BEHOLD A PALE HORSE - WILLIAM COOPER

You gotta read the classics. As you might have been able to tell, based on the entries on this website, I’m certainly in the middle of a years-long CIA/para-politics kick but due to my personal beliefs and disposition, I’m coming at it from a far-left worldview. Cooper, however, is certainly the most influential conspiracy theorist in the last 50 years and someone I feel it’s important to know something about. It really is hard to overstate his influence. He’s the blueprint for Alex Jones (or rather, despite being Bill Hicks in disguise, Alex Jones is the con-man version of Bill Cooper. Hard to imagine Jones shooting it out with the cops. Cooper’s really about it and Jones is a salesman), he’s an important theorist in the Militia movement, Tim McVeigh was a big fan, his chapter on the US government's role in creating HIV (a story I go more into in more detail on a different part of this website: https://walkerzone.org/words/2021/1/4/zones-of-total-permission)was distributed and discussed by the South African Minister of Health in 2000, he’s referenced in countless hip-hop songs, Prodigy of Mobb Deep credits him with introducing the idea of the “Illuminati” to hip-hop, his mythology is the basis for the deep lore on the X Files, his ideas are all over the Qanon phenomena, the list goes on and on. He was an early 9/11 truther and popularized the idea of school shootings being false flags. This book is famously popular in prisons and is one of the most shoplifted books of all time. He died as you’d expect, in a shoot-out with police, on his rural Arizona property in 2001. So it’s got quite a pedigree and it’s so influential I figured I should read it to see what’s up. This book is all over the place. Even the formatting is strange, every page has ****TOP SECRET**** written across the bottom and most of the book is “documents” he “discovered” reprinted with his commentary. Originally, this included Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which he claims is actually “of Sion” and is about the NWO but not from a Jewish angle, from an elite one. For a right-wing fanatic, he does go out of his way to stifle anti-semetism. He later claims he saw his first alien craft alongside a Black serviceman named “Lincoln Loving” and “an American Indian Seaman we called Geronimo.” The reprints themselves are often photocopies of photocopies and hard to read on the page. He’s all over the place theoretically as well. The main thrust of his obsession revolves around two plots. First, he’s worried about an upcoming New World Order which will place all of Earth under a totalitarian system. Secondly, he’s convinced that the elite of the world are in league with aliens. He covers a lot of ground in the book, from how global warming is fake (we’re actually at risk of another ice age) to how HIV is a bioweapon to the problems with the Anti-Drug Act of 1988 to the JFK assassination, all of which he’s able to, in a roundabout way, connect to his two main concerns. I really enjoyed the multiple times he encourages “TRUE PATRIOTS” (his capitalization) to never be at home or with family on holidays since he thinks that the NWO is going to round everyone up on Thanksgiving or Christmas since they’ll know where everyone is. I also like the phrase, “we have been lied to about the true nature of the moon.” While he’s clearly a maniac I do wonder if he himself was being purposefully manipulated (as I believe Jones to be) by the people he thinks he’s investigating to both flood these spaces with bullshit ideas and also to shit-coat certain concepts. For instance, this book is from the early ‘91 but he names Jolly West (who he calls J. West) and John Lilly as MKULTRA guys. West wasn’t confirmed as MK until that CHAOS book that came out last year. Likewise, he talks about Group 40, the cuban assassination squad, but recasts them as alien people and reframes the JFK assassination as alien-related. He criticizes anti-drug laws but fails to see the ways in which these laws are racial targeted or the ways in which the totalitarian NWO he’s afraid of is already here and has been here for Black Americans. He’s got a whole section about weirdo Green Beret/Spook/literal Satanist Micheal Aquino, though he doesn’t touch on any of the Persido thing, which is the most conspiratorial and lurid thing Aquino is associated with. When he says things like documents are anonymously mailed to him, or better, that he found one of these documents left in a Kinkos, it makes one wonder how much of this is by chance. He mentions this fear a few times but dismisses it because, he reasons, if the alien thing is fake what could it possibly be covering up for. This is when you wish that Cooper would actually study the CIA and see that they’re up to much worse shit than hiding aliens. There is a long history of the military and CIA using alien abduction stories or UFO sightings as a cover for other covert shit they’re up to. It would seem that Cooper fell for this sort of thing. Otherwise, I can see why the book is popular and why people like Ol’ Dirty Bastard like it. It’s really straightforward and to the point. It connects all these dots, all these things that seem fucked up and wrong about this world, things like HIV and the drug war and the cold war aren’t just shitty things that are going on, they’re caused by specific people for specific reasons. Likewise, not unlike Q, this is a sort of overarching meta-theory that lets you plug in all these disparate elements into one grand narrative. If I may be allowed a bit of conspiratorial thinking myself, I wonder if this book was part of a larger effort to shift “conspiracy theories” from a left-wing thing (the CIA killed JFK, the US government is caladestinly destroying left-wing governments abroad, the US secretly destroying left wing groups here at home, the CIA is importing crack to destroy black neighborhoods, etc.) to a right-wing thing (the government is hiding aliens, the government is going to change over to a godless NWO) and thus make it easier to dismiss and manage. Just a thought. Either way, I was entertained by this book. I’m not a huge UFO guy but I am a big CIA guy so it was interesting to see this stuff from the right-wing. They truly are pathological. 4 Horses