Speaker 1: Sodomy. Shit, fuck, god, damn it. No, that's not the
Speaker 1: way to introduce the post. I'm so sorry. That was
Speaker 1: just the word sodomy. That's not an introduction of of
Speaker 1: any sort. I'm terribly sorry. Oh my god, I'm so sorry.
Speaker 1: This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast a fine Day
Speaker 1: where we talk about bad people, and I've ruined it.
Speaker 1: I've ruined our discussion of genocide by mentioning the word sodomy,
Speaker 1: and I apologize for that. You're just kind of subverting
Speaker 1: the narrative, and I do appreciate that. I don't know
Speaker 1: what a narrative is. But speaking of narratives, the subject
Speaker 1: of our episode today was was the master of creating narratives? Um? Also,
Speaker 1: Jamie Loftus, you're the guest. Sorry, I got so caught
Speaker 1: up in saying the words satomy quietly that today you
Speaker 1: really gave your all to it. And I know you're
Speaker 1: not feeling well, so that that took a lot to it.
Speaker 1: That kind of Are we talking about Aaron Sorkin, No,
Speaker 1: we're talking about kind of. I mean, okay, so Chris
Speaker 1: Carter was the X Files guy, right, were possible? Maybe
Speaker 1: I think it was Chris Carter. We're talking about the
Speaker 1: guy who inspired a lot of the X Files, also
Speaker 1: talking about the guy who inspired Alex. It is Chris Carter. Okay,
Speaker 1: I mean as long as as long as he inspired
Speaker 1: Alex Jones. I think you're gonna say Alex Mack. No, no,
Speaker 1: not Alex mac. But he also inspired the Wu Tang Clan. Wow, Okay,
Speaker 1: well you got a hand it to him? What a life. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're talking about a real, a real influential piece of
Speaker 1: ship today. Um. Some people, I think when I when
Speaker 1: I mentioned the Wu Tang Clan, the folks who know
Speaker 1: this guy recognized who it is. But we're talking about
Speaker 1: Bill Cooper. Have you ever heard of Bill Cooper? I have,
Speaker 1: but I don't know in which of these contexts I've
Speaker 1: heard of them. Was he like a conspiracy got like
Speaker 1: a conspiracy he was? He was a radio show host
Speaker 1: who was kind of the first Alex Jones in a
Speaker 1: lot of ways. Man. He also was a very successful
Speaker 1: author of a conspiracy book that um went on to
Speaker 1: become one of like the foundational documents of American gangster
Speaker 1: rapp Um. The first paragraph of his Wikipedia page, I'm excited. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's quite a character. I like the first paragraph is
Speaker 1: just a full journey. Holy sh it. His real name
Speaker 1: is not even Bill, isn't it isn't his real name,
Speaker 1: It's William. It's William. But isn't that also not even
Speaker 1: in his real name? UK William Milton Williams my grandfather's name.
Speaker 1: So we're gonna take that Bill. He's Bill. Yes, I've
Speaker 1: decided that already. Don't. Like, Yeah, I have a long
Speaker 1: I have a long and it hasn't really failed me yet.
Speaker 1: I have like a long distrust of someone that insists
Speaker 1: on going by three names, and um, I have a
Speaker 1: feeling that this is no different. No, No, he was
Speaker 1: pretty consistent about just Bill. But yeah, you still shouldn't
Speaker 1: have trusted him because he was a famous liar. Um. Okay.
Speaker 1: So kind of the reason I think this is important
Speaker 1: to talk about today is that um AT at the
Speaker 1: present moment, Jamie eleven Q and on believers are currently
Speaker 1: have uh like active congressional candidates have they have either
Speaker 1: won primaries or runoffs. Um, and we'll be on the
Speaker 1: ballot in November. Yeah. And if if you're if you're
Speaker 1: just joining us from the year two thousand fifteen, um,
Speaker 1: some ship has gone down First off, you might want
Speaker 1: to now yeah, yeah, should just turn your car and angle.
Speaker 1: Yeah so uh. Q and On the qua on conspiracy
Speaker 1: theory basically states that the whole Democratic Party and and
Speaker 1: all global political leadership is part of a satanic cult
Speaker 1: that drinks the blood of children. Um. Donald Trump was
Speaker 1: chosen by our military and also Jesus to take power
Speaker 1: and root out this cabal of devil worshippers. And we
Speaker 1: talk about at the barbecues I have at my house. Yeah,
Speaker 1: as as you should. Um. In some versions of the conspiracy,
Speaker 1: JFK Jr. Is a crucial part of it. Um. But
Speaker 1: that's very much a contentious issue within within this community.
Speaker 1: So there's even I mean there's at least one of
Speaker 1: the Q and On candidates is also hot, which I
Speaker 1: found to be. Yes, there's some hot ones. Yes, I
Speaker 1: know the hot people were in Q and On that
Speaker 1: did you know. I was just like, okay, so they
Speaker 1: know skincare at very least Yeah, okay, I mean you
Speaker 1: can you can give a shit about you know, your pores.
Speaker 1: And also believe that the Luciferian Cabal has been orchestrating
Speaker 1: global politics in order to harvest to dream of chrome
Speaker 1: from the blood of children child Yes, well, I mean
Speaker 1: actually yeah, but that's something some of us just learned
Speaker 1: by accidents. So uh yeah, Q and On, it's pretty silly,
Speaker 1: pretty silly stuff. And it's so silly that all credible
Speaker 1: media kind of ignored it for three years and pretended
Speaker 1: it wasn't happening until there were hundreds of thousands of
Speaker 1: Americans who believed it, and eleven of them who might
Speaker 1: wind up in Congress. Michaels, one person that you went
Speaker 1: to high school with, deeply powerfully would die for Q
Speaker 1: and On, would die for this conspiracy. Yeah. Michael Flynn,
Speaker 1: a lifetime military intelligence man, a general, and a former
Speaker 1: member of President Trump's staff, recently had his whole family
Speaker 1: swear an oath of allegiance. Uh like the mysterious que
Speaker 1: and his cause. So, um, it's a problem. It's become
Speaker 1: an issue. It's a real issue, and it's not like
Speaker 1: there's the only thing to do about it is kind
Speaker 1: of laugh because of how how much of a problem
Speaker 1: it is. But it really is not a laughing matter.
Speaker 1: It's a very serious issue. Um, it's it's and and
Speaker 1: it's worth noting. Like Q and On, for a long time,
Speaker 1: people would talk about it as a conspiracy theory, and
Speaker 1: one of the researchers I follow, Sarah high Tower, UM,
Speaker 1: has kind of been making the point for quite a
Speaker 1: while that like calling it a conspiracy theory really misses
Speaker 1: the point. It's a cult. Um, it's and like it's
Speaker 1: a religious movement. And I think at this point you
Speaker 1: could probably make a pretty good case that Q and
Speaker 1: On is the USA's fastest growing new religious movement UM,
Speaker 1: which is again a real problem. So the question, one
Speaker 1: of the questions we should all be asking ourselves is
Speaker 1: we we try to deal with this thing that's happening,
Speaker 1: is how did we get here? Um? Like, well, the
Speaker 1: question I've been asking myself is who is Q? I've
Speaker 1: been asking myself this for many years. See, I think
Speaker 1: that's the least important thing in the world. Actually, uh,
Speaker 1: but yeah, I I at this point, the belief system
Speaker 1: has gone so far beyond whatever the individual or individuals
Speaker 1: who are like posting the Q drops actually have been
Speaker 1: pushing people to do that. It's like, I think, kind
Speaker 1: of almost immaterial who Q is? UM. So the broader
Speaker 1: question when we look at like Q and on, and
Speaker 1: we look at just the fact that we're in a
Speaker 1: place right now where like the guy who got elected
Speaker 1: president is a famous conspiracy theorist who has like repeated
Speaker 1: conspiracy theories about the active pandemic killing people during his
Speaker 1: administration while delivering like like news to the nation about
Speaker 1: the pandemic. Like the fact that that's where we are
Speaker 1: right now, um like kind of begs the question how
Speaker 1: the fund did we get here? Um? And there's a
Speaker 1: number of theories about like how conspiracism um became what
Speaker 1: it is in American culture. Uh. And it it kind
Speaker 1: of starts in the nineteen seventies with the work of
Speaker 1: a British sociologist named Campbell, who coined the term cultic
Speaker 1: milieu to refer to the kinds of supportive cultural environments
Speaker 1: that allow cults to form. So prior to Campbell's work,
Speaker 1: most experts had kind of seen cults as freak phenomenon,
Speaker 1: strange and terrible, like things that just sort of happened,
Speaker 1: Like some charismatic guy would come along and he would
Speaker 1: enthrall the brains of a certain group of people, and
Speaker 1: then you'd have a cult, and it was just sort
Speaker 1: of like this thing that happened, um, as sort of
Speaker 1: like a freak curiosity um. But Campbell's argument was that
Speaker 1: cults didn't come out of nowhere, and they weren't primarily
Speaker 1: the product of whatever individual or individuals were behind them.
Speaker 1: They kind of grew mushroom like from a fertile cultural substrate.
Speaker 1: You had to have like a culture that could support
Speaker 1: the growth of cults, and certain things in a culture,
Speaker 1: certain like um trends within a culture would make it
Speaker 1: much a much more fertile ground for cults to sort
Speaker 1: of like form and thrive in. So that's like what
Speaker 1: a cultic milieu is. Uh. In the book A Culture
Speaker 1: of Conspiracy, scholar Mike Barkun notes, quote, the cultic milieu
Speaker 1: is by nature hostile to authority, both because it rejects
Speaker 1: the authority of such normative institutions as churches and universities,
Speaker 1: and because no single institution within the milieu has the
Speaker 1: authority to prescribe beliefs and practices for those within it.
Speaker 1: As diverse as the cultic milieu is, however, Campbell finds
Speaker 1: in it unifying tendencies. One such tendency is its opposition
Speaker 1: to dominant cultural orthodoxes. This is also a major characteristic
Speaker 1: of the culture of conspiracy, within which the reigning presumption
Speaker 1: is that any widely accepted belief must necessarily be false. Okay,
Speaker 1: so that that sounds a little familiar. It definitely does.
Speaker 1: I feel like the like conspiracy. Uh, like the conspiracy
Speaker 1: label is used to be dismissive too often of like, oh,
Speaker 1: it's kind of a fun tabloid story. More more so.
Speaker 1: And then when you start calling it a religion which
Speaker 1: has much of the same properties, it's suddenly become serious.
Speaker 1: And all of a sudden, there's hot people running for
Speaker 1: public office. Yeah yeah, or or you know, compounds outside
Speaker 1: of Waco getting burnt down by the FBI, a number
Speaker 1: of things. Do you just bring Waco in here? I'm this,
Speaker 1: we're gonna talk so much about Waco today, getting into
Speaker 1: Waco today. Oh yeah, we're gonna be wake up ready
Speaker 1: for Waco today. Nobody wakes up ready for Waco except
Speaker 1: for David Koresh briefly but not more. Yeah. So, uh,
Speaker 1: we live in a culture of conspiracy now, and and
Speaker 1: I think a lot of Americans are kind of waking
Speaker 1: up to the extent to which that is happening and
Speaker 1: continuing to happen. And what a problem it is, um
Speaker 1: And it wasn't this kind of cultic milieu that that
Speaker 1: has overtaken a lot of even mainstream culture now, like
Speaker 1: didn't didn't happen by accident. It was formed kind of
Speaker 1: intentionally by individual human beings who tended it like a
Speaker 1: good farmer tends to soil, and made basically made our
Speaker 1: culture into one in which a famous conspiracy theorist could
Speaker 1: not just get to become president, but could could get
Speaker 1: to like shout out his nonsense um to like, could
Speaker 1: get to like shout out conspiracy theories about an active
Speaker 1: plague while it was going on, and have millions of
Speaker 1: Americans say, well, like, surely that guy's right. Like the
Speaker 1: fact that we're there now isn't an accident. It was
Speaker 1: it was like the yeah, I don't know, this is
Speaker 1: this is a bad way to introduce this. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of that. I'm trying to like kind of even
Speaker 1: wrap my head around here because the problem is so extensive,
Speaker 1: and there's a number of individuals who were sort of
Speaker 1: behind bringing us to this point because this wasn't always
Speaker 1: the case. You know, there used to be you can't
Speaker 1: really what we're looking at. What we're looking at as
Speaker 1: the root cause of of why we are where we
Speaker 1: are culturally right now and politically right now. Is the
Speaker 1: death of any kind of shared conception of truth. It's
Speaker 1: not possible to have that because a huge chunk of
Speaker 1: the country, whenever somebody claims to be hims to be
Speaker 1: like trying to tell them facts about the world UM
Speaker 1: now kind of automatically will reject those facts if they're
Speaker 1: in opposition to you know, whatever belief structure that person
Speaker 1: has UM and will form the fact that like some
Speaker 1: professional person is telling them that that that their beliefs
Speaker 1: are wrong, will kind of graph that automatically onto this
Speaker 1: conspiratorial belief about the nature of of of the world
Speaker 1: at the moment, like the fact only accepted truths exactly exactly.
