#1042: Mystery Babylon #8
In this installment, Dan and Jordan finally lose patience with Bill Cooper's nonsense and close the book on Mystery Babylon.
May 30, 2025 - Knowledge Fight
54:19
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
I'm sick of them posing as if they're the good guys, saying we are the bad guys. | |
| Knowledge fight. | ||
| Dan and Jordan. | ||
| Knowledge fight. | ||
| I need, I need money. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Stop it. | |
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Andy in Kansas. | |
| It's time to pray. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Andy in Kansas. | |
| You're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding us. | ||
| Hello, Alex. | ||
| I'm a first time caller. | ||
| I'm a huge fan. | ||
| I love your room. | ||
| Knowledge fight. | ||
| Knowledgefight.com. | ||
| Hey everybody, welcome back to Knowledge Fight. | ||
| I'm Dan. | ||
| I'm Jordan. | ||
| We're a couple dudes like to sit around, worship at the altar of Selene, and talk a little bit about... | ||
| Oh, indeed we are. | ||
| Dan. | ||
| Jordan. | ||
| Dan. | ||
| Jordan. | ||
| Quick question for you. | ||
| What's your bright spot today, buddy? | ||
| My bright spot today, Jordan, is the other day we had a little bit of a trip. | ||
| We took a little trip and we went to the dispensary. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And I was wearing my pinky ring. | ||
| You were. | ||
| So I got to experience what it's like to go to a dispensary with a pinky ring. | ||
| All right. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And it was kind of like just going to, No. | ||
| I mean, I think as far as ostent goes at a dispensary, you're going to find a lot more visible characters. | ||
| So that maybe a pinky ring doesn't show out as much as it would in other places. | ||
| But I thought it would make me fit in more, perhaps. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| I mean, there's, you know, from my days, you know, bling bling. | ||
| My pinky ring's worth about fitting, bling bling. | ||
| Every time I come around your city, bling bling. | ||
| You know, like, this is something I associate with some cool weed days. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| I can't believe that it is not still cool. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Also, another pinky ring update. | ||
| Last night, I was watching The Kingsman with my friend Angela Lampsbury, and what does he have? | ||
| He has a pinky ring. | ||
| That electrocutes people. | ||
| Nice! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, that's one of his little gadgets. | |
| In our most recent episode of Matter of Time, there's the ring that poisons people. | ||
| Alright, you gotta be doing more with your ring, is what you're trying to say here. | ||
| Honestly, it's not living up to its potential as a James Bond-y type gadget. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And so I'll try to see if I can do anything with that. | ||
| But I really think that once you get into, like, I can hit a button and it does something, it's probably much bigger. | ||
| It would stick out a lot more. | ||
| You know, I was thinking about that. | ||
| And how they murdered somebody who had the poison on the ring and then they scratched somebody and they die. | ||
| And I was like, man, that's such a great way to murder somebody. | ||
| Why isn't that how everybody murders people? | ||
| And it's like, you're probably going to murder yourself. | ||
| There's like a 100% chance you're going to accidentally touch it and then murder yourself. | ||
| Of course you don't do that in real life. | ||
| You're dead. | ||
| Right, there's a lot of... | ||
| People shoot themselves in the leg all the time. | ||
| That's on your hand. | ||
| In the Kingsman, you put pressure on the inside. | ||
| Anytime you make a fist, you're electrocuting. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| No chance. | ||
| No, it's a mess. | ||
| So yeah, that's my bright spot. | ||
| I went to the weed store with a pinky ring, and it was fine. | ||
| I like it. | ||
| That's good. | ||
| I also tried the weed. | ||
| I don't partake of the marijuana, but it's legal in Chicago, and so I thought I'd dabble around with it a little bit. | ||
| It was fine. | ||
| It was fine. | ||
| Okay, good. | ||
| Excellent review. | ||
| What's your bright spot? | ||
| My bright spot is a little bit similar to when we were at the dispensary. | ||
| They had those things that you could classify the effects, where they'd be like, this strain makes you feel blank. | ||
| Relaxed, focused. | ||
| Sure, fine. | ||
| Fuck you. | ||
| Drop down menu. | ||
| It's bullshit. | ||
| Probably. | ||
| But whatever. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So my wife started doing physical therapy. | ||
| She's got this shoulder thing. | ||
| Started doing physical therapy. | ||
| Feels a lot better. | ||
| So we've got these resistance bands. | ||
| And I figure, hey, my shoulder sucks. | ||
| I got a whole pile of stuff that sucks. | ||
| I'll just do the same physical therapy. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| Works great. | ||
| Works great. | ||
| Yeah, I feel a lot better. | ||
