Dan Friesen and Jordan Holmes dissect Bill Cooper’s Mystery Babylon #8, exposing his plagiarism of A History of Secret Societies by Archon Darule (Artie Shaw) while cherry-picking claims about the Eleusinian Mysteries—Greek fasting rituals tied to Demeter’s myth. They mock his "Bibliography" episode, listing works like Joseph Campbell’s Primitive Mythology without synthesis, and highlight his 1945 inclusion of Time Bomb by Emanuel Piller, an anti-fascist text, as ironic given his later alignment with nationalist extremists. Cooper’s fraudulent remixing, financial sponsorships, and forced narratives prove uninteresting, lacking fun or coherence, with Dan abandoning the series entirely. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, the resistance bands and stuff like that, they probably utilize muscles in a more targeted way than a lot of what you would have done when you were lifting weights.
And then maybe, maybe, you know, you remember when Black Adam came out and The Rock was saying that the power balance of the DC universe was going to change?
From Tinkerbell to Artie Shaw to George Bush's Thousand Points of Light, America has been mesmerized by stardust since its very inception.
And now America is beginning to learn what all these references to the star, the morning star, wish upon a star, stardust, really is all about.
There was something very strange about the classical mysteries.
Something which attracted people to them, and having attracted them, made their initiates, with very few exceptions, permanent devotees.
In Egypt, Greece, India, Rome, and a dozen other places and countries, sacred initiations took place in specially prepared sanctuaries, usually in a cave or underground.
Sufism is generally associated with Islam, but Shah's particular take on the belief was that it's applicable across religions.
There is a universal wisdom in his form of Sufism that could benefit everyone.
Shah wrote a whole lot, including a book from 1964 called The Sufis, which is largely credited with bringing Sufi mysticism to a Western audience.
That was a pretty impactful release, but a couple years prior, he'd released two less successful books under his alias Archon Darul, which one of them was this book, The History of Secret Societies, and the other was titled Witchcraft.
Ooh!
So Bill is just stealing the text of this book, but he's also depriving the audience from understanding the perspective of the person who wrote the original words.
This is a text written by an influential Sufi thinker who's published this book on secret societies under a pen name, Which is worth thinking about why.
Why would that be?
Why wouldn't he put his own name on this?
That context is missing.
And by taking that context away, Bill isn't allowing the audience to know that this book isn't about secret societies in the way that he usually talks about them.
This book considers secret societies to be anything from the Freemasons to tribal hunting parties.
It's about the inherent desire among members of civilization to create in-groups, and how that can be good or bad depending on your perspective.
This book does not pretend to be an exhaustive account of secret societies.
None such has ever been nor ever will be written.
But in these pages will be found some of the characteristic forms which secret societies and cults have taken, successfully or otherwise.
None of them can be regarded as good from every point of view, but all of them can be considered evil from one standpoint or another.
Democracy by autocrats, banditry by the law-abiding, mysticism by the materialist.
So you see what this is kind of saying is that these groups, no group can universally be called good, but every group that fits into this category has something that some group would consider evil.
So he's just reading from chapter 11 of this book, uh, titled The Cults of the Ancient Mysteries, uh, which, Alright, do you think it's the same reason we had Chris Gaines?
Yeah, Chris Gaines could do things that Garth Brooks couldn't.
I think that from what I can tell from his bibliography, which I haven't read a ton of uh uh Idrius's um I I think that maybe these two books that I didn't read Witches and Sorcerers.
I didn't read all of the Secret Societies one.
But I think they might be a Chris Gaines.
Back, what we don't remember is that back when Chris Gaines happened, country was a very restrictive genre.
Until relatively recently, and relying upon comparatively scattered fragments such as
They knew that at the ceremonies, symbolical teaching took place, and hence inferred that the mysteries were a relic of the times when academic knowledge was guarded by the very few, and scientific truths such as Pythagorean theorems were given only, and only, to the elect.
They knew also that orgiastic drumming and dancing formed a part of many of the rituals and therefore told their readers that this was a degenerate form of religion or a mere excuse for licentiousness.
They found that stories of ancient gods and heroes were recited, and were sure that the mysteries constituted little more than an underground survival of prehistoric religion, magic, or tribal initiation.
Or maybe that's exactly what they wanted us to believe, knowing full well that it was false.
You have to be reading this person's point and refute it and bring your own context to it allowing the audience to understand this is the point that this author is making and this is what I'm bringing to it.
So let us return to a sketch of the conventional knowledge about the mysteries.
And those of Eleusis celebrated in Greece, the candidate had to undergo fasting or abstinence from certain foods.
There were processions with sacred statues carried from Athens to Eleusis.
Those who were to be initiated waited for long periods of time outside the hall in the temple where the rites were to be held, building up a tremendous tension of suspense.
Eventually, a torchbearer led them within the precincts, usually underground.
So Bill's adding to the source text that this initiation ceremony happened underground.
He's choosing to plagiarize his entire script from this other person's book, but he doesn't make the full point that he wants to with it.
