Transcription
Behind this door, through this gate, and under these trees... The drone wasn't able to fly where we wanted to go. It keeps dropping signal.
[Sean] There is a real and actual secret society, a group of the most powerful, wealthy men in the world, going back over a century. The Bohemian Club is an invite-only, men-only social club in San Francisco, that's long been the center of conspiracy theories.
Have you been there for the ceremony with the Cremation of Care? I don't think that's something I need to talk to you about. Especially surrounding their yearly encampments at Bohemian Grove. Allegedly meant for the ultra-powerful to just relax and bro out.
[Worker] Seal Team Six came.
[Mary] The Lakeside Talks. That's key. This is where they would keep all of the sex workers during the Grove. Presidents, CEOs, bankers, lobbyists, Supreme Court justices, CIA directors, and those are just the people who've been disclosed already.
The full membership is meant to be completely private, but investigative reporter Daniel Boguslaw reached out to More Perfect Union with something wild: "This is every member of Bohemian Club... And this is everyone who attended the 2023 Summer Encampment." Even just the first few names I saw made me realize this is a story.
Lots of people have already tried to enter the Grove or generally reveal its secrets, exposing the supposed occult rituals that go on inside. Well, I'm Alex Jones, and I snuck in there in 2000. But we wanted to know: what does any of this actually mean for the rest of us Americans who aren't part of this elite club? I get that they do weird rituals, but how is that my problem?
So Dan and I went to California to investigate. We talked to workers from the Grove, a woman who has been protesting the Grove for nearly half a century, and spent way too much time digging through old documents in hotel rooms. And what we found is almost scarier than any occult ritual. I know there's a lot of other stuff going on right now in the news, but investigating the Grove explains a lot of things that are broken in our economy, and how the power structures of our country have empowered small groups of influential, rich people who have been driving policy decisions behind closed doors for generations. And among many other things, will be reporting for the first time the involvement of a current senator.
There it is. "Weaving spiders, come not here." Let's go back to 1872. The Bohemian Club was started as a hangout for local journalists, before growing and admitting artists and intellectuals, and eventually admitting rich guys, because those other guys don't have any money. They could eventually afford this six-story building on the edge of The Tenderloin. The building itself offers little information: drawn blinds, no one coming in or out, but the club started hosting summer encampments in the NorCal redwoods in 1878, eventually moving them to the massive Bohemian Grove.
The encampment's secrecy and notorious rituals like burning a giant effigy in tribute to an owl statue– they're really big on owls– have made the event a magnet for conspiracy theory. The list Dan acquired was for attendance at an encampment nearly 150 years later. I went to the Bay. I found a guy who I knew would have a list. I kept showing up to his office until he finally agreed to give it to me. This is the original list of 2017– a full membership list of everyone who is part of the club. Subsequently, I was able through those connections to get more and more, and that's where we got the 2023 Grove encampment. And the list is massive, broken down into the smaller camps the members are split up into, but it's a totally overwhelming amount of information. Any name we researched was tied to something, so at first it was hard for us to draw specific conclusions and connections. But then Dan got in touch with a source who put us on the right track.
"I'd love to talk to you about the club there. Be prepared because I've been archiving and it's cold out here. I have no heat, so come with a good jacket." Mary Moore, who lives not too far from the Grove, has been protesting and researching it for decades, long before Alex Jones even got his public access show. "Somebody came up and gave me a membership list, knowing that I was an activist, so we used it to research who was making the profits. These are the guys that prefer to work behind the scenes as much as they can. My purpose back then was to make people in the movement understand all our issues are connected by who profits from them."
So what modern issues can we tie directly back to the Grove? What was literally planned at The Grove that affects us today? There's decades of information– Reagan and Nixon specifically loved sending letters about their favorite secret society– but a few things in particular stuck out to me: how they rigged our economy and broke certain programs that we're only now seeing the effect of, how they established a vast dark money lobbying network, how they set up a tax heist scheme to funnel taxpayer dollars directly to executives, how they ruined the very city they're headquartered in, and how they hold on to the power.
Let's start small and specific with the rigged economy. This little tidbit is from the Reagan Library. And as far as I can tell, we're the first to unearth it. It's a memo to Alan Greenspan from Edwin Harper, who's an assistant to the president, saying, "You asked for the paper we discussed at the Bohemian Grove, and it's this document called Social Security Reform Proposals." This is from 1981. In 1983, the Reagan administration did reform Social Security. They made cuts that are still affecting us today. So I reached out to an expert, Alex Lawson at Social Security Works, who sent me one of my favorite emails to receive, which just said, "Your thesis is completely correct. This cut to Social Security was planned at Bohemian Grove." And this is something that's going to be affecting, like, our generation.
