Alex Jones, the death of Bill Cooper and the rise of the Conspiracy Creeps

(Originally appeared in the March 31, 2015 Conspiracy Review)

For many years I sincerely believed that an extraterrestrial threat existed and that it was the most important driving force behind world events. I was wrong and for that I most deeply and humbly apologize.
— Bill Cooper

The conspiracist M. William Cooper (but you can call him Bill) was born in 1943. According to his bio, he was a Vietnam-era veteran of both the Navy and the Air Force, and later some sort of photographer, before making a name for himself in the “UFOlogist” counterculture of the 1980s with extraordinary tales of extraterrestrial races, secret human populations on the moon, and his predilection for championing known hoaxes (such as the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion) as documentary evidence of a worldwide global conspiracy of the rich and powerful intent on enslaving every last one of us. Cooper even had a term for you and I, the everyday schlubs who refuse to see the truth in his message and join him on his crusade. We were mere “sheeple,” he’d say — a portmanteau of ‘sheep’ and ‘people’ — “cattle by choice and by consent.”

“I read while in Naval Intelligence,” he claimed, “that at least once a year, maybe more, two nuclear submarines meet beneath the polar icecap and mate together at an airlock. Representatives of the Soviet Union meet with the Policy Committee of the Bilderberg Group. The Russians are given the script for their next performance. Items on the agenda include the combined efforts in the secret space program.” (The secret space program, of course, being that which has established a military presence on the moon and Mars.)

Cooper continues: “I now have in my possession official NASA photographs of a moonbase in the crater Copernicus.”

Conspiracy theorists all tend to draw on a common pool of elements, but few could match Cooper in his ability to account for almost every fringe idea out there. The effect, for those who accepted his message, must have been profound — like having the veil lifted from your eyes and, for the first time, seeing the world as it really is. Even though I thought the whole thing was nuts, his was still a compelling and highly entertaining alternate universe; one where every day the forces of good and evil were locked in conflict, where every question could be explained by invoking the Illuminati or the New World Order. Cooper described a world where everything had its place and everything was significant. No one — not the History Channel, not Steven Spielberg — could make history come alive quite like him. Even if his “history” was often no more real than the one where Kirk and Spock are caught infiltrating the Space Nazis in contradiction of the Prime Directive.

***

April 19, 1993 was a cool spring morning. My dad drove me out to some shitty small town somewhere out in Erie County to apply for a job at a plastics plant or cardboard box factory or something. It was my senior year at General McLane High School, and most of my graduating class was getting ready to either join the military, move on to a state school of higher education, or go work in a plant somewhere. None of those options appealed to me, so the guidance counselor at Vo-Tech set me up with a sweet interview for a gig as a COBOL programmer — which I was totally unqualified for. As we made the trip in silence, I prayed to God that I wouldn’t get the job. And for the first time in my life, I’m pleased to say, the power of prayer worked.

I still remember sitting in the car on the way home, hearing the news that the ATF was rolling up to the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, in armored vehicles and filling it with tear gas. I didn’t know what to think about it, except that it didn’t sound too good. Wasn’t that place full of kids? It soon turned out that we were ear-witnessing a slow-motion, cold-blooded murder on AM news radio. In total, 87 people died (28 were under the age of 21) for no good reason. With the benefit of hindsight (as well as some important investigations into the matter) it’s obvious that the massacre was an FBI fuck-up of monstrous proportions, and that the raid itself was unwarranted.

Throughout the 51-day siege I was captivated by Cooper’s radio show, The Hour of the Time. It begins with an air raid siren, then a sort of poem read in a weird robot voice (which bears considerable resemblance to Vincent Price’s opening monologue on the cult-classic Canadian kids show The Hilarious House of Frightenstein). Add the marching of jackboot thugs, screams, and dogs barking, and you’re prepped for nightmares before Cooper even opens his mouth. His shows were among the first to use the template that broadcasters like Alex Jones follow today. The facts of the siege were bent to fit into his pet New World Order conspiracy theory, with a few facts and factoids thrown in to give the appearance of legitimacy. (To give credit where it’s due, Cooper was one of the first to report that the Branch Davidians were a mostly harmless Christian sect with ties to the community, which turned out to be true. He also said that the he caught the ATF on video doing some sort of Satanic Illuminati rain dance around the smoldering remains of the compound, which has yet to be definitively proven.)

