Every July, in a 2,700-acre stretch of redwood forest in Monte Rio, California, the most powerful men in the United States gather for what is, on paper, a summer camp.
Presidents have attended. Defense secretaries have attended. Fortune 500 CEOs have attended. Every Republican president of the modern era except Donald Trump has been a member or guest. Every major American defense contractor has had executives present. Henry Kissinger went seven times. The list of attendees, when one of the periodic leaks happens, reads like the index of a 20th-century history textbook.
The official line: it's a private retreat for "men of the establishment," organized by the Bohemian Club of San Francisco, which has existed since 1872. They go for two and a half weeks. They put on plays. They eat dinner together. They sing songs. They drink. They sleep in cabins.
That's the official line.
The unofficial line, which I am now going to walk you through because it is more entertaining than the official line and also has the inconvenient property of being mostly documented, includes the following: a 40-foot stone owl statue, an opening ritual called "the Cremation of Care" performed in front of the owl statue, a male-only attendance policy that was challenged in court and survived, and the fact that the entire two-week event is officially closed to media.
Yes, this all really happens. No, I am not making any of it up. The fun part is figuring out what to make of it.
The Cremation of Care
This is the part that's most famous, and it's famous because in 2000 a journalist named Alex Jones snuck into the Grove and filmed it.
Yes, that Alex Jones. Before he was the InfoWars guy. He was at the time still a relatively obscure conspiracy radio host out of Austin. He brought a hidden camera, parked across the river, and got footage of an opening ceremony in which men in red, black, and silver robes performed a ritual on the steps of an open-air shrine, in front of a 40-foot stone statue of an owl, in which they "burned" an effigy representing "Care," meaning the cares and worries of the world. The ritual involves chanting, music, a small fire, and a pretty elaborate piece of theatrical staging.
Two things are simultaneously true.
One: Alex Jones's footage is real. The ritual happens. You can watch the unedited tape. The Grove has not denied that the ritual takes place.
Two: the Grove's own explanation, given to journalists who have asked over the years, is that the ritual is a piece of theatrical tradition that has been performed at the opening of every Bohemian Grove summer encampment since the 1880s, that it's based on a play called "The Cremation of Care" written by a Bohemian Club member named James Hopper, and that it's no more sinister than the opening ceremonies at any other long-running men's club. Skull and Bones at Yale does similar pageantry. The Freemasons do similar pageantry. Bohemian Grove just happens to do it at scale, in a redwood grove, in front of a giant owl.
So which is it? Theatrical tradition? Or something darker?
Honestly? Both, and neither.
What's Real
What's real is that this is, structurally, an annual gathering of the most powerful men in the United States, in a closed environment, with no press access, no female attendees, and no official agenda available to the public.
What's real is that significant policy and corporate decisions have, on multiple documented occasions, been made or discussed at the Grove. The Manhattan Project's initial scientific direction was reportedly first agreed upon in conversations at the Grove in 1942. Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan reportedly negotiated their political alignment at the Grove in 1967. Several major defense contracts have been informally mapped out there.
What's real is that the Grove has, at various points, been the subject of legitimate journalistic and legal scrutiny. There was a public lawsuit in the late 1980s over its male-only membership policy. There have been periodic exposes in major outlets.
What's real, and underrated, is that this is not really a conspiracy. It's just a really weird and old club for the powerful, that happens to do a strange opening ritual, and that has been allowed to exist undisturbed for 150 years.
What's Probably Not Real
The hardcore version of the Bohemian Grove conspiracy says that the Cremation of Care is an actual occult sacrifice, that the giant owl represents Moloch (the Canaanite child-sacrifice deity), and that the rituals at the Grove are real worship of dark powers.
The owl-as-Moloch claim has no historical basis. The Bohemian Club's official iconography is built around the owl as a symbol of wisdom (the same use Athens made of it). The Moloch reading is a 21st-century overlay added by conspiracy researchers, especially the InfoWars era.
The "real sacrifice" claim is, as far as anyone can tell, false. Multiple accounts from former members (including some who are no longer fans of the place) confirm that the ritual is theatrical and that no actual harm is done to anyone.
What I Think Is Actually Worth Caring About
Here's the part that, in my opinion, deserves more attention than the giant owl.
Bohemian Grove is one of several long-standing institutions where the American power class meets in private to discuss matters that affect the public, with no obligation to disclose anything they discuss, with no female participation, and with no journalistic oversight. Davos, the Bilderberg Group, the Council on Foreign Relations gatherings, certain Yale and Harvard alumni events, and Bohemian Grove all share this structural property.
The conspiracy theorists are wrong about Moloch. They are not wrong that there exists a circuit of private gatherings where decisions are shaped before they reach the public. That circuit is, structurally, a closed elite system of policy negotiation. It is not a "deep state." It is just rich and powerful men coordinating their preferences in private. The fact that this is normal does not make it innocent. (And it pairs uncomfortably with the Epstein files ... another case where the institutional response to elite-only social spaces was, yeah, but technically nothing illegal.)
The actual conspiracy at Bohemian Grove is mundane and unsexy. It's that the ritual is theater, but the network is real. The owl is window dressing. The handshakes underneath the redwoods are not.
Bottom Line on Bohemian Grove
The owl is real. The ritual is real. The 150 years of attendance by the most powerful men in America is real. The Cremation of Care, as a piece of theatrical pageantry, is also real and largely benign in itself.
What's not real: actual sacrifices, Moloch worship, secret world-domination plots concocted under the redwoods.
What is real and underrated: the social network. The handshakes. The fact that consequential American decisions have been pre-negotiated in a setting from which both women and the press are categorically excluded.
The conspiracy is wrong about the ritual and right about the network. The owl is theater. The men aren't.
... Lucid Rob
If you're into this kind of thing ... more conspiracies, more weird history, more of the stories nobody teaches you straight ... I've got a whole channel of it. Come hang out, drop a comment, tell me where I'm wrong, let's actually talk about this stuff. https://www.youtube.com/@LucidRobYT ... new videos every week.