A Huckster at the Mic

Mark Jacobson - Pale Horse Rider: William Cooper, the Rise of Conspiracy, and the fall of Trust in America

The Wall Street Journal, September 19, 2018

‘Nonsense,” said the Talmudic scholar Saul Lieberman, referring to the Kabbalah long before its celebrity moment, “is nonsense, but the history of nonsense is scholarship.” In the intriguing if uneven “Pale Horse Rider,” writer and journalist Mark Jacobson takes a primarily biographical approach to the strange, sad tale of the turn-of-the-millennium conspiracy theorist Milton William “Bill” Cooper (1943-2001). In doing so, he has missed an opportunity to take a deeper look at how, what and why we believe.

Cooper’s best-known work, “Behold a Pale Horse” (1991), is a dense, meandering and bewildering compendium of conspiracy theories. These include the allegation that JFK was murdered by his driver, the discovery of a plan to blow up Jupiter and the revelation of a treaty between Ike and space aliens. Yet there is also the suggestion that “the whole alien scenario is the greatest hoax in history,” a trick to frighten the “sheeple” (a favorite Cooper term) into submission to a “one-world government” controlled by . . . the Illuminati. Choose your own truth. After all, Cooper himself concedes that “one or more conclusions may be wrong.” This Bedlam medley has sold almost 300,000 copies. Why?

Readers wanting to find out are mainly left to navigate their own way through the fever swamps: Mr. Jacobson describes more than he explains, a flaw mitigated by his sharp eye and keen ear. Scattered through his account are stepping-stones to a partial understanding of Cooper’s appeal. A rapper from the Wu-Tang Clan tells Mr. Jacobson that “everybody gets f— [but] William Cooper tells you who’s f— you,” a near-perfect, if NSFW, summary of conspiracism’s attraction to the powerless or paranoid. It offers a structure for rage, an excuse for failure, a flattering fantasy of being in the know.

Mr. Jacobson dubs Cooper a “P.T. Barnum of dread.” (“The Hour of the Time,” his long-running shortwave-radio show, opened with wailing sirens, a sinister distorted voice, barking dogs, shrieking people and the sound of “tramping . . . feet, growing louder, closing in.”) But Cooper was a huckster who took more than a swig of his own Kool-Aid. The origins of his dreamscape—born at the intersection of creativity and psychiatric disorder, and reinforced by post-Vietnam, post-Watergate disillusionment and the need to make a buck—are easier to understand than its evolution. A saga in perpetual flux (Knights Templar! Freemasons! The aliens really were a hoax!), its backstory stretched across millennia.

Cooper was obsessed with the New World Order and the actions of jackbooted government enforcers against the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, and white separatist Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge, Idaho. He became a part of the “patriot” fringe (Timothy McVeigh was an admirer). But, while his views often inspired theirs (the Clinton administration labeled him America’s “most dangerous” radio host), they did not always coincide. Cooper’s following among some African-Americans, a community targeted in conspiracies he claimed to have uncovered, does not fit the militia mold. On the other hand, Cooper reproduced the notorious anti-Semitic forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” within “Behold a Pale Horse.” The deception, he maintained, was not that the “Protocols” were a fake, but something else: The plotters were not Jews, but Illuminati. Oh.

Conspiracism seeps through many cultures, nations and eras. It isn’t uniquely American, but it can take distinctively American forms. For example, Americans’ traditional distrust of government can mutate from a sign of rude civic health into a pathology. Cooper, as Mr. Jacobson relates it, tapped into a feeling of alienation fueled (often) by mourning for a vanished, if frequently imagined, past—white picket fences and all that—which he turned into a very American narrative about the betrayal of the promise of liberty contained in the Constitution, a sacred text now disdained.

Mr. Jacobson is not entirely unsympathetic to his subject’s point of view, commenting that there’s “no arguing [Cooper’s] basic insight: that something wasn’t right, that there was something you couldn’t quite put your finger on except . . . that you were a little less free than . . . yesterday.” That’s an extremely generous interpretation of Cooper’s “insight.” In any case, it’s no secret that we live in an ever more controlled, ever more controlling society.

Mr. Jacobson accepts that Cooper said “some of the nuttiest things” yet asserts that what counted was “the journey, the relentless search for truths.” But that was not what Cooper sought. He replaced truths he didn’t like with stories that he did. In June 2001 Cooper discussed threats made against the U.S. by Osama bin Laden. There would indeed, predicted Cooper, be a “major attack.” Bin Laden would be blamed, but “don’t you even believe it.” Within hours of the 9/11 attacks, Cooper was telling listeners that the two jets could not have felled the Twin Towers any more than a truck filled with fertilizer could have brought down Oklahoma City’s Alfred P. Murrah building. He was the first Truther.

Mr. Jacobson attributes the spread of the Truther virus to the need for “explanation . . . [and] something that made sense”—as if, according to its brutal logic, the 9/11 massacre did not. Yet those words work well as a general description of conspiracism’s allure: Unwilling to face life’s arbitrariness, we make connections where none exist.

