unfortunately. He's. He's got some hits. He's been wrong about some stuff, but he's been right about, you know, a couple things at the very least. He. He pointed out the Bohemian Grove was a little weird. And the stuff that was going on there was. Was strange. So if you're interested in, you know, secret societies, occult rituals, and the doings of the elites, or shall I say the Epstein class? I've seen people say that recently, and I actually think it's a better term. Then you're in the right spot. So let's dive in. Okay. What is Bohemian Grove? Well, it kind of starts in 1872. Place called San Francisco, California. Ever heard of it? Basically, a bunch of journalists and, like, artists and musicians and writers. Like, actual bohemians in, like, the original sense of the word bohemian. Like, do you know where Bohemia is, by the way? Well, I know it's La Boheme, which is the term for the normal class of people. Right. Bohemians, as a colloquial term, is like, artists and people that kind of, like, are avant garde. They kind of, like, go with the flow and they sort of reject cultural norms, you know, and it's like A town in the Czech Republic. I don't know why that's the, the term, but that's why people call it bohemian. And what kind of it means to be a bohemian. Yeah, here's Bohemia and where it's in Czech Republic, right? Yeah, I mean, I probably some great reason, but yeah, regardless, that's where these people are getting together and they're forming a social club and they call it the Bohemian Club. And the idea is pretty simple from the outset, right? It's get a bunch of creative people to get together, have some drinks, maybe do a little drugs in there, you know, I mean, put on some theatrical shows and they celebrate art and they choose an owl as their symbol and they, they see this owl as representing wisdom. And the motto that they adopt was a line from Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. Weaving spiders come not here. Which is essentially a poetic way of saying, like no business, no scheming, no deals. Like with these weaving spiders that are constantly trying to social climb. You leave that at the door, okay? Because in here we get to hang out and be craves. Kind of like original Burning Men is a way to put it, right? Just a bunch of people getting together, just having drinks, you know, probably walking around naked in the woods. And that's. Yeah, I mean also, let me say, a sick logo. I mean, not like the owl in general because it might be Moloch, it might actually be like a satanic entity. But this one is beautiful. I mean, look at the colors on that. That is so nice. I was about to say the colors are the worst thing about it. No, I think the colors, especially for the 60s, I mean, was such a. Such a vibrant. Could you put that on a shirt for me for my birthday? I will sell it on the store. I love that. All right. Now, six years later, in 1878, one of the club's founding members, a stage actor, this guy Harry Edwards, he announces that he's leaving San Francisco for New York. So the club throws like this big going away party in the redwoods of Marin county. And they bring food and lanterns and they stay out overnight and they love it. That camping trip, the simple send off for like one of their members, became the start of a tradition for the group. So in the 1890s, these bohemians landed on their permanent home. A 2,700acre stretch of old growth redwood forest in Sonoma county along the Russian river near a small town called Monte Rio. And they call it Bohemian Grove. And they purchased the land outright in 1899. Now here is where the Original version of the story starts to kind of shift. The club began extending memberships to a bunch of wealthy people who would be able to like, fund these theatrical productions, right? So you got to have like the artist and the on guard peel. But also you got to get some tech bros coming in to kind of like fund the stuff that they're working on, right? So once the money comes in, the power isn't far behind. All of a sudden, Presidents, industrialists, generals, CEOs, they're all joining and, or they're, you know, invited as guests. And by the early 20th century, the famous names attached to the Bohemian Grove include Mark Twain, Jack London, Ambrose Bierce, and then pretty soon after, Herbert Hoover, William Taft, Dwight Eisenhower, and eventually the Bohemians. And the actual artists get crowded out by the billionaires. But of course, the club keeps the name. It's kind of literally Burning Man. It's a bunch of, like, artists in California that want to, like, get together and do drugs. And then like a bunch of rich tech bros and comedians show up. Precedence is pretty big. That's pretty big. We're not far off from, like, Bush going to Burning Man. Which one? Actually, the first is. Yeah, not with us. The first one has already been burned up. I think now what started as a camping trip for artists turns into something very deliberate. Because once the guest list is shifting, everything else shifts. So who gets invited, who gets access, who actually gets to be at these parties is going to change. Because even the most powerful people in the world, all of a sudden you're going to need a lot more infrastructure. Okay, so the real question isn't how Bohemian Grove started. It's like, how did it turn into what it is? Because if you zoom out, the Grove isn't just a forest. It's like a blueprint. Kind of this private, you know, almost 3,000 acre ecosystem where status kind of decides, like, where you get to sleep and who you meet and all that kind of stuff. On the actual property, there are over 100 individual campsites spread across hillsides, each with its own name and its own, like, little, like, internal culture and its own, like, you know, order and stuff. And then, you know, you have the prestigious camps, the ones that are near the lake, like Caveman and Owl's Nest. They, you know, have cabinet secretaries and intelligence people and sitting heads of state. Caveman is actually the campsite where presidents traditionally will stay. Now the peripheral camps further up the ridge are for members who are powerful by, you know, normal, you know, metrics, but not quite like the center of the Web and the camps even have their own valets. They're described in, you know, club records as essentially like these GMs that kind of like, manage everything. And the full encampment runs for two weeks every July. It's actually coming up not. Not far away. And there are 2,900 members and guests housed in bunk beds and private quarters and fed in these dining halls that seat, like, 1500. And they're entertained on two full performance stages. Now, getting in requires you to be invited by a current member, but after that, you kind of