Lords & Serfs Part 2 - The Weaving Spiders

How America's ruling class built its world in secret, and why it has never stopped

There is a forest in northern California where the most powerful men in the world have been gathering for nearly 150 years. It is called Bohemian Grove. It sits on 2,700 acres of old growth redwood in Sonoma County, about 75 miles north of San Francisco. The trees are enormous. The canopy is so dense that very little light reaches the ground. It is, by design, a place where what happens inside stays inside.

Every July, for two weeks, the members of the Bohemian Club and their guests gather here. Presidents. CEOs. Bankers. Defense contractors. Supreme Court justices. CIA directors. Cabinet secretaries. The full membership list is meant to be completely private. The proceedings are meant to be completely private. The club’s motto, carved above the entrance, is a line from Shakespeare: Weaving spiders, come not here. The implication being that business is not conducted at the Grove. That this is simply a place for powerful men to relax among their peers.

The documents say otherwise.

In 1981, a memo landed on the desk of Alan Greenspan. It was from Edwin Harper, an assistant to President Reagan, and it said simply: you asked for the paper we discussed at the Bohemian Grove. Attached was a document titled Social Security Reform Proposals. Two years later, the Reagan administration reformed Social Security in ways that cut benefits still affecting Americans today. The meeting where it was planned was not a congressional hearing. It was not a cabinet session. It was not a policy forum open to public scrutiny. It was a gathering in the redwoods where powerful men sat, by one account semi-naked, and decided what would happen to the retirement security of millions of people who would never know the conversation had taken place.

That memo, retrieved from the Reagan Library, is not a conspiracy theory. It is a primary source document. It is a piece of paper that connects a decision about public policy directly to a private meeting of unelected men in a forest. And it is not the only one.

At roughly the same time, an investor named Bill Draper persuaded a Reagan advisor to cut capital gains taxes while they sat together at the Grove. That single policy change enabled the high risk investment model that became venture capital, which in turn produced the technology industry as we know it today. The decision was not made in Congress. It was not made in public. It was made in a redwood forest by men who would benefit from it, in conversation with men who had the power to implement it.

These are not isolated incidents. They are a pattern. And the pattern has a name. The name is the Heritage Foundation.

In 1973, Joseph Coors, heir to the Coors beer empire and a longtime Bohemian Club member,

co-founded and funded the Heritage Foundation along with fellow club members. Heritage is not a think tank in the conventional sense. It is the ideological infrastructure of a class. It produces policy documents, trains personnel, places alumni in administrations, and coordinates with a network of linked organizations that share a small pool of donors and board members across decades. It was enormously influential in the Reagan administration. It was the primary architect of Project 2025, the 920-page governing blueprint that shaped the current Trump administration’s policy agenda, written, as its own co-founder Edwin Feulner noted proudly at a Heritage celebration just months before the 2023 Grove encampment, as “Mandate for Leadership 7.” Feulner was 82 years old. He had been attending the Grove for decades. He died in late 2025, having lived long enough to see the project he helped conceive in the redwoods become the operating manual for the most powerful government on earth.

Trump himself was never admitted to the Bohemian Club. They didn’t want him. He tried to join and was refused. But the class that runs the Grove was perfectly capable of working around that inconvenience. They didn’t need Trump to be one of them. They needed him to sign what they had already written. And he did.

This is how the court works. It does not require the king to be sophisticated. It requires the king to be useful.

When Donald Trump boarded Air Force One bound for Beijing in May 2026, he brought the court with him.

No advisors, or diplomats and certainly no. China experts. There were none of those on the plane, as former diplomat Brett Bruen noted publicly. He brought CEOs. He brought his family, and the people whose investments would benefit from whatever agreements were reached in Beijing, and whose losses would be cushioned by whatever agreements were not. The trip was described in official communications as a diplomatic summit. It was, more precisely, a trade delegation in which the distinction between American national interest and the financial interests of the people on the plane was not clearly visible to anyone looking for it.

This is not a new arrangement. It is the Grove arrangement, updated for the 21st century and given Air Force One as its vehicle.

Consider Bechtel. The Bechtel family and corporation, one of the wealthiest private enterprises in the world, with two members on the 2023 Grove encampment list, has been funneling government contracts to private hands since the postwar era. George Shultz. Caspar Weinberger. Edwin Meese. The men who moved between Bechtel’s boardroom and the highest levels of government so frequently that the boundary between the two became difficult to locate. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, a decision driven by Grove members including George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Colin Powell, Bechtel received millions in reconstruction contracts. The court had sent the army. The court collected the payment.