| What does this have to do with the weed drop-down menu? | ||
| Because it has the feel of something that people are like, okay, it's just regular lifting weights, okay? | ||
| Lifting weights is probably better than not lifting weights. | ||
| But there is something to do with these exercises that are specifically helpful towards the areas that I need help. | ||
| Towards the shoulder. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Because you're using the shoulder. | ||
| Well, because there's a resistance band thing, it's a whole different thing than what I used to do whenever I was lifting weights. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Yeah, it's similar in many ways. | ||
| Different in a few. | ||
| Different in a few. | ||
| And those differences, very crucial. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I've discovered that I am getting free physical therapy by just doing what my wife does. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| But I don't think this relates to the wiki drop-down menus. | ||
| No, because it reminds me of something like that. | ||
| It reminds me of that same thing where somebody might be like, oh, no, no, this stuff, it touches the muscles right, you know? | ||
| And you're like, okay, fine. | ||
| See, the thing with the... | ||
| Right! | ||
| And that's entirely subjective. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And it's probably not a useful metric. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| What you're describing with the physical therapy is like, this targets muscles in your shoulder. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No! | |
| Oh, wow, my shoulder feels better. | ||
| I mean, more like in the back of my head, it's always been more like chiropractic or something where it's like, You mean like resistance bands? | ||
| No. | ||
| Or physical therapy? | ||
| Physical therapy. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| You know, it's got that vibe to me of like, oh, this is the thing people do to go to be told that they'll feel better about it. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Yeah, I think some connotations, some people are bad in physical therapy circles. | ||
| Right, I'm sure there are. | ||
| Yeah, and maybe you... | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| I think I had a similar experience with Pilates whenever I went and took a couple classes. | ||
| I had just associated it with some kind of woo nonsense. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| But then I went and did it, Yeah, it's crazy. | ||
| So, I don't know. | ||
| The bad reputation of things often gets in the way. | ||
| Yeah, I think the problem is a lot of stuff is bullshit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But some stuff really isn't. | |
| And it's hard to know the difference. | ||
| Well, today we're going to be talking about something that's bullshit. | ||
| Alright. | ||
| And we'll get to it in just a moment. | ||
| But first, let's take a little moment to say hello to some new wonks. | ||
| Ooh, that's a great idea. | ||
| So first, the crab from the Bible. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You're now a policy wonk. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm a policy wonk. | |
| Thank you very much! | ||
| Thank you! | ||
| Next, oops. | ||
| I wonked it again. | ||
| I wonked with your wonk. | ||
| Got wonked in the wonk. | ||
| A wonky wonky. | ||
| You're now a policy wonk. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm a policy wonk. | |
| Thank you very much! | ||
| Thank you! | ||
| And the King in Yellow is a Greenland Husky, and he thanks Forest Fire for introducing him to Knowledge Fight. | ||
| You have a thousand episodes in you. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You're now a policy wonk. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm a policy wonk. | |
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And we've got to take the credit in the mix, Jordan. | ||
| So thank you so much to the sexy beasts and chainsaw will burn this place to the fucking ground, Eddie. | ||
| Thank you so much for now, policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go home to your mother and tell her you're brilliant. | |
| Someone sodomite sent me a bucket of poop. | ||
| Daddy Shark. | ||
| Jar Jar Binks has a Caribbean black accent. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's a loser little titty baby. | |
| I don't want to hate black people. | ||
| I renounce Jesus Christ! | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Yes, thank you very much. | ||
| So, Jordan, today we have, we're going to put the primary ding-dong on the secondary burner. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And we're going to be talking about Mystery Babylon. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| We're going to be talking about Mystery Babylon number eight. | ||
| All right. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| That may happen on this episode. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wait. | |
| In the literal sense that he meant it or in the actual sense in that it happened in the way that he did not want it to happen? | ||
| I mean it in the sense that... | ||