But that's not the only Reagan policy to come straight from the Grove. This one book tells the story of a Reagan advisor being persuaded to cut capital gains taxes by iconic investor Bill Draper while they, quote, "sat semi-naked at the Grove." That little change is what enabled the high-risk investment model of the venture capital business, which spawned the tech industry as we know it today. Draper was on the 2023 attendee list, still attending The Grove 42 years later, as was his son Tim Draper, also in venture capital. That's another important part of this: the generational membership, families that have been passing on power for generations, both in the form of wealth and these connections. And one of these families founded one of the most influential groups in American history. That's dark money.
Do any of these names ring a bell? Charles Koch, obviously. Coors... Pete Coors is the son of Joseph Coors Sr., himself the son of Adolph Coors, all three of the Coors beer empire. But the real legacy of Coors isn't beer. Joseph co-founded and funded the Heritage Foundation with other club members in 1976. Heritage is part of a network that has influenced, led, and funded pro-corporate politics for decades, all of which are connected to the club through funding, founders, or board members and directors. Heritage was immensely powerful during the Reagan administration and had huge influence on his policy. Charles Koch, synonymous with anti-worker political spending, obviously attends the Grove. And remember when Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas got caught taking lavish gifts from Club for Growth lead Harlan Crow? One of those gifts was a trip to Bohemian Grove. Heritage founder Coors Sr. is long dead, but his co-founder, Edwin Fuelner, is on the attendance list for The Grove in 2023, when he would have been 82 years old, and he was on the Board of Heritage until he died in late 2025.
But there's one family that's more deeply tied to the Bohemian Club and elite collusion than any other. That brings us to... tax heist. The Bechtel family and Corporation isn't a household name, but they're one of the wealthiest families and largest private corporations in the world. There are two Bechtels on our list, and the family has been involved for generations. Here's Steven Bechtel Sr. at camp with Henry Kissinger, which came with a cute little memo from Bechtel to Kissinger. The Bechtel Corporation works in massive construction projects. The kinds the government needs to pay for. This is just a partial list of people who sit in the center of the Bechtel executives, government, Bohemian Club member, Venn diagram: Caspar Weinberger, George Shultz, Edwin Meese, John McComb. McComb invented the concept of cost-plus for government contractors, the system where contractors tell the government how much something cost, then get a little profit treat on top of that. Because the contractor determines the cost, they have no reason to keep costs down, especially surrounding executive pay. It's screwed us on everything from how much of our tax dollars go to the wealthy to Medicare Advantage.
Then in the early 2000s, the US invaded Iraq, driven by club members like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Colin Powell. Bechtel got paid millions to clean up the mess. Since so much of this was planned at the Grove, we had to see the place where the slogan is supposedly "weaving spiders come not here," which implies they aren't supposed to be doing business there. So what exactly are they doing up there? So we drove over. "No trespassing. Violators will be prosecuted." And again, we were met with nothing but a security booth and some strange issues with our drone. It keeps dropping signal. Pretty weird. I mean, I haven't seen this much interference. It's not Grove season after all.
But talking to some folks in the neighboring town, Monte Rio, had a lot to teach us. "At my old job, we used to, like, point to the mountain where the property is. And then the people of the Grove, like, came and told us that we can't say that." But then Dan got a call that could give us an inside view. "Where I come from, it's kind of a rite of passage to work at the Bohemian Grove." Two former employees of the Grove, a driver and a skeet shooting instructor, were down to talk to us, but wanted to stay anonymous. "It's all kind of structured in a way so that the members don't really have to see any of the workers. We don't have to interact with them. They're not supposed to interact with them." So what I saw was a picture of the entire cast, their production of Macbeth, with Colin Powell as the lead. Which all seems just kind of weird and lame, right? It's cheesy. I don't think these guys are spending every day thinking about how they can fuck up the environment and the world consciously, but it's got to be nice to have a little respite from doing that.
Monte Rio is the poorest town in Sonoma County. The cost of living out here has become unbelievable. It's almost as expensive to live out here as it is to live in San Francisco proper. Similar is true of the area, back in the city, around their clubhouse. The Tenderloin is the poorest part of S.F., a city that's been the center of national discussion about housing prices, crime, and homelessness, and a state that's been a hot point regarding taxing the rich.
