Bohemian Grove Makes It to Prime Time

Gary North - June 08, 2017

Remnant Review

I don't watch the Netflix series House of Cards. I was on a Washington staff. I just cannot take that much silliness. I have the same problem with Alpha House.

Nevertheless, the following segment has received a considerable amount of publicity from Alex Jones and others on the Right.

To understand its connections with Bohemian Grove, watch this video. I don't recommend that you take seriously the commentator's assessment, but it will help you to understand the artistic connections.

I have spent over 50 years in an intermittent study of occultism. I don't recommend that anybody do this. You can spend your days running down many rabbit trails. It probably is not worth your time. But it is worth your time to know, in general, that such things do exist.

I have a friend who is a regular attendee at Bohemian Grove. He is a highly successful entrepreneur. He is married to a woman I knew in high school. He has traveled in fairly high political circles for a long time. He has always attended the annual two-week sessions every year. But I never knew until this week that it costs $15,000 to do this. That kind of price tag screens out the little people. I am sure there are some people high up in political trading who are invited free of charge. But if you don't have power, you will need money. Attendance is by invitation only.

The man I know is an above-average person. He is vaguely religious, but he doesn't go to church regularly. He is an ethical person. He was involved in starting a highly successful company. He is a graduate of the Harvard Business School. He has a bachelor's degree in engineering. In other words, you would never guess that somebody with this educational background and this much money could be lured into such a silly secret society as Bohemian Grove. But he was. It is a big part of his life. Until he became afflicted with Alzheimer's, he was trying to recruit his son into the organization. His son is also an effective entrepreneur.

The scene in the TV movie is a faithful reproduction of what really goes on every year at Bohemian Grove. The opening ritual is occult. It is not lighthearted. Its seeming silliness is the heart of the matter. The ritual is openly pagan. People indulge in pagan rituals, not because they really believe in some occult hierarchy, although a few do. They indulge themselves because it is a bunch of men doing what men think is clever. This silliness is in fact a cloak for life-and-death seriousness. The silliness is an illusion. That is why it is so dangerous.

Men have been doing this for as long as men have gathered together, separate from women, in what is occult liturgy. It is not a matter of theological confession. It is a matter of ritual.

There is a scene in the movie Peggy Sue Got Married, a time travel movie, in which a woman in her mid-40's goes back in time to her senior year in high school. She visits her grandfather. Her grandfather is about to go to a Lodge meeting. He invites her to the meeting, which of course would not be done. This is from the screenplay. (I love the Web!)

Barney rejoins them, wearing his hat and robe. The group begins to enter the main room.

PEGGY: Do you have to wear that hat?

BARNEY: It wouldn't be a lodge without hats.

This really is the heart of the matter. There have to be funny hats. The funny hats provide the silliness, which is a cloak for life-and-death seriousness. As the movie shows, there is an occult side of it. It is not prominent, but it is in the background at all times.

POWER RELIGION

I have known about Bohemian Grove for at least 40 years. But only this week did I learn that the original plans for the Manhattan Project to create the atomic bomb were organized at Bohemian Grove. They invited J. Robert Oppenheimer to participate. This was not the sort of thing that Oppie did on a regular basis. But he showed up for that meeting. He wanted to run the project, and that meeting opened the door.

There is a lot of power here. The trappings are occult, but the heart of the matter is always the same: power.

This is the old boy network in action. They act as though they are a bunch of good old boys.

There are speeches on boring topics. This provides an element of seriousness. But even this element of seriousness is fake. It is window dressing. It is being lectured at. They do the same thing at other meetings of high-level secret societies. The lectures could be published in any boring academic journal. Everybody who goes to one of the lectures is aware of this, at least I hope this is the case. Nothing in one of these lectures is going to be path-breaking. If it is, it will be one of several, and the others will not be path-breaking. You never know which one of these speeches is actually going to break some path, if any.

In order to persuade these people that they are participating in something important, there have to be boring lectures. Nobody pays any attention to them. Again, they are window dressing.

INNER RINGS

The element of power for most of these participants is elusive. Some of them put up the money. Some of them organize voting, as House of Cards implies. As with all secret societies, there are a series of inner rings. C. S. Lewis describes this in his wonderful lecture on the inner ring. He also describes it in his novel, That Hideous Strength (1946). It is subtitled: a fairy tale for grown-ups.

Here is what Lewis wrote in "The Inner Ring," a lecture delivered to young men graduating from a private high school.

There are what correspond to passwords, but they are too spontaneous and informal. A particular slang, the use of particular nicknames, an allusive manner of conversation, are the marks. But it is not so constant. It is not easy, even at a given moment, to say who is inside and who is outside. Some people are obviously in and some are obviously out, but there are always several on the borderline. And if you come back to the same Divisional Headquarters, or Brigade Headquarters, or the same regiment or even the same company, after six weeks’ absence, you may find this secondary hierarchy quite altered.