Speaker 1: And today we're going to talk about probably the man
Speaker 1: who's most responsible with kind of setting off that domino
Speaker 1: chain reaction that led to the death of truth. I'm
Speaker 1: not going to say that that that this guy killed
Speaker 1: truth on his own, UM, but Bill Cooper probably deserves
Speaker 1: more credit for building our cultic milieu UM than any
Speaker 1: other single person. And only again, like two kinds of
Speaker 1: people really recognize Bill's name today. The first kinder folks
Speaker 1: who like study conspiracy and the history of right wing extremism,
Speaker 1: the militia movement. Those folks will have heard of Bill Cooper.
Speaker 1: The second kind of people who know Bill Cooper today
Speaker 1: are are fans of nineteen nineties gangster rap. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it is the Wu Tang clan. I'm thrilled that we
Speaker 1: have found this intersection at Long Last. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: Bill left a really big influence on both worlds. And
Speaker 1: it's kind of fascinating as to why. Um So, Milton
Speaker 1: William Cooper um So, Yeah, that's the name, Jamie. He
Speaker 1: is a Milton um It's really unfortunate. Was born on
Speaker 1: May six, nineteen forty three, in Long Beach, California. His father,
Speaker 1: Milton Vance Cooper, was an Air Force pilot who got
Speaker 1: his start flying for the US military before the Air
Speaker 1: Force even existed. Milton wisely went by the name Jack,
Speaker 1: which is a much better name for a pilot, Jack Cooper.
Speaker 1: That's a good that's a good pilot name. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: just a good old fashioned MGM renamed. Yeah, and you'll
Speaker 1: note that like neither Milton William nor Milton Vance ever
Speaker 1: went by the name Milton, because it's a it's an
Speaker 1: objectively bad name. Well, I mean, just you know say
Speaker 1: which you will about his life choices, but he did
Speaker 1: make at least one solid Yeah. No, no, he made
Speaker 1: the right call there. Um and yeah, as a little kid,
Speaker 1: Bill went by little Jackie um, which is is Yeah.
Speaker 1: I don't like that's perverted. I don't like that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So Bill's ancestors had come from all over the British Isles,
Speaker 1: which you shouldn't call the British Isles because it wipes
Speaker 1: out the existence of Scotland and Ireland, two nations that
Speaker 1: were kind of oppressed by the British for centuries. But
Speaker 1: I want to challenge the British and the Irish to
Speaker 1: unite and finally wipe out the English, and I feel
Speaker 1: like goading them this way might work. So just as
Speaker 1: a note in the future, when I call something the
Speaker 1: British Isles, it's because I'm trying to orchestrate the destruction
Speaker 1: of the English people. Yeah, you're just trying to people
Speaker 1: to radicalize and get some done. Yeah. Yeah, so like
Speaker 1: you know, I'll I'll refer to them properly Scotland and
Speaker 1: Ireland when you in Wale, when you do something about
Speaker 1: the English. Um. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, Bill uh, Bill's
Speaker 1: family came from all over the aisles, and they wound
Speaker 1: up in the United States. Uh, and kind of all
Speaker 1: over the United States. He had family that fought on
Speaker 1: both sides of the Civil War. Um, there were a
Speaker 1: lot of frontiersman in the Cooper family. As a boy,
Speaker 1: Bill was particularly taken by stories of his great grandfather,
Speaker 1: who he would later call a real cowboy. Uh. He
Speaker 1: wrote later that as a child, he saw photos of
Speaker 1: his great grandpa. Yeah. He would later write that as
Speaker 1: a child, he saw photos of his great grandpa quote
Speaker 1: standing in front of a saloon with a six gun
Speaker 1: in his belt. Now, Bill was a famous liar. And
Speaker 1: this is probably a lot of just wret A lot
Speaker 1: of those guys really like as as a rule, it
Speaker 1: was like a fake that was a constructed image in
Speaker 1: the first place. That's fun fun. Yeah. Yeah, So anyway,
Speaker 1: and yeah, but this is what Bill, This is what
Speaker 1: Bill at least thought it was important for people to
Speaker 1: think about his family background. They were cowboys. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: is a very mature cowboys and horse thieves. He was
Speaker 1: also like, oh, yeah, and one of them got hung
Speaker 1: as a horse thief. Yeah it was Yeah. So the
Speaker 1: Cooper family moved constantly to accommodate Jack's military career. And
Speaker 1: this was not a low stress period to be the
Speaker 1: family member of somebody doing what Jack was doing in
Speaker 1: the military. The Cold War was at its coolest level.
Speaker 1: Nuclear annihilation was a constant threat, and young Bill grew
Speaker 1: up knowing that at any moment his father might be
Speaker 1: sent off to die in a war that would almost
Speaker 1: certainly kill his family in nuclear hell fire as well. Um,
Speaker 1: it was a stressful way to be a kid. Um.
Speaker 1: I I know that particularly well because my dad and
Speaker 1: Bill had very similar childhoods. Actually, my dad was about
Speaker 1: about a decade younger, UM, But his dad, I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't even know what my grandpa on that side
Speaker 1: of the family actually did. He was a civilian employee
Speaker 1: of the Department of the Defense, and he was constantly
Speaker 1: in Southeast Asia, and we don't know, like nobody really
Speaker 1: knows anything else about what Grandpa was doing. I think
Speaker 1: he was probably posing like a cowboy in front of
Speaker 1: a saloon. If I probably posing like a cowboy. But
Speaker 1: like my dad has these memories of like when the
Speaker 1: when the there were stateside, when the Cuban missile crisis hit,
Speaker 1: and he was just like he and I think his
Speaker 1: mom like drove him and his sister out to like
Speaker 1: family who lived away from a city, and they just
Speaker 1: stayed there for days without really knowing anything, just knowing
Speaker 1: that like something had happened, and dad says, like, you
Speaker 1: guys shouldn't be in the city. Yeah. Yeah, it was
Speaker 1: like in a lot of there were a lot of
Speaker 1: kids who grew up, uh, Like my whole family in
Speaker 1: this period of time were military brats, and there was
Speaker 1: a lot of like it was a stressful thing to
Speaker 1: be like, you know, because you're always you're always worried
Speaker 1: that nuclear annihilation is around the damn corner. And so
Speaker 1: Bill grows up with this kind of apocalyptic expectation is
Speaker 1: just a constant part of his reality. Is like a
Speaker 1: little kid. Um, so that's not great. Um yeah, the
Speaker 1: bioy Yeah, and it's yeah. The biography Pale Horse Writer
Speaker 1: by Mark Jacobson, which is a biography of William Cooper,
Speaker 1: notes quote, once while his father was assigned to Lajah's
Speaker 1: Field on ter Sierra Island and the hisurs uh, the
Speaker 1: young Cooper was sitting in the base reck room watching
Speaker 1: a movie when the projector ground to a halt. The
Speaker 1: lights came on and a plea was made for blood donors.
Speaker 1: I knew immediately something terrible. It happened. Running outside, Cooper
Speaker 1: saw that a B twenty nine super Fortress had crashed.
Speaker 1: I saw men on fire running through the night. Cooper
Speaker 1: wrote in Behold a Pale Horse, I was only nine
Speaker 1: years old, but felt much older. That's not great. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's not great. Ye's the problem at the beginning, all
Speaker 1: of these stories start out with like just a traumatized,
Speaker 1: broken little boy. There, we need to start well, no,
Speaker 1: this is probably, but they're like, there needs to be
Speaker 1: some sort of muppet babies for for the bastards. Yeah,
Speaker 1: bustard babies there, and then they can just all go
Speaker 1: to a child therapist and really talk ship through and
Speaker 1: saving a lot of trouble. Yeah, except for Saddam, who
Speaker 1: would have absolutely smuggled in a gun and shot that therapist,
Speaker 1: like shot that therapist immediately. Was Yeah he was, he was,
Speaker 1: you know, are born that way? He was, he was.
Speaker 1: He was a hardened gangster by thirteen. Yeah, but also
Speaker 1: had the heart of a poet, you know. Yeah, well
Speaker 1: of course, yeah, like al Capone, right right. So in
Speaker 1: his own book Behold a Pale Horse, Bill which is
Speaker 1: a great name for a book. It is a great
Speaker 1: name for a book. Bill. One thing you'll learn about
Speaker 1: Bill is that he was a fantastic marketer. And that's
Speaker 1: an objectively incredible title. Like I'm it's a memoir, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: it just includes a section on his background. We'll talk
Speaker 1: about what Behold a Pale Horse is because very influential, Like,
Speaker 1: it's kind of it's a very appealing title. Well it's
Speaker 1: but it's from that book that uh, that line in
Speaker 1: the Book of Revelations. But again we'll talk about that
Speaker 1: in a little bit. So, yeah, it is a great title,
Speaker 1: and I'm kind of frustrated that he took it because
Speaker 1: it would be a great title for a book right
Speaker 1: now about Yeah, So anyway, um, Bill would later write
Speaker 1: himself right a his upbringing that quote, I didn't always
Speaker 1: love my father. He was a strict disciplinarian. My dad
Speaker 1: did not believe in spare the rod, and his belt
Speaker 1: was put to use frequently in our family. And like
Speaker 1: most children who grew up in such families, Bill grew
Speaker 1: was like Bill grew up with a like basically focusing
Speaker 1: all the time on how to avoid getting in trouble,
Speaker 1: like right, That's the thing you learn as a kid
Speaker 1: with authoritarian parents who punish you, um physically particularly, is
Speaker 1: how to not get in trouble. Um. And he was
Speaker 1: regularly the focus of his dad's anger, which kind of yeah,
Speaker 1: his his whole life was his whole life as a
Speaker 1: kid was revolved around hiding from his dad's anger. Um.
Speaker 1: And yeah, he grew up with the feeling that quote,
Speaker 1: rules didn't mean much until I got caught breaking them.
Speaker 1: And discipline like this has the effect of kind of
Speaker 1: training children to be exceptional liars. Um. It teaches them
Speaker 1: to always have a story, a really believable story, in
Speaker 1: order to not get in trouble. And there's actually research
Speaker 1: to back this up. In two thousand and sixteen, Victoria
Speaker 1: talwar an expert on children's social cognitive develop a minute,
Speaker 1: McGill University published a study on this. I f L
Speaker 1: Science reported quote tal Warren and her colleagues developed a
Speaker 1: test to identify effective young liars called the Peeping Game.
Speaker 1: Taking her test to West African schools, one with relaxed
Speaker 1: rules and one with harsh disciplinary regimes, the peoples were
Speaker 1: asked to guests, without looking at it, which object is
Speaker 1: making the noise behind them. Importantly, the last object made
Speaker 1: a noise that was different from any sound it could
Speaker 1: actually produce. For example, a baseball would make a squawking noise.
Speaker 1: If any children knew what this final object was, they
Speaker 1: were clearly taking a peek at it while unsupervised. During
Speaker 1: the experiment, the supervising adult leaves the room and upon
Speaker 1: returning asked the child two questions what the object was
Speaker 1: and if they peaked at it. Talwar discovered that the
Speaker 1: more relaxed school showed a distribution of liars and truth
Speaker 1: tellers similar to that found in many Western schools. However,
Speaker 1: in the strict school, the children proved to be extremely
Speaker 1: rapid and effective liars. Um So that's going to become
Speaker 1: very relevant as we talk about every single thing Bill
Speaker 1: says about his life. Uh so, much of the information
Speaker 1: we have on Bill's filthood comes from Bill himself. And again,
Speaker 1: he's a he's a liar. So yeah, okay, this is difficult,
Speaker 1: This is tough with him, but that's because he wants
Speaker 1: to and that's because he's a good liar. That's because
Speaker 1: he's a good liar. That also doesn't mean that he's
Speaker 1: lying about everything, and in fact, there's a lot. He's
Speaker 1: definitely telling the truth about um, including the fact that
Speaker 1: his dad. I have new trouble believing his dad was
Speaker 1: an authoritarian, you know, parent, because he was a military man,
Speaker 1: and that's real fucking common. I have no trouble believing
Speaker 1: that he was constantly stressed out as a kid about
Speaker 1: nuclear war, because that's what it was like growing up
Speaker 1: in the fifties on a military base. Yeah. So that said, though,
Speaker 1: we're going to we're going to enter into a lot
Speaker 1: of areas where we have Bill's version of the of
Speaker 1: what happened and what's more likely to have happened, and
Speaker 1: they diverge quite rapidly. So uh. Bill's relationship with his
Speaker 1: mother was a little more positive than his relationship with
Speaker 1: his father. He describes her as the kind of woman
Speaker 1: who used to be called a Southern bell, the type
Speaker 1: of women that men like to dream about when they're lonely.
