Hip hop, militias, the Illuminati & alien disclosure — all have been touched by the hand of Bill Cooper, author of the seminal 1991 conspiratorial book 'Behold a Pale Horse'. Annie Kelly explores Cooper's cultural impact and his beliefs that AIDS is a bioweapon and that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion just needed a good glossary.
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Welcome, listener, to Chapter 152 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the Behold a Pale Horse episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Annie Kelly, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
This week, we're covering a much-requested topic, the 1991 book Behold a Pale Horse, and its author, Milton William Cooper, better known as Bill Cooper.
The book had a huge impact on conspiracy theory culture in the United States and is infamous for seeding a broad range of ideas that we're still contending with today.
The Illuminati, extraterrestrial treaties, pilled militias, and AIDS as a bioweapon.
It seems Annie Kelly is intent on ruining this man's reputation by using his words and theories against him.
Greetings listeners, it's your UK correspondent Annie here.
I apologise for taking such a long leave of absence since I last appeared on the podcast.
As many of you may be aware, the England team suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of Italy in the Euros semi-final recently.
This led to some international conflict within this podcast's diverse team, as, in a fit of drunken rage and nationalistic passions, I may have said some words to Julian that I now deeply regret.
Oh, yeah.
Well, you know, I mean, honestly, I was thinking of my beautiful Nonno.
He gets wet in his eyes when the Italian boys are doing good things and then the Ferraris go fast.
So, you know, it's true that I had to abandon the whole UK part of my family who really wanted it to be coming home.
I feel for them, but also there's something in me that enjoys cruelty when it's done to the English.
And I don't know why, it's probably my own issues, I think.
No, no, you've made your feelings perfectly clear.
I'm not actually sure if Julian even is Italian, but he's ambiguously European enough that he seemed like an appropriate target for my frustrated patriotic fervor at the time.
Did you see the fully grown man who just, like, showed his wiener to a bunch of kids just for no reason?
What happened in your country around this shit?
Yeah, that's our culture.
It's like, when there's a soccer match going on, all bets are off.
Wieners are coming out, people are getting punched, all in the name of glorious football.
Yeah, a guy put like a firework or a flare up his butt as well.
Did you guys see that?
Yes, his friend was holding the firework in this guy's ass.
It just yeah, that's lads. That's like eight hours before the game
Where do you go from there? That's pure lottery I once went to a three-day festival in spain
And the british people that were waiting to get their tickets in line were already
Looked like they had been partying for seven days straight They were shattered, like blackout drunk, and it hadn't even begun.
And I always admired that about the island.
It's one of our more charming qualities, definitely.
Anyway, Julian and I have since worked out our issues, and I have committed to bettering myself, learning more about the Italian people and their noble culture, and never making carbonara sauce with cream again.
Oh, you can still do that.
No one cares.
It is just better, isn't it?
It is.
It's very tasty.
Yeah.
Today's episode goes international, as I try to trace the origin of a video clip I saw online and end up reading a book whose influence stretches across the globe to this day, from telegram chats to government officials to QAnon and to, oddly enough, the Wu-Tang Clan.
But I'll start at the beginning of my journey, when I was scrolling through a fairly sizeable British anti-vax channel on Telegram.
The group were discussing a theory I'd never heard before, which was that HIV and AIDS, similar in their point of view to Covid, had been man-made as a deliberate form of population control.
In particular, one comment caught my eye.
It read, The World Health Organization began a 13-year smallpox vaccination program in third world countries ending in 1981.
The smallpox vaccine was contaminated with the AIDS virus.
Travis audibly groaned at this, by the way.
You're right, Travis.
That does sound dastardly and wrong.
I was instantly intrigued.
As I'm sure you guys are sick of hearing me say by now, I've recently started a podcast series on the origins and evolution of the smallpox vaccine, which was the first vaccine to ever be invented.
In particular, there's something I find very moving about the World Health Organization's smallpox eradication campaign of the 1970s, and its success, something that had never been achieved before in human history.
Smallpox was a horrible disease that killed one in three people who caught it, and left the rest disfigured or blind.
And it is genuinely very cool to me that we don't have that anymore, with the last ever natural case happening in Somalia in 1977.
Yeah, see, this is what I'm always saying, is that people nowadays, they really don't appreciate how good we have it.
How much, like, just unknown, confusing disease used to be a way of life, and now these fucking ingrates.
They take this gift, this miracle that's been handed to them, and they reject it.
Yeah.
It's like, you used to be killed by a disease that had the word small in it.
Well, just double that.
Not even a dignified way to put it.
It wasn't even the big, threatening disease.
It was the small pox.
Oh, I got the small pox.
It's like, oh, like the chicken pox?
Like, kind of similar.
One word's same, but this one kills one out of three.
The large pox virus is just too big.
It just gets stuck in your nostril.
It never makes it.
Yeah that's a really good point though Jake, they should have called it something, maybe if they called it something like the mighty pox virus then like people would like still have an appropriate level of fear and awe that we like don't live with that anymore.
They should just choose a Megadeth album name for every new disease.
The end of smallpox was the result of an unbelievable amount of international funding and effort on behalf of the WHO and their local teams, who often did most of the groundwork in countries like India, Pakistan, Ethiopia and Nigeria.
