Clarence Thomas and Bohemian Grove

Bohemian Grove is a cross between TED and Burning Man, with no cameras…or women. What goes on there and what was the Supreme Court justice doing there?

As if Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas didn’t have enough scrutiny of his private life this year, now he’s caught up in a classic conspiracy theory involving secret societies when it was revealed by ProPublica that his luxury trips financed by billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow included an appearance at Bohemian Grove (BG), the exclusive gentlemen’s club and campground in northern California.

Cropped from a photograph by Sharif Tarabay via ProPublica of Clarence Thomas and billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow.

Bohemian Grove has a long history of bizarre rituals (cremation of animals) and customs (urinating on trees) whose participants have included writers (Mark Twain, Jack London, Herman Wouk, Ambrose Bierce), scientists (J. Robert Oppenheimer, Glenn Seaborg, Louis Alveraz), presidents (Teddy Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, H. W. Bush), and captains of industry (Henry S. Morgan, Leonard Firestone, Charles Schwab, Thomas Watson Jr.).

Photograph of a tent at the Bohemian Grove in July 1904, '05, '06 or '07, picturing occupants Porter Garnett, George Sterling and Jack London. Published in The Pacific Monthly in his story "Forest Festivals of Bohemia" in September 1907.

Although Chatham House Rules apply (conversations are private and unrecorded), and despite the organizers’ discouragement of backroom corporate and political deals (motto: “Weaving spiders come not here,” a reference from A Midsummer Night’s Dream that all business is left at the entrance), rumors abound that the opposite is true, with Oppenheimer’s meeting with physicist Ernest Lawrence there on the eve of the Manhattan Project being the type specimen. Just what was Justice Thomas doing there?

Probably what men have been doing there since the Bohemian Club was founded in 1872 and encamped six years later to the wooded 2,700-acre retreat, “a place where the powerful relax, enjoy each other’s company, and get to know some of the artists, entertainers, and professors,” says UC Santa Cruz psychology professor G. William Domhoff who has studied the BG, “who are included to give the occasion a thin veneer of cultural and intellectual pretension.”

Think of Bohemian Grove as a cross between TED and Burning Man, but with no cameras…or women.

Secrecy surrounding BG practically guarantees that outsiders will assume cabals are being concocted and conspiracies plotted, as when the journalist Jon Ronson and conspiracist Alex Jones snuck onto the property to film the curious cremation ceremony there in 2000. The two came to opposite conclusions about Bohemian Grove. In Ronson’s 2001 book Them: Adventures with Extremists, his “lasting impression was of an all-pervading sense of immaturity,” leaving him to wonder “whether the Bohemians shroud themselves in secrecy for reasons no more sinister than they thought it was cool.”

Nixon expressed similar sentiments when he remarked in a 1971 tape recording, “The Bohemian Grove, which I attend from time to time…is the most faggy goddamned thing you could ever imagine, with that San Francisco crowd.”

Photograph of Harvey Hancock standing and speaking to a group of Bohemian Club members at the Owl's Nest camp of the Bohemian Grove over breakfast on July 23, 1967. In attendance: California Governor Ronald W. Reagan, Former US Vice President Richard M. Nixon, and to the right of Nixon Nobel prize-winning chemist Glenn Seaborg. Photo by Edward W. Carter.

A November, 1989 Spy magazine article on Bohemian Grove by Philip Weiss, appropriately subtitled titled “Masters of the Universe go to Camp”, details the author’s “three weeks of male bonding and funny cocktails with Henry Kissinger, William F. Buckley, Henry Kravis, and Ronald Reagan at the most exclusive frat party on Earth.” Spy even included a detailed map of the place (note #3: “Here in the fall of 1942, physicists met to discuss isotope separation as part of the project to build the atom bomb”):

Reflecting that decade, Weiss noted that “the Grove is stocked with Reaganites” that serves as “the primary watering hole for Republican-administration officials, defense contractors, press barons, old-line Hollywood figures, establishment intellectuals and a handful of German-speaking men in lederhosen” who heed the call of Bohemian Club presidents when they summon: “Brother Bohemians: The Sun is Once Again in the Clutches of the Lion, and the encircling season bids us to the forest—there to celebrate…the awful mysteries!” (As evidenced in Weiss’s photograph in his Spy feature article below.)

Predictably, conspiracist-in-chief Alex Jones had a very different and darker take on BG, resulting in his 2000 documentary Dark Secrets Inside Bohemian Grove that purported to reveal what the “Global Elite” were really up to:

Screen shots from Alex Jones’s grainy footage of a bonfire ritual at Bohemian Grove in which “year after year ye burn me in this grove” indicated to the conspiracist that the “Global Elite” were plotting dark and evil cabals there.

After viewing Jones’ film, an ex-Marine and cosplayer named Richard McCaslin (below on the set of his YouTube program) took it upon himself to raid the BG campground dressed as his cosplay alter ego The Phantom Patriot, armed with a pump-action rifle, a .45 caliber handgun, a crossbow, a sword, and a knife, only to discover no evidence of anything sinister going on there. Lost on the grounds and his flashlight batteries dead, McCaslin spent the night in a cabin, was arrested the next day, and was subsequently imprisoned.

Richard McCaslin, dressed as the Phantom Patriot, left this calling card at the Owl Shrine inside of the Bohemian grove. It was later returned to him by a friend, still in an evidence bag, and was published in one of McCaslin's zines. Leviticus 18:21 reads: “Do not permit any of your children to be offered as a sacrifice to Molech, for you must not bring shame on the name of your God. I am the LORD." McCaslin's use of this tract is in direct reference to the claims of child sacrifice made by Alex Jones in his 2000 documentary "Dark Secrets: Inside Bohemian Grove."

Secret societies like the Bohemian Grove are secret only in the sense of what goes on inside them (more or less, intruders like Ronson, Jones, and McCaslin notwithstanding), not their existence, for how else would we know about the hundreds of them over the centuries? Extensive research on conspiracy theories and secret societies (documented in my 2022 book Conspiracy) show that such lack of transparency is what leads people to suspect nefarious goings on, and historically it is a matter of fact that the rich and powerful do periodically meet in private to conspire against others to gain an illegal or immoral advantage over others—the very definition of a conspiracy. One would be naïve to believe otherwise.

Nevertheless, that conspiracies happen does not mean that every conspiracy theory is true, and from what we know about Bohemian Grove and its happenings there over the past century and a half, it is far more likely that Justice Thomas was just blowing off the stress of being a Supreme Court justice than that he was plotting with the Masters of the Universe toward some nefarious evil end.

Still, with great power comes great responsibility (as Stan Lee voiced Spider-Man, who surely would have been welcome at BG), so even if there were no direct back-room deals cut between attendees at Bohemian Grove events and Clarence Thomas for SCOTUS cases he was opining on, in our perilous time of political polarization and democratic divisiveness, more transparency and less secrecy should be practiced by those whose decisions effect hundreds of millions of people.

Michael Shermer is the Publisher of Skeptic magazine, Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, and the host of The Michael Shermer Show. His many books include Why People Believe Weird Things, The Science of Good and Evil, The Believing Brain, The Moral Arc, and Heavens on Earth. His new book is Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational.