BLACK ROCK CITY, NEV. — The influence of Burning Man is being felt from the halls of power to small-town America. And it transcends traditional party boundaries. It is not just Big Tech titans represented at Burning Man — it has become a New Age, pagan playground for the wealthy and powerful. Just this year, Business Insider described it as a “playground for billionaires, Hollywood A-listers, and Silicon Valley elites alike.” From across the political spectrum and around the world to a broad cross section of industries, Burning Man is becoming famous for attracting some of the richest and most influential people in the world.
Nicole Shanahan, a Silicon Valley billionaire and former vice-presidential running mate for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. who was married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin, publicly denounced Burning Man as “demonic” following her conversion to Christianity. And in a powerful exposé posted on social media last year titled “Is Burning Man Demonic?,” she hinted at the significance of what is happening here.
“Within the span of a single week, [Burning Man] concentrates a kind of nucleus of power — intellectual, financial, spiritual — that I have never witnessed assembled in one place before,” wrote Shanahan, who even got (re-)married at the event in 2022.
Shanahan was hardly an outsider looking in and speculating. She attended for almost a decade, even staying at the “First Camp” with key organizers such as Burning Man co-founder Larry Harvey and Burning Man CEO Marian Goodell. The camp was not just built for logistics, she said. Rather, it was “a place of access, where celebrities and dignitaries — tech founders, movie stars, diplomats, and even royalty — were hosted.”
That is not an exaggeration. Aside from Tesla’s Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s co-founders, and other overlords of Tech, top world leaders are known to have attended. These include billionaire Ray Dalio, the CEO of the world’s largest hedge fund; billionaire Josh Kushner, the brother of President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner; former CEO of DreamWorks Jeffrey Katzenberg; retired Supreme Allied Commander of NATO General Wesley Clark; celebrities such as Katy Perry and Paris Hilton; and countless more. Many have overt ties to, and even membership in key Deep State organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations, Bilderberg, and other powerful globalist outfits.
Numerous members of Congress have attended and defended the festival as well. According to the Burning Man organization, “many” members of the U.S. Congress have “decided to attend” for official tours. And while the names are not listed publicly, in keeping with the movement’s anonymity for many high-profile attendees, the group said in 2004 that it conducted five tours for more than 25 senior government “guests.”
One of its staunchest defenders was former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). In fact, in 2015, when authorities at the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) requested facilities for federal law enforcement in charge of policing the land on which the “city” is built, the powerful senator slammed the “outlandishly unnecessary” requests. Even the Republican senator representing Nevada at the time, Dean Heller, balked.
A few years later, in 2019, as BLM sought to put in place regulations and controls, both of the state’s U.S. senators, Catherine Cortez Masto (D) and Jacky Rosen (D), praised Burning Man. In a letter urging the agency not to burden Burning Man with requirements, they called it “an iconic cultural event and significant economic driver for the state of Nevada.”
In an interview with Larry Harvey in 2015, Representative Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) described Burning Man as a vision for the future. “I’ve seen now a physical representation of the potential for the creation of a new world,” he said after attending. “We need to take that energy, we need to take that creativity, and take it into what should ultimately be the most creative of all sciences, and that is the science of human relations that produces our government.”
In other words, the spirit of Burning Man should become the spirit animating American governance. And that seems to be happening.
The U.S. Conference of Mayors is well represented at Burning Man. As part of a “Kindred Cities” program, more than a dozen mayors have attended the main event, from states such as Minnesota, South Carolina, California, New Jersey, Oklahoma, New Hampshire, and Nevada. In 2018, Stephen Benjamin, president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors and mayor of Columbia, South Carolina, was among those in attendance. Praising its 10 Principles such as “radical inclusion,” Benjamin called Burning Man a “really profound experience.”
Hillary Schieve, mayor of Reno, Nevada, claimed publicly in an interview with Common Edge that going to Burning Man once made her a convert. “It changed me forever: the way I approach being mayor, the way I think about infrastructure and cities, the way I engage arts and culture in Reno,” she said. “It’s been said that Burners get the chance to build the city they want to live in. There are a lot of lessons there about how to lead a city that exists year-round.”
The relationship with the U.S. Conference of Mayors formally began in January 2018, when Burning Man representatives attended the mayors’ winter meeting in Washington. Burning Man communications director Megan Miller addressed an audience of roughly 500 mayors and officials. By that summer, the conference had passed a resolution honoring Burning Man and encouraging mayors to support artists and local Burning Man communities as a means of fostering “creativity, innovation, inclusivity, and civic pride.” Dozens of U.S. mayors now attend each year, according to Goodell.
The Right Joins In
It’s not just Democrats and liberal, big-city mayors. Prominent political operative Grover Norquist, a Republican kingpin who leads Americans for Tax Reform, became a regular attendee after being invited by Harvey. In an interview with The New American after his talk on organizing for liberty at the “Soft Landing” camp, Norquist said Burning Man was an important example of how people can and should be left alone to organize themselves without government control.
“If you want to be left alone and enjoy freedom of religion, you have to respect other people’s freedom to be something else or to do other things that are different,” he argued before leaving for the big Republican convention in Dallas. “You cannot expect a state government to respect your freedom of religion if you then say, ‘well, some religions should be left off the list of being allowed.’… One of the things you see at Burning Man is there are thousands and thousands of different ways to run your life and be happy.”