There was naturally a political context to all of this.
The USSR and the US chiefly funded those efforts as a way to get their foot in the door in those countries during the height of the Cold War, but it remains, in my opinion, one of the greatest, almost utopian achievements in human history.
But to many others, particularly as the AIDS crisis emerged in the 1980s, decimating poor black and queer communities, the smallpox vaccination campaign began to be perceived in a much more sinister light.
It was interesting to me that some of the materials from this time were now being recycled by modern anti-vaxxers today, borrowing on their own movement's history as a primary source.
As the anti-vax telegram channel I was reading began to run with the idea that vaccines had been responsible for AIDS, the following video began to be shared a lot, which, judging by the visual quality and the style, was from sometime in the early 90s.
The United States government gave millions of dollars to the United States military chemical and bacteriological warfare establishment at Fort Detrick and they began experimenting with the AIDS virus.
I knew about the AIDS Three years before the word ever came out in the world, in the United States particularly, because of my fieldwork in Sierra Leone.
The British government used their Fortin Down CAB facility.
It's easier to get into the Bank of England, Boston, than to get into Fortin Down.
All the deadliest viruses in the world are being crafted there.
In pursuance of the goal of Global 2000, to decimate the world, shortly after this experiment had finished at Fort Detrick, The World Health Organization started a massive vaccination campaign.
They said, for once and for all, we're going to wipe out the scourge of smallpox.
They chose Africa and Brazil, launched a massive vaccination campaign.
Immediately, AIDS began to appear.
Thousands and thousands of people began dying of a strange new virus, which The World Health Organization then said it'd come from the bite of a green monkey.
They forgot to tell you the green monkey's been there for centuries, and he'd been biting people, if he ever did, for centuries, but no disease of that nature had ever occurred.
The World Health Organization deliberately took this virus, which was crafted from a series of animal viruses, including many of these, and a sheep, which destroys the brain, which is why you find AIDS patients get dementia probably first, before any of the other AIDS-related complex diseases appear.
And they began vaccinating innocent people on the massive scale.
And they began dying like flies.
Why Africa and why Brazil?
Because those two countries had the biggest black population in the world.
And I want to tell the black people of the United States of America, do not trust the Democrat Party.
Do not trust government.
Do not believe that government is your friend.
To them, you are dispensable.
I especially love the bit where he's just like, well, they've always had the monkey and the monkey's always been biting people.
It's like, that's not how virology works.
It was really interesting searching the genealogy of that video, because I obviously saw it first on the Telegram, the anti-vax channels.
And then I was like, OK, you know, I'm going to try and find a clip that I can share with you guys.
And just searching for it, it seemed like an even split between right-wing reactionary, kind of very sort of like the usual kind of anti-government style of group.
And then I think the video, the clip I found there for you, just because it was like the longest one, that's actually from, it's called like the United States of Africa, so I'm assuming it's like a black political Facebook group.
So yeah, it sent me on a search.
The man speaking was referred to in the video description as Dr John Coleman, who proved an elusive man to track down via internet searches.
Sources described him variously as a medical doctor, a former Secret Service intelligence officer for both MI6 and the FBI, and a historian.
Links which purported to be to his personal website nearly always redirected me to malware or spam sites.
Books authored by him on Amazon are all listed as unavailable.
Through the Wayback Machine, I managed to find some non-broken links to his blogs and books, which mainly sketch out a pretty classic New World Order-style conspiracy in which the world is run, and simultaneously being destroyed by a group called the Committee of 300.
I've got some extracts here so you can get a better sense of this guy's worldview.
In my career as a professional intelligence officer, I had many occasions to access highly classified documents.
But during service as a political science officer in the field in Angola, West Africa, I had the opportunity to view a series of top-secret classified documents which were unusually explicit.
What I saw filled me with anger and resentment and launched me on a course from which I have not deviated.
Namely, to uncover what power it is that controls and manages the British and United States governments.
They, in quotes, seem literally to be able to get away with murder.
They increase taxes, send our sons and daughters to die in wars that do not benefit our country, They seem above our reach, out of sight, frustratingly nebulous when it comes to taking action against them.
No one seems able to clearly identify who they are.
It is a situation that has pertained for decades.
During the course of this book, we shall identify the mysterious they, and then, after that, it is up to the people to remedy their situation.
I quote the profound statement made by the prophet Hosea, My people perish for lack of knowledge.
Some may already have heard my expose of the foreign aid scandal in which work I named several conspiratorial organizations whose number is legion.
Their final objective was the overthrow of the U.S.
Constitution and the merging of this country, chosen by God as His country, with a godless, one-world, New World Order government, which will return the world to conditions far worse than existed in the Dark Ages.
Further predictions for the New World Order government included population control via compulsory euthanasia and abortions, forced diversity signaling the end of quote-unquote white America, the outlawing of marriage and family life, and state-mandated gay pornography in every cinema.
As may now be becoming clear, Coleman is a very specific kind of far-right conspiracy theorist, who interprets women's liberation, religious and ethnic pluralism, and LGBTQ rights movements as orchestrated, semi-apocalyptic conspiracies to destroy the nation's state, and people like him specifically.
