Conspiracy Theories, Skepticism, and Critical Thinking

 So, we’ve come to the end of the Cooper book. What we learned is nothing. Cooper’s work is stranger than the previous works we’ve covered ( None Dare Call it Conspiracy and Proofs of a Conspiracy… (both are wordpress links because I didn’t use Substack then)) because Cooper includes work by other authors. In fact, this book is primarily work from other authors with Cooper supplying maybe 30% of the work. This makes the “by William Cooper” a bit misleading. The most generous conception here would be “Edited by William Cooper” since he’s written so little of it. I’ve attempted to make the claim that the NWO conspiracy theorists were more earnest in their belief than the modern-day Deep State conspiracy theorists; they care more about what they let in to their worldview and kept out the real kooks. This book completely contradicts that claim. The difference, I have asserted in the past, was that the 90s era conspiracy theorists had to measure their time. If Cooper is going to write ab

 In this last appendix I have no idea what is happening. This is appendix G: Kurzweil vs Hopkins. If you remember way back in chapter 12 “The Secret Government” Cooper detailed the arrangement between the US government and the secret aliens overlords…or at least that is what he said he was going to do. Instead it was just meandering tale of anecdotes with little to no factual claims. You might be thinking, “I’ve heard this story prior to this blog, and it seemed weird but coherent.” If you do think that, it’s because you’re remembering Chris Carter’s version of the conspiracy that he pushed on the X-Files when star Gillian Anderson became pregnant and they needed to create the meta-story to explain her character’s disappearance. On page 230 (231 on the PDF) we get this line, “ I have discovered that Whitley Strieber is a CIA asset, as is Budd Hopkins.” Cooper explains that he felt that Strieber was not right because he couldn’t look Cooper in the eye. Strieber had taken the position th

 Conspiracy theorists have a strange relationship with “drugs” as a concept. On the one hand people like Bill Cooper seem to want a very limited government, a very hands-off police, and very few laws that are about the most basic of crimes. If it isn’t hurting anybody then there shouldn’t be any issue with it. On the other hand, they really hate the drugs. There are two reasons for them to hate the drugs: the first is simple racism. Drug crimes typically focus on the poor. The history of the United States’ drug laws is not only classicist but it also overtly racist. Drug laws targeting crack were far more strict than the ones targeting cocaine. The other reason that drugs are a focal point is that they offer proof of the grand conspiracy. Drugs provide an example of a problem that everyone sees, that makes lots of money, but no one seems “willing” to fix. In the conspiracy theorist’s mind, fixing the drug problem is as simple as sending in the military to destroy the cartels like in “D

We continue to grind at the appendices, reading one of the people responsible for pushing the idea that FEMA was going to throw us in camps, take away our guns, and let the UN take over the United States (chapters 5, 6). Appendix E is supposed to be about the New World Order but the document on page 459 has nothing to do with it. This is a letter titled “S_T_A_T_E_M_E_N_T” (the letter was likely written on a typewriter, and this was the attempt at underlining). The author of the letter claims that between 1972-74, when Nixon was in trouble, a directive came through that messages from the White House were to be reported to the base commander. That’s it. This is the salient point in the signed letter [it looks like the person’s first name is either David or Daniel E. but I can’t be sure]. The writer refers to an article that he read saying, “ I recall that reason this article was so interesting was that some of us were trying to determine whether we believed that President Nixon would re

 We’ve left the HIV/AIDS conspiracy and now we’ve moved on to the New World Order. You know, the thing that the entire book has allegedly been about, so we’re back to this topic. I know I sound like I’m beating a dead horse’s drum here, but the only justification for this appendix is that Cooper thinks that he needs one. He doesn’t understand what they are for but the “smart books” have them. Is this going to be evidence or different conspiracy theories that are supposed to prove his point. The first document is a scanned version of the front page of John Robison’s “Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, Carried on In the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies (Collected From Good Authorities).” It’s literally just the front page of the book. I spent a good year or so reading this book ; and it’s not the proof of anything. It’s just Robison complaining that Masonry in Europe isn’t how he remembered it, the Illuminati weren

 In the context of this book, the AIDS crisis had crested. Not to say that it was gone, or that the epidemic was over; but that the initial wave had receded. Thanks to the efforts of people like Surgeon General C. Everett Coop; the American population learned a great deal of how AIDS/HIV was spread and how to prevent it. The population learned this despite protests from the Reagan administration and their evangelical base. When Cooper sits down to write the book a few things have occurred: the information about AIDS is out, everyone feels confident about how the disease is spread, and the long tentacles of a Soviet disinformation campaign have worked their way into the American counterculture. Cooper is doing one of two things, and neither of them are good. He’s either adopted the conspiracy theorists’ strategy of just denying every mainstream or he’s lost the ability to be incredulous about claims that fall into his view. I doubt that he’s a willing player here. What Cooper is claimin