Speaker 1: She's the kindlest, gentlest woman I've ever known. Once she
Speaker 1: likes you, she cannot be driven away. She is loyal
Speaker 1: to a fault. Um that that will become a little
Speaker 1: bit more relevant later too. So Yeah, Bill was a
Speaker 1: high spirited, sensitive mama's boy who moved around too often
Speaker 1: to build strong ties, and one of the few constants
Speaker 1: in his youth was Armed Forces radio. Bill was obsessed
Speaker 1: with the emerging popular music of the day, particularly Sam Cook. Moreover,
Speaker 1: he fell in love with the idea of being a DJ,
Speaker 1: which at the time was the guardian and arbiter of
Speaker 1: popular youth culture. Yeah, and again, all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: it's kind of weird the extent to which Bill and
Speaker 1: my dad had the same childhood because my dad also
Speaker 1: grew up on military bases wanting to be a DJ
Speaker 1: and like doing that in high school and ship, Um,
Speaker 1: it was like the cool thing. Like it's not now,
Speaker 1: but at the time, like being a DJ was the
Speaker 1: coolest thing you could fucking be. Uh, Proberties, you are
Speaker 1: just saying it's not, curl the coolest thing you could be,
Speaker 1: because it still is. Asking the coolest thing you can
Speaker 1: be is a white guy who does a podcast about politics.
Speaker 1: That's that's that's what this is. The conspiracy theories are
Speaker 1: that's actually a popular Q and on belief is that
Speaker 1: having a podcast is cool. You know what, who definitely
Speaker 1: actually does think that having a podcast is cool? Who
Speaker 1: the products and services to support this show? They'd fucking better. Uh,
Speaker 1: Lord in Heaven, we're back. Uh. And I just I
Speaker 1: have some good news for everybody. We have a new
Speaker 1: face mask that will be selling in the behind the
Speaker 1: Bastard store. Uh. It just says f d A approved
Speaker 1: to prevent all diseases. Um, so you know when we're
Speaker 1: as we're talking about colts, Jamie, I just want everyone
Speaker 1: to know I am, in act doing everything I can
Speaker 1: to to to get us violently rated by the Food
Speaker 1: and Drug Administration. That that is the goal. So grab
Speaker 1: your kids, uh, take them to my compound in the mountains,
Speaker 1: put them in a basement, and we'll wait for the
Speaker 1: f DAY to come firebomb us. Um yep. But a
Speaker 1: beautiful image. What a beautiful image. Yeah, we're gonna make
Speaker 1: them do it. We're gonna we're gonna radicalize the f
Speaker 1: d A, Jamie. That's my goal. That would be kind
Speaker 1: of fun. It would be neat fun, radicalized with good outfits.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, Well I don't know. Well, but the
Speaker 1: FDA and crop tops see what happens. So okay, fine,
Speaker 1: as long as as long as you know they're still
Speaker 1: like unaccountably violent. That's my my dream for the f
Speaker 1: d A. Oh, they're extremely violent. I'm just saying like
Speaker 1: a cult that it like a Heaven's gate. You know,
Speaker 1: it's like there, you know they have they have no morals,
Speaker 1: but also you know they look nice. They match. Okay, okay, okay,
Speaker 1: well we'll we'll talk about this more. So. Bill was
Speaker 1: a Yeah. Bill Bill as a as a kid on
Speaker 1: the military based like falls in Love with the idea
Speaker 1: of being a dj um in an age sixteen, while
Speaker 1: he was living on Tachikawa Air Base near Tokyo, he
Speaker 1: got his very first radio show on the Armed Forces
Speaker 1: Networks Radio teen program Radio teen. Bill would later write quote,
Speaker 1: I was called the Mad Lad and my theme song
Speaker 1: was Quiet Village by Martin Denny. And this is, Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's a huge dork, And it's the fact that he
Speaker 1: picks Quiet Village is really interesting because it is it
Speaker 1: is not the kind of song you might expect a
Speaker 1: seventeen or a sixteen year old to make his like
Speaker 1: introduction music when he comes on the fucking radio. It's
Speaker 1: like it's a mournful ballad about lost love that starts
Speaker 1: with the lyrics alone in my quiet Village, I pray
Speaker 1: you will be returning one day to me returned to
Speaker 1: me alone, living with the memory of you promising you'd
Speaker 1: always be true to me, be true to me. So
Speaker 1: that's a little weird for sixteen year old Billy just
Speaker 1: right eye energy to it. There's equivalents of this. It's
Speaker 1: really unsettled, like like you can you can kind of
Speaker 1: tell Bill is not going to go good places. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this isn't this isn't going to end well, Okay, it's
Speaker 1: intense very to Yeah. So, as a young DJ, Bill
Speaker 1: finally felt the acceptance that had been cruelly denied to
Speaker 1: him by his father's constant travel. He would later recall
Speaker 1: being elated that quote, hundreds of teenagers all over Japan
Speaker 1: were dancing to the music I spun on my little machines.
Speaker 1: He managed to convince himself that millions of Chinese teens
Speaker 1: were also listening into his radio program, which could not
Speaker 1: have been true um, and that the communists said had
Speaker 1: jammed his signal to stop it. Which, okay, this isn't
Speaker 1: like your DJ energy is like not just that people
Speaker 1: don't have access to it. There if in communism, if
Speaker 1: they can listen to my sad songs about quiet like
Speaker 1: villages and girls not liking me, enough. Oh my god.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, even at age sixteen, Bill was convinced that
Speaker 1: he had somehow become the target of a global communist movement,
Speaker 1: um of the global communist movement, which is is funny
Speaker 1: and again he's probably just inventing this decades later. But
Speaker 1: also I wouldn't be surprised if at the time young
Speaker 1: Bill Cooper convinced himself the Communes were trying to stop
Speaker 1: his terrible radio show. So teenaged Bill was convinced that
Speaker 1: rock and roll music was the very best advertisement for
Speaker 1: capitalism possible. And to be honest, he was probably right
Speaker 1: about that. It's actually something too that's actually at that time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think a lot of teenagers in Cuba got a
Speaker 1: really unfairly rosy idea of American culture by listening to
Speaker 1: the Stones and Ship. I don't like that. I don't
Speaker 1: like the feeling of agreeing with him, but yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: on board for that one. Yeah, No, he's probably right
Speaker 1: about that. Nowto the rock and roll listen, I think
Speaker 1: I'm very skeptical of this rock and roll music that
Speaker 1: the kids are listening to. I think it might be
Speaker 1: dangerous as an adult. Bill Witho mourn in his writing
Speaker 1: that Chuck Berry was thrown in jail for two years
Speaker 1: rather than being made Secretary of State, quote like he
Speaker 1: should have been. So he believed Chuck Berry should have
Speaker 1: been the Secretary of State. And it's probably here that
Speaker 1: I do you know much about Chuck Berry, Jamie not
Speaker 1: really know the right side of who he is. His
Speaker 1: music sounded like, yeah, I mean, father of rock and roll,
Speaker 1: incredible musician, historically an important musician. He was also thrown
Speaker 1: in jail for transporting a fourteen year old across state
Speaker 1: lines for a moral purposes India. Okay, well, yeah, like
Speaker 1: it wasn't a mild It wasn't like a like, it
Speaker 1: wasn't that they weren't just going after him to like
Speaker 1: shut down this rock and roller he was. He was
Speaker 1: sexually trafficking a teenage girl. I mean, to continue on
Speaker 1: my anti rock and roll tirade, which rock artists of
Speaker 1: this arrow was not doing that. It was that is
Speaker 1: that is very fair. We had some ship but no one,
Speaker 1: but no one wants to talk about it. No, I mean,
Speaker 1: Billy Joel didn't. But but that's the only one. I
Speaker 1: bet that it was just that, not that he didn't
Speaker 1: that he couldn't because he would have been terrible at
Speaker 1: sex trafficking. Really, he would have been horrible at it.
Speaker 1: So can't be a good liar. No, no, he can't.
Speaker 1: He's an innocent man. So in nineteen eighty eight, Chuck
Speaker 1: Barry was arrested again and charged for punching a woman
Speaker 1: in the face so hard she required stitches. He was
Speaker 1: also accused by multiple women and girls of filming them
Speaker 1: in the bathroom of his restaurant. So, I don't know,
Speaker 1: maybe not the best pick for Secretary of State, although
Speaker 1: even with that resume, he would have been better than
Speaker 1: kissing Jerry I was supposed to say. I'm like, there
Speaker 1: have been worse people as secretary of state. Oh, that's
Speaker 1: so depressed. There's truly not one rock legend that isn't
Speaker 1: the most horrifying person though there they were all monsters.
Speaker 1: It turns out when you like elevate mostly young teenage
Speaker 1: in twenties something men to like effectively living gods. Uh,
Speaker 1: they do horrible, horrible things repeatedly. Really have been known
Speaker 1: to take advantage of it. Yeah, yeah, it turns out
Speaker 1: to be a bad call. So in nineteen sixty learn
Speaker 1: from it, though, Yeah, we don't do that anymore. It
Speaker 1: doesn't happen anymore. No, and it never will again. Yeah.
Speaker 1: In nineteen sixty two, nineteen year old Bill Cooper joined
Speaker 1: the Air Force. The Navy was his first choice, but
Speaker 1: he got sea sick easily, and he didn't think he'd
Speaker 1: be able to handle a career on a boat. Um,
Speaker 1: this will be slightly ironic. Later, uh, young Bill chose
Speaker 1: to enlist rather than joining as an officer, which surprised
Speaker 1: his family because his family, you know, his military tradition
Speaker 1: had been officers. Um. He wound up going to a
Speaker 1: technical school outside of Amarillo, Texas, where he later claimed
Speaker 1: to have seen real atomic bombs. Quote. I worked around
Speaker 1: them on a daily basis. Because of that, I had
Speaker 1: to wear a dosimeter just in case I was exposed
Speaker 1: to radiation. Bill's first gig was in the field maintenance squadron,
Speaker 1: watching after everyone's quarters and basically keeping their work area police.
Speaker 1: It was a job that kept him alone a great
Speaker 1: deal of the time, and so he was sitting on
Speaker 1: his own and the barracks watching TV on the day
Speaker 1: that President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot by Bernard Montgomery Sanders.
Speaker 1: As Bill later wrote, quote at that point, huge tears
Speaker 1: began to stream down my face. Waves of emotion rushed
Speaker 1: through my body. I felt that I had to do something,
Speaker 1: so I picked up the direct line to the command center.
Speaker 1: I choked back tears. When the command duty officer answered,
Speaker 1: I told him that the president had just been shot
Speaker 1: in Dallas. There was a pause and he asked me,
Speaker 1: how do you know he has been shot. I told
Speaker 1: him that I had watched it on television and then
Speaker 1: hung up the phone. I was numb all over. You know, people,
Speaker 1: you know, it's just so what President Kenny got shot?
Speaker 1: Get over it by Bernie Sanders. Yes, absolutely to it.
Speaker 1: I think I have actually brought this up on this
Speaker 1: show before. But it's my favorite fact, my favorite fun
Speaker 1: fact about the assassination of JFK, which is that meat
Speaker 1: Off was there. Yes, you did bring it up. I
Speaker 1: would think to bring it up. Meat Loaf is like
Speaker 1: thirteen or fourteen years old, and he was like I
Speaker 1: guess he lived in that area and he went like
Speaker 1: with his family to see that he was. He was there.
Speaker 1: So would we have bad out of Hell had JFK lived?
Speaker 1: We may not know. That's a shame that we have
Speaker 1: bad out of Hell. I love, Okay, I know that
Speaker 1: I famously hate rock and roll, but I do kind
Speaker 1: of like that Out of Hell me Love's a terrible person,
Speaker 1: but you know he was fine in fight Club and
Speaker 1: bad out of Hell is pretty good. Yeah, and he'd
Speaker 1: probably I don't know, I had something to do with
Speaker 1: the jfk assassination anyway, I think yeah, he was pro
Speaker 1: of the Youth the youth plot, Yeah he was. He
Speaker 1: was spotting for Bernie Sanders a sniper scope. Um So,
Speaker 1: now Jamie, uh So, you can kind of see in
Speaker 1: that little paragraph like and this is this is again
Speaker 1: from something that Bill writes decades later. But he's kind
Speaker 1: of like he's kind of like sprinkling into his life
Speaker 1: story these little bitty elements of conspiracy. Like obviously he
Speaker 1: calls the duty officer and the guys like how did
Speaker 1: you know he'd been shot? And like nothing else happens,
Speaker 1: but there's this little insinuation that like, you know, Bill
Speaker 1: had kind of stumbled onto something a little bit and
Speaker 1: like that will happen repeatedly. That happens repeatedly in his
Speaker 1: narrative of his early life that he later publishes. Um,
Speaker 1: He'll he'll drop these little like if it like he
Speaker 1: kind of he kind of frames it almost like a movie, right,
Speaker 1: where like he drops these little bit of hints about
Speaker 1: the vast conspiracy and his his childhood like stories of
Speaker 1: his early life. Um. And he does it really well
Speaker 1: like it's it's it's it's good good storytelling. Um. Which
Speaker 1: is something that like Bill has a real talent for
Speaker 1: is is telling stories because he's a great liar. Um. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So uh. He also brought aliens into the mix in
Speaker 1: his his his biography, but not in a way, not
Speaker 1: in a way that was super cookie. Um. This is
Speaker 1: this this part, this is the way he does this
Speaker 1: I actually think is really effective as a storytelling tool. Um. Quote.
