The Donspiracist Returns
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This time the Donspiracist talks about a creepy private hangout and secret society that some of the most powerful men on earth belong to. This is good stuff. Enjoy.
What did you do for summer vacation?
Hopefully, you didn't have to sit through Daddy Day Camp.
But, if you were lucky, you did get to go to camp, just like many of our richest and most influential politicians and businessmen. They congregate for two weeks in July every year at a place called Bohemian Grove, a very large encampment about an hour north of San Francisco. The Grove is owned and run by the Bohemian Club, an organization founded in the middle of the 19th century by men who felt isolated and exiled in the rough American West.
The club has evolved into a meetinghouse of the most powerful men in our society. Every Republican president since Coolidge and most Democrats have been members, as have most upper echelon government officials. The roster of recent members includes both Bushes, Bill Clinton, Reagan, James Baker and Henry Kissinger. Members from other areas of society are prominent as well, including Walter Cronkite.
The ostensible reason for their gathering is to get away from the cares of running the world. Reports from those who have attended or have investigated say a spirit of silliness and drunkenness pervades.
I know, you're thinking, so what? And if that was all there was to it, I would not be writing this article. However, the main event of this summer encampment is the Cremation of Care ceremony, which involves burning an effigy at the foot of a 40 foot stone owl.
You read right: 40 foot stone owl. Here are some pictures from the Coast to Coast AM website.
Filmmaker and radio talk show host Alex Jones infiltrated the steep security at the Grove with a hidden camera in the summer of 2000. He claims to have uncovered some deep dark secrets. The entire film can be found here. Excitement gripped me as I began to watch. I'm always into rich people acting all perverted and pagan, ala Eyes Wide Shut. The sexual ritual scene inside the mansion where everyone is masked remains one of the creepiest pieces of American cinema in recent memory; for raising hairs on my arms, I'll take that over gory horror any day.
The problem is, despite Jones' claims of pagan rituals to a Babylonian god named Molloch, the film doesn't really show more than a bunch of rich men acting weird and silly.
Even if the practices at Bohemian Grove are not occult, it still raises, for me, an interesting question. Why do the rich and powerful of our world join such secret clubs and keep them so secret and behave in such odd ways? I know the old argument that absolute power corrupts absolutely, but hey, I have a brother pretty high up the food chain at GM, and on vacation he takes his kids to the beach, barbecues and plays golf like the rest of us.
The point is Bohemian Grove is suspicious by its very nature. It contains many of the same members as the Bilderbergers, the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, and Skull and Bones. These are not just harmless social clubs. At the very least, these are groups that decide major issues that eventually affect you and me.
But what's with the big owl? It does feel distinctly pagan. And if you look closely, the owl pops up in odd places.
That a view of the Capitol building from above. (I got it from here, another site worth checking out concerning the grove.)
Granted, that may be a coincidence. But I'm not a big believer in coincidences, nor am I foolish enough to believe that the world's richest and most powerful men like to blow off steam by drinking themselves silly and dressing up like women and burning human effigies in a spirit of collegiality.
RELATED: The most in-depth account written about Bohemian Grove written yet, in Spy Magazine in 1989.
RELATED: More Donspiracist.
It's an owl? Bit of a stretch, doncha think.
Or, it could be Mickeyf******Mouse. Hey, I can see the ears. Kind of reminds me of those olden days when you'd search the cover looking for the playboy bunny. (Oh, wow, there it is!) Then you'd look for the number of stars which supposedly had something to do with whether Hughie had screwed that month's playmate. Of course, this was in the olden days. Now the number of stars signifies how many times he watched the playmate doing it.
But let's cut to the chase. I know you're building up to Dealy Plaza, and the really, really big conspiracy. What was Woody Harrelson's dad doing hanging out on the grassy knoll? Why was Richard Nixon in Dallas that day? E. Howard Hunt, and a direct line to the Watergate conspiracy? That "magic" bullet? The CIA and Cuban exiles? The military-industrial complex? It's all part and parcel of that "vast right-wing conspiracy"?
The left likes to pretend that if we had an intelligence test as a precondition of voting that the Democrats would win in a landslide. I'm not so sure. If we disenfranchised all the idiots, the Democrats might be suprised how things fell out. They might end up as the permanent minority party.
Neither party has a monopoly on the intelligent or stupid part of the electorate. I would basically sum up the general difference between a Democrat and Republican voter these days as being that a Republican truly believes that the litmus test for his candidate is Ronald Reagan's "Am I better off today than I was 4 years ago?" The Republican askes what's in it for him, whether it be tax cuts, handouts to business or social/moral controls (which is why Larry Craig had to go). The Democrat is concerned about the country's place in the world, personal freedom (which ironically was the Republican's issue until they made the unholy deal with the Religious Right) and the future of the earth.
As long as that is the difference, the vast majority of the independent voters will vote Democrat, and that is why the Republicans are facing a trouncing in 2008 that may be historic in nature. As one of the Republican candidates said the other day about Craig, the voters will forgive the sinner but not the hypocrite. Most voters right now believe that the Republicans have been hypocritical as a party. So feel free to claim that the Democrats have the license on all the idiots....those idiots are going to reduce the party of hypocrites to solid minority status (nothing is permanent...maybe the Repubs will return to their roots and boot the social conservatives as a controlling force so they can win outside of the deep south and Idaho) in 2008.
