Jordan Holmes and Dan Friesen dissect Mystery Babylon #5, where Bill Cooper’s episode jumps from ancient Egyptian myths to the 1976 Declaration of Interdependence, falsely claiming 124 "traitors" signed it—ignoring its symbolic, non-binding nature and Rockefeller’s later political role. They expose Cooper’s plagiarism of A. Ralph Epperson’s work, including debunked claims about Jesse James faking his death to become a Montana senator, and his selective misquoting of Henry Kissinger (1975) and James Billington’s Fire in the Minds of Men. Cooper’s vague references to "occult forces" manipulating Popes and Masonic degrees—like the Scottish Rite’s 33rd—reveal his reliance on stolen, distorted ideas rather than original analysis. The episode underscores how conspiracy theorists weaponize misinformation, blending historical cherry-picking with modern internet plagiarism to manufacture fear without substance. [Automatically generated summary]
I feel weird because I like him in spite of, like, I don't know why I like him exactly, but it turns out almost everything I see him in, I end up enjoying.
And so we turn on part five, lecture number five, and I feel like we've made a little bit of a departure, and now we're just talking about the New World Order.
Why are all of the legacies of the past, the family, national borders, the right to practice any chosen religion, the right to private property, among other things, under such an attack?
Is it possible that there are actually people and organizations who really want to change the basic order of things?
Well, my regular listeners know the answer to that.
Clues to the answers to these questions folks can be gleaned from some comments made by people and organizations that are talking about these wide-ranging changes in the nature of our lifestyle.
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An Associated Press Dispatch I really feel like I've gotten whiplash from the Egypt stuff to now somewhat relatively current shit.
So Bill referred to Nelson Rockefeller as the governor of New York because he's reading from an AP article from 1968, but it's strange that he doesn't point out that Rockefeller went on to be Gerald Ford's vice president.
I found this article, and it's real.
Rockefeller was running for the Republican nomination, and he was advancing a position that was based on increasing dialogue with other countries in order to avoid war with China and the Soviet Union.
He said, quote, Bill knows that Rockefeller wasn't talking about some kind of Illuminati Egypt cult that he was working for or whatever the fuck.
Interestingly, looking through some of these old newspapers, I was able to find a lot of mentions of the New World Order previous to 1968, because of course Rockefeller didn't coin this term, and neither did Bush.
A lot of them were in letters to the editor, and I bring this up to say that at one point they would print your address in the paper if you wanted to get your opinion published.
Yeah, you're taking on a risk by having your address posted, which means that only the people who really believe what they say or people who are recklessly and dangerously crazy.
On January the 30th, 1976, a new document called the Declaration of Interdependence was introduced to the American people, and it was signed by 124 traitors.
32 senators and 92 representatives, altogether 124 traitors in Washington, D.C., and it read in part, That's not enough.
So the title Declaration of Interdependence has been used a ton of times in the past hundred years.
And in fact, there were two major ones in 1976, most likely because it was the bicentennial celebrating the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
The one that Bill is talking about was written by a history professor from Amherst College named Henry Steele Comager, or at least the preamble was.
This small excerpt of the preamble is probably all Bill has ever read of this document because it was the part that...
Marto's Liberty Lobby.
The Spotlight was an old-time white identity publication that probably coincidentally aired a show on the same shortwave station as Bill, and the same one Alex would go on to broadcast on, WCR.
WWCR.
And the In the lead up to 1976, everyone was excited about celebrating the bicentennial, and different cities thought that they had the right to be the official event.
Boston felt like they were the right choice, which Philadelphia didn't agree with, nor did DC.
Sure.
The federal government decided that it wouldn't be right to choose a city to the exclusion of another, so each place could do their own big celebration.
Philadelphia decided that a part of theirs would be the commissioning of this Declaration of Interdependence.
It had no official government authority and it meant nothing.
It was symbolic and had a lot to do with the feeling that if the world didn't start working together, we were going to destroy ourselves, which is a prevailing attitude they had in 70s and mid-2020s.