Speaker 1: It was during this time when he was he was
Speaker 1: working um in the Air Force, that a couple of
Speaker 1: sergeants kind of adopted me. We went out to clubs
Speaker 1: together and usually ended up chasing women and drinking a
Speaker 1: lot of beer. They told me several stories about being
Speaker 1: attached to a special unit that recovered crashed flying saucers.
Speaker 1: Sergeant MIAs told me that he had been on one
Speaker 1: operation that transported a saucer so large that a special
Speaker 1: team went before them, lowering all telephone poles and fence posts.
Speaker 1: Another team followed and replaced them. They moved it only
Speaker 1: at night. It was kept parked and covered somewhere off
Speaker 1: the road during the day, since we were always half tanked.
Speaker 1: When these stories came out, I never believed them. Sergeants
Speaker 1: were known to tell some tall tales to younger guys
Speaker 1: like me. So that's a good that's a good way
Speaker 1: to kind of start sprinkling this ship into your narrative.
Speaker 1: That's really that's really smart. I feel like that doesn't
Speaker 1: come out come up enough of like, well, I wasn't
Speaker 1: totally sure at first. It sounded a little weird. It
Speaker 1: sounded a little bit. But the more I listened, there,
Speaker 1: that's that. That is effective storytelling. Yeah, that's good storytelling. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The assassination of President Kennedy brought several more days of
Speaker 1: apocalyptic stress to young Bill Cooper. The nation went to
Speaker 1: the brink of war with Russia because nobody knew what
Speaker 1: the funk was going on, and Bill spent his nights
Speaker 1: sleeping under a B fifty two loaded with nuclear munitions,
Speaker 1: waiting for the order to go. So again, to understand
Speaker 1: Bill Cooper's mindset, you have to understand this kid spent
Speaker 1: like the first several decades of his life, sometimes literally
Speaker 1: sitting next to nuclear weapons, knowing that, like all human
Speaker 1: life could end in moments. It's like there's no moment
Speaker 1: of his life that he is not deeply stressed out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: deeply stressed out and just waiting for the apocalypse to
Speaker 1: him like that. Yeah, it's a it's a tough it's
Speaker 1: a tough way to grow into being an adult. Sure, sure, yeah.
Speaker 1: So thankfully the order to end all human life via
Speaker 1: nuclear annihilation never came. In the nineteen sixty six Bill
Speaker 1: got an honorable discharge from the Air Force. He immediately
Speaker 1: decided to join the Navy next since his seasickness had
Speaker 1: apparently improved. And Bill was, you know, shipped over to
Speaker 1: serve on a submarine in Hawaii that because apparently his
Speaker 1: C six C sickness improved. As A yeah, the way
Speaker 1: he describes it as like, after four years in the
Speaker 1: Air Force, he was like, I've always wanted to be
Speaker 1: in the Navy. Like I'm not gonna let I'm gonna
Speaker 1: I'm gonna get over this this problem and do I
Speaker 1: don't Yeah, so Bill or something and was like it
Speaker 1: sounds like he he bought a drug store supplement. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Probably so. Bill claims he got along famously with all
Speaker 1: of his new comrades in Hawaii, including his best friend,
Speaker 1: who Bill takes great pains to inform us, was a
Speaker 1: black sailor named Lincoln Loving. Um, which I had. There
Speaker 1: are actual people named Lincoln Loving, so he might not
Speaker 1: have been making that name up. It does kind of
Speaker 1: sound like the name a white guy would make up
Speaker 1: for a black sailor to be his best friend. In
Speaker 1: the narrative of his life. Uh, Bill's other best friend
Speaker 1: was an American Indian who he doesn't give us the
Speaker 1: guy's real name, but informs us that he was nicknamed Geronimo. Um.
Speaker 1: So I don't I can't say that Bill's lying about this,
Speaker 1: but maybe I can. I can say that I'm pretty
Speaker 1: sure he's lying about this. The sounds yeah, fake as hell. Yeah. Anyway,
Speaker 1: while Bill was stationed in Hawaii, he poisoned one of
Speaker 1: his shipmates. Uh. In fact, the guy who was the
Speaker 1: ship's cook. Now. Bill claims that this is because, for
Speaker 1: no reason at all, the cook banned him from eating
Speaker 1: in the mess, and he also insists that the cook
Speaker 1: was a drunk and Bill was nobly worried he might
Speaker 1: endanger the other crew members. While underway, Bill wrote quote,
Speaker 1: I won't tell you what I laced his vodka with,
Speaker 1: but it wasn't anything you'd ever want to drink. Believe me.
Speaker 1: I kept that chief so sick he was transferred off
Speaker 1: the boat for medical reasons. I didn't want to hurt him,
Speaker 1: but it was either get rid of him or starved
Speaker 1: to death. I made up my mind that chief or
Speaker 1: no chief, I wasn't going to see on a boat
Speaker 1: that wouldn't feed me. Um so real willing to poison
Speaker 1: his fellow sailors, which is I feel like this? It
Speaker 1: seems like maybe he had a real problem with this guy.
Speaker 1: I feel like most most most people would have found
Speaker 1: a way to do that that didn't involve poisoning a man.
Speaker 1: But I don't know. I mean, listen, desperate times, desperate
Speaker 1: test sometimes you got a poison a guy. Um. Anyway,
Speaker 1: the Navy was only ever supposed to be a stepping
Speaker 1: stone on Bill's way to achieving a bizarre, and in
Speaker 1: my opinion, pointless dream. He wanted to be the first
Speaker 1: member of his family to serve in all four branches
Speaker 1: of the armed forces, which is a weird dream, isn't
Speaker 1: that like kind of a like that's just like what
Speaker 1: if I went to four high schools? Like what is
Speaker 1: the point that is in that? It's like the egot,
Speaker 1: but you've always are doing shitty jobs. Uh and it's
Speaker 1: not at all like the egot because they'll take anyone
Speaker 1: pretty much. Um okay, interesting irrational goal. But anyway, he
Speaker 1: never got to do this because by the time he
Speaker 1: was near the end of his four years in the Navy,
Speaker 1: the Vietnam conflict had really started to heat up, and
Speaker 1: Bill requested deployment to a combat zone and the Department
Speaker 1: of Defense was like, absolutely, we keep getting all these
Speaker 1: guys killed. So yeah, like you you, You're more than
Speaker 1: welcome to go to Vietnam Bill, Okay, cool? Um. So
Speaker 1: Bill was sent to a naval support unit in the
Speaker 1: Quaviat River Quang Tree Province, and this was a really
Speaker 1: dangerous posting. Bill's job was to captain a river boat. Um,
Speaker 1: motoring up and down the river. Sounds like he's been
Speaker 1: alive for a hundred years already. Yeah, he's in his twenties. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and he's do If you watched Apocalypse now, yes, you
Speaker 1: know the you know, the like a huge chunk of
Speaker 1: it there on that boat with the machine guns that
Speaker 1: get shot at repeatedly. Yes, that's Bill's job, Like Bill
Speaker 1: does that for real, Um, And it's it's a really
Speaker 1: it's one of the most dangerous gigs you could have
Speaker 1: in Vietnam, like because you're on these like fiberglass boats
Speaker 1: that are basically big moving targets that have no armor
Speaker 1: on them. So it's it's it's a bad it's a
Speaker 1: dangerous gig vibe. Okay, yeah, yeah, whatever else you can
Speaker 1: say about him, and well we're gonna say mostly bad
Speaker 1: things about him. Bill Cooper saw some ship. Um. His
Speaker 1: best friend during training was a guy named Bob Baron,
Speaker 1: and both men made a pact to drink at of
Speaker 1: Scotch and the other man's memory if they died in battle. Uh.
Speaker 1: Bob shipped out first, and he was killed almost immediately
Speaker 1: UM treat for Bill Um. Bill Cooper felt that now
Speaker 1: Vietnam was quote a personal war. They had killed a
Speaker 1: part of me. UM. He claims that once he reached
Speaker 1: the river, his boat engaged the enemy more times than
Speaker 1: any other boat that ever patrolled that river. We kept
Speaker 1: the enemy off the river and I never lost another man.
Speaker 1: I can't tell you if that's true, he's almost certainly exaggerating.
Speaker 1: But he won awards and stuff for gallantry under fire,
Speaker 1: He had a really he did some ship in Vietnam. Um,
Speaker 1: And it's it's probably fair to say that Bill's service
Speaker 1: in Vietnam was the only time where his like imagination
Speaker 1: of who he was as a person came close to
Speaker 1: being the real thing. Um. So, you know, Vietnam is
Speaker 1: in some ways a really positive experience for Bill, but
Speaker 1: he also walks away from it horribly, horribly traumatized. And
Speaker 1: obviously he's a man who grew up in the fifties
Speaker 1: to a father who was incapable of having emotional conversations,
Speaker 1: and Bill grows into an adult with combat trauma and
Speaker 1: no no capacity to deal with it in any in
Speaker 1: any way. Um. But his service earned him a promotion
Speaker 1: to the Office of Naval Intelligence in Hawaii, where he
Speaker 1: worked on the briefing team for Admiral Bernard Clary, commander
Speaker 1: of the U. S. Specific Fleet UH. In order to
Speaker 1: do this job, bill security clearance was upgraded to top
Speaker 1: secret Q sensitive Compartmentalized information Q. Yeah Q I hear yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's where and that's where Q and on comes from
Speaker 1: is like Q was a level of military intelligence classification.
Speaker 1: I thought it was just a spicy continent. No, Bill
Speaker 1: Cooper is clearly cute. No he's not because spoilers, he
Speaker 1: dies violently. But um yeah, so giving Bill Cooper any
Speaker 1: kind of security clearance would prove to be one of
Speaker 1: the worst mistakes the US Navy ever made, a second
Speaker 1: only to its continued failure to finally destroy the city
Speaker 1: of Boston. Bill Cooper was a competency, but giving him
Speaker 1: access to top secret information was a really bad decision,
Speaker 1: because not because Bill was a spy or because he
Speaker 1: would in any way reveal actual secret information, but because
Speaker 1: he was exactly the sort of guy who knew how
Speaker 1: to dine out for the rest of his life on
Speaker 1: the lies that his position with Admiral Clary allowed him
Speaker 1: to tell. He later trying to not act on the
Speaker 1: fact that you said competent Seman, I'm sorry I stopped listening.
Speaker 1: I thought you were going to defend the city of Boston,
Speaker 1: because I know you're from that whole eastern chunk of
Speaker 1: the country. Listen, there is no defending the city of Boston.
Speaker 1: Glad we agree on this, ja There's no I mean
Speaker 1: by all means watch Patriots Day on Netflix. It's in
Speaker 1: the top ten right now. And um, I can't watch
Speaker 1: it because it will give me PTSD PTSB. He will
Speaker 1: give me. It's just Mark Wahlberg. I'm kidding. Um, there's
Speaker 1: no defending the city of Oka full You know what?
Speaker 1: Do you want to get beat up by my uncle?
Speaker 1: So she I don't take what kind of my uncle
Speaker 1: will will kick? And I'm kidding. My uncle is a grifter.
Speaker 1: He's pretending to be on disability, but he's not. Well,
Speaker 1: what's that that's my rochette that I'm holding can take?
Speaker 1: I'm in a challenge. Are salutes at home? To figure
Speaker 1: out who Jamie's uncle is? A report him to? I mean,
Speaker 1: talk about it, guys. We're talking about good liars. Someone
Speaker 1: talk to my uncle. He's it's not Jamie's uncle. Oh
Speaker 1: is it time for that already? Transition I've ever done?
Speaker 1: I'm so sorry, but also fun the Boston Salt. You
Speaker 1: know you want to know who won't tell on you
Speaker 1: for committing disability fraud? The products and services that support
Speaker 1: this podcast? Oh thank god. My family really can't handle
Speaker 1: another situation like this. We're back. We're back, my family.
Speaker 1: The last time my family went to court, we all
Speaker 1: had to testify that my grandma had thrown a TV
Speaker 1: at my grandpa. So don't talk about the city of Boston.
