Bohemian Grove and the Humiliation of Alex Jones
The fall of Alex Jones is one of the more revealing stories of the Trump era. Not because he was once sane, but even at his most ridiculous, he had a following that never questioned a word he said. Now, that spell has broken. His increasingly sycophantic defenses of President Trump, his soft‑pedaling around Trumpworld’s ties to Palantir and other security‑state darlings, and his muddled outrage over the Epstein cover‑up have exposed a hard truth: you can’t scream “deep state” for a living while refusing to admit that Trump swims comfortably in the same swamp.
Jones built a brand on telling people there was a permanent security apparatus ruling behind the scenes, and he wasn’t entirely wrong about that. But as Trump went from outsider to sitting president to war‑time incumbent presiding over an Iran campaign, Jones’ line shifted from insurgent critique to damage control. He’s publicly fretted about watching the Trump administration “sink” over Iran and Epstein, yet still framed the problem as a betrayal of Trump rather than an indictment of the system Trump sits atop.
That’s a dodge. You can’t rail against the “iron triangle” of contractors, generals, and politicians on Monday, and then turn around on Tuesday and insist that your preferred president is mystically separate from that triangle—while his own appointees prosecute a strategically incoherent war, basically carpet bombing civilian infrastructure, blowing up schools, and killing little girls.
Jones, almost by accident, was occasionally right.
He latched onto “gay frogs” and became a meme. But underneath the theatrics was real endocrine‑disruption research on atrazine, a herbicide shown in peer‑reviewed work to feminize male frogs at extremely low concentrations. Jones spun this into a deranged population‑control plot. Yet the underlying point—that powerful firms quietly saturate the environment with chemicals that alter biology while regulators look away—wasn’t wrong.
More importantly, Jones put Bohemian Grove in the popular imagination long before respectable outlets would touch it. In the late-1990s and early-2000s, he was dismissed as insane for treating a secluded California redwood camp for the rich and powerful as a serious locus of elite networking. Responsible Statecraft recently reported what Jones could only insinuate: the Grove’s a dense social hub of the U.S. war machine. The outlet’s investigation makes clear that Bohemian Grove isn’t just a goofy summer playhouse with bad robes and corny rituals; it’s a private, alcohol‑soaked networking zone for the revolving door between the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies and the contractors they later “advise.”
A leaked 2023 attendance list includes former national security advisers, former chairs of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and former NSA directors. A 2017 roster shows three former CIA directors as “dues-paying members.” This isn’t speculative. The people who plan wars, advocate for them, and profit from them have been meeting privately for decades.
The history is even darker than Jones suggested. As the Responsible Statecraft report notes, in 1942, under the redwoods, J. Robert Oppenheimer met with the S‑1 committee; within a month, he was tapped to lead the Manhattan Project and build the atomic bomb. Four decades later, the sitting CIA director used the Grove as a venue to brief members on covert operations abroad—parts of his speech remain redacted in the CIA’s own archives.
If you wanted to design a physical incarnation of the “iron triangle” that H.R. McMaster once criticized—contractors, military, and government fusing into one self‑dealing blob—you’d end up with something like Bohemian Grove.
The club motto, “Weaving spiders come not here,” is supposed to mean no business allowed. In reality, as long‑ago reporting by Spy magazine confirms, the motto’s a joke. Kissinger was talking business in the 1970s. More recently, Pennsylvania Sen. Dave McCormick, who was elected in 2024, used the Grove to cultivate high‑dollar donors, and a cluster of real‑estate bigwigs from one camp collaborated to kill affordable‑housing ballot measures in San Francisco.
In 1967, Richard Nixon told an audience at the Grove that it was they—not the American public—who’d determine America’s destiny, boasting of U.S. economic and military superiority and casting the club’s attendees as stewards of “freedom” against “totalitarianism.” That’s the purest expression of what Jones has always claimed to expose and yet now refuses to name: a self‑anointed class, unaccountable, convinced it owns the country.