As part of the celebration, a bunch of members of Congress signed the document, but their signature didn't mean anything in this context, at least not in terms of passing a law or it being considered like...
A binding treaty.
Literally every member of Congress could sign my autograph book, and that doesn't magically make it a law.
The spotlight made a big deal out of this and how it was internationalism trying to take over the country.
If you go back and you look at the response to this declaration, it's almost entirely associated with the spotlight and an editorial written by a guy named George Benson.
Benson is remembered as the president of Harding University, and more importantly, as a fierce opponent of racial integration.
Students at his college attempted to express their desire to desegregate, which led to him giving a speech in 1957, which the Arkansas Times described like this.
Quote, citing Washington D.C. as an example, Benson warned that integration would bring, quote, increased destruction to property, increased gonorrhea and syphilis, and increased pregnancies.
As an offshoot of this, he started an outlet called the National Education Program, which disseminated his op-eds to newspapers and distributed extreme right wing periodicals.
And it was in essence, another John Birch society type of entity.
Yeah.
It pushed anti-communist hysteria and deeply regressive bigotry with the funding of pro-business groups of the time.
These are the kinds of sources that Bill's pulling from.
They were the groups that made a big deal out of this meaningless gesture that was part of this celebration in Philadelphia.
Neo-Nazis like Willis Cardo and racist propagandists like Benson blew things out of proportion, and that exaggeration lives on in the legacy of the media ecosystem that they built.
Bill is an extension of that, and Alex, a further extension.
They carry on the work, these bigots who like to pretend that they oppose desegregation because it was an anti-communist plot, that work that they kicked off, and they got that ball rolling.
Anyway, I don't know what this has to do with Osiris' penis, but I'm sure it'll all come together at some point.
Another individual who has commented is Henry Kissinger, probably the greatest traitor this nation has ever known, former Secretary of State.
According to the Seattle Post Intelligence of April 18, 1975, Mr. Kissinger said, quote, Our nation is uniquely endowed to play a creative and decisive role in the new order which is taking form around us, unquote.
So Henry Kissinger used the words New World Order a lot more than just this one time, but I guess any example is as good as another.
In April 1975, Congress had voted against a proposed $722 million emergency military funding package that was meant to support South Vietnam.
In theory, it was largely about evacuating the remaining American citizens in the country and providing evacuations for South Vietnamese people who were in serious danger after we pulled out of the conflict.
The Kissinger quote was in reference to this bill failing and how it represented the U.S. not taking up the leadership in the position in the world that it's uniquely placed to be in.
This was an article from April 18th and Saigon fell on April 30th.
Fuck Kissinger and all that, but there's also an understandable context to this quote that Bill isn't interested in.
Someone just said the words New World Order and that's all that matters.
Historian Walter Mills maintains that prior to World War I, Colonel Edward Mandel House, the major advisor to Woodrow Wilson, The president at the time had a hidden motive for involving America in the war.
The historian wrote this, quote, The colonel's sole justification for preparing such a batch of blood for his countrymen was his hope of establishing a new world order of peace and security, unquote.
You see how these people fool themselves?
They always say that the end is peace and security, a world utopia.
But to get it, they spill more blood than ever has been spilled in history.
Each time they try to bring about their utopia, the blood runs in the streets.
So by this point in the episode, I was pretty sure that most of this was just Bill reading stuff and he was plagiarizing again.
So I tried to figure out where all these quotes exist in the order that he's reading them.
And I figured out that he's just reading the introduction to the book The New World Order by A. Ralph Epperson.
Epperson was a classic New World Order and various other conspiracy theory crank, and I think my favorite of his big claims is that Jesse James wasn't killed in 1882, but instead lived on under a fake name and was elected senator of Montana from 1901 to 1907.
So in 1948, a man named J. Frank Dalton appeared and claimed to be Jesse James.
Unfortunately, he had also previously claimed to be a U.S. Marshal named Frank Dalton, who he definitely wasn't, and also that called into serious question if J. Frank Dalton was even his actual name.
He also spent a little bit of time pretending to be the head of a Confederate secret society called the Knights of the Golden Circle, which gave him access to tons of buried treasures.