Speaker 1: A very Boston story. Watch your grandma throw roku at
Speaker 1: your grandpa. See how you like it, Oh, Jesus. So
Speaker 1: Bill gets this job working for the admiral, and he
Speaker 1: gets top secret security clearance about it, and he uses
Speaker 1: the fact that he had this gig for the rest
Speaker 1: of his life to kind of make the lies that
Speaker 1: he will later tell about the US government, um to
Speaker 1: give them like an air of truth um. As he
Speaker 1: later wrote, quote, I began to see things at first
Speaker 1: that made no sense to me. President Nixon was on
Speaker 1: television giving a speech, an incredible speech, saying that we
Speaker 1: were conducting no bombing raids in North Vietnam, Cambodia, and Lao.
Speaker 1: Five minutes later, intelligence came into the office with k
Speaker 1: a figures of sorties over exactly the targets. Nixon said,
Speaker 1: the Americans weren't bombing. I would shake my head and
Speaker 1: wonder what in the world was going on here? That
Speaker 1: wasn't right. I never said anything at time, most of
Speaker 1: us never did. I never imagined the people in charge
Speaker 1: of the country would light of the people like that.
Speaker 1: I was raised to think that this was impossible. Now
Speaker 1: that part may or may not have been true. The
Speaker 1: bombing raids he's talking about happened, but it was also
Speaker 1: common knowledge by the time he actually wrote about them.
Speaker 1: His biographer Mark Jacobson seems to believe in this part
Speaker 1: and think that it was kind of a turning moment
Speaker 1: for Bill where he starts to distrust the government in
Speaker 1: a real way. Um. But once his career is a
Speaker 1: conspiracy theorist got going, Bill started focusing on other things
Speaker 1: he'd seen in the Admiral's file cabinet. First and foremost
Speaker 1: was evidence that President Kennedy had been assassinated by his
Speaker 1: own Secret Service agent, William Greer. This was a remarkable feat. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: because number one it was Bernie Sanders and number two
Speaker 1: Greer was driving JFK's Limo at the point the president
Speaker 1: was shot. And Bill hand this like weird conspiracy theory
Speaker 1: of like a shellfish tox and pellet gun that was
Speaker 1: built into the body if I think an umbrella. Um.
Speaker 1: But for the rest of his life, when Bill would
Speaker 1: be like talking about government conspiracies, he'd say like I
Speaker 1: saw the evidence of it and the Admiral's fire in cabinet,
Speaker 1: and like he would say that about fucking everything sounds
Speaker 1: like a game of clue. So this job is very
Speaker 1: fortunate for Bill Cooper because he did have a security
Speaker 1: clearance at one point, and he basically it would allow
Speaker 1: him to lie for the rest of his life about
Speaker 1: having seen evidence of like evil government plots. That kind
Speaker 1: of reminds me of like when I guess, I guess
Speaker 1: in context to my life, when someone like works on
Speaker 1: a TV show that's good, but they do nothing but that,
Speaker 1: then they associate themselves with that TV show for the
Speaker 1: rest of their lives. Yeah. So yeah, Bill Cooper like
Speaker 1: kind of for for uh, sort of an example of
Speaker 1: the way Bill would later frame his relatively brief period
Speaker 1: of time working as basically the Admiral Secretary. Um, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna quote from a speech he gave at Hollywood High
Speaker 1: School in nineteen nine. Yeah, it's weird. It's weird that
Speaker 1: that got to happen. Huh every time it sounds like
Speaker 1: a fake place. Right away, I knew I was seeing
Speaker 1: what I was not supposed to see. Material never intended
Speaker 1: for my eyes. The grits were there what had been
Speaker 1: covered up the trees in this betrayal, I looked right
Speaker 1: into the heart of it. Everything about the war was
Speaker 1: in there, the story behind the alleged attack by the
Speaker 1: Vietnamese navy, and the gulf of talking, the death counts,
Speaker 1: the Americans dealing with corrupt South Vietnamese government. That's what
Speaker 1: I learned in Vietnam. I thought I was fighting for
Speaker 1: my country, and I found it I was really fighting
Speaker 1: for big business, the coming one world government, Cooper told
Speaker 1: the audience. It was a devastating realization. This is from
Speaker 1: his biography Pale Horse Writer. So Bill continued to do
Speaker 1: his job in the Navy, but when the time came
Speaker 1: up to either sign up for four more years or leave,
Speaker 1: he opted to quit this time. Soon Bill was back
Speaker 1: in the mainland United States without a job for the
Speaker 1: first time in his adult life. And he'd kind of
Speaker 1: grown up obsessed with the idea of like living you know,
Speaker 1: like kind of a stereotypical Americana life, you know, living
Speaker 1: in like a small town with like a close knit community. Um,
Speaker 1: and that was when he gets back to the US.
Speaker 1: He winds up and like the California, like big cities
Speaker 1: in California, like the fucking Bay Area and stuff, and
Speaker 1: he's like, this is so different than like what life
Speaker 1: is supposed to be like in America. Something must have
Speaker 1: gone horribly wrong. And people who knew Bill as a
Speaker 1: kid will point out, like, Bill never knew the like
Speaker 1: quote unquote like real America that he would spend the
Speaker 1: rest of his life obsessed with living he like lived
Speaker 1: on military basis. He never knew. It was just like
Speaker 1: a projection of like the media he was consuming, exactly exactly,
Speaker 1: like he grew up having this kind of miserable childhood
Speaker 1: and longing for, you know, the kind of America he
Speaker 1: saw on the television, which never really existed anywhere. Um yeah,
Speaker 1: so uh yeah. Bill winds up in the Bay Area.
Speaker 1: He gets a job as a diving instructor, He buys
Speaker 1: a motorcycle, and he attempts to lead a normal life.
Speaker 1: Um but, as Bill would later claim, his sense of
Speaker 1: guilt and outrage over the things he'd learned to overpower
Speaker 1: would overpower him. So he like he later claims that
Speaker 1: basically he's he leaves the military with the knowledge of
Speaker 1: all these horrible secrets, you know, these these evil programs
Speaker 1: that the government is instituting to a filing. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: this evil filing cabinet full of secret government plans to
Speaker 1: suborn the liberty of the American people and destroy freedom. Um.
Speaker 1: And so he decides to start like going after he claims,
Speaker 1: um that he goes to a reporter and like starts
Speaker 1: giving him the information that he's gotten. Um. And he's
Speaker 1: trying to like basically do what Woodward and Bernstein you know, did,
Speaker 1: and be like a deep throat to them to like
Speaker 1: reveal all these horrible government conspiracies. Um. And when he's
Speaker 1: midway through this process, he's tracked down and he's almost
Speaker 1: murdered by government men. Now. Bill claims that this happened
Speaker 1: while he was on his motorcycle driving on Skyline Boulevard.
Speaker 1: A black Cadillac limousine pulled up behind him and ran
Speaker 1: him off the road. Bill would later write, quote, two
Speaker 1: men got out and climbed down to where I lay,
Speaker 1: covered in blood. One bent down and felt for my
Speaker 1: carotid pulse. The other asked if I was dead. The
Speaker 1: nearest man said no, but he will be. The other
Speaker 1: applied good. Then we don't have to do anything. Now.
Speaker 1: I felt that lie could have used a second draft. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think he to use an editor on that one.
Speaker 1: Um so. Bill claims he recovered, only to be run
Speaker 1: down a month later by the same Cadillac, and this
Speaker 1: time the assassination was closer to his success. They damaged
Speaker 1: his right leg badly enough that it had to be
Speaker 1: amputated above the knee. Car yeah, same car, same limousine.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah. And while he was in the hospital recuperating,
Speaker 1: Bill claims the same government men came to visit him again.
Speaker 1: They only wanted to know if I would shut up
Speaker 1: or if the next time should be final. I told
Speaker 1: them that I would be a very good little boy
Speaker 1: and that they needn't worry about me anymore. Obviously, these
Speaker 1: are all lies. Bill's motorcycle accident had a completely mundane explanation.
Speaker 1: He lost control of his bike and almost died horribly
Speaker 1: as a result of the fact that he was a
Speaker 1: bad motorcycle driver. Um yeah. And this is like what
Speaker 1: his family like. His dad when this got brought up
Speaker 1: to him, his dad was like, what the funk is
Speaker 1: he talking about? It wasn't the government, like he was.
Speaker 1: He fucked up and crashed his motorcycle, and like I
Speaker 1: had to pay for his medical bills because he would
Speaker 1: have been bankrupted otherwise. Um. And this was part of
Speaker 1: why Bill light about this was because his relationship with
Speaker 1: his dad was strained and he couldn't like admit that
Speaker 1: he needed his family's money for a medical issue, especially
Speaker 1: when he'd caused himself. So it was the government. Yeah, um, yeah,
Speaker 1: I love I love his little soft core line about
Speaker 1: I'm going to be a good little boy. What you do? Yeah,
Speaker 1: that is that is sexy, objectively sexy. Yeah, little Jackie
Speaker 1: in I'll be a good little boy. Jamie for blowing
Speaker 1: your mind with my amazing ideas. I think you need
Speaker 1: to get off this skype call right now and start writing. Yes,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, I have a final draft filed to take
Speaker 1: And that was That was the last time any of
Speaker 1: us ever talked to Jamie. She was too big a
Speaker 1: star after making her Bill Cooper pornography video of brain
Speaker 1: failure four pages into I'll be uh So. The mid
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies and early nineteen eighties were a real rough
Speaker 1: period for Bill. Um. He had a fucking shipload of PTSD.
Speaker 1: He was missing most of a leg, like he's in
Speaker 1: a bad place. The seventies aren't a good time for Bill.
Speaker 1: Um and medical science didn't really formally recognize post traumatic
Speaker 1: stress disorder is the thing until it was added to
Speaker 1: the d s M in like nineteen eighty. Um So
Speaker 1: for most of the time that Bill was struggling with it, um,
Speaker 1: the term was used as post Vietnam syndrome when like
Speaker 1: doctors believed it was a problem at all. Um And
Speaker 1: in the US in the nineteen seventies, it wasn't like
Speaker 1: a very welcome place to admit you were struggling with
Speaker 1: mental health issues related to your military services. Like Bill
Speaker 1: wasn't didn't talk about this ship to anyone for quite
Speaker 1: a while. Um, he's just burying his trauma with the
Speaker 1: what's certainly even more PTSD from a horrible motorcycle accident.
Speaker 1: He he's he's a damaged boy. Um And I I'm
Speaker 1: saying that in the colledge that that should not at all,
Speaker 1: um mitigate what comes next, because we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about his incredibly long history of profound spousal abuse. Uh. So,
Speaker 1: we don't know how many women that Bill Cooper married
Speaker 1: in the seventies. Um. What, Yeah, we have no idea.
Speaker 1: It's a lot. It's too many women. So how can
Speaker 1: that be true? How can you? Yeah, because he was
Speaker 1: a famous liar. Oh yeah, maybe making up what well? No, no, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: he we we know he had a number of them.
Speaker 1: It's just that we don't know how many of them
Speaker 1: there were because he lied about to all of them
Speaker 1: about the others and wouldn't acknowledge them. And yeah, we'll
Speaker 1: talk about it'll this will make more sense than a
Speaker 1: little bit um, his biographer writes, quote and his voluminous
Speaker 1: FBI file. Cooper's father, Jack, is quoted as saying that
Speaker 1: his son had been married or engaged at least nine times.
Speaker 1: According to Jack, Bill was still in high school when
Speaker 1: he got engaged to a seventeen year old Japanese girl.
Speaker 1: The elder Cooper had to break it up. A year later,
Speaker 1: living on Tinker Air Force Base near Oklahoma City, Cooper
Speaker 1: again got engaged to another young Asian woman. Now Bill's
Speaker 1: marriages weren't kept secret to protect his exes or whatever
Speaker 1: kind of super cool spy explanation he probably would have
Speaker 1: preferred people believe. The ugly reality is that, especially as
Speaker 1: an adult after his military service, Bill was wildly unstable
Speaker 1: and violent, and living with him was a waking nightmare
Speaker 1: for most of the women that he married. UM. He
Speaker 1: kept his prior relationships hidden because nobody would want to
Speaker 1: marry a guy with Bill's history. UM. In nineteen seventy six,
Speaker 1: he got hitched to Jenny's Pell Um, who told Bill's
Speaker 1: biographer later that I was number four. I think so again.
Speaker 1: Nobody has a real clear idea, even his wives, of
Speaker 1: like how many people he married. UM, but he gets
Speaker 1: married a shipload uh quote. I had no idea what
Speaker 1: I was getting into. One minute he'd be the sweetest,
Speaker 1: warmest guy. Then he'd changed start yelling at me for
Speaker 1: no reason. It was like living with Dr Jacklin Mr. Hyde.
Speaker 1: We were living in Union City, near Hayward. Bill was
Speaker 1: working in Oakland at the diving school. He'd get up
Speaker 1: at six to drive to work. I tried so hard
Speaker 1: to be a good wife. Every day. I had clean,
Speaker 1: make dinner for him. I said a nice table waiting
Speaker 1: for him to come home. In the beginning, he'd rush
Speaker 1: home and give me a kiss, bring flowers. It was great.
