The Strange True Story of the Godfather of Conspiracy Theories
In prison, Cooper was viewed as a hero who clued in the oppressed and gave them the 4-1-1.
In prison, people know who William Cooper is and in Harlem they know, but most people have no idea.
He was actually legitimately searching for the meaning of some things.
Everybody's talking about the word freedom. [But] what exactly does that mean? What does it mean to be free? He was somebody who was obsessed with this idea, but he didn't feel free. He felt imprisoned even when he wasn't in jail, which is, I think, the reason why he got so popular among prisoners. He had a real sense of being in prison—this idea that people are watching you and trying to keep you from getting to be a free person.
Most people would call this paranoia in the clinical sense, but it was a global paranoia [and] most people feel it. You feel it most extremely when you're in a situation where you actually are confined. Cooper was looking for the reasons why he felt confined even though he was living in America, supposedly the bastion of freedom.
He was a gung-ho guy from a military family, [but] when he went to Vietnam, it began to dawn on him that it was all bullshit. These people were just fighting for their own freedom and the Americans were there to try to stop them from getting what they wanted. It's a much more complicated situation than what I just said, but to him, it seemed like, "Well, I don't know if I'm fighting on the right side here.” Then when he got [into] Naval Intelligence and a lot of the stuff they were saying was actually contrary to the actual intelligence papers that he was reading.
He began to think, "Wow. This is really a problem here.” [From Vietnam] he got serious PTSD [and] was in the VA twice. That sort of armed his personality about looking [for] the person that was telling you one thing, but actually wasn't telling you the truth. That seems to be the way everything is now. But that's not the way it was back in the 1960s. People still believed what the government said, strangely enough. There's always been conspiracy theorists, but for the modern conspiracists, Cooper is the father. You always hear from people about the Federal Reserve and the [Illuminati]—he really brought all that stuff up.
"I think if you're, say, a black man in America, you have every reason to be paranoid, right?"
I read Cooper's book in prison and it's not what you’d call a page-turner or anything. Why do you think the book is so big in prison and hip-hop?
Those guys reading the book in prison are really the beginning of the modern conspiracy thing. That kind of thing like, "They're out to get me. They're watching me. They're fucking with me. Everybody's looking through all my phone calls." Nobody in the world doesn't think that their information is being stripped [nowadays.] There is this kind of sense that, "I'm getting screwed and there's people out to get me, who are they?" And people don't like to say, "Well, it's really me. It's really my fuck up." People don't like to think about that. They want to blame it on somebody else.Not everybody, but a lot of people do. And I think if you're, say, a black man in America, you have every reason to be paranoid, right? You have every reason to be paranoid, because they are out to get you. When they started reading that first chapter, Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars—and then there's another one called The Secret Government—Cooper was looking for some reason why people were being oppressed and why he felt like a prisoner even though he was trying to do his own thing and the rappers [and prisoners] picked up on that kind of stuff. In their way, they we're looking for the same thing that William Cooper was looking for.
Almost ten years later [after seeing ODB with the book], I actually interviewed him just about a couple months before he died. I went and talked to him, because he was supposedly finishing his record he never finished. I reminded him of this time that I saw him reading this book, and he said, "Oh, yeah. William Cooper, that's right.” I said, "Well, what is it about William Cooper?” He said, "Well, everybody in this world is getting fucked. What William Cooper does is tell you who's fucking you. When you're somebody like me, that's a really significant thing."
Prodigy [from Mobb Deep] read Behold a Pale Horse [too]. He did a guest spot on a LL Cool J video called "I Shot Ya." He comes out and says, "The Illuminati wants my mind, soul, and my body," and, "The secret society keep their eye on me." This is all the shit that he learned in the William Cooper book. I interviewed him before he died and he said the first time he ever saw the world Illuminati was in Behold a Pale Horse. In 1996, Jay-Z picked it up, and quotes Prodigy's line. But once Jay-Z is saying it, you might as well have it on the radio 24 hours a day, right? You see how this stuff just travels through the culture.
Is it fair to say Cooper also facilitated Trump's rise?
Trump is a product of a narrative that comes out of both conspiracy and religious feelings. The idea that Hillary Clinton is part of the Illuminati, as Bill Cooper always claimed, might be cracked, but it carries a lot of force. Conspiracy always wages war against the establishment. That is one of the best things about conspiracy, which might as well be called parapolitics. It would be hard to find someone who seemed more establishment than Hillary. So it makes sense for someone who sees the Clintons as the elite to vote against them. The crazy thing is that many people saw Trump, the billionaire, as not part of the elite. The religious reasons to vote for Trump seem more interesting to me. The idea that he is some chosen person whom God has taken from the life of real-estate huckster and philanderer is in keeping with notion of the born-again sinner who is given another chance through the grace of Jesus. It makes no sense to secular people, but it is compelling to believers. What is left to decide is whether this kind of religious thinking falls under the same tent as conspiracy.