Love it.
In 1995, Jesse James' actual descendants had his grave exhumed, and they did mitochondrial DNA testing, which found that the body that was buried there was consistent with their DNA, strongly concluding that that was the actual Jesse James.
Even if this guy was Jesse James, which he wasn't, Dalton was still, like, never a senator from Montana.
These are just one of the great examples of these old-time U.S. fraudsters, and A. Ralph Epperson wrote a whole damn book about Those were the days when you could just...
I mean, you say that it was like the Old West, but when you stop and think about what you could do and how it was just whatever you want, that's crazy.
Adolf Hitler, a socialist and the head of the German government prior to and during the nation's involvement in World War II, is quoted as saying this, quote, National socialism will use its own revolution for the establishing of a New World Order, unquote.
Adolf Hitler was a socialist.
Nazi means National Socialism.
Hitler confided to Hermann Rauschening, the president of the Danzig Senate, quote, National socialism is more than a religion.
It is the will to create Superman, unquote.
And what is the number of the man?
666.
You see, in the New World Order, only one man will be allowed to live.
The new man, the illumined man.
The number of that man is 666.
You will see that number increasingly all around you.
I'm not sure that that's a real Hitler quote, but even if it is, it's not surprising that he would be talking about wanting a New World Order that's different from the old one.
The quote about Superman is from Hermann Rushning, who left the Nazi Party in 1934 and fled Germany in 1936.
In 1939, he published a book called Hitler Speaks, which has also been called The Voice of Destruction.
The book contains a lot of things alleged to have been said by Hitler, but many historians look on it with a bit of skepticism.
Some people who question the book's authenticity are straight-up neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers who are seeking to defend Hitler from looking as bad as he does in the text, but other non-Nazi folks have also found some reason to think that some of the book at least is inauthentic.
Either way, in the text, Roshning says, quote, Those who see in National Socialism nothing more than a political movement know scarcely anything of it.
It's more than a religion.
It is the will to create mankind anew.
So Bill is just reading from the introduction to Epperson's book, though, so he misses a lot of the context around these things.
But he co-authored the Communist Manifesto with Frederick Engels, another hack writer, in 1848.
Mr. Marx wrote that the communists, quote, openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions, unquote.
It feels like it's a really important part of history.
It was a pretty important book.
He was pretty famous for writing it.
If we suddenly discovered that a secret shadowy organization several thousand years old was the impetus behind him writing it, I feel like there's an interesting story there.
Yeah, once I realized that this is just Bill reading the introduction to this book, I kind of, I ran out of a little bit of steam and patience for it, because I could just read it.
And I'm not impressed by a Ralph Epperson's rigor and quality of work.
Some of the Catholic Popes in the past have commented on the major changes coming in the future.
One such Pope was Pope Pius XI, who wrote the following in 1937.
Communism has behind it occult forces for which a long time have been working for the overthrow of the Christian social order, unquote.
One of the popes who preceded him, Pope Pius IX, wrote this in November 1846 about the changes that he saw in the future.
That infamous doctrine of so-called communism is absolutely contrary to the natural law itself, and if once adopted, would utterly destroy the rights, property, and possessions of all men and even society itself.
Now, don't get all worked up about what the Pope says, because they have succeeded now with this Pope in putting one of their own upon the throne of the Vatican.
In 1993, Bill is saying that the globalists finally got their Pope on the throne, which has to be referring to John Paul II.
He's remembered as a good anti-communist pope now, but weirdly at the time, he was the epitome of what the mystery religion wanted to install in power.
This Pius IX thing from 1846 was his qui pluribus speech, which would be interesting to hear Bill's take on.
It's too bad he's dead, so I can't ask him about how that speech was mostly about the evils of human rationality and how philosophy threatens the foundation of the church.
Quote, in order to easily mislead the people into making errors, deceiving particularly the imprudent and inexperienced, they pretend that they alone know the ways to prosperity.
They claim for themselves without hesitation the name of philosophers.
They feel as if philosophy, which is wholly concerned with the search for truth in nature, ought to reject those truths which God himself, the supreme and merciful creator of nature, has deemed to make plain to men as a special gift.