Speaker 1: Then he got home later and later it could be
Speaker 1: after ten or midnight. Sometimes he didn't come home at all.
Speaker 1: I be beside myself, trying to figure out if he
Speaker 1: was all right. It was really awful. I'd sit there
Speaker 1: at the dinner table, looking at the cold food and
Speaker 1: crying my eyes out. When he did come back, he'd
Speaker 1: say he was tired and go straight to bed. I
Speaker 1: didn't understand what was happening. I thought it was all
Speaker 1: my fault. And then there's a number of possibilities about
Speaker 1: like what Bill was doing at the time. He very
Speaker 1: well may have been cheating. Probably was cheating because he
Speaker 1: was constantly had a carousel of women kind of going um.
Speaker 1: He also had like a bunch of really unsuccessful business ventures.
Speaker 1: He had an art gallery that failed, So maybe his
Speaker 1: fucked up career was on his mind. Yeah, terrible, it's bad.
Speaker 1: And he was also he was also an alcoholic and
Speaker 1: increasingly like an increasingly like vicious drunk during this period
Speaker 1: of time. So he was up probably out drinking a
Speaker 1: lot of the time. And Janice described him as a
Speaker 1: monster when he was drinking. Quote, he'd get a use
Speaker 1: of mentally and after a while physically. I tried to
Speaker 1: make excuses for him. The war, his leg. He always
Speaker 1: told me the men in the car would come back
Speaker 1: to finish the job. One day he hit me gave
Speaker 1: me a bloody nose, knocked me out. I called the hotline.
Speaker 1: They told me to get out of there. Tony was
Speaker 1: just a little baby. Then the next day we drove
Speaker 1: built to work and just kept going. We moved in
Speaker 1: with my parents in Los Altos. I only saw him
Speaker 1: one more time after that, when he drove up to
Speaker 1: get his stuff. I thought he might stay a moment
Speaker 1: talk to his son, but he just got the things
Speaker 1: and left. And Bill we don't actually know many kids
Speaker 1: Bill had, either, but they all kind of have the
Speaker 1: same story as this one, where like he he'll have
Speaker 1: a couple of kids or a kid with one of
Speaker 1: these women and then he will be a violent monster
Speaker 1: and she will flee with the kid and Bill never
Speaker 1: tries to reach out again. Um. God, miserable. It's not good,
Speaker 1: it's not great. It's not a good way to be
Speaker 1: a person. Um. And it is like you look at
Speaker 1: Bill's history and again, not to mitigate the profound spousal abuse,
Speaker 1: but it's like, yeah, hard to imagine how this guy
Speaker 1: grows up good at being in a relation ship. Yeah,
Speaker 1: impossible for him to be good in relationships. I just,
Speaker 1: oh God, I hate that. I hate that there's so
Speaker 1: many victims of that cheese. Yeah, a ton of victims.
Speaker 1: Janice's story is probably very similar to a number of bills,
Speaker 1: unknown number of wives. Uh. It's important to note that
Speaker 1: the monster Bill could take quite a while to come out,
Speaker 1: and he was very good at charming women um in
Speaker 1: the meantime, As the story of his ex wife Sally illustrates.
Speaker 1: Bill and I started talking. I liked him, but he
Speaker 1: was smoking. I told him, smoke really bothered me. I'm allergic.
Speaker 1: He looked me right in the eyes, said all right,
Speaker 1: and crushed his cigarette into the ashtray. He said he'd
Speaker 1: been smoking since he was fourteen, a couple of packs
Speaker 1: a day, But for me, he was going to quit.
Speaker 1: I asked him when he pointed to the cigarette in
Speaker 1: the tray and said, I already did. He never smoked
Speaker 1: another cigarette as long as I knew him. We started dancing.
Speaker 1: He had this kind of old world formality about him,
Speaker 1: that military thing. I suppose. He was a very graceful dancer,
Speaker 1: very light on his feet for a big guy. It
Speaker 1: wasn't until later that I realized he had an artificial leg.
Speaker 1: You would never have guessed it. Plus he made me laugh.
Speaker 1: He was Zany, always acting out these incredible stories. He
Speaker 1: did these funny impressions. I love to hear him talk.
Speaker 1: It didn't make a difference what the topic was. He
Speaker 1: knew everything about it. He had this tone in his voice.
Speaker 1: It just draws you in. You can hear it on
Speaker 1: the radio. He was perfect for that. We got married
Speaker 1: on Catalina on the steps of the Wriggly Mansion. The
Speaker 1: party was at l Galleon. Bill planned the whole thing,
Speaker 1: told the band what to play. It was great, but
Speaker 1: then he started drinking and picking fights. I guess that
Speaker 1: should have been a sign. My girlfriend said I was
Speaker 1: crazy to marry him, but I really loved him. So yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not great. It's not and it's I'm trying it
Speaker 1: just in kind of trying to classify Bill. I don't
Speaker 1: know that. I don't know that he's what you'd call
Speaker 1: a predator because I don't think I don't think he
Speaker 1: had a whole lot of control over what he was doing.
Speaker 1: I think he was a pretty broken person. But he
Speaker 1: also didn't go to like extreme measures to win back
Speaker 1: the women who left him, like when he when he
Speaker 1: violently chased them away. He would just kind of pretend
Speaker 1: they never existed, move on to the next person. I
Speaker 1: mean that's still like pretty clear. I mean it's hard
Speaker 1: a ball. Yeah, yeah, definitely an abuser. But I don't
Speaker 1: he's not like I don't think he's like seeking women
Speaker 1: out and like trying to psychologically fuck them out. Like,
Speaker 1: I don't think there's any kind of like planning in it.
Speaker 1: I think Bill is one of these people who has
Speaker 1: like violent mood swings and no control over them and
Speaker 1: no desire to really control them. Yes, deeply selfish, Yes, yes, yes, absolutely,
Speaker 1: and just yeah that's that's that's the feeling you get
Speaker 1: from him. His mood swings seemed to come more or
Speaker 1: less at random, um, and probably was a mix of
Speaker 1: a number of things. Um. He was also like working
Speaker 1: a pretty unsatisfying life at this time, a lot series
Speaker 1: of horrible dead end jobs, repeated failed business games, and
Speaker 1: you get the feeling he was taking that out on
Speaker 1: his family as well. Um, But he also took it
Speaker 1: out on everyone around him. And one of these dead
Speaker 1: end jobs, Bill got into an argument with his boss
Speaker 1: and punched through a plate glass window to try and
Speaker 1: strangle him. Um. So he is not a not a
Speaker 1: not a planner. That this point, he really is just
Speaker 1: by the seat of his pants at every turn. Yeah,
Speaker 1: punching through a plate glass window is not something you
Speaker 1: do if you're thinking a lot about your violence. So
Speaker 1: he was let go from that job. And obviously money
Speaker 1: was always tight because Bill repeatedly got fired from jobs
Speaker 1: for being a violent piece of shit. Um. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: also he couldn't stop from getting the women that he
Speaker 1: was with pregnant. So we got Sally pregnant, like, you know,
Speaker 1: pretty much as soon as they get married, their daughter, Yeah,
Speaker 1: competent salmon um their daughter Jessica again, like, we don't
Speaker 1: know how many kids he had um. Yeah. Sally later
Speaker 1: recalled quote, he was the most loving, attentive dad. He'd
Speaker 1: play with Jessica for hours. He seemed so happy, but
Speaker 1: then just like that, he'd go off start yelling. I
Speaker 1: blamed it on the drinking, but it was more than that.
Speaker 1: It was like he became possessed, not in control of himself.
Speaker 1: I tins up every time he came into the room.
Speaker 1: One night, when Jessica was little, we went to chuck
Speaker 1: e cheeses. Bill was drinking. He got abusive, calling me.
Speaker 1: I mean, that is something that happens at Chucky Cheese.
Speaker 1: I mean, no, no, what no one's going to be sober?
Speaker 1: I would I would be more worried about No. Wait,
Speaker 1: I don't want to make that reference. Um, that's bad. Still,
Speaker 1: how's birthday carries at Chuck E Cheese? Is no one
Speaker 1: is sober and no one is getting along? Yeah? No,
Speaker 1: no one should get along. I don't know. I don't
Speaker 1: want to. This story goes in a bad place, so
Speaker 1: I don't want to make the drinking jokes about Chuck
Speaker 1: E Cheese. Is that normally? Like are a real positive
Speaker 1: part of my life. I loved I love talking about
Speaker 1: what a bad place Chuck E Cheeses is. But this,
Speaker 1: this story is real dark. This is one of the
Speaker 1: worst Chuck E Cheese stories I've ever heard. And that's
Speaker 1: saying something. Yeah, Bill was drinking. He got really abusive,
Speaker 1: calling me names. I told him I'd had enough to
Speaker 1: stop the car, let us out. I was holding Jess
Speaker 1: in my lap. We didn't deal with seatbelts like today.
Speaker 1: I opened the door to go when Bill turned and
Speaker 1: pushed me and Jess out of the car with his
Speaker 1: artificial leg. It was like getting hit by a four
Speaker 1: by four. We went flying. I was okay, but then
Speaker 1: I looked in Jess's tiny face was all cut up.
Speaker 1: So he keeps a wife and infant daughter out of
Speaker 1: a moving vehicle after getting drunk at Chuck E Cheese?
Speaker 1: Is um, Jesus Christ, why they have a to drink
Speaker 1: cap now? First of its Bill Cooper. That's the Bill
Speaker 1: Cooper rule of Chuck E Cheesus. That is so that
Speaker 1: is very upsetting and very It's not the first time
Speaker 1: that has happened at a Chuck E Cheese, not the
Speaker 1: fiftieth time that's happened at a Chuck E Cheese. No,
Speaker 1: for reasons that are probably too depressing to think about.
Speaker 1: Sally didn't leave for good after that. She set up
Speaker 1: a meeting between her Bill and their pastor to try
Speaker 1: to talk things out, and the subject of the conversation
Speaker 1: quickly turned to Vietnam and Bill. As soon as like,
Speaker 1: the pastor kind of started asking him questions about his service,
Speaker 1: Bill got violently angry. He started screaming and became so
Speaker 1: incensed that Sally's pastor had to call the v A
Speaker 1: to come and pick him up. Um, So the couple
Speaker 1: splits in like nineteen eighty two, and during this time
Speaker 1: Bill is going to Long Beach College and trying to
Speaker 1: make use of his g I bill, and he spends
Speaker 1: a lot of time. They're like, this is kind of
Speaker 1: the first time in the early eighties after his his
Speaker 1: this marriage X breaks apart where he starts to kind
Speaker 1: of deal with his PTSD UM by writing about it.
Speaker 1: So he does like essays and stuff about um what
Speaker 1: like he and other veterans are kind of experiencing one
Speaker 1: of his essays, and most people were doing at that time.
Speaker 1: He does to an extent try to process his trauma.
Speaker 1: He writes an essay titled Vietnam Are we still suffering Casualties?
Speaker 1: Ten years later? Um? And in it he wrote quote
Speaker 1: on the campus of Long Beach City College. Aspector reaps
Speaker 1: its harvest ghastly. It stalks the future of those who
Speaker 1: know it's past, any of us who have stood against
Speaker 1: it and survived. The demon strikes down dreams, educations, and
Speaker 1: even minds. It is insidious in nature and rides upon
Speaker 1: an undercurrent of memories, ignorance, and fear. It is not
Speaker 1: dead as many believe, nor is it a figment of
Speaker 1: the imagination. It is as real, as real as the
Speaker 1: earth we walk upon. He's writing about his PTSD, and
Speaker 1: he's writing pretty well about it actually, like Bill's not
Speaker 1: a bad writer, um and he uh no, and he
Speaker 1: One of the interesting things that happens during this time
Speaker 1: is he meets a young Vietnamese refugee at Long Beach
Speaker 1: College and gets to like interview her, and he has
Speaker 1: this realization that like when he was the way he
Speaker 1: later described as like he realized that if he'd encountered
Speaker 1: this woman when she was a young girl in Vietnam,
Speaker 1: he probably would have shot her. And this like really fucks,
Speaker 1: like Bills, you can't over exaggerate how much Vietnam fox
Speaker 1: this man up. Yeah, which is which is you know,
Speaker 1: like a story ful lot of people, Yeah, it's yeah,
Speaker 1: and you know, to be fair, a lot of people
Speaker 1: who don't kick their wife and infant child out of
Speaker 1: a moving car, so like certainty that you will then
Speaker 1: do that. Um yeah, but yeah, it's a rough like
Speaker 1: Bill is. And this will become really appropriate because of
Speaker 1: the man he grows into. Bill is like the fucking
Speaker 1: poster child for how badly American imperialism fox up young men,
Speaker 1: the young men who are two of like, how American
Speaker 1: imperialism sucks you up? How like PTSD fucks you up?
