All Bad Things...Behold a Pale Horse Recap

 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 about the “Brotherhood of the Snake (chapter 2)” he needed to find a book, article, ‘zine which described it, read it, and then write about for this book. That took time, more time than someone like Alex Jones who can just scroll through Twitter find some memes and then pretend he read a “white paper” about it. Cooper, and those of his time, didn’t have this luxury. Even the internet and BBS services required time back in the 90s.

Cooper doesn’t seem to be that discerning at all. This is just a preview of what would become of the conspiracy crowd thirty years later. He includes anything which supports the worldview and that he could include in the book without copyright problems. This last fact is probably why we don’t see more of the UFO stuff. He’s already on the outs with proper UFOlogy and even he didn’t want to run afoul of copyright litigation.

I think that he could have done us the courtesy of retyping some of this book. The most annoying thing about reading it was the disjointed fonts and type sizes. In the appendix there is the poorly copied material, but if he’s trying to point out that the original exists and that he has it—it’s fine. Otherwise, it’s incredibly hard to read some of the sections, and only because I could zoom in/out on the pdf was I able to get through some of it.

I also don’t think that this book is meant to be read. Conspiracy books are supposed to fire up the blood. Allen and Robison both want you to be shocked at their assertions. Robison wants your outrage that the Parisian women were attending the Opera bare armed and without male escorts(!) and Allen wants you to think that the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s was secretly controlled by the Communists and the Rockefellers. Cooper can’t sustain the outrage because his target is all over the place.

Let’s compare with Robison’s book. Robison begins talking about Masonry in France and how it’s different. Then he moves East to Bavaria where he discusses the Illuminati and Adam Weishaupt, then it’s a discussion of the German reading society and their nefarious plan to bring literacy and books to the public. Robison’s conspiracy makes sense from a narrative point of view. He argues that all of this is related since the Illuminati really did start in a Bavarian Masonic lodge and it explains why French Masonry was so different from when he hung out as a younger man (he was never, according to him, a Mason). When the Illuminati were disbanded, they simply became the German reading societies. It’s factually inaccurate but it’s coherent as a conspiracy theory story.

What Cooper presents is quite different. On the surface it’s an anti-New World Order conspiracy theory, but the content doesn’t match. The first chapter is the most famous, “Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars,” but it devolves into some weird discussion about energy, financial systems, and computers. It’s supposed to be a document which is the orientation for new recruits into the New World Order but that doesn’t make any sense given the content of the chapter. The second chapter continues on this thread with a discussion about Secret Societies, which is fine, but then Cooper lays in about Pyramids, ancient Egypt, and ancient mysticism (not real ancient mysticism but the kind conspiracy theorists think is real). This is David Icke lizard-alien territory.

Then it gets weirder as he begins a non-sequitur discussion into the JASON group’s plan to use a nuclear-powered satellite to re-start Jupiter’s development into a second star. This book needed to keep it simple: the UN is going to seize your guns and institute martial law; instead we get divergences into esotericism and science fiction plots.

This book isn’t meant to prove anything by virtue of its content. It’s not an argument it’s a cudgel. No one is meant to read it, you’re supposed to point at it and say, “look this book has everything in it, just read that.” It’s so dry and technical in the beginning that someone unfamiliar with this worldview is very likely to give up and just say, “I don’t think any of this is true.” They’d be right, but accidentally so and the supporter of the book isn’t going to be challenged. It’s proof by verbosity and its effectiveness will vanish if one merely points out one of the weirder aspects of this work.

So that wraps it up. We can close the book on Cooper.

What next? My original intention was to follow this book up with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but Cooper took that from when he included that book here. I’ll consult my list of conspiracy book pdfs, I call it the “dark archive,” but I’m also open to any kind of suggestions as well. Next week, there will be no post as I prepare for the new book and recover from the election.