| That's what I was thinking you were thinking. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| The power balance of the Knowledge Fight universe is not going to change. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But it's kind of funny to imagine something will change. | ||
| I'll tell you that. | ||
| So we start here. | ||
| We're going to begin lecture number eight of Bill Cooper's Mystery Babylon series. | ||
| And as is my tradition, I would like you to tell us what we know so far. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Oh, shit. | ||
| Okay, it's not Captain Lumia, but that's the name that I've given for- Yeah. | ||
| Lord My Tram may not be that important of a piece of this. | ||
| No, but for some reason, Lord My Tram. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Then we've got... | ||
| There was just a name. | ||
| You just have a name. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| It's not the Jews, but it's not not the Jews. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's not. | |
| And then there's the Seventh-day Adventists. | ||
| Got to watch out for that seventh day. | ||
| You never know. | ||
| You switched the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday. | ||
| It could all go crazy after that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then, really, we're just reading pamphlets at the end of the day, I think is where I'm at. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You missed some of the ideas about Horace. | ||
| Well, sure, but I thought I've already read, you know what I'm saying? | ||
| I'm trying to keep up to date with what I've had. | ||
| Because in my head, we're still in Egypt. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because we don't know what the Knights of Malta are up to. | ||
| No. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I'm looking for you to bring what you know about Horace and his gigantic penis. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| And what does that have to do with the Seventh-day Adventists? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Because ideally, we're supposed to be learning, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, this is supposed to be an illuminatory course, ironically. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, so... | |
| Like, the basis of words being far more important than the actual etymology of them. | ||
| Like, soul, you know, that's the sun, even if it's not related to the sun particularly. | ||
| Right, it's also part of your shoe. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| I would say the bad guys... | ||
| The bad guys sound like us, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't trust us. | ||
| Okay, that's interesting. | ||
| I put you in an unfair position, because there really isn't a synthesis you could make of this, but that's fair enough. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I find myself thrown by how disconnected everything really seems in terms of the first seven installments of this series. | ||
| And then Bill starts off here, and I found myself once again suffering from whiplash. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So that opening about Tinkerbell and what have you, I was like, this doesn't match tonally with the stuff you're clearly reading. | ||
| Yeah, what are we reading now? | ||
| There's got to be a point where we jumped from Bill saying something about... | ||
| That's him. | ||
| And then he jumps to text. | ||
| So that's just him. | ||
| The rest of it is just him reading from a book called A History of Secret Societies by someone named Archon Darule. | ||
| This was a pen name that was used by a man named... | ||
| Okay. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's interesting. | ||
| Bill's not dealing with it at all. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Are we in a reputation kind of change thing? | ||
| Or do you think perhaps he's just trying to get rid of his whole Sufi thing in general? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Garth Brooks... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He had to do this. | ||
| He had to create this alter ego. | ||
| And that's why he became Lil Nas X, right? | ||
| That's, again, country would not allow. | ||
| Not going to happen without... | ||
| So Bill reads on from this text. | ||
| What were the mysteries? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Wait, what? | ||
| And of course, if those who did the writing were members of the mysteries, they would never... | ||
| So, everything after he said tribal initiation. | ||
| So when he went into the maybe, that's what they want you to think. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's not from the text. | ||
| That sounds right. | ||
| That's Bill adding his own shit to this, which is fraudulent. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| You have to have it one way or the other. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You can't blend those things together. | ||
| It's just... | ||
| It's remix culture. | ||
| Like, remember how... | ||
| So, there's that song, Under Pressure. | ||
| Really great song. | ||
| And Vanilla Ice was like, let's blend that together with my own song. | ||
| And then he made a new song out of their song. | ||
| Right? | ||
