The Vatican: Behold a Pale Horse pp. 92-100

 When a conspiracy theory gets large enough it becomes incoherent. I've mentioned this before but no person could look at the "Q-Map" and understand it. By the time a person understands one entry, they've veered off into dozens of others. This, I must stress, is by design. If you stopped at "The Vatican" on the Q-map and seriously delved into it, you'd be mystified at why it is on there. You would find a very interesting piece of world history (and an actual historical conspiracy), but no relationship to Q-anon. Similarly, Cooper must include the Vatican in his worldview but it's impossible for him to link it to the UFOs or the New World Order. This presents a problem.

The Vatican, even to an atheist like myself, is a pretty important political force in world history. A person must be purposefully ignorant to not understand this. Its importance means that it has to be involved in the world conspiracy, but in what fashion? The Vatican, at the time Cooper is writing, is headed by John Paul II, a staunch opposer of Communism and nuclear weapons. Where does the Vatican fit here? 

Cooper cites someone named Piers Compton, a Vatican conspiracy theorist, who claimed that hundreds of high-level Catholic officials were secretly in the Illuminati. Compton claimed that Pope Leo XIII wore the All-Seeing Eye as evidence of his illuminism. The eye is a Masonic symbol, not an Illuminati symbol, but these types of details rarely matter. What's more interesting is that this claim of hundreds. There are only around 180 Catholic Cardinals in the world which would mean that the Illuminati is the Catholic Church for Cooper/Compton. 

Cooper wants us to believe that the Vatican is part of the Illuminati, but why? Does it matter? Not particularly because the only thing the Vatican can do is issue theological doctrine to followers. Cooper curiously misidentifies the Pope by calling him John XXIII. I don't quite understand how this error crept into this book unless he's later going to explain the Hutton Gibson conspiracy theory that there should have been a different Pope in the 1950s because the smoke from the Vatican chimney was the wrong color. 

Cooper has to make something happen here or move on. If you want to claim that the Vatican is part of the grand world conspiracy make it do something. Instead, Cooper moves on to Libya and Khadafi. He gets there via the Catholic Church citing the fact that the first ambassador to the Vatican from the US was a man named William Wilson. It would be interesting but Cooper's book is seriously devolving into name-dropping without any content. Here is his chain of thought starting the with Vatican:

Vatican-->William Wilson-->Libya-->Knights of Malta--> all European Aristocrats --> Ronald Reagan --> Knights of Malta (again) --> the Black Nobility

This entire chain is linked by "X knows person Y who knows Z etc." It would be interesting if there was something happening here. At least when Gary Allen did this in "None Dare Call it Conspiracy" he made it a list or a graphic that you could see. As a teacher, this feels like padding. Cooper is just blowing through conspiracy accusations so fast that it not only can I not take the time to refute his claims without making this book my life's work, but also so that even his believers could not understand him. 

If he wants to spend this section of his book claiming that the Vatican isn't "True Christianity," sure, I get that and there are tens of millions of mainline Protestants in the US that will agree. This isn't what he's doing. If he wanted to tie the Catholic church to complicity with the Nazis, I can show you books on that subject. Yet, Cooper isn't doing any of this: he's just trying to claim a tie between the Knights of Malta, the Vatican, and the Black Nobility. None of which would be a conspiracy theory, since both the Knights of Malta and the Black Nobility are/were avowed Catholic organizations. 

I'm an atheist, you don't need to convince me that the Catholic church is a blight on human history, but I have to draw a line when the claims are factually incorrect. Cooper wants to claim that I.G. Farben Chemical sold Zyklon B and Cyanide Gas to the Nazis. This is pretty much true, the only difference being that it was a company that IG Farben owned and it is pretty much an accepted fact that the company executives had to know what was happening in the camps. Cooper then claims that the pipeline between Farben and the Nazis was a Polish salesman who would become Pope John Paul II. None of this stands up to even the most basic scrutiny. The Nazis would not have trusted a Polish anyone to supply them with anything. I am curious as to where Cooper has found this story. 

The rest of the chapter wraps up with more namedropping. The temptation is to break up these posts and finish the chapter next week, but there is nothing of content in the rest of the pages. Cooper introduces the Bilderberg Group and gets into some numerology, but there's no point to any of it other than to name them. The most interesting part is that this book may be the origin of all the symbology conspiracy theories that identify various parts of the dollar bill as being clues. Cooper has a few paragraphs on the frequency of the number 13 (Satan's number...not really) and a complicated analysis of the date "July 4th, 1776." 

For our purposes, he quotes Robison's book about secrets, completely missing the point. Robison viewed the secrecy of the various groups he opposed as being a problem because they were threats to the establishment, while Cooper thinks that the secrecy of the groups is because they are the establishment. 

Cooper writes in the final paragraph, "I hope I have shown you the role of secret societies and groups within the world power structure. I hope you can see how these groups gain and keep power."

He hasn't done any of that. He's named a bunch, then named individuals tied to them, but he hasn't identified how they run things. JASON runs this, and the Vatican runs that, which would be more information than Cooper has provided. Instead, we've gotten a doomsday prediction that never occurred about the planet Jupiter and a bunch of rich people that know each other.