I think all of us are the lost tribes of Israel and all of us are in a diaspora. Being that I am part Cherokee, there is a small chance I may have some Jewish DNA. There was some mixing of Cherokee and Jews in South Carolina before the Trail of Tears diaspora of the Cherokees. Jesus was/is here to remind us to love each other.
I wrote the following in email a few days ago:
I am learning so much from listening to the perspective of this 26 year old Jew:
Very interesting also the point @1:23 that the Christian Zionists (even in the USA) want the temple to be rebuilt so that Jesus can return and conquer ... but I am apparently lacking knowledge of the theology. Does Jesus conquer the Jews? Who is the Jewish messiah? Moses? Jesus will not conquer Moses.
What I hear from this young Jew (Shlomo) is the desire to back away from the Babylonian Talmud and return to the spirit of the Torah (before the paranoia of the exile from Egypt), which is to love all peoples.
Yet he admits the Jews rose up to control business in the USA because of their preference to do business with other Jews.
But it seems to me the beast is taking advantage of this. In short, power corrupts absolutely.
Again this brings me back to the point that Jesus was making about walk with nothing. And do not depend on things of this world. If God can feed the birds, he can feed humans. And for example in one miracle Jesus caused one fish become baskets of fish.
Decentralization may help if we can figure out a way to prevent it from becoming centralized.
So that the natural tendency of humans to form in groups will not become a systemic threat.
Also very interesting point that Shlomo made is that Jews (and Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese) have been one people for 1000s of years, but not the Europeans. This is why we are more vulnerable, because we do not have strong in group heritage!
Interesting that the Jews are not paternalistic. They cooperate on a wide-scale within their in group. Tie this back into that two-part blog I wrote about paternalism:
@anonymint/geographical-cultural-ethos-science-is-dead-part-2
Steven Augustine commented on ‘Pale Horse Rider’ Examines the Life of William Cooper, Where Conspiracy Blurs with Fact:
Cooper was a classic American type and not really fringe at all. From Elijah Muhammad to Father Divine to Father Coughlin… to Billy Graham, Falwell and Robertson […] there’s a long American tradition of charismatic hucksters blending Millennarial thought-systems with entrepreneurial zeal and (occasionally) stockpiled weapons. Some of these hucksters are “respectable” and some (like Cooper) aren’t. Cooper was a “wacko” because he had fewer followers than Billy Graham. Well, in fact, Cooper really was a wacko. As was Graham.
What makes Cooper extra interesting was the overlay of ’50s Sci Fi that lent his spiel a little interplanetary resonance (he must have read some Charles Fort as a kid). If he isn’t a figure straight out of Ray Bradbury’s stuff, his spirit certainly went directly to the spiritual plane of one of Philip K. Dick’s pulpiest stories when he died, with his old testament cadences and pseudo-Mystery School vocab and all that juicy UFOlogy (later recanted).
Cooper’s dark, imaginative scripts map territory that overlaps not only with PKD but with Edgar Cayce, as well… the American neighborhood it covers is so large, in fact, that any biography of Cooper that doesn’t touch on all these above-mentioned figures (and more) is missing an opportunity and the point. Which being (and I’m sure that Greil Marcus would agree with me here): the vast network of spooky crawlspaces under all those faux-green American lawns of the 19th and 20th century… be they Republican, Democrat or Third Party as well as Undecided. Paging David Lynch.
Consider (this in a Rod Serling voice) the American ability to somehow imagine a categorical distinction between the unfalsifiable “conspiracy theories” of a huckster like Cooper, and the similarly unfalsifiable theories of a huckster like Rachel Maddow. Forget weighing the actual evidence: the stack of (carefully vetted, cross-referenced) books one must normally read in order to be conversant in just about any topic of importance, under debate, is not necessary when one is the choir being preached at by a charismatic huckster super-charged with her/his and your own absolute certainty: you go with your stupid gut. From stupid to crazy is not only merely a skip and a jump but fun… especially when you have lots of company.
From “WMD” to “Russiagate” to “magic bullets” to “the Right Wing Conspiracy against the Clintons” to “OJ is innocent ” to “the lizard people” to “the gulf of Tonkin incident was real” to “Michelle Obama is a man” to “Ross Perot was a kook” to “flat earth” to “Cosby was framed” to “JFK and/or Obama wanted to end all War” to “gender is fluid” to “Native Americans are connected to the Earth” to “the Universe is teaching us something” to “my house plants like it when i talk to them” to “god gave this land to his chosen people” and all that preposterous jazz…
…”It is a hypnotic dive into a world where theory is considered fact,” and in which every side of every ridiculous debate is justifiably convinced that the other side is insane.
RE: Debunking Mark Roberts’ 9/11 Disinformation Tactics