Cooper ended his days “a madman,” writes Mr. Jacobson, “holed up in his [Arizona] hilltop home.” There was a federal warrant out for his arrest (for tax evasion and bank fraud) but after an altercation with a neighbor, local police took action. An attempted arrest in November 2001 ended with a scramble in the dark. Cooper shot first, leaving a cop paralyzed. A deputy returned fire, handing Cooper a death he had forecast on air—gunned down on his doorstep in the middle of the night, a Truther martyr, some argued.

The most in-depth coverage of Cooper’s death, notes Mr. Jacobson, may have come from “a then relatively unknown twenty-seven-year-old shortwave broadcaster from Austin, Texas: Alex Jones.”

The Plot Sickens

Daniel Pipes: Conspiracy

National Review, December 31, 1997

Poor, sad Princess Diana. Within hours of the tragedy in Paris, her death was being honored in the way most characteristic of our time: a conspiracy theory relayed over the Internet. She was murdered, you see, by British intelligence. The mother of a future King of England could not be allowed to marry an Egyptian. Ridiculous, of course, although Muammar Qaddafi seemed to think that there was something to it. Which would not surprise Daniel Pipes. His fascinating, though all too brief, new book traces the development of conspiracy theories from the time of the Crusades to the Roswell era. Naturally the Libyan leader makes an appearance. But, to be fair, he is no more deranged than many in the dismal crowd that Mr. Pipes summons for our inspection. For, as he explains cheerily, "this book is the opposite of a study in intellectual history. [It deals] not with the cultural elite but its rearguard, not with the finest mental creation but its dregs . . . So debased is the discourse ahead that even the Russian secret police and Hitler play important intellectual roles." Well, that's encouraging. With depressing effectiveness, the author shows how we have allowed ourselves to be seduced again and again by variants of the same couple of stories. And if there is a conspiracy there must be conspirators. Freemasons, perhaps, or maybe the Trilateral Commission.

And don't forget the Jews. The conspiracy theorists never have, something that Daniel Pipes dates back to the Crusades. Jews became a convenient local proxy for the Muslim enemy.

In a cruel paradox, as the pogroms intensified so did the idea that the Jews were planning a terrible vengeance. That fear in turn provoked further repression, and the cycle that was never really to end had begun. It is a plausible view, but, as the author concedes, it has a problem. Why pick on the Jews when "Muslims constituted a so much more substantial presence and threat"? Mr. Pipes never says, preferring merely to point to a pattern whereby "alleged conspirators are rarely those whom logic might point to."

For this is not a book that dwells on the psychological causes of conspiricism. This is a pity. It is a central question, and the answer is probably not too difficult to find. Take an obsessive personality, pour in a trauma or two, and garnish with a little paranoia. Add war, revolution, economic depression, or plague. When we are confronted with such vast, often incomprehensible cataclysms, a conspiracy theory can be a comfort. It provides an answer to people's questions and an object for their anger. It can also be fun. Winston Smith enjoyed his Hates.

Mr. Pipes touches on this, but he spends far more time describing the symptoms of the disease. He does this well. And it is a disease. At least from the point where an interest in conspiracy theories tips over into "a way of seeing life itself. This is conspiracism. . . It begins with belief in an occasional conspiracy theory . . . and ends with a view of history that dwells largely or exclusively on plots to gain world power or even destroy the human race."

Compulsively autodidactic, conspiracists live in a dark universe illuminated only by a vast and self-referential literature (two thousand books on the Kennedy assassination alone since 1963). Bolstered by obscure factoids and outright forgeries, its authors peddle theories of astonishing complexity. The right answer is never obvious and the obvious is never right. Readers are pushed further and further into irrationality. Which is not surprising. As the core belief of conspiracism is that all appearances are intended to deceive, reality itself becomes an illusion, a dangerous trick rather than a wake-up call.

In the West, at least, Pipes feels that conspiracism is in retreat, discredited by the twin failures of Communist Russia and Nazi Germany. "Hitler and Stalin had established the hideous price of conspiracy theories running rampant."

Let's hope so. But there is something a little Fukuyama-annish about such a view. We live, after all, in an age of rapid and highly unpredictable change. Even in this relatively benign era conspiracy theories continue to flourish. Most are not serious, just couch-potato mythologizing: but they can act, Mr. Pipes concedes, as a pathway to more dangerous fantasies--Timothy McVeigh is, apparently, a believer in UFOs. Above all, they chip away at the shared assumptions of truth that must underpin society.

In the case of American blacks this may have already happened. Mr. Pipes list some of the conspiracies that circulate within this community, but without appearing unduly concerned. He may be too relaxed. From the idea that AIDS was developed as a genocidal tool (as a supplement, doubtless, to the crack distributed in the ghetto by the CIA) to kente-clad anti-Semitism, there is plenty to suggest that a dangerous conspiracism has already taken root in an important part of American society. Its success may suggest that conspiracism remains more of a threat than Mr. Pipes would have us believe.