But this is such a totalising conspiratorial mindset, similar to QAnon, because it interprets pretty much every news story about progressive movements as proof of its own validity.
The evidence, as Coleman continually points out in his work, his blogs, his books, is all around you.
There was a different kind of evidence, though, continually peppered throughout the blogs and forums I discovered discussing Coleman's work when I was trying to get the measure of him.
This evidence consisted of utterly bizarre documents, which some Coleman fans claimed were the ones that he saw in his previous career, and what set him off on his path of righteousness.
The documents were said to be official artefacts, something that the Committee of 300 or the Illuminati or the Bilderberg Group had carelessly left lying around and had since been discovered.
The origin of most of these I went on to discover was a single book called Behold a Pale Horse.
Named for an excerpt of the edgiest chapter of the Bible, Revelations, Behold a Pale Horse was published in 1991 by a small new-agey publishing house called Light Technology, but it was a runaway success.
With an initial press run of 3,500 copies, by the end of 2017 the book was closing in on 300,000 copies sold.
Much like John Coleman, its author, Milton William Cooper, mostly referred to as William or Bill to many of his fans, is a hard man to pin down.
Just like Coleman, he claimed a long-standing military intelligence background.
And unlike Coleman, it is confirmed that he was in the Navy and did a tour of Vietnam.
Although it's possible some of his claims, for example that he had Q clearance, which led him to see top-secret documents meant only for the highest ranks of the military, were exaggerated.
You see, this is the frustrating part when you explore conspiracy theories, is that there's so little that's, like, new.
The conspiratorial world is just something that just picks up stories and it just sticks with them for hundreds of years, possibly.
Whoever wrote the Q-Drops, obviously, they had an encyclopedic knowledge of the conspiracist tropes.
And so, yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if they're intimately familiar with like, you know, Behold the Pale Horse is all sort of like, you know, modern conspiracists are.
Yeah, that does not seem like a huge stretch.
No, and this comes up constantly.
People have been asking us to do an episode about this non-stop because it is kind of the glue, it's the nexus, another moment frozen in history that in retrospect looks absolutely wild.
Nonetheless, this implication of having insider intelligence unseen by the general public lent his wildest claims credibility, which is lucky because the claims in Behold a Pale Horse are incredibly wild.
As Colin Dickey, writing for the New Republic, put it, Cooper would later claim that at one point, while on Admiral Bernard A. Clary's staff, he'd gotten a glimpse of a cache of top-secret documents revealing a vast government conspiracy against America's citizens.
Among the files Cooper said he found in Clary's cabinet was evidence that JFK had been assassinated not by Lee Harvey Oswald or a shadowy figure from the Grassy Knoll, but by his driver using a gas pressure device
developed by aliens from the Trilateral Commission.
Wild.
Yeah, that's, I mean, it's one thing to, you know, say that it was the, you know, say that it was the driver,
but to take it a step further and say that the driver was using secret alien technology
and that he had the secret alien technology because there was an alien committee, you know,
that was working alongside the United States government.
I mean, that is a triple stuffed Oreo right there.
Yeah, and in fact, there's an extra element of wildness because the reason JFK had to be assassinated
was because he was going to reveal the fact that aliens existed on this earth.
Of course, he's going to expose the reptilians for who they are.
Yeah, which I think actually the X-Files also did.
They like stole that from this.
Cooper initially claimed that an alien nation and their allies in the government were in secret communication with one another in order to establish a global regime, and thus were engaged in what he called a quiet war against their more powerful governmental rivals and the American people.
In the 1980s, Cooper became something of a celebrity speaker in UFO circles, travelling from town to town to give lectures.
I actually managed to find a poster of one of those lectures here.
It's really cool.
Minimal design at its best.
Scottsdale, Arizona!
That's the same place of the Q-Con!
Is it?
Holy shit.
God damn it.
Arizona.
I'm telling you, I'm telling you.
There is a river of slime under Arizona that is just causing everybody's brains to turn to mush.
Yeah, yeah.
This was the, yeah, the satanic place of the Q Conference.
This Scottsdale.
Yeah.
Bill Cooper, former U.S.
Naval Intelligence member.
Friday, May 11, 1990 at 7 p.m.
for $15.
An evening you won't forget and can't afford to miss.
Hear the truth unfold as Mr. Cooper reveals the latest information, as well as that which has been hidden from the public eye in top secret government files since the 1940s.
Learn the truth behind the government's smokescreen when Mr. Cooper speaks about the secret government, the war on drugs, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the activities of extraterrestrials here on Earth.
It's at the Safari Hotel in Scottsdale.
But despite making his name as a UFO guy, it's clear that by the time he published his book in
1991, Cooper was slightly more ambiguous on the alien question, or the AQ.
One chapter from the book detailing "the secret government"
finishes with...
You must understand that, real or not, the purported presence of aliens have been used to neutralize certain wildly different segments of the population.
Don't worry!
The Benevolent Space Brothers will save you!
It can also be used to fill the need for an extraterrestrial threat to justify the formation of a New World Order.
The aliens are eating us.
The most important information that you need to determine your future actions is that this New World Order calls for the destruction of the sovereignty of nations, including the United States.
The New World Order cannot and will not allow our Constitution to exist.
