Peter Thiel's "Secret Society"

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Transcript:

Breaking news! Billionaire Peter Thiel has a super secret society of influential people who gather in super secret meetings to super secretly control the world! Jeeze, where have I heard this before? It sounds so familiar. Oh yeah, because this sort of thing has been happening since the beginning of time, and every few decades there’s a new revelation, and new conspiracy theories, all about the secret society controlling the world. The one that dominated my life until this most recent news was a little meeting of the minds known as the Bohemian Club.

I first learned about the Bohemian Club from the journalist Jon Ronson, who described his adventure in the year 2000 uncovering the club with a delightfully wacky conspiracy theorist named Alex Jones. Yes, that Alex Jones. You can read all about it in Jon’s book Them: Adventures with Extremists, but the gist is this: Jones swore up and down that there was a secret society composed of the richest and most influential people in the world; that they gathered on a regular basis to conduct weird rituals in the redwood forests north of San Francisco, like dancing with Satan and sacrificing babies to their dark gods. A lot of Jones’ beliefs were pretty clearly antisemitic tropes, but Ronson humored him and accompanied him on an infiltration of Bohemian Grove, where the men supposedly met each summer. And what he saw shocked him: Alex Jones was RIGHT. I mean, in part. There really was a gathering of extremely rich and influential men in the middle of a redwood forest, and they really did do weird rituals like dancing around in masks and holding symbolic cremations.

But they weren’t Jewish lizard people planning a world takeover, and they weren’t sacrificing any babies. They were absurdly wealthy and powerful frat bros, who got together to do stupid shit and probably trade stock tips.

You see, the Bohemian Club was started in 1872 by a group of Bay Area journalists who wanted to bro out together and appreciate the arts. They started making artists they liked “honorary” members so they could all bro out together. Eventually they realized they needed to recruit some rich people to buy the land they were renting and pay for all the booze they were drinking, and that was the tipping point. Within a few years, the “bohemians” were the minority and the rich guys were running everything.

The club’s motto is “Weaving Spiders Come Not Here,” a nice bit of Shakespear that suggests that members shouldn’t use the club to conduct business, but come on. That’s the entire point of a secret club of rich people: not appreciating the arts, or putting on silly plays, or even sacrificing babies. It’s to develop and strengthen connections that will help them gain more money and power. That’s it.

And boy, did the Bohemian Club pay off in spades for a lot of otherwise mediocre men: Herbert Hoover introduced Richard Nixon to Dwight Eisenhower at Bohemian Grove in 1950 (Nixon was later caught on tape calling the gathering “faggy.” Sorry for the slur but I just find that very funny.) Venture capitalists used the gathering to convince Reagan to cut social security and capital gains taxes. Members of the Bechtel family appear in photos at the Grove with people like Henry Kissinger, and were members at the same time as George W. Bush and Colin Powell, which may be one reason why the Bechtel’s construction company got the first major contract to rebuild Iraq, and now they’re about to get billions of dollars to build a data center for fellow Bohemian Club member U.S. Senator David McCormick.

I’m telling you about all of this before I talk about the latest revelations about a NEW secret society because I think it’s illustrative of how REAL conspiracies get warped and magnified into a misleading, sometimes bigoted, and sometimes dangerous conspiracy THEORY. Yes, rich and powerful men really were meeting in the woods each summer, but they were NOT sacrificing babies. Why does that matter? Well, a fan of Alex Jones heard him say that that’s what they were doing and he went to Bohemian Grove to try to murder everyone.

It also matters because those kinds of lies distract from the real issue, which is how much power these guys actually have, here in the real world, without the need to commune with Satan. Whether they’re in the middle of the woods or some startup’s board room, they’re conspiring to make their own lives better by ruining everyone else’s life. They’re not physically sacrificing babies in a bonfire but they ARE killing people by taking away their safety nets, their healthcare, their government protections, all so these guys can make an extra buck. It’s sick.

So. On to “Dialog.” Yes, in 2006 Peter Thiel started his own Bohemian Club, but the founding differed a little. Instead of journalists starting it, artists building it, and then soulless rich losers taking it over and making it into a blatant networking opportunity, Dialog started with the soulless rich losers. They added a bunch of other rich losers, and influential politicians, and then the journalists and artists who would be awed by the wealth and power around them and thus could serve as useful idiots for them.