| It's the same thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This should work out about the same as that did. | ||
| Because that didn't go well. | ||
| No, it didn't go well. | ||
| He did steal it. | ||
| That was the problem, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or like that Bittersweet Symphony. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was just a fuck you to the Rolling Stones. | ||
| Really messed that one up, huh? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| So Bill starts talking about the Eleusinian mysteries out of Greece. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Makes sense. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Got it. | ||
| It's a story that lends itself to going underground and then re-emerging. | ||
| So a mystery school that's based on Demeter would probably make that part of its symbolic acts. | ||
| Some sort of rebirth. | ||
| Right, so I don't get... | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| I think ultimately there's two problems with this source text. | ||
| One, any good secret society cannot by definition be in this book. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And that's a problem for Bill. | ||
| Which makes them bad secrets. | ||
| Well, sure, but that makes it a problem for Bill. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It does make it a problem for Bill. | ||
| It's not a problem for the book in and of itself because it's an interesting assessment of these types of in-groups. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| You know, like that's what it's interested in. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| The secretness of it is almost secondary. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Sometimes some of them have a characteristic that membership is secret. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Sometimes their rights are secret. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But sometimes they're not. | ||
| Yeah, this is a problem for him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's why he shouldn't be using this. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I find myself... | ||
| I think that I feel deflated. | ||
| I feel like I'm out here thinking we're going to get Mystery Babylon, which is in my head... | ||
| Like, we're on some of the same track, but instead of going to space, we're going to Olympus. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| So we've still got magic, we've still got all the good stuff going on. | ||
| And instead, we're getting a guy stealing books from people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so episode one can't lead into episode two, or three, or four, or five. | ||
| No. | ||
| He's just reading these things and demanding that they be connected, and they're not. | ||
| He hasn't done the work of connecting any of this stuff to make it a palatable and worthy And that's infuriating. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it reminds me, when I was reading way early on, the only teacher that I liked was just explaining, like, hey, keep notes. | ||
| Keep notes in the margins of your books. | ||
| Keep notes to show where it is that you think this is due, and then you can refer back to it. | ||
| And it's like, that's not supposed to be... | ||
| No. | ||
| Like, I'm not going to... | ||
| Like, I'm reading Harry Potter and then being like, Let's face it. | ||
| I mean, it's a little bit of a racist name. | ||
| Anyways, Harry Potter was then doing the... | ||
| That's neither an audiobook nor is it a worthwhile product of analysis that you're doing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| It fails on both counts. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And that's what's going on with Bill. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But I find this content to be intolerable. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| I can't handle this shit. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It should be the end of his legacy, honestly. | ||
| Quite frankly. | ||
| End of my concern with it. | ||
| Yeah, it really... | ||
| This really should, like... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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'm sorry? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How? | ||
| How fucking dare you! | ||
| Right. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, that's worse than you think. | ||
| I believe that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I thought those were good, but it's not. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| The episode is reading off basically a reading list that's supposed to make Bill look smarter. | ||
| The sources that we've seen him pull from so far have been pretty low level in terms of credibility and respectability. | ||
| Chris Gaines is one? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But here's a little snippet of Bill's Mystery Babylon bibliography. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Most people, though, sit back and say, I don't know where to find it. | ||
| I don't know anything about doing research. | ||
| Why don't you tell me? | ||
| That's not the way to do it, folks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