have to, like, get through, like, a vetting process. And it goes well beyond wealth. You get put on a wait list that runs, like, 20 to 30 years. The initial membership fee is roughly $25,000 plus annual dues. One former guest said that the wait supposedly is shorter if you play an instrument. Kind of a fun fact. I don't know if that's a euphemism. Sounds like it a little bit. Right now, at this point, Bohemian Grove isn't a retreat. It is a. It's like a filtering system, okay? It's a system designed to concentrate a specific type of person over decades, over time, behind these closed doors. And when you build something like that, what really matters isn't, like, you know, the. The rules or what you do. It's the results, like, what actually happens. And the results are pretty significant. It's hard to really know exactly what goes on, again, because it is a closed club and it's very secretive. But from what people have reported on, and, of course, leaks, we know a little bit now. The club's official position for most of its history has been very simple. There's no membership list. I mean, obviously there is, but the rules are kind of like Fight Club, right? The club doesn't discuss the members or the guests or anything that happens. And there's no list. There's. There's no club even. What are you. What are you talking about? There's no Burning Owl. None of that stuff. Yet over the decades, through memoirs and journalism and, like, avant garde, sort of like, you know, rogue, you know, creators and journalists, they've figured out a. A comprehensive picture. And not only is it extraordinary, but it's very telling. Virtually every Republican president since, like, the 1920s has been a member or a guest. We're talking Hoover, Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, George H. Bush, and W. Several Democrats have also attended as guests, including Jimmy Carter. So just think about that. The Grove has also hosted, at various points, people like Henry Kissinger, a U.S. diplomat and strategist, secretary of state. That guy that like, did all the Cold War stuff. He like bombed Laos to, you know, dust, basically, that guy. And Colin Powell and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, James Baker, he was a senior statement. He was a secretary of State and had a big role in the Cold War and like Gulf War stuff. This guy, George Schultz, another secretary of state in the 1980s who helped, you know, with the Cold War tensions and negotiated arms deals with the Soviet Union. I mean, the list goes on. Karl Rove, Walter Cronkite, Clint Eastwood. I mean, anyone and everyone, or at least the most important, you know, like high ranking sort of status people within our society. Now here's the detail that a lot of people miss. Every day at the lakeside, prominent figures and members and guests deliver what are called Lakeside talks. These are informal, but they're really substantial presentations on policy and science and geopolitics and intelligence and technology and anything you can imagine that really fancy, rich, powerful people would talk about. And over the decades, these talks have been given by legit directors of the CIA and astronauts and former presidents and business leaders. All of them off the record. That's. Nothing's published. There's no transcripts, no accountability, none of that. Now this is kind of ironic because you'll remember that the club's original purpose was. Was supposed to be a place where people would like, meet up and play and do drugs and be creative. I mean, their motto literally says no weaving spiders. But two weeks of unguarded, off the record conversations amongst the people that literally run the country and the banks and the corporations. Well, the structure kind of made Bohemian Grove into the web. And it's affectionately, I shall say, filled with spiders. And the plans that were spun, thank you, pun intended, on this literal grove would directly affect the rest of the world. So, for example, 1950, Eisenhower and Nixon met for the first time at Bohemian Grove as guests of former president Herbert Hoover around a campfire at Caveman Camp. At that time, Nixon was mid senate campaign and Eisenhower was being quietly courted for a little role called the President of the United States. And the Grove was where they were first introduced and where conversations started to happen later. Nixon himself described his 1967 lakeside talk as the speech that gave him the most pleasure and satisfaction of his political career. Think about that. He was like, that was the peak. He called it the first milestone on my road to the presidency. What do you think that means, Christos? The first milestone. That was like the moment where he's like, ah, I did my speech, my lakeside talk, my tent Talk at Bohemian Grove. And now I'm on track to be president. Seems like there's, you know, maybe. Maybe some important contacts that came from. This sounds like an unofficial stamp of approval from someone, perhaps. Now, the speech was entirely off the record. No one really knows what he said. The audience of fellow, you know, Grove members reportedly gave a standing ovation. That same summer, Nixon and Ronald Reagan sat down informally at the Grove. And reached sort of like an arrangement. Reagan would stay out of the 1968 presidential primaries. Unless Nixon faltered. That conversation between two dudes that would eventually become presidents. At some retreat center in the middle of California. Off the record, you could say. Shaped the trajectory of the future of American conservatism. Now, if that is all that it was, it would already be extremely powerful. But there's one moment in its history that goes even further than that. A moment where it doesn't just, you know, like, put people together in the same room. It actually changes the outcome of things. Because at this point, it's like, okay, this sounds like a fraternity. You know what I mean? It sounds like a bunch of dudes getting together, hanging out. And then eventually those dudes go on to be, you know, the shapers of, you know, American foreign policy. Or banking or corporate interests. And they're all kind of talking and hanging out. But it's just the most high profile fraternity you could ever imagine. But there's actual substantial, like, outcomes from this stuff. So in 1942, in the middle of World War II. Some of the most important men in America met at Bohemian Grove to try to figure out how to build a bomb. Yeah. September 1942. The United States was at war. We know this. And there's a small group of dudes that gather to answer one of the most consequential questions in human history. Can we build an atomic bomb? So the S1 executive committee, the government body that was overseeing earlier early nuclear