Along with Norquist, another key player in mainstreaming and normalizing the Burning Man spirit in right-of-center audiences is the libertarian magazine Reason. The publication has done far more than cover Burning Man; it touts the festival using the language of the liberty movement and parts of the conservative coalition. Long before Norquist set foot on the dry lake bed, or playa, where Burning Man is held, senior editor Brian Doherty had written the first serious history of the event (This Is Burning Man) and a 2000 Reason cover story on Black Rock City’s fraught relations with the Bureau of Land Management — treating the week in the desert as a working demonstration of radical self-reliance, voluntary association, and Hayekian spontaneous order.
When Norquist’s 2014 trip produced the predictable pearl-clutching, Reason and Reason TV leaned into the joke and the substance at once: a satirical video asking whether “radical inclusion” could survive an anti-tax activist, plus reporting that let Norquist himself describe the city as “the way the world should be” and “exhibit A” of people organizing without the state. In doing so, the magazine took Burning Man’s principles — gift economy, leave no trace, do your own thing without harming others — and recast them as the live-action version of the “leave us alone coalition” Norquist has spent decades assembling.
What had looked to many conservatives like hippie anarchy became, in Reason’s telling, proof that large-scale cooperation does not require a bureaucracy, and that a festival dedicated to “radical inclusion” need not be a gated community of the Left. That framing helped move Burning Man from curiosity to usable parable inside both the libertarian press and the broader, small-government intellectual ecosystem.
Deep State Globalists: Kindred Spirits
Multiple experienced “Burners” explained to The New American that many billionaire heirs from elite, Deep State families attend, too. David Rockefeller’s grandson Christopher Rockefeller Lindstrom, who serves as a director for the David Rockefeller Fund, for example, is known as a Burner. Kucinich said he met the Rockefeller scion there, and a Burning Man volunteer roster posted online actually lists him as a member of the “Crew.”
Even more interesting, perhaps, is that one of the original board members of the Burning Man organization was Rae Richman, who at the time ran Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors’ Bay Area office. Reporting from 2011 identifies Richman as part of the initial 17-member Burning Man Project board. “I want people to not have to go out to the desert to have that opportunity for self-expression and creativity,” she was quoted as saying by the San Francisco Bay Guardian.
Researcher and author Carl Teichrib, a Christian who leads the “Camp of the Unknown God” and has attended seven times so far, told The New American of meeting senior officials with the European Union, top leaders in the World Economic Forum (WEF), and more throughout the event. Burning Man speakers such as WEF Young Global Leader Lucian Tarnowski, whose speech Teichrib attended, have brazenly touted the coming new global system and the UN’s 2030 Agenda in their major talks in Black Rock City.
The overlap between the Davos “business elites” and Burning Man is significant. WEF bigwig Yves Béhar, for instance, is currently a Burning Man Project board member, with his official Burning Man biography noting that he is a frequent speaker at the WEF in Davos, Switzerland. The former chief technology officer of the WEF, Brian Behlendorf, spoke at a major Burning Man event in 2013 on “transforming education” and “burnifying the academic world.”
The “cross-pollination” between Burning Man and the global elites gathered around the World Economic Forum is more than a matter of prominent individuals attending both. The Burning Man Journal explicitly explored the relationship in a 2014 article titled “Davos Is Burning.” In it, the author described encountering fellow Burners at the WEF’s annual meeting in Davos and emphasized what he considered the “striking similarity” of discussions taking place in the two communities. Those shared subjects included inequality, gender and LGBTQ issues, water, climate change, veganism, and Buddhism.
More significantly, the article portrayed Burning Man and the WEF as complementary global networks — one originating from the bottom up and the other from the top down — that are increasingly engaged in “cross-pollination” across sectors of society. It even compared Burning Man’s network of affiliated organizations with the WEF’s constellation of stakeholder communities, including its Young Global Leaders, Gender Parity Programme, Women’s Communities, and Global Faith Leaders.
The author ultimately concluded that participants in the two movements carry “essentially the same spirit” and represent a humanistic movement capable of spreading around the world. In other words, years before Burning Man’s connections to Silicon Valley billionaires became widely discussed, Burning Man’s own publication was openly describing an ideological and networking convergence between the desert gathering and the institutional world of Davos.
Because most Burners do not use their real names during the event, but rather “playa names,” and almost everyone is wearing a costume of some sort along with ski goggles and a mask to protect from the dust, nobody truly knows how many prominent leaders attend or have attended Burning Man. But multiple Burners interviewed by The New American said that they were CEOs and “senior executives” in what they call the “default world.” Many more refused to say what they do, for obvious reasons.
One indication of the number of VIPs is the traffic at Black Rock City’s temporary airport. “As far as we know, we’re the busiest temporary airport anywhere,” airport managers were quoted as saying in the Reno Gazette Journal while welcoming attendees arriving by air. That air traffic represents more than a large carbon footprint — it shows that the private-jet crowd is deeply involved in the global re-paganization of the world and the mainstreaming of the New Age and occult.
Burning Man would be concerning enough if it was just hippies, drug users, and perverts going out to the desert to have “fun.” But the reality is far more troubling: Burning Man is a global movement bringing together many of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world for the cause of global transformation. The nature of the event makes it easy to discern what that transformation will look like. If the world burns at the hands of these techno-pagan elites, their vision of “build back better” will make the pagan societies of old seem like nice places to live. Humanity must wise up and put out the fire — now.
Article posted with permission from Alex Newman