The New World Order will be a totalitarian, socialist system.
We will be slaves shackled to a cashless system of economic control.
Later, he would actually become an anti-alien hardliner, telling listeners of his radio show, The Hour of Time, that he had been duped.
The documents about aliens he had seen were faked, designed to further the myth of extraterrestrial contact for the Illuminati's own sinister purposes of division, panic and control.
I don't get how you could do this as a radio announcer.
Be like, all aliens are real and they're coming to get us.
And then you announce them.
Actually, that explosive thing that I talked to you about was all bullshit.
And now in my own mythology, they're all part of the conspiracy.
They're fake, but they're still part of the conspiracy.
And you still have followers.
You still don't have people say, well, now your credibility is shot.
I don't know, just not how I follow people.
It's human, you know, it's human to get duped.
Especially by nefarious government agents.
I mean, who's gonna blame you, Travis, if a New World Order was able to pull one over on you?
Yeah, but this is supposed to be the military intelligence guy, you know?
It'd be like, you know, it'd be like if Q, like, backtracked on some of his claims.
You know, actually, General Flynn, he actually did do those things.
He's actually a bad guy.
My bad, my bad.
I got some bad info.
People are like, oh, what the hell are you talking about, Q?
Well, I mean, at that point, the community would split.
There would be people who say Q has been compromised, and then there were others who would say, well, there must have been a reason why he had to, at first, say this.
Right.
Disinformation is necessary.
Yeah, it's the same shit over and over and over again.
I read an article which kind of suggested he was quite cannily, I think, just sort of responding to trends that were going on.
You know, UFOs were becoming a bit less popular, a bit less cool, and the militia movement was really like on the rise.
So he kind of was sort of attaching his star to one, really.
Yeah, I don't know like how conscious he would have been that he was doing that.
He may well have just like believed everything he was saying, but it kind of seems a bit Bit more than coincidental.
The quiet war, though, marshaled by shadowy institutions such as the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, the Vatican and the FBI, was still very real, and according to Cooper, they were winning.
Much like Coleman's own theories of intentional societal collapse, Cooper saw the proof everywhere around him.
We cannot survive any longer by hanging on to the falsehoods of the past.
Reality must be discerned at all costs if we are to be part of the future.
To cling to the past is guaranteed suicide.
You will never get a second warning or a second chance.
Like it or not, this is stark reality.
You can no longer turn your head, ignore it, pretend it's not true, say it can't happen to me, run or hide.
The wolf is at the door.
I fear for the little ones, the innocents, who are already paying for our mistakes.
There exists a great army of occupationally orphaned children.
They are attending government-controlled daycare centers.
And latchkey kids are running wild in the streets.
And the lopsided, emotionally wounded children of single welfare mothers, born only for the sake of more money in the monthly check.
Open your eyes and look at them, for they are the future.
In them, I see the sure and certain destruction of this once proud nation.
In their vacant eyes, I see the death of freedom.
They carry with them a great emptiness, and someone will surely pay a great price for their suffering.
What follows from this mission statement in the book is a hallucinatory jumble of events, timelines and documents purporting to furnish the proof for this quiet war in America.
Cooper pastes long and dense bodies of work by other people constantly in between his own analysis.
Some are real, such as newspaper headlines or laws he finds revealing.
Others are obvious forgeries, like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which Cooper posts in its entirety.
Although, he does take care to mention that he's not interpreting it the usual, very anti-Semitic way, but believes it refers to the Illuminati instead.
How many times do I have to say it?
It's not about the Jews.
protocols of the elders of Zion, but not in an anti-Semitic way. It's not about the
Jews. The Jews were code word for the Illuminati, which is code word for the
Jews. Oh yeah, he actually has his whole system of like replacing words in the
protocols where you replace Jews with cattle and like to make it to make it I
guess not anti-Semitic.
Yeah he gives you a key where he's like yeah you should like think of Jews as the Illuminati and yeah yeah goyim is cattle or whatever.
At the back of this book, I've included a glossary of terms.
If you look down, you will see that Jews refer to Illuminati, and if you look further down, you will see Illuminati, that refers to the Jews.
I mean, they're still doing this.
I remember, I talk about this all the time, how when I went to vote after Calm Before the Storm got kicked off of Reddit, And they were talking about the Jewish problem, quote-unquote, obviously.
And they were saying, you know, oh, well, it's not all, you know, we don't hate all Jews.
It's just the people who pretend to be Jewish to enact their New World Order.
We got no problem with Jews, especially, you know, Jews who believe in QAnon.
It's just that it's the evil fake Jews that are just giving you guys a bad name.
I mean, this shit is still, still pervasive throughout conspiracy communities.
And then on the vote there was the community they were like, "Oh no, actually we mean Jews,
wait, what the hell are you talking about?" Yeah, there was always a person underneath
that was like, "You know, this guy's a fucking op." Or like, "Oh, this is so fucking chill."
But the more I read of this book, the more I came to realise that this confusing,
contradictory, information-dense style is part of its charm.
Because there is so much material in there, and so many secret enemies, it seems plausible that a reader would be left with the impression that sure, probably some of it's not true, but surely enough of it is to be worthwhile.
That certainly seems to be why it has attracted such a wide and diverse range of fans, from the American militia movement to modern day conspiracy celebrities like Alex Jones.