research. They actually met at Bohemian Grove to resolve the outstanding questions holding back this program. And in attendance was this guy, Ernest Lawrence. And another guy named J. Robert Oppenheimer, two of the most important physicists alive. Also present was the president of Harvard University. Representatives at Standard Oil and General Electric. Senior military officials. And General Leslie Groves, who would go on to command this entire project. Now, just to be extremely precise about what happened here. Because the history on this is remarkable. The site selections and the final construction of the bomb. Unfolded over two months and multiple locations. But the September 1942 Bohemian Grove meeting was a turning point. It was where the committee resolved that the Project should be placed under army control. And where General Groves was elevated as its director, those frameworks set the Manhattan Project on the path that led to Los Alamos and Oak Ridge and Hanford. Remember this whole, like, hey, no weaving spiders. This is literally the center of the web that leads to the creation of the most devastating weapon ever produced by human beings. It's pretty crazy. Wildly enough, the club actually acknowledges that this meeting happened. This is one of the very few things that they'll actually confirm about the Grove's history. Probably because denying it would be, at this point, harder than just being like, yeah, some physicists were here. It's not like anything happened. But that framing some physicists showed up and hung out and, you know, drank some beers by the lake is exactly the kind of understatement that keeps the secrecy of the Grove alive. Because what the Manhattan Project meeting demonstrates isn't that the Grove is a place where the world's fate is decided over cocktails. It's that when the people who do decide the world's fate need to get into the same room, away from the press and from, you know, journalists and off the record, in a setting where they can actually speak freely, the Grove, at least in 1942, is the place that they would go. So the takeaway here isn't subtle. When something consequential needs to be discussed, this is where they do it. And yet that's not what most people associate with this place at all. Because the Grove isn't famous for policy or, you know, physics meetups. It's famous for something much weirder, because every year, on the first night of the encampment, before the talks, before the networking, before any of that stuff, there's a. A ritual, I guess, is how you could describe it. There's like. I'm trying to. I'm trying to use, like, generous framing, okay? Just in case I ever get invited. It's. It's a ritual, an opening ceremony. I don't know what you call it, but they've been performing the same thing since 1881. All the members gather at the lake, and at the far end is a massive shrine of an owl. A 40 foot concrete owl built in the late 1920s, covered in moss and, you know, other redwood forest debris, wired with audio equipment on the inside. And as night falls, the members are dressed in robes, and then 18 torchbearers line the lakeshore. And it's difficult to really say exactly what happens next, but I'll explain what people have sort of talked about in the Internet and This is all allegedly. And you can draw your own conclusions. Basically, there's a. A figure that comes out, maybe like the leader of the procession, some would say a high priest type person that inveighs against Dull Care. Now this is a stand in for the anxieties and the burdens of ordinary life. And an effigy representing Care is placed into a coffin, carried in this like, you know, like candle lit procession and set ablaze in a giant fire in front of the owl. And then the owl speaks. The voice is like this booming, recorded, theatrical thing that basically comes from inside the statue. And for decades, the recorded voice actually belonged to Walter Cronkite. Yeah, if you've never heard of Walter Cronkite, he's was dubbed the most trusted man in America, the voice of CBS News for decades. He was the man that told the country when JFK was shot. He reported from Vietnam, anchored the moon landing. And every year at a ceremony deep in the woods, his voice came from inside this giant concrete owl while a bunch of dudes wore robes. And they earned this effigy called Dull Care, that by all accounts is a human effigy that represents something else right in front of the owl. Now, the official explanation here is this. It's a production, it is a theatrical production, which is what the organization has been doing for 200 years. It's a symbolic letting go of the world and the stress of everyday life before this vacation and this time of relaxation and fun can actually begin. Now, the word care, in its original English, kyaru, actually means anxiety, not compassion. So you're not burning empathy, you're burning worry. And it's meant to be cathartic. It's not a cult, it's not any type of ritual thing. It's just to symbolize, hey, we're letting go of the outside world. And honestly, that might be the truth. I mean, that's what they're saying, you know, that might be the whole story. Maybe it's just a little thing. On its own, the ritual's a little weird, okay? But combined with all the secrecy, it becomes something very different. Because once an image like that escapes and you actually see, you know, presidents in robes holding torches while they're burning a human effigy, you're like, that's a little weird, right? I don't want to get political, but it's a little weird. Now, in the year 2000, someone actually got inside Bohemian Grove with a hidden camera and captured everything. Now, if you've ever seen the grainy footage of a giant Owl and a burning effigy. The clip that's been circulating online for 25 years. This is where it came from. Would you actually mind pulling that clip up? That'd be great. Nobody talks about what actually happened, like, what the footage is depicting. What's up, guys? We're gonna take a break real quick because I gotta tell you something kind of embarrassing. All. I've been working out pretty consistently for a while. I love working out. I think it's super important. Part of my daily routine. 