With these truths, mankind can gain true happiness and salvation.
So by means of an obviously ridiculous and specious kind of argumentation, these enemies never stop invoking the power and excellence of human reason.
They raise it up against the most holy faith of Christ, and they blather with great foolhardiness that this faith is opposed to human reason.
Without doubt, nothing more insane than such a doctrine, nothing more impious or more opposed to reason itself could be devised.
For although faith is above reason, no real disagreement or opposition can ever be found between them.
this is because both of them come from the same greatest source of unchanging and eternal truth god they give such reciprocal help to each other that true reason shows maintains and protects the truth of faith while faith frees reason from all errors and wondrously enlightens
Like, I know that Bill's a religious guy and he has a respect for faith and all that stuff, but I have to assume that he'd have some problems with the Catholic Church being, like, wholly dismissive of rationality.
Another clue about what is in store for the future world was offered by Dr. James H. Billington, who received his doctorate as a Rhodes, Rhodes, Rhodes, Rhodes, Rhodes Scholar.
Where have you heard that before?
You have a Rhodes Scholar sitting in the Oval Office right now.
Received his doctorate as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University and has taught at Harvard and Princeton Universities.
He wrote this in his book entitled Fire in the Minds of Men.
Quote, This book seeks to trace the origins of a faith, perhaps the faith of our time.
What is new is the belief that a perfect secular order will emerge from the forcible overthrow of traditional authority.
Unquote.
You hear that?
They believe a perfect secular order will emerge.
Nothing perfect will ever emerge from the minds of imperfect men.
So this is from James Billington's book, Fire in the Minds of Men, Origins of the Revolutionary Faith.
Bill is reading from Epperson's book, which paraphrases the first lines of the introduction of Billington's.
In full, the original says, quote, This book seeks to trace the origins of a faith, perhaps the faith of our time.
Modern revolutionaries are believers, no less committed and intense than were the Christians and Muslims of an earlier era.
What is new is the belief that a perfect secular society will emerge from the forcible overthrow of traditional authority.
Epperson's quoting of the passage removes the line about Christians and Muslims because he wanted to obscure the point that these revolutionaries Billington is writing about are not all that different from religious revolutionaries of the past, except in the sense that they're secularly inclined.
And because of that editorial choice that Epperson made...
In terms of quoting this passage from Billington, now Bill is just reading...
So this is a 1971 book that B.F. Skinner wrote called Beyond Freedom and Dignity.
Sure.
In the introduction, he clearly lays out sort of the theme of what he's talking about.
The application of the physical and biological sciences alone will not solve our problems because the solutions lie in another field.
Better contraceptives will control population only if we use them.
New weapons may offset new defenses and vice versa, but a nuclear holocaust can be prevented only if the conditions under which nations make war can be changed.
New methods of agriculture and medicine will not help people if they're not practiced, and housing is a matter not only of buildings and cities but of how people live.
Overcrowding can be corrected only by inducing people not to crowd and the environment will continue to deteriorate until polluting practices are abandoned.
In short, we need to make vast changes in human behavior, and we cannot make them with the help of nothing more than physics and biology, no matter how hard we try.
So Skinner goes on to make the argument that our civilization has made essentially zero progress on understanding human behavior from the time of Plato to the...
Sure.
He says, quote, whereas Greek physics and biology, no matter how crude, led eventually to modern science, Greek theories of human behavior led nowhere.
And I think he makes a great point, too, in the introduction.
He's talking about how, like, if you showed modern physics and all this shit to Greek thinkers of that time, they'd have no idea what to do with any of that.
His basic point is that we have these concepts like, quote, states of mind, feelings, traits of character, human nature, and so on, that predominate the study of behavior.
These kinds of variables were once part of our understanding of physics and biology, but we needed to let them go in order for those sciences to progress.
He's talking about how, like, back in the day, Aristotle used to think that things sped up when they fell because they were eager to get to Earth.
But I also am certain that Bill has never read that book.
Yeah.