He can't.
It doesn't include these things, so he adds those details.
This is an act of lying.
In this particular case, there may be some actual truth to the idea that initiates into the Eleusinian mysteries were taken underground for a brief time, because that mystery school was in honor of Demeter, the Greek goddess of the harvest.
As her story goes, Hades, the god of the underworld, fell in love with her daughter Persephone and kidnapped her to make her his wife.
This was done with the blessing of Zeus, but after they pulled off their plan, Demeter got super pissed off that her daughter had been taken.
She flexed her superpowers a little bit, which caused the world's plants to stop growing, and then humans are going to run out of food, which would cause this trickle-up problem for the folks on Mount Olympus who required people to worship them.
Zeus sends Hermes to go get Persephone back from the underworld, but Hades had given her six pomegranate seeds to eat, and it's custom that if you accept food from someone, you gotta come back to their hospitality.
Persephone has returned to her mother, and plants grow again, but she's gotta go back and live part-time with her husband in the underworld, which is why there's a winter, and crops don't grow.
Well, no, that's one of the things that's actually interesting in the beginning of the book that talks about how some secret societies aren't actually secret.
And I think that I would be more fine with it if it seemed to make a point.
Like, I think one of the downsides and one of the difficulties of plagiarism is you're beholden to the texts and paragraphs of the person you're plagiarizing.
So one of the reasons I went back to cover these Mystery Babylon episodes were because I said that we were going to do it, and I feel like what I want to do is make good on some of these old ideas.
Like finally getting around to these things that seemed like a decent plan, but we never put them into motion.
There's an ethical aspect to it, where Bill is just reading other people's books and trying to obscure that fact and present this context as being his own creation.
But there's another aspect to this that's just boring.
It doesn't build to a larger point.
These are just disconnected chapters from random books Bill's reading and pretending that in the process he's risking his life to uncover a mystery religion that secretly runs the world.
If Bill were making a compelling argument and any of this made sense, I might be able to tough it out and make it through the rest of these episodes, but this is just shit.
There is no reason to take this seriously and the existence of this series is an indictment of Bill Cooper's legacy and embarrassment.
And even still, I could maybe have kept going if I thought that we were eventually going to get to witches.
But I made a classic mistake of looking at the titles of the upcoming episodes, and there's no witches to be found.
I think eventually Bill starts breaking down some of the eventual plot of the Assassin's Creed games, but looking over the list of what's to come, I'm cutting bait.
I made it to episode eight, and honestly, that's way too far for anyone who approaches this with a critical eye.
I'm closing the door on Mystery Babylon, and we can consider this item on the checklist checked the fuck off.
However, before I leave this behind entirely, I wanted to point out that episode 17 of this series is titled Bibliography.
I saw that title and I thought, well, here's where Bill's going to cop to the fact that he's just been stealing other people's work this whole time and list off all the books he's been reading for the previous 16 episodes.
That's what a bibliography of this might look like.
Now I've got all these books stacked up around here, so if you hear a moment of silence, it's because I'm reaching for something.
I literally have surrounded myself with stacks of books.
I'm going to give you the title, author, and publisher of as many as I can, starting with the most important for you to use to get started with, and working on that.
Next one is by Joseph Campbell again.
The title is Creative Mythology, The Masks of God.
I'm not going to sit here and say that Bill's never read any Joseph Campbell or anything like that, but I am going to say that he did not read out of those books.
He plagiarized from other things that would be more embarrassing to list off in your bibliography, probably.
I would say that regardless of whether or not his eyes have looked at the pages of a book written by Joseph Campbell, the evidence of the structure of this series suggests that if he did read Joseph Campbell, Joseph Campbell would have hit him with a book.
I think that there's something amazingly accidentally revealing in him saying, you have to know the context of this before you can take it out of context.
Yeah, you don't have to read all these books because the utility of actual research is finding things that confirm to the conclusion you're entering the source with.
Be very careful about the Dead Sea Scrolls, folks, because everybody who's had their hands on them has been in the pay of the Rockefeller family, and the people who are translating them now are in the pay of the Rockefeller family, and they say that some of them have leaked out and that you're getting the real version.
You don't know that.
This could have been intentional leaks and nobody...
So the Rockefellers basically are telling us what the Dead Sea Scrolls say, and I can just about tell you what they're going to tell us right off the bat, that Jesus didn't die, and all kinds of things.
So the inclusion of this book on his list is part of what makes Bill such an interesting historical figure, even though he sucks and I hate him.
Time Bomb is a book that was written by Emanuel Piller, and it was published in 1945.
The Liberty Lobby wouldn't be founded until 1958, so right off the bat, you should be able to tell that this book is not about the Liberty Lobby or Spotlight or America Free Press themselves.
Time Bomb is an anti-fascist text.
From the book, quote, We've defeated it in open battle.
We've defeated its armies, but we've not beaten the idea.
We've not defeated all the fascists, nor all the people who would like to see fascism dominant in our country.