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And so I started taking Mars Men. And honestly, I've been on it for a while, and I've actually noticed a difference. This is going to sound crazy. This is real. 2024. I did blood work. My testosterone was, like, fine. It was, like, on the lower side of normal. And I did blood work recently, completely unrelated to this. And I've been taking Mars Men for, I don't know, maybe like, four or five months. My testosterone went up. Now, I don't know if it's from Mars. I'm not going to say it's only them. You know, maybe I've been eating a little cleaner, I've been sleeping better. Who knows? But my testosterone actually got an increase. I mean, I couldn't believe it. My energy feels steadier throughout the day. My workouts have been better. And going into summer, I'm actually, like, leaning out in a way that I feel better about now. Mars Men is a natural supplement. I don't even have it in the studio because it's at my house. There's no synthetic hormones, no Sketchy stimulants, just actual ingredients like Tonga Ali shilajit, zinc boron. And they're designed to actually support healthy testosterone levels. Now, look, you can just go buy all of these supplements yourself. You can go buy Tonga Ali shilajit, but you gotta make sure they're from the right place. You gotta make sure they're the right quality. And it can get expensive to actually like parsed all together. But with Mars Men, it's just all of it in one already done for you. It's made in the USA, it's third party, tested in every batch, and over 91% of users actually report higher energy. Now here's the crazy thing with Mars men. There's a 90 day money back guarantee. 90 days, three months of trying it out. And if it's not for you, you get your money back. Zero risk. And for a limited time, the people are listening to this program, you're going to get 50% off for life. I don't know how often this offer comes around. I don't know why they're doing this. 50% off for life. Free shipping and three free gifts@ Mengotomars.com that's Mengotomars.com for 50 off and three free gifts when you check out. It's also available on Amazon. It really worked for me. I like it. I still take it because, you know, I like natural supplements and it makes me feel good. Now when they ask where you heard about it, tell them the good people at Camp Gagnon sent you. It really helps to show more than you know. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break because I want to talk to you about something that happens in your late 20s, early 30s, that no one tells you that basically your ability to handle a night out drinking with the boys completely changes, bro. When I was 22, I could go out on like a Thursday, sleep three hours, wake up, go to work, then go to the gym, feel completely normal, and then do it again the same day. Like, I felt invincible. 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Cheers was actually invented by a student at Princeton, and now it's everywhere. I mean, it's been on Shark Tank, 50 million doses, 30,000 stores. It also has thousands of five star reviews on Amazon and has been backed by doctors and PhDs and clinicians and all this stuff. And the idea is very simple. You're a normal adult, you're having a couple drinks, all right? Cheers help support your body so that you feel way better the next morning. And all you do is you take three capsules after your last drink or before bed. And obviously, this isn't for, like the insane, you know, college nights. All right, if you have like 12 tequila shots, I don't know what to tell you. But if you're a responsible adult, having a couple drinks at a wedding, it's going to make a huge difference. And honestly, for me, the biggest thing is that, you know, I just wake up feeling like a functional person that's still able to get stuff done. I'm able to recover better, and I'm still able to have fun with the boys at night. So same night out, but a way better morning. And that is with Cheers. So for a limited time, our listeners are getting 20% off their entire order when they go to cheershealth.com and they use the code camp. So you just go to Cheers Health, use the code camp, and you're going to get 20% off. And after your purchase, they're going to ask where you heard about Cheers. Please tell them it was from the good people over at Camp Gagdon. It really helps us. It keeps the fire burning. It keeps the lights on. Thank you guys so much. Cheers has been amazing. I can't handle the uneasiness of the next day. And Cheers makes it all possible. Now let's get back to the show. It was July 15, 2000, and there's a radio host by the name of Alex Jones that entered Bohemian Grove with his cameraman, this guy, Mike Hansen, and with them, a hidden camera. They blended in as guests, and the grove is large enough that not everyone knows each other. And they made their way to the lake. And that night they captured the footage of the Cremation of Care. This is the footage right here. Now, it's a long video, so we're not gonna play the whole thing, but you can just see a glimpse of it. So it's not great footage, but you can see there's sort of this fire. There's a bunch of people kind of standing around. There's this sort of, like, ominous music playing in the background. Once again, this summer sets us free. It's a bit strange. I mean, part of you can just be like, yeah, this is like, you know, rich, powerful people like to do these, like, campy big, you know, like, shows and theatrical productions. And there's symbolism. And it's kind of fun to, like, be naughty and, you know, dress up. Now, Jones actually puts this footage out and declares that he had captured evidence of ritual sacrifice of the global elites. So he had a documentary called Dark Secrets Inside Bohemian Grove that spread really quickly in, like, the early days of the Internet. And the imagery is pretty, pretty clear, right? You have a bunch of guys, there's a fire, there's a giant owl, there's an effigy getting burned. And the symbolism is a. You know, it's a little on the nose. Now, what Jones didn't explain was the sacrifice was a theatrical effigy. The ritual was a scripted, dramatic production. And the robe figures were members who were essentially performing a play. Now, journalist John Ronson, who also entered the Grove and watched the same ceremony, offered a different read. His assessment called it an all pervading sense of immaturity. He said that the most powerful men in the world playing dress up, drinking a bunch and watching, like, this cheesy theatrical show is actually embarrassing. He said, like, this whole thing isn't like this sinister ritual. It's like just a bunch of dudes, like, dressing up in the forest, like, drinking. And it's actually like, pretty whack. It was like that was. That was his take. Now, there's also some different questions that come up. Is one of those frames actually better? Is one of those perspectives actually like a better, like, make you feel good, you know, like the idea that these men are performing, like, these rituals, or the idea that they don't even like doing them and that they're all just kind of getting in there, like, you know, getting drunk, watching, like, this theater play. And, you know, we've all been assuming that there's something grand going on. Both