How William Cooper and his book ‘Behold a Pale Horse’ planted seeds of QAnon conspiracy theory
https://www.azcentral.com/in-depth/news/local/arizona-investigations/2020/10/01/behold-pale-horse-how-william-cooper-planted-seeds-qanon-theory/3488115001/
Nearly 30 years after its publication, “Behold a Pale Horse” remains a bestseller, finding new audiences for whom Cooper’s warnings — of a cashless society, a socialist order that devalues work, the confiscation of weapons, global leadership usurping the sovereignty of the United States — still resonate.
Though portions of the book are dated, some paragraphs can strike readers as eerily prescient.
Cooper described a CIA plan to induce in people, via drugs and hypnosis, the desire to shoot up schoolyards. Cooper said such incidents would hasten the call for gun control. “This plan is well under way,” he wrote. “The middle class is begging the government to do away with the 2nd Amendment.”
Cooper’s work describes a conspiracy that is timeless: Nearly all that has been told to you is illusion. If you think shadowy forces are pulling the strings, it is because they are. Don’t trust anybody and be on guard. Citizens must soon fight for what they hold dear.
Cooper saw his mission as increasingly urgent.
“Unless we can wake the people from their sleep nothing short of civil war will stop the planned outcome,” Cooper wrote in the book’s opening pages.
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Milton William Cooper joined the military after high school and served in Vietnam as a Naval patrol boat captain.
In 1972, he was part of the team that briefed the commander of the Navy’s Pacific fleet. It was then that Cooper claimed to have read a trove of secret documents.
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Around the time he published his own book, Cooper became convinced his UFO theories were wrong. He told his radio listeners he had been duped when he was in the Navy. The documents he had seen were fake, he said, designed to further the myth of aliens and keep the population afraid.
But, Cooper asserted, his theories about shadowy forces bent on world domination were still valid.
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“Behold a Pale Horse” became popular in New York prisons like Attica and Sing Sing, especially among Black inmates, said Mark Jacobson, who wrote a biography of Cooper called “Pale Horse Rider.”
Jacobson said he couldn’t find a practical explanation of why the book became so popular in New York prisons. His search for that first inmate who read it proved futile.
But he said he found a philosophical reason for its popularity. Prisoners already think the system has lined up against them, Jacobson said in a phone interview. “Someone comes along like Bill Cooper, he’s speaking your language,” he said.
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Cooper pulled on historical threads of tragic events and tied them to what he saw as the government and media colluding to make a boogeyman out of Osama bin Laden. Cooper predicted an awful event would soon occur in the United States and that the country’s leaders would blame it on bin Laden.
On Sept. 11, 2001, the day his prophecy was realized, Cooper stayed on air for 10 hours. According to audio archived on the Cooper tribute website, BeholdAMessenger, in the initial hours after the attack, Cooper theorized the towers of the World Trade Center came down by controlled demolition.
That theory would become the center of future conspiracies suggesting the 9/11 terrorism attacks were an inside job by the U.S. government.
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Q 133 - Who is A. Cooper
WITH Q 782 - Behold A Pale Horse by B. Cooper
https://youtu.be/yHHWiOlUbYY