The Drug WARS: Behold a Pale Horse pp. 159-162

Last week we introduced Cooper's poor understanding of the omnibus drub bill of 1986. This followed his poor understanding of a series of executive orders. That's not counting the Dr. Pabst contribution which also misunderstood the legal system. Cooper is going to finish his analysis of the drug bill this week, and as a spoiler--it will not get better. 

The way to understand works like this is to become familiar with certain topics that conspiracy theorists are obsessed with. It helps put things into perspective. For example, the Cooper strain of conspiracy theorists obsess over the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States. The reason is that they don't quite understand what it does (regulate the money supply through interest rates--I'm being very simplistic, but that little blurb is profoundly more informative than anything they can claim about it). They do so because it is something you can point to, we don't elect the board of governors, and a bank has probably screwed you in some fashion before. It's name is on the money right next to the eye of providence; it's just a handy thing for them because, again, they don't know how it works but you probably don't either which allows them to fill in the gaps. If you do know how it works, they'll change the subject. 

Another thing they love to discuss is the dreaded "cashless society." Cooper, by this time, is doing a fairly popular AM radio show called "The Hour of the Time" and in between his right-wing proto-militia movement rantings, he sold gold and silver certificates. Yes, he is the pioneer of doing that. Part of his pitch was that the government cannot track gold and silver...which is kind of true. I want to be clear: in my academic opinion, Cooper is a true believer. He's not an Alex Jones who probably once believed in something, Cooper sold gold because he thought it was impervious to tracking and it would still be considered money when society collapsed. In a cashless society, there is not only tracking but when the government falls apart there is no way to purchase goods. 

Cooper opens today's section (Page 159 on the pdf), warning that the drug bill has introduced several financial rules. The first is that a business must report any transaction over 10k, that an ID must be verified if a person purchases a money order of 3k or more, and to study whether or not 100 and 50-dollar bills should be removed from circulation. He then asks why? 

It's very easy to explain this if you merely look at the city of Miami in the mid-1980s. This was the domain of the American Cocaine industry and while we may disagree on how to fight the drug war one thing that this bill attempted to do right was go after the money. They designed these provisions with the intent to stop the flow of money South in an effort to stop the flow of cocaine to the United States.  It payment isn't going to the Escobar cartel, he's unlikely to continue to ship his product here. Cooper wants to believe that the "drug war" is merely a pretext, but, as always, he has to give us a better connection of the dots. 

The tracking program is much the same, only in this case the reason the government wanted to know the speed and destination of private aircraft was to stop smugglers. Cooper wants us to believe that the word "border" is undefined here and could mean city, state, county, etc. but that's sovereign citizen bullshit. It's a federal bill, everyone who is being honest knows that they mean the border of the country. This is the Reagan administration they are not going to be putting checkpoints in between Miami and Dade. 

Conspiracy theorists also obsess about databanks. Now, this is a facet of their position that I get a little sympathetic towards (as I stated two weeks ago). The government doesn't need a database of certain things: like political affiliations; but it is wise to have one for criminal records or for people fired from law enforcement positions in order to prevent crimes. 

We can ignore Cooper's comments that follow the phrase "My sources have informed me..." because either he's making it up or the person who told him is making it up. The weird eugenics argument he's making is completely fictional. Cooper thinks that if you are convicted of assault and battery for engaging in a fight this means that your family is in danger since "they believe that violence is hereditary and this could mean execution of family members as well." 

It could mean that, but it doesn't. He's fabricating the entire thing. Along with worries of banning weapons from federal office buildings which is an odd hill to die on for him. If he really wants an uprising against the government, no law banning weapons in a federal courthouse is going to deter him, so there's no right being lost. 

Cooper's eye turns toward the post office where the claim is that they are going to become a federal police force. This, he says, is impossible because the Post Office is not part of the federal government, "The Post Office Department is a private corporation and is not a part of the Federal government." 

This claim is so wrong that I doubted myself. Cooper's claims are usually incorrect but he's just misunderstood something or filtered it through his conspiracy theorist lens. Here, he's just wrong. The USPS is an executive branch agency with a governing board in which the majority is appointed by Congress. Remember Trump tried to sabotage the USPS in favor of privatizing it (which has been a standard GOP thing for the last 30 years). 

The section continues like this. Cooper reads a small sentence of the bill to claim it promotes death camps, only to immediately drop it and move on to something else. This is a gish gallop and nothing more. My explanation of the post office was longer than he mentioned it and in a conversation, he'd be long on to something else while I checked Wikipedia to confirm that he was wrong. That, however, is the point, he just wants to have the impression that he has read the entire bill and understands it. 

The last point he makes is to claim that the government is going to destroy small businesses with the use of prison labor to remove the cost of labor. There is a serious problem that can be discussed concerning prison labor, especially in private prisons. Cooper is not having this discussion, he just makes the claim. The problem is that I want to know how this would work. Small businesses are typically not factories making products, but storefronts selling products or providing services. My curiosity is piqued by how this would function. 

None of it matters though, because Cooper doesn't really care. What he wants is for Joe who operates a hardware store in Idaho to be afraid of an alliance between the evil government and the large corporation that is building a store down the street. Cooper gish gallops in order to find something that will trigger the panic response in his readers. It really doesn't matter what it is, just that they feel that twinge in the back of their neck. 

The entire chapter closes as Cooper says that the 366 pages of "very small print" surely contain other horrors. This is a gamble, I did not read the bill but I read enough to understand that Cooper has not read it either. I'm sure he looked at it, but there's no way that he read the bill. The gamble continues as he implores the reader, "You will find it in your library, though, exactly as I have stated at the beginning of this chapter. Please look it up yourself to verify that it it [This is a typo I'm sure, he means "is"] indeed real." 

As sure as I am that he did not read it, I'm even more sure that his readers are not going to either. Reading a law is difficult and it's almost a different language. His readers can find the bill in the local library, or request a copy of it there, but that will just confirm that it exists. They'll get as bored as reading it like a first-year student reading Aristotle and put it down assuming that Cooper is correct. That's the real danger of these kinds of books.