And Q himself, who posted BIG in response to a fan bringing up Behold a Pale Horse on 4chan, within a day the book was sold out on Amazon.
It's also said to have been one of the most popular books to read amongst prisoners since its publication in 1991, interestingly.
Behold a Pale Horse has even had a solid influence on several musical genres.
Cooper's biography Mark Jacobson writes, Around the time of the release of Wu-Tang Clan's monumental Enter the Wu-Tang, 36 Chambers, I saw Old Dirty Bastard sitting on a stoop in 6th Street.
He was reading Behold a Pale Horse.
I said hello, but, engrossed, he did not look up.
Over the following years, I began to notice that the Wu-Tang were far from the only rappers interested in Bill Cooper.
The writer and his books have been name-checked thousands of times by any number of artists, big time and not.
Such luminaries as Tupac, LL Cool J, Busta Rhymes, CeeLo Green, Eminem, Jay-Z, Immortal Technique, and dozens of others have either invoked Cooper in his work in their music or talked about him in interviews.
As late as 2008, rapper Nas, the Queensbridge House's project-raised, lyrical non-pareil, paid tribute in Testify.
He was exposing shit, Nas rapped, likening himself to Cooper, quote, who told you Pale Horse is the future.
I heard y'all was downloading it Like I'm y'all man who be exposing shit Like William Cooper Who told you the pale horse is the future Would you testify with some realness like that?
Take you scared I don't think you prepared Damn It's a badass line.
This is perfect.
It reinforces my theory that I'm attempting to spread that Trump secretly met with Nas before the release of Illmatic and funded the album.
Really?
No.
You're the worst at spreading conspiracy theories.
I would have straight up believed you.
Well I got accused of bad journalism last time when I did, I asked the question to Jim Watkins in a Q conference room and tried to like jam that in before the question.
Rap isn't the only musical genre whose name checked the book.
The country and western singer Charlie Daniels, perhaps most famous for the song about the devil going down to Georgia and losing a fiddle battle, unjustly in my personal opinion, also released a song called Behold a Pale Horse.
Now it's true that Daniels never actually name-checks Cooper here, and given the fact he was a devout Christian, may just be using the original Bible verse for its cool apocalyptic imagery.
But just listen to the lyrics of this song and try to tell me you don't think he's at
least heard of the book of the same name.
"There was a mighty nation, blessed above all of creation.
It was a rare and precious pearl.
Conceived in faith and liberty, home of the brave, land of the free. It was the envy of the world.
But this shining city on the hill has turned from the creator's will and let evil take control.
Now the reckless men who lead them want to strip away their freedom and to steal their very soul.
Now it's smoke and mirrors, switch and bait, criticize and confiscate and let the guilty walk away.
In this once righteous godly nation, in the halls of education, they forbid a child to pray.
They say we need to spread the wealth.
They pretend to guard the health of the feeble and the poor.
While the hand they hold behind their backs confuses and conceals the fact that the wolf is at the door.
There's an unseen It makes his little puppets dance to every song he sings.
It's a night born then, on a rising tide.
Look beyond the shadows, behold a pale horse ride.
They claim to seek a new world order, nations without borders, but don't believe the lie.
Wow.
Fantastic.
He really went for it.
starvation in the twinklin' of an eye.
Wow. Fantastic. He really went for it. I think that uh...
That's like red-pilled Leonard Cohen.
I thought it would be a little bit more subtle than the New World Order is coming, but no, he just went right there.
At the beginning, it's sort of like straying that line of just like conservative Obama-era whining, which kind of can usually sound a bit conspiratorial, but then, yeah.
The second you go to the unseen hand that pulls the strings and the New World Order stuff, you're just like, oh man, yeah, you are pilled.
I read a book, it was called Behold a Pale Horse by a man named Cooper.
And now I'm gonna list all the stuff I read inside.
It's like, I went to the bathroom, I opened the medicine cabinet, and shook a couple pills out in my hand.
All of them were red, took them straight into my head, and then I went and posted on 4chan.
Oh my god.
And now it would be, now it would be like, it would be totally fucking ruined.
It's like, I've been listening to an audiobook, see I signed up for audible.com.
I was banned from the YouTube, made an account on Rumble, banned from Twitter once again.
That's it.
Goddamn.
Oh my god, country is gonna be so good.
For the next 10 years, country is gonna rock, and rap is gonna be really good, too.
Yeah, these things come in cycles.
Some of Cooper's big-name fans have had much darker consequences, though.
One of those is the white supremacist American terrorist Timothy McVeigh, who was responsible for bombing a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people.
You dropped this, King.
According to the FBI, McVeigh owned a videotape that had been promoted by Cooper on his radio show about the federal raid of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, titled Waco the Big Lie.
The report includes that McVeigh's copy had an address on it that indicated McVeigh had ordered it personally from Cooper.
It's not just the most extreme and dispossessed sections of society who have expressed affinity for Cooper's theories, though, and his influence stretches further than adding a bit of edge to popular musicians.
In 2000, the South African government found itself in the middle of a media scandal when their Minister of Health, Manto Chabala Lam Zimang, was said to have distributed the book among the country's provincial health ministers during a national meeting on the AIDS epidemic.