Unless we defeat them, they may defeat us, and they can easily grow strong enough to do it.
It's been estimated by Dr. L.M. Birkhead, an outstanding authority on the subject, that some sort of fascist propaganda has been, in the past few years, placed in the hands of at least one American out of every three.
This is a book that's very invested in protecting the rights of minority groups and specifically with advocating for labor.
From the end of the text...
Fascist propaganda is unlikely to interest them.
In that case, the promotion of fascist principles would interest only those who would wish to enslave their fellow men, and free Americans would reject it utterly.
This book is antithetical to the current version of what Bill Cooper's radio tradition embodies.
Pretty much all of the people who are in his lineage have become xenophobic, business-supporting Trump loyalists, and their antics are directly called out by Timebomb.
For instance, the current right wing is obsessed with nationalism, which the text points out was used as the emphasis for groups like the America First Party and the Nationalist Party, and quote, this is not the first time that this has been used as a protective coloration by pro-fascists in America.
Indeed, nationalism has been a favorite word of fascists in every country.
German nationalism, Italian nationalism, Spanish nationalism, Argentine nationalism, All use the same patriotic slogans to the same end.
Bill recommending this book and saying that it explains the root of the liberty lobby and the spotlight would put him directly at odds with the prevailing strain of right-wing ideologues who've taken over their propaganda apparatus in the last 20 years or so.
The inclusion of this book in his bibliography is fascinating because, on some level, it makes the argument that in terms of his legacy, he's lucky he died when he did.
His fight against these imaginary mystery religion folks was about to get much harder because he was about to get a ton of allies coming to his side.
Allies that he shouldn't side with and he knows he shouldn't side with because they're fascists.
The inclusion of Time Bomb here has to mean that Bill would have faced a crisis as the far right wing ideas that he preached became more mainstream.
I understand what you're saying, but that's because you're thinking like a person.
If I'm thinking like a fascist, right, I'm thinking, how do I sell fascism?
Obviously, the best way to sell fascism is by telling people that it's anti-fascism.
And anti-fascism is far more popular.
So you say that you're the anti-fascist, and the only way to convincingly say that you're the anti-fascist is to know what actual anti-fascists would say.
There's some things in his bibliography that are, like, of the vein of Read this book because it's people who disagree with us and you'll know what they think.
Sure.
The same way that Alex says, you gotta read what your enemies believe.
So when Alex is against the Iraq war, you have to embody that anti-war stance in order to steal people from the anti-war to get them onto the fascism team, which then turns into the pro-war team.
If that was the way that he was presenting this, I would say that that inclusion is not weird at all.
Sure.
But because he's saying this is a valid attack on people like Willis Cardo and folks who had such a big part of growing the right-wing media ecosystem.
Do you mean he would have had to Go through the steps in an actual struggle to get to the fascism, as opposed to Alex, who just kind of was like, surprise, motherfuckers, I've been here the whole time!
And to the extent that there isn't a I've been here the whole time for Bill, I think that he with the sense that I get is he would he would have to become a knowing person.
Yeah, maybe in the larger internet era and time, that would be the case.
And one of the reasons that I think that this is particularly of interest is that this is like right at this time when Bill's doing this series, he gets...
And so, like, there's the change of that in some way.
The, like, please mail me a check to cover the expenses of putting the show on WWCR to I now am telling you that you should go buy silver from this guy.
You know, you see these kind of transitions that Alex went through or in some ways didn't have to go through super publicly.
Because he had a gold sponsor at the beginning.
Right.
But it makes you wonder, like, does this inevitably go to fascism?
Or does somebody who's aware that fascism is what underlies the Liberty Lobby and these sorts of groups, does somebody who knows that, are they able to resist?
But I definitely get where you're coming from, and I think that that is an inflection point.
It at least represents that in some way.
And you just wonder, is the awareness, Is it enough to tamper that inflection point?
That choice?
Is it enough?
And when I was thinking about this, as I was going through all of this, I realized how much more interesting it is to me to think about Bill Cooper and what he might have done and how not interesting he is.
And it's been such a massive disappointment as a work that he's put out.
He's dumb, plagiarist, angry, and if you have eight episodes of my time, if I've given you that long and I sincerely don't really know what your point is, that's bad.
And I think that one of the lessons that I learn about These kinds of whimsy is that when they are imposed on you, they are no longer fun.
Yeah.
Like, space people and all that shit is fun.
It's fun to think about aliens.
delight but once they are secretly running the world and have treaties with governments and things like that These aliens are being forced upon you in a way that, like, there's an anger.
There's a hostility to it.
And I think that that has a tendency to overtake the whimsy.
Yeah, I mean, I think there's definitely an impulse of if you're imagining, right, and what you're imagining, you want to be real, it can be as long as you're only around people who also imagine the exact same thing as you do.
But once you're around people who don't imagine that thing...
As long as it's not being used in some kind of malicious way to Trojan horse racist ideas or something, if you just sincerely believe that the world is more fun if butterflies are fairies, who cares?