Speaker 1: How like the expectation based on like media and like
Speaker 1: expectations versus reality fuck you up. There's no there's no
Speaker 1: limit on ways that this guy's fucked up. Case study
Speaker 1: a lot of lessons in the story of Bill Cooper.
Speaker 1: So Bill gets married again in nineteen eighties six, and
Speaker 1: that worked out about as well as you'd expect. By
Speaker 1: the tail end of the Reagan years, he had nearly
Speaker 1: two basketball teams have failed marriages in their rear window,
Speaker 1: a head full of bad memories and no real prospect
Speaker 1: for worked. The future looked bleak. Yeah, um, so the
Speaker 1: future looked bleak for Bill. But then in nineteen Jamie
Speaker 1: there came a single shaft of brilliant sunlight. Bill Cooper
Speaker 1: discovered the Internet. No, I know, I know, the worst
Speaker 1: thing that could have happened to this confirmation of the
Speaker 1: whole thought he's ever had in his life. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's it's unfortunate that things about that way. Yeah he was.
Speaker 1: Bill Cooper was one of the very first people on
Speaker 1: the Internet. Yeah, like, one of the very first human
Speaker 1: beings to really get into it. Um, and the late
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties Internet was a real different beast than the
Speaker 1: modern one. There was nothing that really worked like social media,
Speaker 1: but there were b b s s, which were essentially forums.
Speaker 1: So if you remember what forums were, you can if
Speaker 1: you can think back to a time before Facebook. Bill's
Speaker 1: kind of into that sort of thing, um, and he
Speaker 1: quickly discovers parannet, which was dedicated to the paranormal, particularly
Speaker 1: UFOs And yeah, so Bill gets super fucking into UFOs
Speaker 1: um and into this community of like UFO nerds and
Speaker 1: like really the first online community of UFO nerds that exists. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is such early Internet ship. It's like every annoying
Speaker 1: couple in their forties met on an Internet forum. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just exactly. Yeah, though legally as well, um, that's in
Speaker 1: the constitution. So Mark Jacobson suggests that flying saucers and
Speaker 1: sort of like belief in UFOs was quote the first
Speaker 1: populist truth or issue, the first time the authorities denied
Speaker 1: something that a large percentage of the population believed to
Speaker 1: be true. And this is probably accurate in a culture
Speaker 1: of conspiracy, scholar Michael Barkon notes, quote, within a few
Speaker 1: months of the first modern claim of a flying saucers
Speaker 1: siting in nineteen forty seven poles showed that of the
Speaker 1: population had heard of them. By nineteen sixty six, that
Speaker 1: figure had risen to ninety six percent, and more importantly,
Speaker 1: forty six percent of all Americans believed UFOs actually existed.
Speaker 1: More than a decade later, in nineteen seventy eight, thirty
Speaker 1: percent of college graduates believe they existed. At that time,
Speaker 1: the number of Americans who believed UFOs were real reached
Speaker 1: its highest level fifty seven percent. Now Wow, by nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety the number of UFO true believers had actually fallen
Speaker 1: to about forty seven percent, and it was still at
Speaker 1: around that level six years later. And this suggests that
Speaker 1: the Internet so much allow for the spread of a
Speaker 1: belief in UFOs, as it did help to make those
Speaker 1: beliefs kind of more durable by building communities for people
Speaker 1: like build to explore and expand on existing theories. And
Speaker 1: this allowed for very different kinds of conspiracy theories to merge.
Speaker 1: For example, there's always been stories about an alien crash
Speaker 1: landing in Roswell since like nineteen seven UM, and there'd
Speaker 1: also been conspiracy theories theorists who believe that JFK had
Speaker 1: been murdered by someone besides the widely accepted culprit, who is,
Speaker 1: of course Bernard Sanders accomplished me yeah. Um. And then
Speaker 1: starting in the mid nineteen eighties, there was Majestic twelve,
Speaker 1: and in brief, Majestic twelve conspiracy theory purported to be
Speaker 1: a set of briefing documents for the incoming newly elected
Speaker 1: president and forming him of the existence of a secret
Speaker 1: organization of the world's dozen most powerful people. M J
Speaker 1: twelve is like the first hidden global government conspiracy theory um,
Speaker 1: and it was formed in the wake of the Roswell
Speaker 1: land Like this, this hidden global government was supposedly had
Speaker 1: been formed in the wake of the Roswell landings to
Speaker 1: deal with the newfound existence of aliens. Now, the initial
Speaker 1: claims of the m J twelve conspiracy theory were rather basic,
Speaker 1: because this document actually was only like, I think, a
Speaker 1: dozen pages or something. But once m J twelve hit
Speaker 1: the Internet in the late nineteen eighties, a funny thing
Speaker 1: started to happen. Conspiracy theorists began grafting their pet conspiracy
Speaker 1: theories onto m J twelve. Writing in the jfk assassination
Speaker 1: and the Tonk and Gulf incident, which you know was
Speaker 1: the spark behind the Vietnam War and a bunch of
Speaker 1: other shady stuff into the machinations of the Majestic Twelve. Now.
Speaker 1: The most successful of these conspiracy fan fiction authors was
Speaker 1: a fellow named John Lear, the son of a guy
Speaker 1: of the guy who created the Leir Jet. Lear's theory
Speaker 1: was that the leaders of the US had made a
Speaker 1: devil's bargain with aliens back in the nineteen sixties to
Speaker 1: hand over American citizens and cattle to them for mutilation
Speaker 1: and experimentation in exchange for technology. But the aliens, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is this is the X files, right, like this
Speaker 1: is actually like is literally what the like John Lear,
Speaker 1: And then the work that Bill Cooper does with Lear
Speaker 1: is the inspiration for all of the X Files. Clearwater
Speaker 1: Revival playing in the background of this Devil's deal with
Speaker 1: the Aliens is good. I feel like I'm there. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: so you know, Lear, Lear in Cooper, once they got together,
Speaker 1: would kind of argue that actually, the Majestic twelve um
Speaker 1: were had we're kind of getting like grifted by the aliens,
Speaker 1: that like the technology they were getting wasn't very good
Speaker 1: and the aliens were way more brutal with their abductions
Speaker 1: than they were supposed to be um, and so like
Speaker 1: the conspiracy evolves under Lear into like claiming that the
Speaker 1: Allies in the military had balked at this this like
Speaker 1: agreement with the Aliens, and that was what led to
Speaker 1: the creation of the Strategic Defension Initiative Reagan's Star Wars
Speaker 1: Missile program. Is. What's happening is the Internet is making
Speaker 1: conspiracy theories had largely been sort of spread by kind
Speaker 1: of you know, there'd be some underground newsletters and stuff,
Speaker 1: but also people just kind of spread these these fake
Speaker 1: documents that we're purporting to be like the and this
Speaker 1: is like throughout the eighties, these documents that were claimed
Speaker 1: to be like, you know, evidence of one conspiracy or another.
Speaker 1: And the Internet brings all starts to bring all this
Speaker 1: ship together, so like we can take your take your
Speaker 1: cork and take it from your corkboard and really start
Speaker 1: to compare some ideas. Yeah, yeah, um, I'm gonna quote
Speaker 1: from the book A Culture of Conspiracy on sort of
Speaker 1: what happened like the impact of of John Lear's uh,
Speaker 1: what's called the Leer statement, which is like his personal
Speaker 1: theory about MJ twelve. The Leer Statement is brief, only
Speaker 1: seven printed pages, but dizzying in its claims. It elevates
Speaker 1: m J twelve to a conspiratorial position nowhere hinted at
Speaker 1: in the original papers themselves, and implies a web of
Speaker 1: subsidiary conspiracies to silence the news media with that in
Speaker 1: the academic community, and to must lead the UFL community
Speaker 1: as well. According to leer upologist William Moore, the figure
Speaker 1: most identified with the MJL twelve papers was probably himself
Speaker 1: a disinformation agent in the higher of MJ twelve. So
Speaker 1: you also start to see like what's essentially like this
Speaker 1: big over conspiracy that's being created. Like it's not just
Speaker 1: it's not just aliens exist, It's not just there's a
Speaker 1: secret world government. It's not just JFK was killed, you know,
Speaker 1: um by the CIA or whoever. It's like all of
Speaker 1: these things are part of this massive, branching, impossibly influential conspiracy.
Speaker 1: What you're seeing is the precursor for the kind of
Speaker 1: conspiracy that qan On is right, Like this is when
Speaker 1: that first starts happening, and Bill Cooper is one of
Speaker 1: the guys on the ground making it happen. He's one
Speaker 1: of the most influential people in this early little online community. UM.
Speaker 1: And you know, Bill had kind of just started by
Speaker 1: sharing tales of of aliens and stuff in paranet um,
Speaker 1: but he very quickly graduated into like writing about Lear's
Speaker 1: work and adding conspiracies to it. And Lear and Cooper
Speaker 1: soon like become friends and start talking and start working
Speaker 1: together on like expanding kind of people's idea of what
Speaker 1: a conspiracy could be. UM. And here's how it'll be
Speaker 1: less so in just a second. Cooper's biographer actually interviewed
Speaker 1: Lear um pretty recently. Uh, and Lear was very old
Speaker 1: at the time. But here's how Leir described the two
Speaker 1: men's early friendship. I heard there was this guy on
Speaker 1: parannet who was supporting what I said, Bill Cooper. He
Speaker 1: was writing into the bulletin board saying he'd worked in
Speaker 1: the Office of Naval Intelligence and see this incredible amount
Speaker 1: of top secret material. And he could vouch for word
Speaker 1: for word fifty percent of what I said. Lear and
Speaker 1: Cooper spent a lot of time together through nineteen and
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety. I liked him from the beginning. Lear recalled
Speaker 1: he was smart, and he had a good sense of
Speaker 1: humor and amazing memory. He also could drink me under
Speaker 1: the table, which wasn't so easy to do back then.
Speaker 1: When I saw him put away a fifth of Scotch
Speaker 1: before lunchtime, I knew he was my kind of guy.
Speaker 1: Then he'd be off on something else, that was Bill.
Speaker 1: One minute, he'd be wrapping himself in the flag, standing
Speaker 1: up and reciting parts of the Constitution verbatim. Then he'd
Speaker 1: be like a beat nick at a jazz club. Hey daddy, oh,
Speaker 1: hey daddy Oh. He might have pulled a gun on
Speaker 1: me three or four times. Then again I pulled a
Speaker 1: gun on him too. Okay, So just to summarize, he's like,
Speaker 1: I knew this guy. We were going to be friends
Speaker 1: when I found out he was very sick in his head,
Speaker 1: that there was a little hope that he was going
Speaker 1: to seek out help or get any support from someone
Speaker 1: in his life. I was all about this, and I
Speaker 1: thought it was really cool because I shared these same issues,
Speaker 1: because I have the same problem. We both had violent
Speaker 1: mood swings and pulled firearms on each other regularly. That's
Speaker 1: what we have interested in addressing this. No, therefore, were
Speaker 1: going to be good friends soon. Bill Cooper developed his
Speaker 1: own hypothesis based off of Lear's theory about global elites
Speaker 1: trading human souls for alien technology and excited online rants.
Speaker 1: Bill would claim to have access to top secret information
Speaker 1: that at least sixteen alien craft had crashed and been
Speaker 1: found by the US government UH aliens had been recovered dead,
Speaker 1: and one had been recovered alive, but was always very
Speaker 1: specific in these kind of posts. According to Mark Jacobson quote,
Speaker 1: Cooper's rewrite of Lear's hypothesis added new items like a
Speaker 1: particle beam weapon and machinery for cloning and synthetic genetic
Speaker 1: duplication of humans to the shopping list of Lear's and
Speaker 1: holy tech for flesh deal. He also tweaked the timeline
Speaker 1: of government alien interaction. Now there were three separate meetings,
Speaker 1: the most significant being the signing of the formal agreement,
Speaker 1: which took place on February tenth, nineteen fifty four, and
Speaker 1: Murrock now Edwards Air Force Base near Lancaster, California. The
Speaker 1: historic event had been planned in advance and the details
Speaker 1: of the treaty had been agreed upon Cooper rights in
Speaker 1: the secret government. President Eisenhower had been vacationing nearby Palm
Speaker 1: Springs when he was spirited away to the base on
Speaker 1: the pretext that he had an appointment with his dentist
Speaker 1: who happened to be Dr tim tote Leary, father of
Speaker 1: the LSD guru Timothy Leary, which of course would make
Speaker 1: it into later conspiracy theories, but is true. Uh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: So it's not hard to see why Bill's alternate version
Speaker 1: of history played well with very online people. It's fun,
Speaker 1: um yeah. And and Bill wasn't content with just being
Speaker 1: a giant among the very first and the very saddest
Speaker 1: conspiracy nerds and the internet kind of fun. Everything is
Speaker 1: connected vibe to it that people a yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and he get he starts to get kind of famous
Speaker 1: within this community for that, and he's soon he's speaking
Speaker 1: at like conventions and stuff, UFO conventions all around, like
Speaker 1: he's kind of in demand by later angel Fire fan sites. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And in ninety nine, Bill decides he's going to take
Speaker 1: things a step further because he doesn't want to just
Speaker 1: be limited to the Internet. So he prints out five
Speaker 1: thirty five copies of all of his findings on extraterrestrials,
Speaker 1: and he sends out copies to every member of the
Speaker 1: U S House and Senate. UM. And he'd written so
Speaker 1: much like these documents he was sending everyone in Congress
Speaker 1: um were so extensive that the whole endeavor costs twenty
Speaker 1: seven thousand dollars. Yeah yeah, what yeah, he in like
Speaker 1: nineteen eight nine money. Yeah, okay, Yeah, Bill's dedicated. His
Speaker 1: guides for Congress included a helpful taxonomic guide to all
Speaker 1: the different aliens species out in the galaxy, including two
Speaker 1: different kinds of gray aliens and the draco Moffman. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: let's not let's not make fun of mothman here, okay, Okay. Now,
Speaker 1: Bill obviously hadn't seen anything like these creatures in person um,
Speaker 1: and but he was, you know, at this point claiming openly,
Speaker 1: you know, he'd been claiming for years to his friends
Speaker 1: of all the secret seed seen in that admiral's cabinet.