Now Brendan Bechtel, the latest family heir, stands alongside Senator David McCormick, whose 2022 Senate campaign was funded in part by eleven men who shared his camp at the 2023 Grove encampment, at announcements of AI investment deals in Pennsylvania data centers and power plants. Bechtel is positioned to receive billions in construction contracts from those deals. The senator who helped announce them was funded by the men who planned with him in the redwoods. The president who blessed the deals signed the policy blueprint the Grove’s ideological infrastructure spent decades writing.

The weaving spiders are very busy.

The people not on the plane are worth pausing on. While the court flew to Beijing to negotiate market access for the investor class, 40 million Americans were losing food assistance. The One Big Beautiful Bill, the same legislation that delivers trillions in tax cuts to the top of the income distribution, cuts $187 billion from SNAP. The Kraft Heinz CFO described the reduction in food stamp transactions on an earnings call as “down in line with expectations, if not even a little more than expected.” A corporation modeling the hunger of its customer base as a revenue line item, calmly, in front of investors. The court had planned this too. Not in a single meeting, not in a single memo, but across decades of coordinated policy work by the network the Grove built, the think tanks, the dark money organizations, the donor pools, the placed personnel who move between Heritage and the White House and back again.

The wealth tax that might have funded those benefits was never passed. The antitrust enforcement that might have broken up the meatpacking oligopoly was abandoned. The campaign finance reform that might have made the donor class less powerful was blocked. Each of these was not an accident or an oversight. Each was a decision made by people whose interests were served by the outcome and who had the access, the funding, and the institutional infrastructure to ensure it.

Bernie Sanders, who has spent decades inside the system watching this happen, put the numbers plainly in a recent address: the top 1 percent now owns more wealth than the bottom 93 percent. One man, Elon Musk, owns more wealth than the bottom 53 percent of American households. These are not the natural outcomes of a free market. They are the outcomes of a market that has been shaped, over generations, by men who met in a forest and decided what it would look like.

The Grove did not create inequality. But it has been one of the primary mechanisms by which inequality has been planned, protected, and extended across generations while the rest of the country was told it was simply the way things are.

It is not simply the way things are. It is the way things were made to be.

There is another problem with leaving the future in the hands of the court, one that gets less attention than the unfairness of the arrangement but is in some ways more alarming. They are not particularly good at this.

The savings and loan crisis of the 1980s cost American taxpayers roughly $130 billion, the result of deregulation pushed by the same political infrastructure the Grove helped build, followed by the spectacular mismanagement of institutions whose executives collected enormous compensation while driving them into insolvency. The government absorbed the losses. The executives kept the gains. This is not a description of a functioning meritocracy. It is a description of a system that privatizes profit and socializes failure.

Enron was, at the turn of the millennium, the seventh largest company in America. Its executives were celebrated as visionaries, “the smartest guys in the room.” Fortune named it America’s most innovative company six years in a row. Its leadership moved through the same networks, attended the same events, sat on the same boards as the rest of the court. When it collapsed in 2001, not through bad luck or unforeseeable circumstance but through deliberate, systematic fraud, it wiped out the retirement savings of thousands of employees who had been encouraged to hold company stock while the executives who knew what was coming sold theirs. The court protected its own. The employees lost everything.

WorldCom. The dot-com collapse. The 2008 housing crisis, perhaps the most consequential demonstration of elite incompetence in living memory, in which the most sophisticated financial institutions in the world packaged worthless mortgages into instruments they rated as safe, sold them to pension funds and municipalities and ordinary investors, collected enormous fees, and then required a government bailout when the entire structure collapsed. The people who designed the instruments kept their bonuses. The people who lost their homes lost their homes. The people who lost their retirement savings lost their retirement savings. And within a decade, the same institutions, the same class, the same network had reconstituted itself, resumed its compensation levels, and continued attending its encampments in the redwoods.

And then there is the matter of the planet itself. The court has known about the consequences of carbon emissions for decades. Internal documents from ExxonMobil, one of the most powerful corporations in the world, with deep ties to the Grove network, show that the company’s own scientists accurately predicted the trajectory of global warming as early as the 1970s. Rather than act on that knowledge, the company spent the following decades funding think tanks, including several connected to the Grove network, to manufacture doubt about the science its own researchers had confirmed. The Heritage Foundation, the same organization that produced Project 2025, was among the recipients of fossil fuel industry funding used to delay climate action. The court did not merely fail to address the problem. It actively suppressed the solution while the window for relatively painless correction closed.