There are no formal admissions or expulsions. People think they are in it after they have in fact been pushed out of it, or before they have been allowed in: this provides great amusement for those who are really inside. It has no fixed name. The only certain rule is that the insiders and outsiders call it by different names. From inside it may be designated, in simple cases, by mere enumeration: it may be called “You and Tony and me.” When it is very secure and comparatively stable in membership it calls itself “we.” When it has to be expanded to meet a particular emergency it calls itself “all the sensible people at this place.” From outside, if you have dispaired of getting into it, you call it “That gang” or “they” or “So-and-so and his set” or “The Caucus” or “The Inner Ring.” If you are a candidate for admission you probably don’t call it anything. To discuss it with the other outsiders would make you feel outside yourself. And to mention talking to the man who is inside, and who may help you if this present conversation goes well, would be madness.

It all seems so harmless. It is not harmless.

And the prophecy I make is this. To nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colours. Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or bribing, will almost certainly not appear. Over a drink, or a cup of coffee, disguised as triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you hope to know better still—just at the moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude, or naïf or a prig—the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which the public, the ignorant, romantic public, would never understand: something which even the outsiders in your own profession are apt to make a fuss about: but something, says your new friend, which “we”—and at the word “we” you try not to blush for mere pleasure—something “we always do.”

And you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world. It would be so terrible to see the other man’s face—that genial, confidential, delightfully sophisticated face—turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to know that you had been tried for the Inner Ring and rejected. And then, if you are drawn in, next week it will be something a little further from the rules, and next year something further still, but all in the jolliest, friendliest spirit. It may end in a crash, a scandal, and penal servitude; it may end in millions, a peerage and giving the prizes at your old school. But you will be a scoundrel.

That is my first reason. Of all the passions, the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.

There is a 1970 made-for-TV movie on these matters. It did not get much attention. It starred Glenn Ford and Dean Jagger. It was a better-than-average TV movie: The Brotherhood of the Bell. It did for Skull and Bones what Kevin Spacey did for Bohemian Grove. It is the story about a decent man who is asked to do a very bad thing, and he does it. It is a movie about redemption, but the redemption side of the story is completely implausible. The dark side is very plausible. At least for now, you can watch it here.

The general public did not know anything about Skull and Bones until Esquire ran an article exposing it in 1977. The producer and screenwriter of Brotherhood of the Bell obviously did know. They did not expect the public to make the connection. In contrast, the screenwriter and producers of House of Cards did expect the public to make the connection.

When you watch the segment of House of Cards on the ritual, you might conclude that nothing this silly could be connected with men possessing such wealth and power. You would be wrong. These days, I suspect that more people would be willing to believe in such a connection. I don't think that was true in 1970. The general public doesn't pay much attention, but at least they have been exposed to something bordering on the real world.

RITUALS

How could it be that such silly rituals would be adopted by otherwise smart, rich, and powerful man? The answer out of the obvious: smart, rich, and powerful men have been doing this throughout recorded history, and I suspect throughout unrecorded history. This is what they do. At the very top of the hierarchy of wealth and power, this is what they do.

Lesser men indulge themselves in Burning Man ceremonies. Or they go to the Lodge meeting.

The average man does not get involved. These organizations are deliberately targeting men who want to be, above average. They don't know how to do it. They think that joining a lodge will help them do it. And for some, it will.

All serious organizations recruit new members. They have to in order to survive. They evangelize. Ultimately, they initiate. Churches baptize. There are always initiating ceremonies of one sort or another. One question always is this: "Who is in the inner circle?" Another is this: "What is the confession of faith in the inner circle?"

Beware of any inner circle that does not have a confession of faith. If it screens the initiates in terms of anything except a confession of faith, you can be sure that the organization is based on a quest for power.

I'm not speaking about organizations of shared experiences. I'm not talking about the Veterans of Foreign Wars or the American Legion. These are brotherhoods, but they are brotherhoods of shared experience that had nothing to do directly with the quest for power. I'm not talking about charitable associations. I am also not talking about trade associations. I am talking about initiatory organizations. I am talking about taking oaths. I am talking about this: "by invitation only." If the invitation is based on objective criteria, such as passing an exam or running a successful company by the age of 40, there is nothing wrong with that. Anybody can get involved who has met the objective criteria. I am talking about the organization that does not have objective criteria, does not have a confession, does not have a mission statement, and invites only "the right sort of people."

We all know the phrase from the movie version of All the President's Men: follow the money. Even more important is this one: follow the confession. If you can't follow the confession, don't follow someone you think is a member of any inner circle.

Stay out of inner circles. That was Lewis's advice, and it is my advice.