To be clear, here is what the book alleges about AIDS.
The elite were told shortly after the year 2000, the total collapse of civilization as we know it and the possible extinction of the human race would occur.
They were told that the only things that would stop these predicted events would be severe cutbacks on the human population.
Several top secret recommendations were made by Dr. Aurelio Pace at the Club of Rome.
He advocated that a plague be introduced that would have the same effect as the famous Black Death of history.
The chief recommendation was to develop a microbe that would attack the autoimmune system and thus render the development of a vaccine impossible.
Since large populations were to be decimated, the ruling elite decided to target the undesirable elements of society.
Specifically targeted were the black, hispanic, and homosexual populations.
The African continent was infected via the smallpox vaccine in 1977.
The vaccine was administered by the World Health Organization.
The U.S.
population was infected in 1978 with the Hepatitis B vaccine.
The idea that a top government minister, let alone one in charge of public health, was supposedly receptive to this kind of thinking about the disease was shocking to much of the world.
South Africa at this point in time was still very much impacted by AIDS, with one-fifth of its adult population infected and a projected decrease in life expectancy of 20 years within the next two decades.
And it would have consequences in terms of policy.
Chibala Lum, Ximang, was notably reluctant to adopt a public sector plan for treating AIDS with crucial antiretroviral medicines, and earned the tabloid nickname Dr. Beetroot for instead promoting the benefits of healthy eating and nutrition to boost the immune system as a preventative strategy instead.
In a subsequent peer-reviewed study estimating the consequences of the South African government's HIV and AIDS policy between 2000 and 2005, researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health estimated that more than 330,000 lives were lost, and an estimated 35,000 babies were born with HIV who didn't need to be.
What is behind such a diverse range of people becoming enraptured with Cooper's conspiracy theories?
I find Mark Jacobson's interview with Old Dirty Bastard, years after seeing him reading the book, instructive here.
We'd been sitting there a while, ODB and me, watching the Robin Williams movie Mrs. Doubtfire on television, when I brought up seeing him, those many years before, reading Bill Cooper's Behold a Pale Horse.
It took a moment, but ODB turned to me, his face swollen, eyes leaden.
William Cooper, behold a pale horse, yeah!
A spasm of lucidity took hold.
For an instant, he was as clear as a bell.
Everybody gets fucked.
William Cooper tells you who's fucking you.
When you were someone like him, ODB said.
That's valuable information.
Jesus.
Watching doubt fire, like, absolutely out of their minds, so that he has to basically come into consciousness for a
moment to answer the question?
Love it.
The thing is, I'm not so sure that that's true.
Indeed, I think this is often the problem with conspiracy theories in general, that they point people towards the people with power over them, and then past them, to secret societies in the shadows that by their nature can never ever be organised against effectively or defeated.
But ODB touched on something real, which is the desire to understand why things are the way they are when trust and authority has been totally lost.
And it makes sense, in context, why the AIDS crisis in particular would deepen mistrust in medical authority in some of the most vulnerable sections of society.
Because from Europe to Africa, many of them were failed.
As the French anthropologist Didier Fassin writes, More than any other disease in recent memory, AIDS has provoked a multiplicity of such counter-narratives among laypersons as well as scientists, through urban legends, or in the public sphere, from Haiti to Indonesia.
Commentators usually consider these conspiracy theories to be mere nonsense that can only be condemned or ridiculed, depending on which rhetorical weapon seems more effective.
By doing so, they underscore the irrationality of such beliefs without examining their meaning.
Conspiracy theories express social imaginaries and political anxieties that remain unspeakable or unheard.
Therefore, specialists in world affairs and international relations certainly have a lot to learn from studying them.
That's right, King.
Thank you for promoting our podcast.
It is understandable, even if not necessarily excusable given the consequences, why a black South African woman would find something compelling in the idea that Western medical institutions could not be trusted in the case of the AIDS virus.
In 2000, the apartheid regime had only been officially over for about a decade, and the country remained heavily scarred from what had essentially been an unofficial civil war in the decades before.
Cooper's understanding of government schemes for the clandestine genocide of undesirable elements to control a restless population was paranoid.
But it no doubt looked a lot less paranoid to many black South Africans who had lived under the BOTA government's discriminatory policing and authoritarian detention tactics for resistance groups.
Similarly in the States, where the black community was disproportionately affected by AIDS, and serious medical ethical abuses like the Tuskegee syphilis experiment were within living memory, The belief that medical institutions didn't necessarily have your best interests at heart wasn't so much crazy as common sense.
And then, on November 5th, 2001, came the event that cemented Cooper's status as a legendary figure in conspiracy theorist networks forever.
After predicting constantly for a decade that he would be assassinated, he really was shot by Apache County Sheriff Deputies after they tried to arrest him on charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and endangerment.
They had been responding to a call from a neighbour, saying that Cooper had threatened them with a gun.
When they attempted to make the arrest, Cooper began firing, shooting one of the deputies in the head.
According to a spokesman for the Marshals Service, he vowed that he, quote, would not be taken alive.
Such an event was perfect catnip for conspiracy theorists, including the young Alex Jones, who was just beginning to become a figurehead in the budding 9-11 truther movement.
