Today, Dan tells Jordan all about why Alex Jones most likely did not really infiltrate Bohemian Grove, or at least did not do so in the way he presented in his documentary Dark Secrets: Inside Bohemian Grove. There are a lot of problems, and Dan discusses a few of them, and the gents speculate that a man who lies for a living probably started that career with a big lie.
Yeah, they make you pay like hundreds of dollars to take TV production classes, and they take like months to complete the ones you need in order to get on TV, but if we just shoot our own videos, they'll produce.
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We're going to need a better studio than your bedroom.
He would go out in public with bullhorns and make a big spectacle of himself and scream about banks and what have you.
That was sort of his modus operandi.
And because he was this crazy public figure, that's why Richard Linklater, who was an Austin filmmaker at the time, ended up putting him in Waking Life and then Scanner Darkly a little bit down the road.
where he played characters very similar to himself.
Crazy street preachers.
In Waking Life, he's a guy yelling in a bullhorn driving around in a car.
It's a stretch for him.
But he's yelling a bunch of stuff back then that I actually am kind of cool with because they're all about human potential and stuff like that.
He's screaming about how the indomitable spirit of humanity is great.
But the reason that he ever broke through in conspiracy theory communities and the reason that he got this elevated status as the champion of conspiracies, what made it really break was that he put out a video where he showed breaking into and infiltrating Bohemian Grove in the hills of California.
I believe it's in the north.
The North Coast area.
So anyway, that was in 2000.
Allegedly, he infiltrated on July 15, 2000.
And he made the biggest fucking deal out of it.
He made a video, started selling it.
This is sort of the beginning of his documentary Empire.
He started getting a lot of attention for it because it was this mysterious place where powerful people go.
And Alex Jones, he sells himself as the only person who's been able to break in Right.
And the hallmark of it, the big coup de grace, is he got footage of the cremation of care ceremony, which is the most famous part of the video.
It's the part that everyone who's seen it, it's the part they remember, because the rest of it's fucking bullshit.
It's a video of a giant stone owl where they burn a figure in effigy.
And he portrays it as a satanic ceremony where they're killing a baby, all this shit.
But the more important pieces are Alex Jones claims that he is the one who exposed Bohemian Grove.
And before that, no one knew about it.
And it was this shadowy place where really powerful elites went.
And I would like to play this news report from 1981.
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Now a question.
What have Herbert Hoover, Art Linkletter, Jack London, and Richard Nixon all had in common?
Well, they've all been members of the exclusive all-male Bohemian Club in California, where every year at this time, the elite from around the country get together for two and a half weeks of fun and games.
Steve Shepard has this special assignment report.
More than 2,000 members of San Francisco's exclusive and all-male Bohemian Club...
The Grove is the Bohemian Club's summer retreat, and its facilities are hidden beneath lush forest canopy extending south from the banks of Sonoma County's Russian River.
For more than a century, the camp has been a place where club members and guests from all across America gather to relax.
So, more fascinating little pieces of Alex being completely wrong are that in 1989, which, if you're counting, is 11 years before Alex Jones broke in, a journalist named Philip Weiss, reporting for Spy Magazine, infiltrated Bohemian Grove for six days.
I would like to read a couple of excerpts from his column.
So this is from Philip Weiss' article, and I quote, For me, the trick was getting in.
A guest card was out of the question.
Club bylaws have stated that a member sponsor's application, quote, shall be in writing and shall contain full information for the guidance of the board in determining the merits and qualifications of the proposed guest.
No, Section 8, Article 18 was too fine a screen for me, and my attempts to get a job as a waiter or a valet in one of the camps failed.
In the end, I entered by stealth.
Some observers of the Grove have warned that security was too good.
They'd sniff me out immediately.
I might last three hours before they put me in Santa Rosa jail for trespassing.
Lowell Bergman...
A producer with 60 Minutes who used to hunt rabbits in the nearby hills remembered a fire road leading into a site near the Guernasville Waste Treatment Plant but said they'd spot me sneaking in.
Others mentioned barbed wire and electronic monitoring devices at places where the grove abuts Mount Rio and helicopters patrolling the ridge roads that traverse the thousand-foot hills and form the grove's perimeter.