Since the quote that he's using is just a paraphrasing of Skinner's text that was published in Time Magazine, which was then included in the introduction of Epperson's New World Order book.
I sense that a lot of the things that we will be secondhand quoting through another person will center mainly within the first ten pages of all books that they are quoting.
Aldous Huxley in his book called Brave New World Revisited quotes a character called the Grand Inquisitor in one of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky's parables as saying this, quote, In the end, they, the people, will lay their freedom at our, the controller's feet, and say to us, make us your slaves, but feed us, unquote.
The Tucson Citizen newspaper of November the 3rd, 1988, printed a photograph of a group of people involved in a march for literacy.
You can tell that he's just reading because of that little slip-up that he made.
The text has a grammatical error in it that says, quote, the Tucson Citizen newspaper of November 3rd, 1988, printed a photograph of a-some people involved in a march for literacy.
He reached the a-some part and he felt the need to correct it on the fly.
The people of the world will give up their freedom to the controllers because there will be a planned famine or some other serious occurrence such as a depression or war.
The change to the New World Order is coming shortly, folks, and it has already begun.
However, if that is not the case...
It will be introduced one step at a time so that the entire structure will be in place by the year 1999.
And many sense that changes in this nation's lifestyle are occurring.
Most of us know full well that these changes are taking place.
The newspapers are saturated with articles reporting the activities of those advocating increased governmental spending for a variety of unconstitutional purposes.
Organizations supporting a globalism concept urged the world to adopt a one-world government.
Psychologists preaching the destruction of the family unit and recommending that the society rear the nation's children.
Governments closing private schools and nations forming regional governments under which national borders are scheduled to disappear.
And so I was listening along to this and I'm like, alright, I guess maybe what we should do is a book report of these books that he's talking about or something that he won't even cop to.
One is a woman named Alice Bailey, a prolific writer on the subject of the new age.
She was the founder of an organization called the Arcane School, one of the major Lucis Trust divisions.
The Lucis Trust was a major publisher of books supporting the religion and published a newsletter or newspaper called Lucifer.
In her book entitled The Externalization of the Hierarchy, she told her readers who the organizations were that were going to bring the New Age religion to the world and she identified them as being, quote, The three main channels through which the preparation for the New Age is going on might be regarded as the Church, the Masonic fraternity, and the educational field.
And folks, that is exactly who is bringing it to realization.
The main thrust of this program It's going to be to examine only one of the three organizations mentioned by Alice Bailey.
In Epperson's book, after the quote from Alice Bailey, there's a parenthetical paragraph that starts, quote, the main thrust of this book will be to examine only one of the three organizations.
Bill was scanning the text as he read, saw the word book, and replaced it with program, because he knew that saying book would make it too obvious to the listener that he was just reading a book.
At no point does he say that he's just reading Epperson's book, and there are instances like this where he goes out of his way to substitute words to cover up that fact.
And he wants to make it look like what he's reading is the product of his own work or study.
That's the charade that he's playing.
My point here is that Bill is a fraud.
And in that clip there, you can see it clearly.
Using sources and texts to make a larger point is good.
But that is not what Bill is doing.
He is taking ownership over this text that he had no part in creating.
But I honestly think that even if you want to do that, I think that there's an ethical way to do that for him to be like, today we're going to be going over this book.
Writers, lecturers, researchers, exposing the involvement of the church in the educational field, in the New Age movement, and in the New World Order.
So I'm not going to attempt to duplicate those efforts.
However, only a few are aware of the involvement of the Freemasons, and that is why I have chosen to concentrate on that organization, Mystery Babylon.
So the actual text there says, quote, There are numerous works by other writers exposing the involvement of the church and the educational field in the New Age movement, so this writer will not attempt to duplicate those efforts.
Bill replaced the words this writer with I in the text in order to make it look like this is his work and not someone else's.
The fact that Bill could operate like this disqualifies him from being someone that can be taken seriously as a provider of information.
You can see him manipulating what the listener hears in real time on the show, and he knew that he could get away with it because the internet didn't Sure didn't.
didn't have a copy of Epperson's book and they wouldn't know that Bill is just reading from it.