Thanks to the incredible hacktivist maia arson crimew, we have a list of who many of these assholes are: lots of tech bro founders like LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, YouTube’s Neal Mohan, and Xitter’s Elon Musk. Political people like Jared Kushner, Cory Booker, and Ted Cruz. And then the useful idiots: Sam Harris, Peter Attia, Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, Bret Stephens, and, hilariously, Joseph Gordon-Levitt. And we also get to see the topics of their next meet-up:

““Money (Does?) Buy Happiness,” “Bring Back Nuclear,” “Navigating WWIII,” “Battlefield Technologies,” and “How’s Your Sex Life?” Other talks include “Build-a-Cult,” moderated by the founder of the Christian networking site Pray.com, and “Build-a-Party,” run by a former White House national security official.

These leaks were quickly followed by an even funnier leak, in which Wired reports that each member of Dialog was graded based on how much money they have and how famous they are, with lower-rated members expected to pay more to stay in the club.

Sadly, Wired doesn’t name names when they report things like “In one note, a staffer assigned a member a grade “so she doesn't get seated with grade Cs” indicating that they wanted to avoid this member sitting with VIP attendees.” Who, Wired?? NAME HER! I want to laugh in her face!

We’ve also been informed of the equally funny news that Dialog ran a dating service where they tried to match up members with each other.

And that’s pretty much it. I’ve seen a lot of people talking about this on social media, and honestly…I’m sorry, it’s just not surprising or even very interesting to me, at least until I get the names of the people who were paying more to be in this stupid club because they aren’t rich or famous enough. I see people referring to this as a “secret society,” and guessing at the ways that the people in this club have been manipulating us mere plebs. Joseph Gordon-Levitt got so much heat he released a statement swearing that he never met Peter Thiel despite going to a few Dialog events, and I’ve seen people say he’s lying, and that Thiel is behind Gordon-Levitt’s recent activism trying to destroy Section 230 “for the children.” As I’ve mentioned in the past, yeah, wealthy tech bros are the only people who will benefit from “child safety” online ID laws. And, sure, Peter Thiel’s puppet, Vice President JD Vance, has floated the idea of killing Section 230 but only for “big tech companies,” which would make an exception for sites like Rumbl, which Thiel has invested in.

And sure, journalists have already caught one guy on the Dialog list in an obvious lie: Maryland Governor Wes Moore said that he isn’t in the club, and that he only went to one event ten years ago and hasn’t had anything else to do with the club or Peter Thiel. But MDBayNews fact checked that and found that the fucking EPSTEIN FILES revealed that he attended at least two events, Axios independently reported that he was a member back in 2025, and the leak of this year’s conference shows that he will be attending and his title is “Governor, State of Maryland,” which he didn’t get until 2023.

That’s…that’s pretty embarrassing.

But does all that mean the celebs like Joseph Gordon-Levitt are also lying? No, of course not. He might be, but I’m not convinced. Like, yes, Peter Thiel is an actual evil piece of shit, but I don’t think that he is funding Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s campaign to destroy the internet as we know it. (I’m not going to go into why Section 230 is important but if you’re interested, go read Mike Masnick’s report on why we shouldn’t be happy that Meta took a loss in court this past spring.)

No, I think that Joseph Gordon-Levitt is just one of a handful of useful idiots Thiel and his cronies got to join their little club because he’s kinda famous and probably decently rich. He helps fund the club so the smarter soulless assholes can network, and while they do it they can say “oh yeah, I know Joe,” or Josh Brolin, or whoever the fuck Sophia Bush is. And as a little bonus, sure, maybe they can apply some pressure to influence these people when they’re out there talking to the general public about child safety online or AI. Because, let’s be honest, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is spending all his time right now trying to destroy the open internet, not because he’s evil, I don’t think, but because he’s just kinda dumb. How hard would it be for someone to gently suggest that he accept a compromise with JD Vance, where now everyone has to show their license to the PornHub guy to access any website on the internet but smol bean startups like Rumbl get a pass?

Because billionaires like Peter Thiel do not care about the arts. They only care about culture such that they can manipulate it to their own ends. They’re not huge fans of 500 Days of Summer (though if they’ve seen it, I bet they came away thinking Summer was a huge bitch); they just want the chance to use an actor’s fame, or reputation, or audience. That’s it. That’s why everything conservative billionaires touch turns to shit. That’s why they have no art or culture of their own.

So yeah that’s the story of Dialog, which is the story of Bohemian Grove, which is the story of a thousand “secret societies” before them: just a bunch of rich assholes trying to get richer.

Peter Thiel's "Secret Society" (YouTube)