Perhaps he is trying to trick us.

Off Center

James Gardner: The Age of Extremism

National review,  June 30, 1997

"It will not," writes James Gardner, "be obvious to everyone why O. J. Simpson's name should appear at the head of a chapter that touches upon Darwinism, the Holocaust, and French post-structuralist philosopy." Quite. But, as The Age of Extremism makes clear, we live in an age of doubt. If nothing can be proved absolutely, then nothing can be absolutely true. But this is a flawed skepticism, one that paves the way for extremism. For, as Mr. Gardner explains, its corollary is a willingness to believe anything—" as long as it is at variance with received opinion or unadorned common sense." The Holocaust never happened, O.J. is innocent, and the world was put together in seven days. The French post-structuralist? Oh, he believes the Gulf War never really took place. To be sure, there's nothing new about nonsense, but now the extremes seem omnipresent and no one is arguing back. This thought-provoking book gives us the Kooks' Tour. It is a sharply written and often amusing guide. Klansmen, we learn, are old hood, Shriners from Hell lacking that "manic, Nietzschean edge to which the neo-Nazis and certain militia groups aspire." Perhaps these should look to the Church of Satan, "whose quest for self-actualization suggests vaguely right-wing, yuppie leanings."

But it is when he turns to his specialty, the arts, that Mr. Gardner, NR's art critic, hits his stride. By the time he has finished, our "extremist culture" is eviscerated, dismantled as effectively as the corpse in a Joel-Peter Witkin photograph. What's left is not pretty; it is little more, the author concludes, than a childish attempt to "gross out" the audience. "Performance artist" Mike Kelley probably achieves this when he defecates onto stuffed animals, but so what? As a gesture in the tradition of the rebel artist it's pretty lame, an angry shoving at an open door. For we live in a society where the Center (a term that Mr. Gardner uses to mean the broad consensus) accepts these gestures. Mr. Witkin's photographs were at the Guggenheim, Reservoir Dogs (torture, burnings to death) wows the film critics, and American Psycho (torture again, cannibalism, Grey Poupon) is in a bookstore near you. In Mr. Gardner's view, this artistic "rebellion against the Center has become one of the fixtures of the Center, and thus, in the final analysis, it is really no rebellion at all."

So we can all relax, then? The United States, Mr. Gardner feels, is becoming more cohesive, not less, as society assimilates those it once marginalized. The remaining outsiders, driven as much by their psyches as by any political or social concerns, are forced to ever greater shrillness just to he heard. But it will not matter. In tones worthy of Star Trek's all-consuming Borg, Mr. Gardner concludes that the Center will probably absorb what it wants from its opponents and move on reinvigorated. "Through its encounter with these extreme voices, the Center will arrive at a stronger and more confident sense of its identity than it had before."

That is unusual optimism from a contributor to NR. Just what is it that the Center is absorbing? Are there any side-effects? With the exception of the arts, Mr. Gardner never really says. Partly this is a function of his definition of extremists as, roughly speaking, those whose sole raison d'etre is a rejection of the Center. This is too narrow. So far as politics is concerned, it leads him to focus on an irrelevant and truly lunatic fringe. The extremists who really matter largely escape his gaze, simply because they have chosen, to some extent at least, to work within the system. They are relentlessly balkanizing America by race and by sex, dopily "spiritual" and nastily closed-minded. But don't look for them in some East Village squat. Try elsewhere: the universities, the media, the White House.

These people are now setting the Center's agenda, and therefore, they cannot really, by James Gardner's definition, be extremists. But, to the extent that they have internalized the attitudes of the Sixties, that is just what they are. Citing the rows over political correctness, Mr. Gardner concedes that the Center has been going through some rough patches, but he sees this as unsurprising in a time of change. He is too sanguine. In refashioning the Center, the new establishment is wrecking it, alienating it from its past, its traditions, and its identity. Elsewhere, the author writes of "that sense of malaise and lingering sadness" that permeates our society. Well, this is why.

And it is going to get worse. A culture fixated on the twin goals of half understood diversity and bogus assimilation is unlikely to succeed, particularly when what core values its elite has are the shifting prejudices and inchoate leftism of thirty years ago. Lacking any degree of real intellectual certainty, it has proved hopelessly incapable of dealing with the extremes. For the Center, therefore, the notion of "inclusion" becomes little more than the formula for an orderly surrender.

Mr. Gardner seems to find this bearable, part of the price we must pay as society progresses towards "a wealth of diversity within a context of a common interest and a common culture." And pigs might fly. Yes, the extremes are ever noisier, but these are bellows of triumph, not cries of despair. Society is moving on, but toward a malevolent shambles truly worthy of Mr. Gardner's descriptive talents.