For those unfamiliar with the Masonic degrees, all Masons in America start through what is called the Blue Lodge, consisting of only three degrees.
A Master Mason is of the third degree, and really knows nothing, even though he thinks that he has been illumined, and I get letters from him all the time.
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I'm a Master Mason, and I never heard of any of the stuff that you're talking about.
Most of the shit is him stealing someone else's book and pretending it's his work, but that was all Bill.
The anger, the condescension, that's his face.
He thinks everyone else is so stupid, and he's pissed off that anyone would doubt his superior intelligence, but the demonstration of his intelligence and wisdom is just him reading another idiot's book.
It's kind of the lesson that I'm learning from going through this lecture series, is that he's a huge fraud, and he's very angry.
Yeah, it is, like, because, essentially, if you insult me while you're just reading a book, then what you're really saying is you should read this book.
And once you read this book, you will be an equal to me in terms of the information that we share.
But if I withhold from you that piece of information, that is my, because I'm doing it because I know that if you read that book, then you would have every right to call yourself an equal.
And it's only attributable to some books that he has read.
So the only thing that he can say to about other people or to or about other people is that I give them the opportunity to read the books that gave me my...
Whatever.
And they can either say yes or no.
That's it.
Like, you're smart if you read all my books, and you're stupid if you say no, and you don't read all my books.
So I think that there's something kind of funny that happens, and that is because Bill is plagiarizing this text, sometimes he'll go off in little flights of fancy that end up being contradicted by what he's about to read.
...into the Blue Lodge, goes through three separate and different initiation ceremonies, one for each degree.
After completing these ceremonies, he may stay where he is or choose to affiliate himself with either the York Rite, which has 13 degrees, or the Scottish Rite, which has 32, and then the Meritor is 33rd.
The latter is divided into two separate jurisdictions, the Southern and the Northern.
And these are based primarily on state borders, and whether one joins one or the other depends on where the initiate lives.
The two Scottish Rites have an additional 29 degrees, making for a total of 32. There is one more degree called the 33rd degree, which is honorary, and only a few are invited into that degree, and to even be considered, they must perform some major work toward the completion of the great work, which is the plan to bring about.
So, toward the beginning of that clip, Bill says that there are 13 levels in the York Rite, which was him riffing away from the text a little bit.
He continued reading, not knowing that Epperson later says that the York Rite has 9 degrees, which contradicts what Bill just said.
So Bill has to try to correct the ship by saying that he's since learned that the York right has 13 degrees, not 9, which is meant to imply that since the time Bill wrote this lecture that he's delivering, he's discovered that.
And this could actually be very easily resolved by him being honest about the fact that he's just reading this guy's book and say, this is a point of disagreement we have.
I've found other information.
Let me tell you about that other information that I've found that contradicts the number of levels of York masonry.
That also includes another instance of Bill removing Epperson from his own text.
Epperson wrote, quote, Since little has been revealed about this order, the author will concentrate only on the Scottish Rite.
There was the pure demagogues, the pure evangelicals, the fires, the brimstones.
Those were those guys.
And then I had Bill in a different place.
I guess, I suppose the quote-unquote intellectual side, the intellectual tradition of making up bullshit and then reading it to each other in an oral tradition kind of thing, and spreading it around to fundamentally give the fire and brimstone people something to point to.
Yeah, he's an angry old dude who just steals shit.
I think intellectual is a term that I think a lot of people have baggage with and stuff, so I don't want to say that I think he's part of this intellectual stuff, but I viewed him as someone who like, you know, you can be like a punk.
Maybe it is the, like, coping mechanism of this douchebaggery is to, like, okay, everything we do have sucks, so let's just remember it like it was awesome.
You know?
Like, how much of people now remembering Rush Limbaugh isn't the, like, day-to-day, he's just a prick.
Rush Limbaugh.
And in their minds it's like, remember when Titans used to walk through the radio hallways?
Right, and I think that over time, because you just have to make peace with the fact that some people are plagiarists, you kind of have to be like, well, are you artful about it?