not the way to do it. | |
| The second book I'm going to recommend here that you get This book is entitled Primitive Mythology, The Masks of God. | ||
| Again, it's by Joseph Campbell, Primitive Mythology, The Masks of God. | ||
| And I believe it's printed by Penquin Books. | ||
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Next one is also by Joseph Campbell. | |
| Occidental Mythology, The Masks of God. | ||
| It's by Joseph Campbell, entitled Occidental Mythology, The Masks of God. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Also published by Penguin Books. | |
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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. | ||
| So in these episodes that we've listened to, Bill has not used Joseph Campbell as a source at all. | ||
| He's ran out of weird books by weirdos and pamphlets. | ||
| This bibliography is not the works that Bill's used to make this series. | ||
| It's a bibliography of what he wants the audience to think he's used. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, he is not doing good storytelling in terms of this series. | ||
| But ironically, other people have created quite a Joseph Campbellian myth around Bill Cooper. | ||
| That is a good point. | ||
| So he himself is the subject of a mythological cycle, and yet he is not able to tell a story in a coherent way. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, I mean, that is... | ||
| It is ironic. | ||
| Damn. | ||
| Oh, the hero does not have a thousand faces. | ||
| No. | ||
| But there's some other things that he says in the course of this bibliography episode that I thought were quite interesting. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, I'm really going to have to hurry to get a substantial amount of these books in. | ||
| I hear somebody at this screening and pulling their hair out. | ||
| I can't possibly read all these books! | ||
| Yes, you can. | ||
| I've done it. | ||
| Boom! | ||
| Hit me! | ||
| Hit me! | ||
| I'm sorry? | ||
| I'm sorry? | ||
| Next book is A History of Mathematics. | ||
| Okay, you did not cite A History of Mathematics. | ||
| This is ridiculous. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That implies intentional lying. | ||
| I mean, wow. | ||
| Listen. | ||
| You don't have to read the whole book, dum-dum. | ||
| Believe me. | ||
| I know you think it's intimidating because you think, oh, all these words, they probably have meaning. | ||
| Wrong! | ||
| Wrong! | ||
| You just gotta prove that you looked at them. | ||
| If you catch a vibe off a book, then you can just take anything in it and use it. | ||
| Oh, the Principia Mathematica. | ||
| We gotta have that one in there, obviously. | ||
| It's nuts. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| That, to me, it's almost too honest, you know? | ||
| In the way that an exact lie is something of the truth, you know? | ||
| If you are exactly opposite the truth, then in a way you are telling the truth, because the truth exists, obviously, as a response to your lie. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
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|
Yep. | |
| So sometimes the source is going to be, you know, he says in this episode, too, he's like, you know what? | ||
| These books are good, but sometimes the writers get caught up in the exoteric. | ||
| And so it's like, okay, so why? | ||
| Just believe what you want to believe about these sources, then. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| Anything that doesn't conform to the belief that you have already is... | ||
| Sure, that makes sense. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah, that's what I'm saying, right? | ||
| Like, if Bill Cooper says you don't have to read the books, then you know the truth. | ||
| Because the truth is, you have to read the fucking books. | ||
| Otherwise, you're that. | ||
| Right? | ||
| You know, he's proof of concept that that is a thing. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And I think that Alex took that ball and ran with it. | ||
| And ran with it. | ||
| Listen, I have stacks of books. | ||
| I don't need to read the books or to understand them. | ||
| I need to have the stacks. | ||
| Yeah, him having these piles of books and doing space work with it. | ||
| And doing the same thing! | ||
| God damn it! | ||
| Yeah, it's very similar. | ||
| Oh, the illusion. | ||
| So, the Eleusinian mysteries? | ||
| Something along those lines. | ||
| Or the illusion. | ||
| I think the regular mystery is like... | ||
| What are people up to with this shit? | ||
| You know? | ||
| Whodunit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's a regular mystery. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I prefer that one. | ||
| So there's some sources in this bibliography that Bill is giving almost an anti-source vibe to. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And one of the things he warns against is the Dead Sea Scrolls. | ||
| Next one is the Dead Sea Scrolls. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, just wait and see. | ||
| That's so Alex-y, too. | ||
| Like, I'm going to tell you in advance what this source says. | ||
| I already know. | ||
| I don't even need to. | ||