One day, I drove up to the front gate and got a daunting glimpse of what looked like the grove sheriff.
A barrel-like figure in a Smokey the Bear hat.
A set of checkpoints on the Berlin Wall seemed to stretch out behind him.
But by then, I'd made my connection.
My driver was Mary Moore, an Earth Mother type with long silvery blonde hair, who's the most active member of a distinctively Californian left-wing group called the Bohemian Grove Action Network.
Moore agreed to help me get in, providing me with a sort of underground railroad.
She put at my service a mountain guide who demanded only that I keep the methods he devised for me confidential.
He had a keen geographical sense, and a girlfriend who described a plan to seed magic crystals at the Grove gates and make them open up of their own accord so the Native American drummers could walk in.
My imposter included misrepresenting myself in conversation with other campers, and my story kept changing as I learned more about how life inside was organized.
I said I was a guest of Bromley camp, where unsortable visitors end up.
At 33, I was one of the youngest Bohemians, but I was welcome almost as a policy matter.
Quote, we looked around and saw we were becoming an old men's club, a member said, explaining recent efforts to recruit fresh blood.
Being from New York was fine.
The Grove limits retreat guests to out-of-staters.
Though clamoring by well-connected Californians to visit the forest, Not sure what that means.
No one inside acted suspicious, but paranoia about the groves seemed justified, and I brought along my own version of cyanide, Interol, a tranquilizer used by actors to counteract stage fright.
One day a member asked if I was related to a bohemian named Jack Weiss.
No, but I've heard a lot about him and I'd like to meet him.
You can't, he said.
He's dead!
After that, I began working a dead West Coast relative's promise to have me out to the Grove one summer into my shaggy dog story about an invitation.
He goes to the cremation of care ceremony that Alex Jones videotapes and misrepresents as some sort of a satanic thing.
And the reality of it is that the cremation of care ceremony is this thing where you have all these super powerful people who have crazy stressful lives.
It's much the same as really rich people often go to dominatrixes to get the power taken away, have a symbolic power exchange.
And in this case, these people have such scrutinized lives and such stress that they go to this place where they can privately let loose, maybe do some gay stuff, get drunk all the time.
Put on little musical numbers, have people give speeches, and that's basically a lot of what goes on there.
There's a lot of politics discussion that goes on now, too, much more than originally.
And so the cremation of care ceremony is where you have a manifestation of care who comes in, which is what is burned in effigy eventually.
And it is this idea of the stresses and the cares of the outside world, and they bring it in on a boat, a pontoon boat, to this ritual space in front of the giant owl of wisdom, the giant owl Moloch.
Yeah, so those are two things that happened over a decade before Alex ostensibly, allegedly revealed it to the public.
And this guy, Philip Weiss, it's a long read, but I recommend everybody reading his article here about his infiltration because it's, first of all, he's a great writer.
It's witty, it's really great, and it's a really interesting window into sort of the reality of what the Bohemian Club is more than Alex's satanic nonsense that he spouts.
So the other problem that Alex Jones has with his movie that he put out, his documentary about breaking into Bohemian Grove, is that...
A couple people have done some really good analysis on it, and one question keeps jumping out, and that is, why do all of the things that seem the craziest about Bohemian Grove, why is none of that on camera?
Why is that just Alex's narration over shots of trees and stuff like that?
He talks about how he sees surveillance equipment everywhere.
But it doesn't show wires going all around the trees.
Doesn't show none of that is on camera.
OK, he talks about seeing all sorts of things and none of it is presented within the documentary.
Further, he says that he gets accosted by sheriffs on his way in to try and break.
It's not on tape.
He just says that it happened.
There's no reason to believe that it actually happened.
When you're making a documentary, you really gotta show and prove what you're doing.
Basically, what he ended up doing in that alleged half hour is walked about 50 feet.
He made almost, like, the area that he would have to walk to get to where he says he ends up, this parking lot, this parking area where he ends up and gets picked up by a shuttle, is so close to the external road.
So he knows he can sneak in pretty easily, but he has to present it as really difficult, because otherwise this isn't this sacred space that he's broken into.