The result is not a quarterly earnings miss or a bankruptcy filing. It is the destabilization of the planetary systems that every human being, every economy, and every civilization depends on for survival. Wildfires of unprecedented scale. Flooding that displaces millions. Droughts that threaten food systems. Species extinction at rates not seen since the asteroid that ended the dinosaurs. The court extracted maximum value from the atmosphere the way it extracted maximum value from the meatpacking industry and the utility grid and the federal food assistance program, efficiently, profitably, and with the costs distributed entirely to the people who had no seat at the table when the decisions were made.

This is not incompetence in the conventional sense. It is something worse, the competent pursuit of short term profit in full knowledge of the long term consequences, by people structurally insulated from those consequences. The executives who made those decisions will not live to see the worst of what they set in motion. Their grandchildren will. So will everyone else’s.

The court does not merely extract value from the people below it. It periodically destroys enormous amounts of value through a combination of greed, short-termism, and a structural immunity to consequences that removes the one mechanism, failure, that might otherwise impose discipline. In a genuinely free market, Enron’s executives would have been ruined along with their employees. In the market the court has actually built, they were inconvenienced.

This is the argument that does not get made often enough: we are not being governed by our betters. We are being governed by people who have constructed a system that protects them from the consequences of their own decisions while ensuring that everyone else absorbs those consequences fully. The Grove does not select for wisdom or competence or genuine vision. It selects for access, for inheritance, for the willingness to maintain the arrangements that keep the canopy dense and the light from reaching the ground.

Frederick Douglass understood something about this class of people that remains true: power concedes nothing without a demand. Not because the powerful are evil, though some are. But because the system they inhabit insulates them from the feedback that might otherwise produce change. They do not feel the consequences of their decisions. They do not need to. That is precisely what the court is for.

The court always believes it is permanent. It never is. The Habsburgs who demanded tribute from the Swiss cantons had been doing so for generations. The arrangement seemed immovable because it had always been. The cantons were small. The empire was vast. The idea that a collection of mountain communities could simply decide to stop paying tribute and build something durable in its place would have seemed, to any reasonable Habsburg administrator, preposterous. It was not preposterous. It was a decision. And once made, it could not be unmade by force alone.

The British East India Company was, for a time, the most powerful corporate entity in human history. It had its own army. It governed territory. It extracted resources from an entire subcontinent and delivered the profits to shareholders in London who never set foot in the places they were draining. It seemed permanent because it was enormous and because enormous things tend to seem permanent. Gandhi’s salt march did not destroy it alone. But it named what the Company was, in terms the people living under it could see and repeat and build upon. Once named clearly enough, the thing became harder to sustain. The empire that had seemed immovable was gone within two decades.

The Robber Barons of the American Gilded Age, the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, the Morgans, built fortunes and wielded power that makes even today’s billionaire class look modest by comparison. They owned judges, senators, and they owned the press. They seemed, to the people living under them, like a permanent feature of the landscape, as natural and as immovable as the mountains. Theodore Roosevelt did not think they were immovable. Neither did the muckrakers who named them, Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens, who understood that the first act of resistance is always the same: describe what is actually happening, in enough detail that it cannot be dismissed, to enough people that it cannot be ignored.

The Grove is not the Gilded Age. The current court is not the East India Company. But the mechanism is identical: private power, coordinated in private, shaping public outcomes for private benefit, while maintaining the public fiction that the outcomes are natural, inevitable, and beyond the reach of democratic correction.

They are not beyond the reach of democratic correction. What Tarbell understood, what Gandhi understood, what the Swiss cantons understood before either of them, is that the court’s greatest advantage is not its wealth or its connections or its access. Its greatest advantage is the widespread belief that nothing can be done. The trees are too tall, the canopy too dense, the roots too deep.

The roots are deep; the canopy is dense, and the trees have been growing for a long time. But forests have burned before. What grows after is not decided by the trees.

In the parts of this series that follow, we will look at exactly how the extraction works, industry by industry, mechanism by mechanism, community by community. We will look at what resistance has looked like when it has worked, and what it requires when it hasn’t. We will look at what a different arrangement might actually consist of, in specific and practical terms, because a resistance without concrete demands is too easy to absorb and too easy to exhaust.

The court has been building its world for generations. It has done so in private, in a forest, under a canopy that filters out most of the light.

We are allowed to name what we see. We are allowed to build. The arithmetic, as it has always been, is not on their side.