| I'm just gonna prime you so you'll feel confident whenever you don't even look at it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And just in case there's anything in these sources that's threatening to the ideas that I have, that's the Rockefellers. | ||
| They're lying to you. | ||
| This isn't a good use of a bibliography space. | ||
| It's such a great way of dramatizing the act of not reading, though. | ||
| You know, like, oh, listen, I know you're looking at those Dead Sea Scrolls with mouth-watering. | ||
| Oh, I want to read those. | ||
| Dangerous! | ||
| Be careful with those! | ||
| You could get into trouble! | ||
| What? | ||
| Like you're gonna catch a stray word from the Rockefellers and be like, oh, these ideas are the best! | ||
| Yeah, you'll be poisoned against Bill. | ||
| The fuck are you talking about? | ||
| Absurd. | ||
| Absurd! | ||
| So there's another thing that's in Bill's bibliography that I thought was crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I'm not sure if this will hit you. | ||
| You pray love. | ||
| No. | ||
| Another one that's very important is called Time Bomb. | ||
| Time Bomb. | ||
| We'll give you the roots of the Liberty Lobby in the spotlight and America Free Radio, and we'll open your eyes on the Nazi influence in this country. | ||
| Time Bomb, by Pillar, published by Arco. | ||
| Arco. | ||
| And this is very revealing. | ||
| 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 still believe that he probably would have... | ||
| Well, here's the thing. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So you read an excellent book. | ||
| It makes sense. | ||
| Yeah, so there's a number of things. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| The same way that Alex says, you gotta read what your enemies believe. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| But see, you have to embody your enemy in order to steal your enemy's people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| You see what I'm saying? | ||
| No, not totally. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So you gotta embody the anti-fascist. | ||
| This isn't learn to avoid. | ||
| This is learn to steal. | ||
| This is gain the power of your enemy to steal it. | ||
| Sure, but I think that that book is about fascist propaganda and shit. | ||
| Bill citing it and specifically saying that it's the roots of the Liberty Lobby, I think would put him directly... | ||
| If he said, this is a book that... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Or something like that. | ||
| You know, get into the headspace of the people who hate us right wingers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| And call us all fascists or whatever. | ||
| 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! | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
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|
Gotcha. | |
| 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. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I see what you're saying. | ||
| And that's interesting on some level, mostly because he died at just the right time. | ||
| To not have to, we'll never know the answer to that question. | ||
| To never confront this concept, yeah. | ||
| Whereas we have, you know, on Monday we had our episode that covered Kelly rushing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We have this snapshot of Alex present and past. | ||
| You don't have Bill Cooper's actions as it relates to the 2016 election. | ||
| We don't know. | ||
| We don't know. | ||
| I think my position is that he would have gone similar paths to everyone in his media space. | ||
| But maybe he'd be more like David Icke. | ||
| Where there's an insistence and a need on being like, no, I'm my own person. | ||
| That's possible. | ||
| And what that would look like. | ||
| What does that look like in more post-9-11 modern terms is interesting. | ||
| You know, I don't know what he would say about that. | ||
| But in my opinion, anybody who would just read books on the air and then act like they're theirs, Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| read on the air, you know? | ||
| Yeah, my instinct is that he would go along, but in a way that attempted to preserve the independence and autonomy that... | ||
| He views himself as having. | ||
| He tried to do both, and then everybody would see him wilt like a little flower. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Because I do see where you're coming from, from a purely, like, think perspective. | ||
| From, like, an abstract perspective, this person, as we understand what they say about themselves, could behave in either of these directions. | ||
| But for me, it is literally like, well, he took the gold sponsor, so done. | ||
| Do you know what I'm saying? | ||
| And I think that's valid. | ||
| It's the doing moment of, like, that's the real choice, is when he took that gold sponsor, he picked Trump. | ||
| You know? | ||
| I find it difficult to not agree. | ||
| I think I'm less absolute about it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| He sucks. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| If I'm analyzing these two questions that we just had a conversation about, he's a good bet, if that makes sense. | ||
