The Sheep Aren't Ready; Behold a Pale Horse...pp. 163-166

This chapter is a cheat. It's one page, and Cooper is purporting that this isn't even his writing...again. The title of this chapter is, "ARE THE SHEEP READY TO SHEAR? Oklahoma H.B. 1750 TEST CASE FOR THE POLICE STATE."

Two things thwarted my attempts to research this subject: paywalls and time. Oddly enough, I had plenty of time to do the research but the documents in question are not online. The Oklahoma legislature's website only goes back to 1993 and I need 1988. The University of Oklahoma which also maintains an archive returned a 404 error. So I decided to just find what I can about the bill and move forward. The further problem is that Cooper's source, Gary North, a new name to add to our gallery of conspiracy theorist; maintained a website but his own archives do not go any earlier than 2004. The article that North wrote, is on a website called the "McAlvany Intelligence Advisory" but that article is locked behind a paywall. For people interested in distributing the truth, these people sure do lock it down. 

Cooper begins his chapter with, "Gary North recently wrote about one of the scariest pieces of socialistic police-state legislation to arrive on the scene to date." 

Right off the bat, this is a lie. Even if we grant that Cooper/North has an accurate read on the legislation, I just spent two weeks writing about the legislation that Cooper said was the most socialistic assault on the Constitution in the form of the 1988 War on Drugs Bill. I want to be charitable because I know what Cooper is doing. He's creating this book piecemeal. There is no common thread that runs through each chapter, where John Robison's "Proofs of a Conspiracy..." dragged on and on; it at least had a consistent conspiracy narrative in it. Cooper is putting together anything that scares his conspiracy theorist worldview and then calling it a book. This chapter behaves like the previous chapters do not exist because this chapter isn't concerned with anything that came before it. Unlike every other conspiracy book I've ever read, Cooper never refers to earlier chapters or even references what he is going to write about. 

Dr. Gary North (seriously, he earned a Ph.D. in history from UC Riverside in 1972 with a dissertation titled: "The Concept of Property in Puritan New England 1630-1720"): was a Christian fundamentalist conspiracy theorist. His life's work was a book he finished shortly before his death concerning the economic system of the Bible. I may put that work on my list of things to read, it sounds like an odd one...but then I discovered it was 31 volumes and 6k pages, so I'll probably pass. Perhaps, I'll take a look to see what he claims about Ecclesiastes and economics. 

The meat of the bill is that on January 1, 1991, a new law goes into effect--the 1988 HB 1750. Cooper through North claims that "It requires all Oklahoma residents to declare everything they own to the tax collector, everything: guns, coins, art collections, furniture, business equipment, bank accounts, household furniture, etc." 

Without reading the bill I know that this is wrong. HB 1750, is a tax assessment amendment. When you send in your yearly taxes you have to declare any source of income. Your bank accounts and business equipment count; your house for property reasons; but not your furniture or art collection, unless you are declaring them as either a write-off or a source of income. 

The explanation here is supposed to be scary, but it's not. Cooper goes on, "Any taxpayer who refuses to fill out the form and submit it to the tax assessor by March 15 - the ides of March - will be visited by an assessor. He (the assessor) will ask permission to enter the home or place of business. If this request is denied, he will be issued a search warrant. Any property not previously listed, or undervalued, will be assessed a penalty of up to 20% of its market value. This will make renters into property taxpayers and make life easy for the gun grabbers." 

The rest of the chapter discusses that if Oklahoma can pull this off here, it will soon be a country-wide law. The point of the law is to see if the average Oklahoman will stand up and oppose it, if they will not then the plan moves forward. If they do...then they will foil the Illuminati in their plan and stop? This part never makes sense. Cooper's suggestion is to meet the assessor on your porch with a gun, a problematic suggestion given how Cooper will meet his end. 

The final sentence in the chapter, "THE CONSTITUTION MUST BE AGAIN, AS IT ONCE WAS, THE SUPREME LAW OF THE LAND. FEDERALISM IS TREASON. STAND UP AND FIGHT."

Now, let's go back to the law itself. First off, your taxes need to be filed on April 15th, not March 15th. I know this because it is also my mom's birthday. 

The law itself concerns investigations into homes that have not filed their tax returns. The HB 1750 provisions do not apply to you if you have paid your taxes and there is no dispute about the valuations of your property. If a resident claims to have an extensive library of Rothko's paintings, the assessor may want to see them given the unlikelihood of a personal collection outside of a museum or gallery. If an individual is claiming that their three-story seven-bathroom home is only worth 10k, the assessor will want an inspection. 

As to the other claim about entering the property: this is true. The assessor can ask, and if denied they can apply for a search warrant. Once more, if you aren't dodging your taxes none of this applies. However, what Dr. North and Cooper are both missing is that this law actually restricts the assessor's power to enter. 

Prior to HB 1750 (1988), the assessor had full legal authority to enter when they pleased. There is no evidence that they ever did this (and I'm sure it would be quite dangerous for them to do so), but that authority was granted to them as a leftover from the days of the Homestead Act and the founding of the state. What Cooper and Dr. North are complaining about is something that they would actually want: a limitation on the government's power. They read the bill as a "new law" but never bothered to check what the old law was. 

I wouldn't expect to look at the old law if my city put a new one in regarding parking, so I would fall into this trap as well--but I'm also not claiming to be a legal expert like Dr. North or Cooper. There's little blame I can actually throw at Cooper for trusting Dr. North on this one--until I read the bibliography for the chapter and see that he cites the law itself. Cooper is claiming to have read the law, which I doubt, because knowing his style he would have bragged about it. He just lied about the citation.