MARY CALLAHAN
Santa Rosa Press Democrat
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Legions of summer camp-goers spreading out around Sonoma County will be joined this weekend by some of the nation’s most powerful campers as the annual two-week encampment at the Bohemian Grove opens Friday night.
The super-secret Bohemian Club and its guests meet each summer in the 2,700-acre Monte Rio grove for what they say is fellowship and good-natured high-jinx — a break from the grueling grind of leadership.
But critics, who until recent years mounted protests outside its gates, say the gatherings serve as strategy sessions for a New World Order operating outside democratic institutions.
While the grove’s motto — “Weaving Spiders Come Not Here” — specifically targets arachnids, the club excludes all but the nation’s most powerful and well-connected individuals, according to critics.
Founded in 1872 by five San Francisco men seeking to connect “gentlemen” with art, literature, music and drama, the all-male club is said to have included a variety of political, financial, military and industrial leaders.
Among them: Presidents Ronald Reagan, Richard M. Nixon and both Bushes; former cabinet members Colin Powell, George Schultz and Henry Kissinger; and industrialists Stephen David Bechtel, Leonard Firestone and David Rockefeller.
The clandestine nature of the summer retreat promotes broad speculation and endless theorizing about what goes on there.
Most critics raise the specter of national policy with global implications coming from behind the gates of an exclusive, closed-door gathering of largely conservative, wealthy white men.
This year’s encampment begins Friday night and runs through July 27. The traditional Cremation of Care ritual, in which a human effigy representing “dull care” is burned beneath a massive form said to represent the club’s owl mascot, will be Saturday night.
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See Also: Bush, McCain and Obama to visit Bohemian Grove?
Watch these Alex Jones Documentary Videos about the Bohemian Grove:
Dark Secrets: Inside Bohemian Grove
The Order of Death