Speaker 1: And now he starts like justifying, like, this is how
Speaker 1: I learned about all these aliens from the cabinet. Um.
Speaker 1: This is a very wise cabinet. Yeah, that that admiral
Speaker 1: really kept a lot of different ship just under his desk,
Speaker 1: And apparently Bill had a ton of time to really
Speaker 1: read it and take it in, and you know, well,
Speaker 1: you know, you know a lot of three Martini lunches
Speaker 1: happened happening in the Admiralty back then, you know. So
Speaker 1: uh yeah, So Bill sends all this off to Congress,
Speaker 1: along with an offer to undergo hypnotic regression to convince
Speaker 1: Congress he was the real deal. Um. No one took
Speaker 1: him up on the author but could yeah, just let
Speaker 1: me hypnotize you. I can come into you. My ideas
Speaker 1: are good. No, you just have to. You have to
Speaker 1: hypnotize me and take me back to the past. Oh
Speaker 1: and then I will give you the Oh, I see
Speaker 1: what he's doing. Okay, watch like thirty different episodes of
Speaker 1: the X Files for more information on hypnotic regression. I
Speaker 1: guess so. Yeah, and nobody at Congress ever gets back
Speaker 1: to Bill, but he later will write that at least
Speaker 1: sending all of this nonsense out to them had quote
Speaker 1: prevented the government from arresting or harming me, and he
Speaker 1: moved by them would be interpreted as total confirmation of
Speaker 1: everything that I had revealed. Um. A lot of faith
Speaker 1: to have in this evil government. So luckily for Bill,
Speaker 1: the late nineteen eighties saw the meteoric rise in popularity
Speaker 1: of the UFO movement, and Bill became one of its
Speaker 1: first celebrities. He started to make money selling his different
Speaker 1: writings on extraterrestrials, and he was invited to speak at
Speaker 1: the Mutual uf Phone Network Moufon Symposium in nine now.
Speaker 1: The mouf On Symposium started with disaster when on Saturday evening,
Speaker 1: an m J twelve expert named William Moore admitted that
Speaker 1: he had colluded with an Air Force Office of Special
Speaker 1: Investigations employee to spread false information to UFO researchers, which
Speaker 1: is exactly what like Lear and Bill Cooper had been
Speaker 1: claiming UM. But unfortunately, More admitted to that some of
Speaker 1: the disinformation he had spread UM was like one of
Speaker 1: the pieces of fake, you know, leaked government documents that
Speaker 1: Bill had used as a major source in his own
Speaker 1: work UM. Mark Jacobson writes quote. This was particularly troubling
Speaker 1: for the Lear Cooper contingent, since Lear had included a
Speaker 1: fair amount of this work in his hypothesis. It brought
Speaker 1: the galling possibility that much of the MJ twelve story
Speaker 1: that revealed Washington malfeasance was itself part of a government
Speaker 1: directed disinformation program. Following more speech, Cooper ended up at
Speaker 1: Lear's home in a rage. He was roaring drunks, dreaming
Speaker 1: that he had been set up and demanding to know
Speaker 1: who I was really working for. Leir recalled, that was
Speaker 1: one of those times I thought he might kill me.
Speaker 1: By the next day, Cooper had calmed down. Who cared
Speaker 1: what Millia William Moore said anyway, the man was a liar,
Speaker 1: a fake, less than upon in the larger game the
Speaker 1: original m J twelve papers, where Bogus Cooper said a
Speaker 1: pile of craft designed to lead you right through the
Speaker 1: rose Garden. The truth, the real truth, the one he
Speaker 1: learned while looking through Admiral Clary's cabinet, was still out there,
Speaker 1: ready to be told. So after this all happens at
Speaker 1: his first really big speech at move Ons, Bill gets
Speaker 1: on stage and he delivers a captivating lecture that relied
Speaker 1: very heavily on his own experiences stumbling upon top secret
Speaker 1: information while working for the Navy. I'm gonna play you
Speaker 1: a little segment of that right now, Jamie. That's what
Speaker 1: I sent you, Jamie over text. Yeah, and this will
Speaker 1: give you an idea of kind of where Bill is
Speaker 1: in terms of a pitch man, how he isn't delivering
Speaker 1: his information at kind of the start of his career
Speaker 1: because he's not really on the radio yet. Okay, so
Speaker 1: he's still he's still finding his voice. He's still finding
Speaker 1: his voice. And fine, hey, you know we've all in
Speaker 1: there or accounts that there were four. I saw pictures
Speaker 1: of three of those dead alien bodies in a report
Speaker 1: called Project Grudge, which also included material from a report
Speaker 1: called Blue Book Report Humber thirteen. So I'm not sure
Speaker 1: whether there were three or four. I saw photographs of
Speaker 1: three of those bodies for sure. Really, it doesn't make
Speaker 1: any difference if there was one or fifty. The important
Speaker 1: thing is that it occurred and that there were dead
Speaker 1: alien bodies that were not of this world. Okay, um, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know he does kind of have the energy of
Speaker 1: a Reddit user who is who is on stage for
Speaker 1: the first time. But it sounds like Key course corrects
Speaker 1: this later in his life. He sure does. But we'll
Speaker 1: hear a lot of thing thrown out. There's ideas being
Speaker 1: thrown out in a decent shirt. Yeah, in a decent shirt.
Speaker 1: So yeah, one are shown that from that is that
Speaker 1: like what Bill saying is obviously absurd, but he's smart
Speaker 1: enough not to dwell on any like one piece of
Speaker 1: data for long a very matter of fact the way
Speaker 1: it's delivered. Yeah. Yeah. And one of the things that
Speaker 1: Bill really starts to do so like UFO conspiracy theories
Speaker 1: had for most of the time that existed just kind
Speaker 1: of been this theory that like there's aliens out there
Speaker 1: and the government doesn't want you to know about them.
Speaker 1: Bill finds a way to really connect UFO conspiracy theories
Speaker 1: to people in a much more kind of emotional level,
Speaker 1: because you know, by this point the late nineteen eighties,
Speaker 1: everyone's pretty aware that things have started to go wrong
Speaker 1: since World War Two, Like most Americans are like, this
Speaker 1: doesn't seem like the path we were supposed to be
Speaker 1: on um And Bill kind of is the first guy
Speaker 1: to be like, what if we just blame it all
Speaker 1: on aliens? Like what if that's the reason things went wrong?
Speaker 1: A shortcut? So I had to come up with a
Speaker 1: great one. It is interesting too, just even like listening
Speaker 1: to how he talks of how he seems to be
Speaker 1: kind of using this like military way of carrying himself
Speaker 1: to like have a level of authority. It's not really
Speaker 1: the same kind of conspiracy theorist carrying oneself that you
Speaker 1: see now. It's very it's not like a media personality.
Speaker 1: It's like a He sounds like a military person saying
Speaker 1: that weirdest should I've ever heard. Yeah, uh and and
Speaker 1: he yeah. Another quote from that speech where he kind
Speaker 1: of goes into detail about how the aliens said fucked
Speaker 1: things up for America, I think is salient to end
Speaker 1: on for this episode. Quote Without the aliens, you can't
Speaker 1: make sense of anything that's happened in this country for
Speaker 1: the past forty four years. But the aliens in the middle,
Speaker 1: and you've got all the answers. Your own government is
Speaker 1: selling your children drugs and you don't seem to care.
Speaker 1: Your own government has given away the power of the people,
Speaker 1: and you don't seem to care. There is an apathy
Speaker 1: that is running rampant in this country that is deadly.
Speaker 1: Whether or not there are aliens, where now truly a
Speaker 1: nation of sheep and ladies and gentlemen. I assure you
Speaker 1: sheep are always led to the slaughter. It's here I
Speaker 1: should note that Bill Cooper is probably the man who
Speaker 1: invented the words sheeple wow. Yeah. He's the sheep oh
Speaker 1: guy yeah, popularized. If you saw about any of what
Speaker 1: he said with a absurd devotion to capitalism. I agree
Speaker 1: with it. Well, it's just about aliens. With devotion to capitalism,
Speaker 1: you're onto something. Because one of the things that I
Speaker 1: think separates Bill from guys like Alex Jones is I
Speaker 1: don't think Bill was primarily a grifter. I think Bill
Speaker 1: was a guy who, for all of his many, many
Speaker 1: horrific flaws, um like, recognized that things were really fucked up.
Speaker 1: And he created this because he was a liar and
Speaker 1: a fabulous um he had, he created this, and because
Speaker 1: he was kind of like fundamentally mentally incapable of really
Speaker 1: admitting what had gone wrong. He creates this whole schema
Speaker 1: to justify or to to explain to people who don't
Speaker 1: want to admit what the actual problem is why things
Speaker 1: are fucked up in America. And that's really like the genesis.
Speaker 1: That's why conspiracy is so fucking popular today in large
Speaker 1: parts because things are fucked up. Everybody knows it, and
Speaker 1: a lot of us are desperate to not stare the
Speaker 1: real problem in the face. And Bill Cooper was the
Speaker 1: first guy to really get good at providing people with
Speaker 1: something that would let them not stare the real problem
Speaker 1: in the face. Um And I don't know the extent
Speaker 1: to which we'll get into this a little tomorrow or
Speaker 1: in part two. I don't know the extent to which
Speaker 1: Bill knew what he was doing. Um, I don't know
Speaker 1: the extent. There's definitely a part of him that was
Speaker 1: a pitchman and a con artist, and there's a part
Speaker 1: of him that I think was like a patriot who
Speaker 1: was legitimately traumatized by how fucked up he watched his
Speaker 1: country become. I don't really know, um, but it seems
Speaker 1: like both things are kind of going on. He truly
Speaker 1: is like suffering of a lot of definitely suffering. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's definitely suffering. He's definitely has some mental illness issues,
Speaker 1: and um, I can't wait to hear what he does next. Well, Jamie, first,
Speaker 1: you're gonna have to tell us where they can find
Speaker 1: you next so that you can Okay, well sure you can.
Speaker 1: Well you can follow me and Twitter. This never feels right, Uh,
Speaker 1: you can follow me on Twitter. You can listen to
Speaker 1: my podcast My Year in Mensa, which there will be
Speaker 1: I think there will be another episode of and some
Speaker 1: developments in in the near future. And you can listen
Speaker 1: to the Bechdel Cast every Thursday Feminist Movie podcast and yeah,
Speaker 1: all right, and you can find me somewhere. No one,
Speaker 1: no one's, no one's ever learned how though? Um So
Speaker 1: you can follow him at I right, okay on Twitter.
Speaker 1: He doesn't believe in Instagram. I don't believe in Instagram
Speaker 1: now um or or the TikTok's what the kids are doing?
Speaker 1: All right? I think you would be really good at TikTok, Robbert,
Speaker 1: you would fucking love TikTok. It's a bunch of angry teenagers.
Speaker 1: You would say fuck the patriarchy. It's you would love it,
Speaker 1: and you would be good at it. I don't recommend it.
Speaker 1: I don't know, absolutely not unless it makes me years
Speaker 1: old lawless skin TikTok. If you're looking for a teenager
Speaker 1: to tell you that your parents are racist, TikTok, that's
Speaker 1: my looking for Kelly and Conway's daughter. Yes, being on
Speaker 1: the right side of history, tiktok' looking for. If you're
Speaker 1: for teenagers that are trying to make it so that
Speaker 1: there's empty seats at Trump rallies, also, tiktoktok are your sponsor. No,
Speaker 1: I'm kidding, I'm I'm so tired even thinking about TikTok um.
Speaker 1: I'm so tired thinking about young people in general. Um, alright,
Speaker 1: old alright, old guy. The podcast over, yep.