Cooper and Jones, in fact, had something of a feud during Cooper's lifetime.
Stemming from some kind of argument which led to Jones calling Cooper a foul-mouthed drunk, and Cooper responding with the following on-air rant.
Before we get started, I have to clear up a little discrepancy here.
Apparently the other night, or within the last week, because I've been getting a lot of email about this, and I even received one telephone call.
Apparently somebody called the Alex Jones Broadcast, And ask him why he didn't have me on the air, or ask him something about me.
Alex Jones said he had had me on the air once before, several years ago, and had to cut me off the air because of the foul language that I used.
So on the air tonight, I'm going to tell you, Alex Jones, you are a bold-faced, miserable, stinking little coward liar.
Let me say that again so there's no mistake about it.
You can all tell Alex Jones that I said this, and I suspect he's listening because he does.
Alex Jones, you are a bold-faced, stinking rotten little coward liar.
I was only on the Alex Jones Show one time.
It was years ago, when I didn't know who he was, when I didn't realize what a liar and a coward and a sensationalist Bullshit artist that he is.
He was on one little FM station down in Texas.
He wasn't on all the stuff that he's on now.
And I agreed to be on his broadcast.
That's when I was doing guest appearances on broadcast.
Years ago.
I was not cut off.
I did not use any kind of foul language whatsoever.
He treated me very well.
And I stayed on for the whole show.
Some of you in Texas Know that that's true, because you heard the broadcast and you taped it.
Later, when I found out who Alex Jones was, and what he was doing to the truth, and what a cowardly liar and sensationalist he really is, every time he called me after that, I have always refused to appear on his broadcast.
Absolutely refused to lend him any credibility whatsoever by appearing on his broadcast.
And that made him very angry.
I've also revealed him for the lying, sensationalist, bullshit artist that he is, by every once in a while bringing to your attention the lies and the deceit and the rumors that he spreads over the airwaves that are not good for any of us, and they're not good for the nation.
They are especially not good for militia and patriots.
It's stunning.
I really enjoy his, um, he's like a Corsi type, but way more poetic.
He does have a lovely voice, doesn't he?
Yeah.
And you know, yeah, I think he has, he created more culture.
You know, it's of course, Jerome Corsi will not be quoted by Old Dirty Bastard.
Nonetheless, this disagreement between the two men wasn't going to stop Jones making content out of Cooper's death.
He even invited Cooper's long-term friend, Glenn Jacobs, publisher of a weekly newspaper called Round Valley Paper, on his radio show to discuss Cooper's death.
Jacobs described the interview thus, He asked me for what happened and I told him.
I told him that Bill went off his nut and headed into town and waved his pistol in the face of the town doctor.
I told him I knew Bill well, that if I stepped outside I could see his house up on the hill.
I was Bill's friend.
I was sorry he was dead, but what he did was aggravated assault and that's a felony in 50 states.
I told him that in my opinion, the Apache County Sheriff's Office didn't have much choice.
Everyone knew Bill was serious about going out in a blaze of glory.
If he got back into the house, he would have had a perfect field of fire.
He could have killed a lot of people.
But that's not what Mr. Jones wanted to hear.
He wanted to hear that the Feds had snuck up in the night and ambushed Bill.
That the pressure of resisting the New World Order had gotten to him.
I don't know if Jones cared about Bill Cooper, whether he lived or died, but that's what he wanted to hear.
Because, you know, Jones is a storyteller and what he wants is a good story for his show.
Right, he doesn't want to hear that a guy, you know, finally lost it and like, you know, grabbed a gun, you know, went down to kill people.
There's something quite sad about that quote, because it makes me think of how many times in Behold a Pale Horse Cooper takes the time to rail against everyone who has ever lied about him just for telling the truth.
Control of his own image was clearly something that was important to him, and yet when it comes to a man he considered a friend and a man he despised discussing his death, it was the man he hated whose framework won out.
Every single place I have gone to during my research on William Cooper has all held the view that his death was a politically motivated assassination, to silence him before he revealed too much about the incoming New World Order.
In fact, I even found a quote from this podcast's favourite felon, Jake Angeli, aka the Q Shaman, saying as much.
Demonstrating Cooper's continued importance to conspiracy movements long after his death.
The fact that he time and time again predicted we would be in this New World Order system by now is never considered very important.
It makes sense then that Cooper's theories have been rejuvenated by the current Covid-sceptic and anti-vaccination movement.
Reading Behold a Pale Horse, it struck me how much of the concepts and predictions were exactly the same as the ones I read in telegram groups every day, just with a slightly updated language.
Global 2000, Cooper's preferred nomenclature for the sinister depopulation and control plans of the elites, has become The Great Reset, but it's very much the same thing.
Cooper's theories are multifaceted in their appeal, and in a sense timeless because of that.
There will always be some group who, in ODB from the Wu-Tang Clan's words, feel that they're getting fucked and want to know who's fucking them.
In my opinion, the problem is that the real answer to that question isn't half as exciting or accessible as the one which includes the Illuminati, Masonic cults and aliens.
One, two, one, two.
Yo, check this out.
It's the Jump War right now.
I want everybody to put your rope down.
Put your guns down.
And report to the pit.
The gravel pit.