answers, in their own way, are, like, a little strange. Now, whatever you make of that footage, it did something important at A time it lodged the Bohemian Grove, you know, into the psyche of the culture. I mean, this elite, men only secret society of the country's most powerful people all getting together. Now, a spy magazine writer who snuck in years before Jones did, described the scene pretty plainly. He says, you know, you are inside the Bohemian Grove when you come down a trail in the woods and hear piano music from amid a group of tents. And then a around a bend to see a man with a beer in one hand and is in the other urinating into the bushes. Now, that image, the gap between public power, private behavior, is kind of what makes people feel weird about the Grove, right? Take away the costumes, the rumors, the interpretations, this idea of like, you know, ritual sacrifice. And what you're left with is something simpler. And honestly, I think more important, it's a place where the most powerful people in the country can act however they want with no cameras and no consequences. And they just all get to, like, hang out with each other and, like, rub shoulders. It's literally like a frat, I guess. And eventually that stops being contained. And eventually what happens at Bohemian Grove doesn't stay there. Now, for most of its history, it was a sealed system, right? It wasn't like the most secret thing ever in terms of like, oh, no one knows about it. It was just self contained. What happened on the inside stayed on the inside. And people had murmurs of like, oh, yeah, these people going up in the woods. But it wasn't like, like top secret, like what goes on at like, Los Alamos or like some like, you know, government site. Because all these people just wouldn't talk. So nothing ever gets out. But over time, this containment starts to fail. And when it does, it doesn't fail all at once. There's just like, breaches that happen over time. And the first time was 1978. The Bohemian Club was charged by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing with refusing to hire a female employee. It's kind of funny that it was like a gendered employment dispute that kind of like blew the whole thing open. The club fought it in court, citing in the official legal documents that members urinate in the open without even the use of rudimentary toilet facilities. And that the presence of woman would actually just alter member behavior. It's just guys being dudes. Nothing. You know what I mean? You can't have a chicken there. Ruining the whole vibe. Now, the trial judge was later found to have previously participated in club activities. The request to disqualify him was denied, and the club ultimately lost the appeal in 1987 and was forced to begin hiring women as daytime employees. However, women are still barred from membership. And then in 1989, Spy magazine writer Philip Weiss spent seven days inside the Grove posing just as another guest. And his November article, Masters of the Universe Go to Camp Inside the Bohemian Grove, described uninhibited behavior is one way to put it. Heavy drinking and this peculiar spectacle of very powerful men regressing into something like, like a college frat. And in 1993, presidential counselor David Gergen resigned from the Bohemian Club after publicly announcing he would not run around naked at the encampment. That's literally why he stepped out. He's like, yeah, I'm not doing some gay shit running around naked in the woods. And then came the one that changed everything. In 2023, investigative outlet ProPublica published a Pulitzer Prize winning investigation into Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. And some of the big headlines were this. Clarence Thomas had accepted luxury travel from billionaire Republican donor this guy Harlan Crow for more than two decades without disclosing it as required by law. We're talking like cruises on super yachts and private jets and, you know, resort stays and repeated trips to Bohemian Grove. Now, this is significant because it, you know, bringing a guest into this encampment costs a member like thousands of dollars. And Crow was flying. Thomas there was on a private jet, and he was covering all the lodging and the fees and all that stuff. And they were sharing a camp with none other than Charles Koch, whose advocacy group Stand Together, had cases actively before Clarence Thomas's court. One attendee who saw Thomas at The Grove told ProPublica, I was taken with how comfortable he was in that environment and how popular he holds court there. Same camp, same fire, but off the record and off the books. And you have two people hanging out, one of which has cases in front of the Supreme Court justice of the United States, just having a beer at chit chatting. At the very least, it seems like a conflict of interest. Now, Thomas's initial response was just a denial. His lawyer issued a statement calling the allegations untrue. And he claimed that he'd been advised that hospitality from personal friends without business before the court didn't need to be disclosed. But in June 2024, Clarence Thomas reverses. In an amended financial disclosure, he acknowledged that the very first time he had inadvertently omitted a Bohemian Grove trip from his 2019 filing, he listed it plainly as food and lodging at a private club in Monte Rio, California. Now, here's the thing. ProPublica had documented at least six undisclosed Bohemian Grove trips with this guy, Harlan Crow. Thomas's amendment covered only one of them. The ethics investigation continues. The pattern, the denial. And then kind of like a quiet reversal amendment and incomplete disclosure has now repeated itself multiple times across multiple different trips. So when you're looking at this all together, right, like the legal stuff, people on the inside talking about it like, you know, cultural leaks and people like Alex Jones like putting it on the Internet, what you're really looking at is something very simple. This is a system that was never fully closed and it didn't explode. It just kind of like bled. And eventually that bleeding starts to affect the world around it. Because Bohemian Grove doesn't exist in isolation. It exists in this place, a real town called Monteria. Now Monterio is this small little community at the end of Bohemian Avenue where the grove's entrance stands. Has the fourth lowest median household income in Sonoma County. It's a quiet kind of working class river community surrounded by one of the most extraordinary redwood ecosystems on the planet. And every July it absorbs a two week influx of private security details and cars and secret service and members and protests and all sorts of stuff all converging on this narrow road that