Any interesting summation of the differences between Democrats and Republicans-- Repubs are selfish and Dems are unselfish. I wonder then why Dems are always courting voters with promises of various payoffs and benefits. I've heard the Dems described as the "gimme party."
As for Craig, certainly you've heard the quote about how "hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue." To make an analogy, and an admittedly imperfect one, I am an off and on again smoker. But I would certainly never claim that cigarettes are not harmful to me and others. If I were a lawmaker, I would probably be a proponent of various laws restricting smoking and attempting to limit it. This hardly makes me a hypocrite. What it means is that I am an imperfect being, something you probably already suspected, and I don't always do what is healthy and best for me. I occasionally succumb to my weaknesses. This does not mean that I'm going to go around promoting them.
How did we get to Dealey Plaza and the differences between Republicans and Democrats? The column isn't about either one. Hahahaha.
The whole point of Bohemian Grove is that it is a mixing of the country's most powerful men, with no respect to political affiliation. And there's no questioning this one: the Grove does exist and the Cremation of Care does occur.
I was responding to Bob T's ridiculous statement that an intelligence test could eliminate Democratic voters. Thus, I suggested that anyone who would vote for President on the basis of Ronald Reagan's time honored criteria is a dope.
As for your conspiracy, it has no legs. Give us more before I worry about the fact that people with influence hang out together.
Don, a guy I know from my local pub is an artist who sometimes caddies to supplement his artistic earnings. I think the country club where he works is called Pine Valley. It's somewhere in New Jersey. You have to be like super-rich to join. I believe Bill Gates is a member. Could this golf club be another conspiratorial enclave of the very wealthy where nefarious and secret plots are hatched? Or, is it maybe a place where wealthy people play golf, and get to feel that their club is really, really exclusive. No doubt business is discussed there also. Does this constitute conspiracy?
Closer to home, is Philadelphia's own Union League a conspiratorial society? (A rather large group of conspirators, because I think I heard that they have five thousand members.)
PalestraJon, I didn't actually say that an intelligence test would eliminate only Democratic voters. I said that disenfranchising all the stupid people might actually eliminate more Dems than Repubs, contrary to the smug belief of many Dems that the intelligent people vote Democratic. Obviously, there are unintelligent and intelligent people in both parties. It's a sort of victory to get a Democrat to agree with that.
BTW, Donspiracist, one of the things you have to accept about this website, or any other, is that the discussion is gonna go where the discussion is gonna go.
Bob, I have been coming to this website a long time, I know what it's like. And I agree with PalestraJon that your comments are ludicrous.
As for your golf club or the Union League, which I have been to dinner at, yes, wealthy people gather there. BUT, and this is a big but, they don't burn human effigies in front of a 40 foot stone owl representing the Babylonian god Molloch on the 18th green or in the middle of Broad Street now do they?
Bohemian Grove is disturbing for what it suggests that certain wealthy people do behind closed doors, often completely disregarding the so-called "values" they espouse in their public lives. In that sense, the Grove is a lot more like the ritualistic sex party Tom Cruise attends in Eyes Wide Shut than it is your golf club.
I'm glad you agree with PalestraJon on that matter. He, however, doesn't seem to agree with your U.S. Capitol as owl theory.
You're right that country clubs and the Union League don't seem to go in too much for pseudo-pagan ceremonies, (other than the rather common ones of homage to Dionysius in their bars). But lots and lots of other organizations-- everything from fraternities and sororities to the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts-- go in for the secrecy thing. So we have secret handshakes, initiation ceremonies, various other ceremonies, and all sorts of mumbo-jumbo. Humans seem to have a need for that sort of thing. Ralph Kramden and Norton belonged to the Loyal Order of Raccoons.
When I was a Boy Scout, years and years ago, I was chosen to be a member of a Boy Scout group called The Order of the Arrow. We had an "ordeal" to go through, and an initiation ceremony. There was a secret motto. (I'm not telling. I did, after all, take a solemn oath.) There was all sort of pseudo Native American mumbo jumbo. Perhaps I didn't make it into the real inner circles of the group, but I don't remember any nefarious conspiracies. No plots to overthrow the U.S. govwernment, and retake the ancestral lands of the Leni Lenape tribe. I also don't think that participation in this sort of thing was considered pagan worship by any of our various religious denominations.
You may also have heard of the Burning Man festival, going on right now or recently concluded. They conclude by burning a huge effigy of a man. (I read that this year some "artist" fired it up a little too early.) A "pagan" ceremony? A secret, conspiratorial society? If I didn't think that they're all probably too stoned out there at Burning Man to do much conspiring, I guess I'd be worried.
I was in the Order of the Arrow too. It was nothing like Bohemian Grove. It was wannabe Native American stuff, very mild, very unremarkable, at least in my experience. Have you watched Alex Jones' video? Maybe Burning Man is an apt analogy, but I doubt the Bushes go there (Bill Clinton might however lol).
But I'm not going to waste my breath. You don't see it. You don't want to see it. That's fine
Harry Potter has an owl!!!
John Dillinger was almost killed at the Little BOHEMIA Lodge!!!
Coincidence? I don't think so!
But the clincher is Keanu Reeves is playing the Michael Rennie part in "The Day The Earth Stood Still" remake.
Be afraid! Be very afraid!