Leave your fathers at home.
Leave your children at home.
Before taking back Underground.
I be Bobby Boulders.
Wu-Tang Clan on your mind one time.
It's the Jump War.
So just Jump War, my nigga!
Ha!
Holla force from the land of the lost.
Behold the pale horse, or Coke.
Follow me, Wu-Tang got a beat.
The best things in stocks and Clark Wallaby.
African Killer B's Black Watch.
On your radio, blowin' out your watch.
From Park Hill to House on Hornet Hill.
Every time you walk by, your back get a chill.
Let's build, we want to talk bout skill.
I spit like a semi-automatic to the grill.
Elbow grease and elbow boom.
Baby play me, baby fall down, go boom.
Buddy people gather round, countdown to apocalypse.
I'm the kid with the golden arms, and I'm the motherfucking hotnick.
Pass the blunt.
Yeah, you know, I think that, you know, it was really interesting about QAnon and the
innovation it brought to Behold the Pale Horse Conspiracy is the fact that it brings a solution.
You know, Old Dirty Bastard talks about like, okay, this book tells you who's fucking us.
QAnon provides answers like, well, here's how we can fuck them back, you know?
Behold a Pale Horse conspiracism is very despairing.
Whereas QAnon, I think really what kind of invigorated conspiracists, is that it purported that it wasn't just secrets being leaked.
It wasn't just, well, you have to sit back and learn about the horrors that are being done to us.
There's this hope.
There's this white knight behind the scenes who is about to defeat the evil Cabal and then make all of your friends who tell you that you're crazy Make them realize that you were right all along.
Yeah, that's so true.
I hadn't thought about that, how it almost kind of brought the theories in Behold a Pale Horse, and then it's just sort of like, but just like, you know, what's the phrase they use?
Just like, sit back and enjoy the show, right?
Like, Hillary Clinton's going to be arrested next weekend.
They're all going to Guantanamo.
Yeah, it offers this, it has this slightly more like optimistic or hopeful kind of light at the end of the tunnel in that way.
I have to wonder if QAnon's appearance was because there was finally a quote-unquote politician in the highest position in the country who was perceived to be fighting back on some level.
Because there was a outward image of somebody that was acting as if this deep state, this New World Order, the Illuminati, was real and that he, you know, he alone was fighting back against them.
This reminded me of the Discordians as well, you know, just writing essentially fiction and and you know, you're publishing it.
It's essentially this product that gets out there and is very imaginative and gripping and it just changes culture forever.
And there's that kind of doubt around it of like, what is this?
Is this journalism?
Is this fiction?
And yeah, it just it leaves that that lovely space for everyone to find, you know, their own fears represented their own.
And also, it's a really great story.
The guy knows how to write.
So yeah, I'm not surprised.
Yeah, it feels it feels like postmodern fiction when I was reading it.
Like it felt like almost like, do you remember that book House of Leaves and stuff like that?
I haven't read it.
Had that kind of same sort of slightly messy, but like, oh, there's something interesting in here and I just kind of need to sort of figure out what it is vibe.
You can see how it's quite an addictive book in that way.
Yeah, the Illuminatis trilogy was also fascinating and fun.
And, you know, we're writing these kind of these things for ourselves or whatever drove Bill Cooper, his belief that it was the truth.
And it becomes so seminal.
I mean, it's funny because the Illuminati That means that between the Discordians and him, you know, there was just a lot of re-injecting of the Illuminati conspiracy theory into the culture over decades.
From the 60s to the 90s.
It is wild to see that because it is really just like, what's the best story?
What's the best post?
This is like the post that floats to the top, you know?
Like, Bill Cooper has an epic thread.
He met so many people's needs in that moment.
Yeah, and he was a real poster as well.
He was like, I didn't include this because it's kind of more in his UFO sort of history, but he was like, yeah, on these UFO forums in like 1982 when like basically like the internet like barely existed.
So he was, yeah, he was a true born online poster.
And seminal to Q. I think this is the, it's like a proto-Q, just didn't get the anonymous right yet.
He wanted to see his beautiful name, Bill Cooper, on his beautiful book and sell it.
Thank you for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
Please go to patreon.com slash QAnon Anonymous and subscribe for five bucks a month to get a whole second episode every single week.
Plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes.
If you want to hear me talk a little bit more about the history of vaccines and smallpox, then you can find my podcast at Vaccine The Human Story.
We're on YouTube and SoundCloud, and you can find us on Twitter as well at Vaccine Podcast.
Listener, until next week, may the deep dish bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy, it's a fact.
And now, today's auto-tune.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
The government's been in bed with the entire telecommunications industry since the 40s.
They've infected everything.
They get into your bank statements, computer files, email, listen to your phone calls.
Every wire, every airwave.
The more technology you use, the easier it is for them to keep tabs on you.
It's a brave new world out there.
At least it better be.
Yeah, time to see who be the real deal and who the fake.
My shit be realer than the Abrahams and Prunetate.
Gunfire put the driver in the shooter place.
Close casket, close J. Edgar Hoover case.
Firebombs in the modern day Babylon.
Bombs longer than the marathons grab Saddam.
New World Order thanks to the CFR.
Build and recruit through suits, spread they BS far.