serves as like the actual way that people go home. So as a result, the relationship between Monte Rio and the encampment is kind of complicated. Some local businesses actually appreciate the surge, right? They see it as like tourism. Others find this disruption to be really frustrating. The Press Democrat reported that protesters blocked the narrow access road and it created as much disruption for locals, if not more. But turns out there's an even bigger David and Goliath fight that's going on, the greatest in California's conservation history. So in the mid-2000s, the Bohemian Club submitted a non industrial timber management plan proposing to log up to nearly 2 million board feet per year from the property that they own, including stands of old growth redwoods. Basically they're trying to cut down a bunch of trees. And the stated rationale was fire prevention. Now critics, including a former fourth generation club member named John Hooper, who resigned his membership specifically because of this reason, argued that it took a great deal more than commercial logging dressed up as conservation. He argued that it looked a lot more like commercial logging dressed up as conservation. Now Hooper had hiked into one of the grove's finest old growth stands and found trees tagged for cutting down. So he went to the club's board and they kind of brushed him off. So then he quit and promptly founded the Bohemian Redwood Rescue Club with a bunch of local activists. So Scientists from ucla, uc, Davis, they basically weighed in and they basically said that harvest levels were unsustainable and that the redwoods, famously fire resistant, didn't actually need to be cut down at all. So in 2011, a Sonoma county superior judge ruled for the plaintiffs in Sierra Club vs. Cal Fire and basically ordered the state to rescind the Bohemian Club's logging permit. And in 2012, the settlement was reached, and the club agreed to permanently protect its finest and largest specimens, some of which are like a thousand years old. If you've never been to the redwoods, you should. Have you been? Nope. I mean, it's unbelievable. You look at these trees and you're like, these are just un. These are crazy. And the idea that they were just gonna, like, cut down, like, thousands to hundreds of thousands of trees is kind of heartbreaking. Now, as one attorney in on the Winning side basically put it, no matter how influential a group may be, it's not exempt from the law. So even here, this is kind of like a long way to say there's a place defined by access and insulation and influence. But still, the system isn't untouchable. It can be challenged and it can be constrained, but only when there's enough pressure built long enough from the outside that it forces it to do that. And that matters because for most of the history of the club for 150 years, the Bohemian Club's official position on membership was simple, right? There's no list. The club doesn't disclose any of the members. And Bohemian Grove was built on this assumption that no one could see inside. But that assumption didn't last forever, because finally, someone proved that wrong. Now, In February of 2026, this is. I mean, just a few months ago, an independent journalist named Daniel Boguslaw broke that position completely open. Boguslaw drove from Massachusetts to the Bay area with a 2017 partial attendance list as leverage. Identified a club member and went to that person's office every single day for a week. And he got nothing. He stayed at the Tenderloin Hotel. He relocated to West Oakland, and he kept on waiting. And then one night, at Eli's Mile High Club in Oakland, a courier just arrives with two manila envelopes. And inside was what appeared to be the 2023 Bohemian Grove Camp membership list. That's it. 2, 200 names. Boguslav published it on his substack deeper states on February 25, 2026. And the San Francisco Standard independently reached a club insider who confirmed that it was the genuine 2023 attendance roster. The press Democrat conducted its own verification and the Bohemian Club spokesperson declined to confirm or deny, citing that the club's long standing privacy policy would basically impede them from doing so. Now, the Intercept, an outlet originally set to run the story, got scared and said no thanks. But boguslav published it himself anyway and the list went crazy. What it revealed wasn't the satanic cabal of, you know, like human sacrifice that Alex Jones maybe posited initially in the early 2000s, but it was something more mundane and more revealing. Some of the names on the roster, Again, this is 2023. Michael Bloomberg, Charles Koch, Eric Schmidt, Paul Pelosi, husband of Nancy Pelosi, Conan o', Brien, Ken Burns, Clint Eastwood and Clarence Thomas, whose names on the list dovetail directly with this ongoing ProPublica investigation about the undisclosed trips regard. Let's step back and just look at the famous names for a moment and look at the portrait that the list kind of paints. What this membership list shows is that this is not a cross section of America, you know what I mean? It's just a bunch of old dudes hanging out in the woods. It's a bunch of people drawn from like finance and defense and, you know, contracting and energy and media and law and politics, yada yada yada. And you know, they're all just sitting in this one camp, all talking and hanging out. And this is basically been the same group that's been controlling the levers of American society for the entirety of its existence. And for 150 years, that slice has been meeting in private, off the record, in the same old forest, with no accounting of what's going on. One researcher built a publicly searchable database cross referencing the names with SEC filings, open Secrets, a site you should check out, and LinkedIn turning the leaked list into this open source power map of the upper crust of American aristocracy. What the list didn't reveal was this conspiracy that people have been talking about. But what it does show was something that the club's own motto was designed to actually obscure. This is a deep, dense network that's completely invisible to everyone. Until now. One detail from this whole thing that we mentioned a little bit before that we should discuss is Moloch. Now what is Moloch? It is. This has been connected to Bohemian Grove and also some other stuff that I'll explain it through my lens Again, people are, you know, entitled to their own interpretation. Now, Moloch is a figure from the biology bible and it's associated with child sacrifice. It's referenced in Leviticus and Second Kings. And the name kind of over time became like colloquial, like shorthand for a system that, like, devours people. You know what I mean? Like, people have described, like, capitalism