Which brings us back to Dan's list. So then what's the name of this big S.F. advocacy group? It's called Neighbors for A Better San Francisco. It at one point, I believe still was the biggest big spender in local S.F. politics. This group is spending on city council races, mayor races, you know, trying to sway ballot measures, ballot initiatives. Nick Podell. Yep. William Oberndorf. Yep. Stephen Merrill. Bingo. This thing's basically just an offshoot of the Bohemian Grove. Yeah. This is Atwater, he's a founder and former chairman of Prime Finance. And, you know, he was one of the big backers of this Neighbors group. They most recently focused their spending, fighting a ballot measure that would have marginally increased property taxes on the most wealthy to fund affordable housing. And top donor, William Oberndorf, who used his charitable foundation to donate $2,000 to Make-A-Wish Foundation and $200,000 to Neighbors. And Neighbors, like Heritage or any of these ghoulish national organizations, is just one part of a network of linked organizations sharing a small pool of donors and board members across the city.
But let's zoom back out nationally. Mary said something that made me curious about the power of the Grove today. Trump is not welcome at the Grove. He tried to join. He's not a member. He's not on the list. You'll see. They didn't want him. But the Trump agenda is still inherently tied to the Bohemian Club. This is how they held on to power.
Back in New York, Dan and I started digging into the influence of the club on today's administration and politics. I found this clip of Ed Fuelner, who's one of the founders, and he's been attending The Grove for years. He was on your list in 2023. He did die a little bit after this, but here he is, just a few months before that meeting of the Grove.
[Edwin Feulner] Tomorrow at our celebration, we'll be introducing Mandate for Leadership 7 called Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, the Conservative Promise. A sincere thank you from this old man who was around the first time it all happened.
The first time it all happened, that's, you know, going into the Reagan administration and making all the changes that we're still facing today, and making our lives more difficult today. And it goes to show these people's ability to re-consolidate power. Right. They didn't get the guy they wanted the first time around. They didn't let Trump in, but they were still able to weasel their way in and craft his policy book. In the months that Project 2025 was being written, the board of the Heritage Foundation was like a quarter Bohemian Club guys.
But it goes even further: on our 2023 list in Mandalay, the same camp as Michael Bloomberg and Henry Kissinger, for whom this would be the last Grove, is another name: David McCormick. At the time, McCormick was but a simple hedge fund billionaire who'd tried to run for Senate in Pennsylvania before being defeated by Doctor Oz in the primary. But just two months after this, he announced he was running again. And this time he won. So I compared our attendee list to McCormick donors. 11 men in Mandalay camp donated to McCormick's campaign. And that's not even including the ones who gave through dark money tricks.
As Senator McCormick was part of an announcement with President Trump for a big push for AI investment in Pennsylvania data centers and power plants. At the same event was... this guy, Brendan Bechtel, the latest family CEO and heir to the Bechtel fortune. Bechtel is poised to get billions in construction contracts from this deal, funneling money and power to Bechtel seems as important to the Trump administration as it did to earlier administrations. Bechtel is getting big deals with foreign companies for U.S. construction, brokered by Trump. They have money tied up in the Venezuelan pipelines Trump wants to seize from the Venezuelan people, and they've been floated as a beneficiary of the Kushner/Trump plan to rebuild Gaza.
We're seeing a level of collusion among the ultra-wealthy that seems almost unbeatable. They are all on the same team. They are all protecting each other. It's not even about party politics. Paul Pelosi, Nancy's husband, is on the list, as is his nephew, who works for Harlan Crowe, as are several major centrist and Democratic Party donors. They have class solidarity, but so do we. A tenants union was organized specifically to fight against John Atwater's Prime Realty, and they've had big wins because they organized every building that Prime owns. Even workers at the Grove had a win. A class action lawsuit by Grove valets alleging wage theft, misclassification, and other labor violations, went in favor of the workers. "I won some money, recently in a class action about wage theft. They weren't counting the overtime of the employees."
The whole world is moving towards understanding the connectedness that we all need to work together. But knowing the truth, the connectedness could help bring power back to everyone else. And we only scratched the surface here. We'll be releasing the full list so you can dig through yourself. Let us know what you find and reach out to us at stories@perfectunion.us.