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How William Cooper and his book ‘Behold a Pale Horse’ planted seeds of QAnon conspiracy theory
EAGAR, Ariz. — When authorities killed William Cooper in a burst of gunfire outside his hilltop home in eastern Arizona, he was an author and radio host who had attracted a rabid following among UFO buffs, prisoners and the militia movement.
For them, his book, “Behold a Pale Horse,” and nightly shortwave radio show lifted the veil on how the world actually works.
Through his death in 2001, Cooper’s legacy was cemented. He was seen as a sage and legend. His book would become a defining text for conspiracy-minded people. What might have otherwise been seen as an amateurish hodgepodge of ideas earned gravitas once its author was gunned down.
Though the official story had Cooper killed as deputies tried to arrest him on a local criminal charge, devotees would make him a martyr. Global forces, it was thought, needed him silenced.
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.
That Cooper would die in a shootout with authorities seemed fated. And, in his book, he suggested it was an honorable way to die.
“I believe that any man without principles that he is ready and willing to die for at any given moment is already dead and is of no use or consequence whatsoever,” Cooper wrote in the creed that began his book.
The internet was not yet ubiquitous in the mid-1980s when Cooper started spilling what he said was clandestine information from top secret documents he read as a member of a naval intelligence unit.
Cooper used not only his book, but also in-person lectures, mail-order cassette tapes and a show on shortwave radio to share his understanding of a master plan to destroy the world.
Even though many have never heard of Cooper, his dark, conspiratorial thinking has endured and been amplified. He was a forerunner to the conspiracy theorists of today such as Alex Jones — with whom Cooper feuded.
One audience that found “Behold a Pale Horse” is the Patriot wing of the Republican Party. In an invitation-only Facebook group, some members of Patriot Movement AZ, a group of far-right Republicans, traded their thoughts on conspiracy theories and their hatred of Muslims and immigrants. Members of the group have also become influential in the Arizona Republican Party.
The Arizona Republic reviewed thousands of the group’s posts, comments, photos and videos shared between 2016 and 2019.
“I’m almost done with ‘behold a pale horse’ which details deep state control using school shootings etc as political motives to control the USA. Also very scary,” a member commented in May 2018.
The book has also attracted followers of the conspiracy theory known as QAnon, which falsely casts Democrats as doing the bidding of globalists in order to shield their perversions, including devouring babies for their nourishing blood.
QAnon adherents believe an anonymous figure inside government is sporadically posting cryptic clues to corruption and the perpetrators of child-sex crimes using various online bulletin boards — the shortwave radio of modern times. The anonymous source of the information is “Q,” named for the level of top secret clearance he’s purported to have.
One adherent, Jake Angeli, has intentionally made a spectacle of himself by appearing at Arizona protests wearing a fur hat topped with horns and carrying a weathered sign that reads, “Q sent me.” Angeli said he has researched the secretive groups he believes control the world — Illuminati, Trilateral Commission and Bilderberg group, among others — and felt validated by finding Cooper mentioned them in his book.
Angeli said that the government needed to kill Cooper to silence him.
“When you really do enough research, it all ties together,” he said.
Another tie: In “Behold a Pale Horse,” Cooper claimed to have Q-level security clearance.
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Milton William Cooper joined the military after …