as a Moloch. People described socialism as a Moloch. Like, and then people will describe, like, literal Moloch as an entity for child sacrifice that's appeased through death and war and all that kind of stuff. Stuff. Now, the connection with Bohemian Grove comes from Alex Jones's footage. Now, Jones looked at this 40 foot tall owl with a fire burning in front of it and an effigy at the Cremation of Care ceremony getting, you know, basically cremated. And he called it Moloch. You can, you can see how he gets to that conclusion right? Now, the problem here is that the, you know, the Grove committee has basically said, this is just an owl. And it was chosen way back in the day. And it comes from Shakespeare's motto about wisdom. It has nothing to do with this evil, satanic, bloodthirsty, written, ritualistic, child sacrificing owl. Like, they call it the Cremation of Care, not the Moloch ritual. But maybe they can't call the Moloch ritual because it's kind of obvious. Now, I just want to be fair to the club. Their own literature going back over a century, it never mentions Moloch. There's no documented connection, but the inference here is pretty obvious, right? Jones basically calls the owl Moloch. And people run with it because it makes a ton of sense, right? They have this image of a bunch of dudes in robes with fire and an effigy that he claims is an effigy of a human getting burned in front of a giant statue. A giant statue of an owl. And he's basically like, yeah, that's. This is Moloch. Now, the label comes after the footage. Not from evidence from actually, like within the club or from the people that have talked about the club. But again, people in the club don't talk about the club. So it's not necessarily, you know, proof that there's nothing there. But you can see how that got connected. Now, people on the Internet have also pointed out that there is a child sacrificing demon referenced in the Bible on the $1 bill. You can see it right here. That's the owl. That's Moloch. That's what people have said. All right? Now this is right on the, you know, corner of the one other bill. It's very small. And if you zoom in, you see this thing that people have said is an owl. Now, the actual official explanation is that it's an incidental detail in engraved scroll work. So basically they say it's like an intricate decorative line work thing that appears throughout currency and was designed to make counterfeiting harder. Now, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing never confirmed that this is an intentional owl or not an owl at all. And no primary source, no designer historical notes, official documentation actually support that this was intentionally placed. Now, the broader claim is that this owl connects the dollar bill to the Bohemian Club or the Illuminati or Freemasons. Now, again, none of these are supported through documents, but the Freemason symbols actually do appear all over the dollar bill. I mean, the pyramid, the Eye of Providence, those are documented and historically explained. And maybe we'll do a whole episode on symbolism within America and specifically American money, because there's a whole bunch of stuff that's really fun to talk about. But they have not, you know, confirmed or denied that this is the owl. But people have made this claim like, okay, you have a bunch of American presidents all getting together, they're all hanging out, they're all wearing robes, burning these effigies in front of a giant owl. This is connected to the Old Testament. This is Moloch. This is proof that America is basically serving the satanic child sacrificing being, which is why we're doing all this foreign policy stuff, killing kids around the world. And you are complicit every single time you pay taxes, which is evidenced by the picture of moloch on the $1 bill that you put into the treasury every single year. That's the story. Is it true? I don't know. There's this also. This. This idea that the elites, the satanic elites, if we call them that, that they require to signal or tip off what they're going to do before they do it, that it requires implicit consent. I forget the exact term for it, but this is the idea that they have to show you and that they need you to be kind of aware of it and then to do it anyway. Now again, is any of that true? I don't know. I'm not one of these people to claim, like, this is what's happening. They're controlling the. It's my Alex Jones impression that they're controlling whatever frogs. But, like, no, this is more or less why people believe this. Where it all comes from and what the official explanation is and why people point out like, hey, this is all pretty weird. That's just my take. It's all very strange. Now, the scary truth of this is that we still don't know exactly what happens at Bohemian Grove. We kind of know who's been there, you know, over the years. And specifically in 2023. We have an idea of what's, you know, going on in terms of, like, rituals and these sort of, you know, theatrical performances. And these plays and stuff like that. And we know some of the most consequential relationships in modern history. Have definitely passed through this forest. But the actual conversations, the actual business dealings, the private alignments, the moment where influence actually takes shape, those are still invisible. The guest list from Bohemian Grove doesn't list out some conspiracy. It's not Epstein Files level of, you know, groundbreaking. But rather it just shows a pattern. It shows that this is an old club and you're not in it. It's a big network that's been quietly reinforcing itself for over a century. Basically out of mind. And the crazy thing is that now that we know that the Grove exists for sure. And that people are meeting there. And many of those people are some of the most powerful, high ranking members of our society. What else is going on? Because maybe the Grove isn't the center of anything in particular. Maybe it's just the part that we've happened to stumble across. And maybe we still can't see the whole picture. What other spaces, whether hidden in the California Redwoods or somewhere else. Are still operating behind closed doors? And what exactly are we not supposed to see? And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a brief history on the Bohemian Grove. And I mean, this is again, one of those things that people have been talking about for a long while. Ever since I've been deep diving on my conspiracy wormholes. This has been the spot where people are like, yeah, this is what's happening. But once again, my position with this stuff is generally like. Like, if you know about it, if I'm talking about it, if there's enough evidence, we can see, like a membership list. It's already