Cooper died soon after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. He had been holed up in his home in a small town in Arizona for a number of years, wanted by the feds for tax evasion. Like many of those militia-types, he had done the calculations and decided that, through a series of regulatory perambulations I could never quite fathom (including something about writing “the united States of America” with a lowercase “united”) that the income tax was unconstitutional, and therefore he simply wouldn’t pay it. The feds knew where he was, but they didn’t go after him. The last thing they wanted, after Waco, was another bloodbath.

In the end, Bill’s death was at the hands of local law enforcement. Responding to an aggravated assault complaint, they tried to trick him out of his yard sometime before noon on November 5, 2001. A gunfight ensued: one officer was critically wounded, and Cooper was killed. Since then, the aftershocks of two major cultural forces — the September 11 attacks and the growing power of the internet — have splintered his message into innumerable pieces and scattered them throughout our society. Everything from Rosie O’Donnell’s “9/11 Truth” spiel to the yuppie war against vaccination, from the current crop of post-apocalyptic, anti-authoritarian Young Adult novels to the absurd practice of taking loaded assault rifles into Chipotle and Instagramming about it later; the doomsday rhetoric thrown around by the likes of Glenn Beck and the late Michael Ruppert all contain somewhere within it the DNA of Bill Cooper.

***

The most well known descendant of Bill Cooper is Alex Jones. The 41 year old former football player’s star was on the rise at the time of Cooper’s death, a fact that didn’t please the volatile host of The Hour of the Time. In fact, he devoted one full episode to Alex Jones, during which he edited down some of Jones’s radio broadcasts to make them sound even more insane than they actually were.

On December 31, 1999, Jones reported the Y2K meltdown of society in real-time — as it played out only in his fevered imagination. The United States military invaded Austin, Texas and began preparations for martial law as nuclear power plants began failing all over the country. A young upstart named Vladimir Putin, “raging with power,” had his finger on the trigger, hastening nuclear war. It was basically War of the Worlds, except that the host of the program clearly believed his own bullshit.

It might be utterly foolish to look for a motive inside someone’s mad ravings, but that never stopped Bill Cooper. According to Cooper, the Alex Jones Y2K freak out had “the smell of a setup.” In other words, he was asking: just who is Alex Jones really working for? The CIA? Mossad? The Illuminati?

Where Cooper beat around the bush a bit, David Chase Taylor of Truther.org gets right to the point. According to him, Jones’s Y2K show was most likely “a Zionist beta-test,“ a PsyOp designed to “whip the American people into a frenzied hysteria and subsequent panic.”

All these conspiracy creeps are con artists, and by income alone Alex Jones is the biggest creep out there. To be honest, I’m not sure that he even knows that he’s a con artist — that’s the extent of his deceit. Contrary to the conspiracist infighting, Alex Jones is not working for the “global elite” or some CommuNazi New World Order. He’s working for himself, and he’s doing quite well. The Alex Jones Show is broadcast daily on over 160 radio stations, and the take from all his properties is estimated to be at least $10 million a year.

Americans love their conspiracy theories. Looking for the hidden influences behind the scenes is the natural impulse of a wary, irreverent population that’s been conditioned to think for itself—even if it doesn’t always have access to the resources to make the most informed decisions. And that’s a healthy impulse. But it becomes pathological when the most gullible of us get whipped into a frenzy by a millionaire that’s selling himself as some sort of populist folk hero. In this respect, Alex Jones and the establishment he rails against have an awful lot in common.