| Do you know what I'm saying? | ||
| Because maybe you're right. | ||
| Maybe he could, maybe he couldn't. | ||
| Where are you going to put your chips? | ||
| Right? | ||
| It's a good bet, especially because it's unanswerable. | ||
| Exactly! | ||
| As long as we never find out the answer, because if we find out the answer is more love this shit, then the bet is trash. | ||
| You know, it wasn't even fun to do. | ||
| Yeah, this is like Schrodinger's cat, but you can never look in the box. | ||
| Yep, never look. | ||
| Just don't look in the box. | ||
| You can't, though, because he's dead. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So is the cat. | ||
| And so this is where the balance of power in the universe shifts. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that is that I'm done with Bill. | ||
| We're done. | ||
| Done with Bill. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Time to be free. | ||
| I was kind of done with him in some ways before, but there was this lingering, dangling thread of the Mystery Babylon. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And the enticement of, I'm going to teach you about the religion that runs the world secretly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Almost Campbellian, if you will. | ||
| It's unforgivable. | ||
| And so I bid a nice adieu. | ||
| Yeah, it sucks because I really do think there is... | ||
| I think there's an analog to sweary-carry. | ||
| There's as much magic as you want in Angels and Demons. | ||
| There's as much bullshit as you want in secret societies controlling things with fucking treaties. | ||
| All the components are there to make a grand story. | ||
| And instead, he's reading kind of shitty books. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And I think that Carrie has that for sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think Bill has that. | ||
| It's the hell conundrum, you know? | ||
| It's always a delight talking about how the gods are fighting each other all the way up in there. | ||
| Ah, look at it. | ||
| They're crazy. | ||
| Who knows what they're going to do next? | ||
| But then you go, and if you don't listen to them, you're going to go to hell. | ||
| You're like, I just got here, man. | ||
| I just woke up. | ||
| Yeah, I think fantastic ideas, you know, in terms of fantasy and things that are outside of Miracles could happen. | ||
| Right, but a lot of that has to be accompanied by humility. | ||
| It has to be accompanied by a sense of, if you don't believe this, it doesn't matter to me. | ||
| I'll get over it. | ||
| Yeah, because I'm having fun with it. | ||
| I enjoy this magic shift. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'll live. | |
| And I think that a lot of these folks do not have that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that is why their beliefs tend towards, like, this isn't fun anymore. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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... | ||
| And you're like, well, that's not fun. | ||
| And then you fight a war over it. | ||
| That's basically the history. | ||
| But it doesn't have to go that way. | ||
| No, it doesn't. | ||
| If people believe in fairies and wizards and stuff, I'm not... | ||
| Sure. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| Harry Houdini and Charles Dickens. | ||
| They care? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| Because Dickens went hard into fairies and Houdini went hard into telling people that fairies weren't fucking real! | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The two of them are both not fun. | ||
| No, they're both not fun. | ||
| People who have whimsical beliefs in supernatural things and people who can tolerate people with whimsical ideas about supernatural things are fun. | ||
| Go have fun. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Everybody else, Bill Cooper sucks. | ||
| Get the fuck out of here. | ||
| Get the fuck out of here. | ||
| Get out of my butt! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So anyway, Bill Cooper sucks. | ||
| I'm done with him. | ||
| And I'd like to apologize to everyone for taking this many episodes to ditch this loser. | ||
| The dream, you know, hope only dies when you give up on it, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's tough. | ||
| It can be tough. | ||
| It can be tough, but it's time to let the Babylon go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Because there was nothing there to begin with. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| Anywho, we'll be back with another episode about our primary ding-dong. | ||
| But until then, we have a website. | ||
| Indeed we do. | ||
| It's knowledgefight.com. | ||
| Yep, we'll be back. | ||
| But until then, I'm Neo. | ||
| I'm Leo. | ||
| I'm DZX Clark. | ||
| I am the mysterious professor. | ||
| Woo! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah! | |
| Woo! | ||
| Yeah! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Woo! | |
| And now here comes the sex robot. | ||
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, Alex. | |
| I'm a first-time caller. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm a huge fan. | |
| I love your work. |
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