shifted. Like, this is still, like a good meeting place for people to, like, hang out and do business deals and stuff like that. But, like, the actual power consolidation centers, I think, shift before you actually know what's going on. That's kind of my theory. What were you gonna say? Chris says, well, basically, you're right about it's already gone. But it was at one time a thing. Absolutely no question. That's how I feel about, like, the Freemasons, right? Freemasons, like, ran America. And like, the early, like the late 1700s, 1800s, like this was like a very much a prominent part of American politics. If you wanted to have a seat at the table, if you wanted to get backdoor access to what people were talking about, you needed to be in this club. And that meant you needed to do whatever rituals they were down with. Even if you didn't know what the rituals were, even if you, you just were like, hey, I'm trying to get ahead. I'm trying to meet the right people. I'm trying to like, get this business deal. I have a billion dollar construction project and the state won't let me do it. But I know that the mayor is going to this event. Maybe I can go rub shoulders with him and he'll be a little bit more amenable to my desires. That is how I think power actually works. I think that of course, like the rear, the weird rituals and the effigies and these theatrical productions and stuff, it's all strange. And maybe that's a part of it. Maybe that there's a few people on the inside that actually understand the occult significance and they're doing this stuff specifically. But, but, you know, maybe there's, maybe it's just. There's some people that are just like, yeah, I'm just trying to get ahead in business and this is the way to do it. Personally, I think that, yeah, rich people and powerful people like to do weird stuff. Now do they know that they're participating in something strange in a cult? I think there's a mix. I think specifically at like the turn of the century, 1900s, people were fascinated by like theosophy. There was like an occult revival. People wanted to go see something that they couldn't explain. They wanted to experience this divine interaction with their life. So they would go to seances and they would go to these sort of black masses. They would go to rituals, they would get their palms read, they would do tarot, they would do all these things that were sort of peripherally spiritual, mystical kind of, you know, experiences. And I think this kind of falls in that camp. I think there's some of the people. This is probably my bet. There's probably like a couple people maybe early on, maybe they don't even exist anymore, that created this ritual for a specific type of purpose. Maybe they were, you know, doing something satanic. I'm sure. I think the vast majority of people that go are just kind of like going along with it. So like that one dude, John Ronson, that basically said like, the whole thing was like, very embarrassing and like, sort of weird and whack I think that's probably how like a lot of them feel. I think there's like a subset of them that are like, oh, this is fun and mystical. There's a bunch of them that are like, this is very whack. And I just want to like do business and try to climb the social ladder. And then there's probably like a handful at some point at, in the whole thing that were connected to like some type of weird ritual occult belief. That's kind of my take. But if you're participating in it, then you're kind of complicit, even if you don't know that's what, that's what you're doing just by going, putting on the robes, having this whole ceremony. So it's pretty weird. And the fact that all the most powerful people in our country, I mean presidents, future presidents, former presidents, are all meeting up to like chat, that to me is like, that's just how it all works. And like I said before, once you know about it, it probably moved. And there's probably a group right now where all the most powerful people are going and we don't know what it is. And by the time we know what it is and by the time there's documents that leak, they'll all have moved on to a new thing. Just my opinion. I don't know. Let's say you, Christos, wouldn't it be funny if the whole tree cutting thing was because of the people that took video conspicuously? Oh, they're like, we can't give them a place to hide. Exactly. Dang. That maybe Alex Jones is the reason they try to cut down hundreds of trees. Alex Jones killed the environment. That's crazy. Yeah, that's the title. Yeah. It's all, it's all wild. I'm very glad Alex Jones did that. Yeah. For his faults we understand that, you know, he's done some crazy things, but this one, I mean, he put it on the map. And I think he forced a lot of people to reckon with this weird ceremony and realize like, hey, this whole, you know, idea of like the American public or like the, rather the American, like presidential elite are just like good God fearing Christian men that just want to do right that I'm like, they're meeting up in the woods doing rituals and I'm not saying they're evil for that, but I am saying it's just weird. And anytime people give conspiracy theorists or like, you know, conspiracy curious people, like a hard time, they're like, dude, nothing. I'm like, it's weird, bro. Just say it's weird. I'm not saying that they're all evil. I'm not saying that they're murdering people and burning them. I'm just saying it's weird. And I think at the very least we can agree on that. I don't know. What do you guys think? Is there anything I missed? Is there anything that I over, you know, I overlooked? Please drop a comment. I read all of them. YouTube, Spot, Spotify, all that. I would love to know what you guys think. Furthermore, I have great news. If you like religious content, if you like going through, you know, occult rituals and all sorts of crazy things that occur in every single religion from around the world, we have religion camp. That's where I talk about what everyone believes and where we're all going. And then if you like the history stuff, like we did a little bit today, you're gonna like history camp. That's where we talk about everything that's ever happened. And if you just like to rock with, you know, crazy conspiracy rabbit holes and the stuff going on right now, well, you're always welcome here at Camp Kenyon. Thank you so much for tuning in. Truly means the world. God bless you all and I'll see you next time. Hey, we have a brand new channel that is a part of the camp universe and we made it specifically with you in mind. And I personally think that you're really going to like it. So check it out. And somewhere through the trees, 2,000 men are chanting around a 40 foot owl. This is the Bohemian Grove.