Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Bill Cooper: The Man Who Killed Truth

Episode Date: July 16, 2020

Robert is joined again by Jamie Loftus to continue discussing Bill Cooper. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. About a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Behind the Bastards, the show where we talk about the worst people in all of history.

And every now and then, Jamie, we change ourselves for the better. Wow, we learned something. I got a big file cabinet in the background. I've been learning a lot of things. Yeah, just lie about a file cabinet for decades. Just really milk the most out of, you could possibly can, out of the fact that you worked for a guy with a file cabinet back in the 60s. Imagine if everyone had that foresight to be like, no, no, no, you don't understand. I used to work at a comptroller's office and it feels like a real missed opportunity. It's not too late. I hate that word, by the way.

Comptroller? Because it's supposed to be pronounced controller. Not the way the Massachusetts comptroller pronounced it, but just kind of funny. Yeah, I mean, we've been talking about Boston a lot and that's just one more reason they're bad. Anyway, outside of Boston. Two martis. Jamie, welcome back to the story of Bill, Billiam Cooper. Oh, Billiam.

Are you, are you ready to, I can, I see you've got your beanie baby. I just got my eBay beanie baby in the mail. I'm so excited. And that's a death themed beanie baby. Is it not? It's, well, that's, no, that's this one. This is the end. Yeah, you do have a death themed beanie baby. Yeah. Yeah, the theme is the death of beanie babies. Yeah, I got a, you know, mint condition in the mail. And before anyone bothers me about it, they're like, because there's like this myth that beanie babies are expensive. They're not, I got these two for $8 together.

So I'm good. I have a, I have a, I have an animal familiar and I'm ready to go. All righty. Well, let's do some shit. All right. On July 4th, 1989, Bill Cooper committed marriage for the very last time. Yeah. Yeah. This wife would be his most successful adult relationship. And depending on who you believe, their relationship may be evidence that he did grow as a person. Although that may not be true either. Yeah. She was a 28 year old Taiwanese woman named Annie Mordhost.

Bill was 46 years old at the time. Yeah. In the grand tradition of all wonderful love stories, Annie and Bill were married in a Las Vegas Boulevard wedding chapel. And we know very little about their courtship. Bill would claim that Annie was the daughter of a nationalist Chinese official who'd fled the country when Mao and his communists won the Civil War. But, you know, who knows what the fuck happened really about her life. It sounds like it could be a lie, perhaps. Like everything Bill says. Yeah. Right. Annie came into Bill's life just as his career and conspiracies was really starting to take off.

She defended her new husband fiercely at one point during a lecture at the Showboat Hotel and Casino, a fight broke out between two UFO nerds. Annie stepped in front of her husband with a hand on the hilt of an enormous kitchen knife she always kept in her purse. Okay. Actually, they maybe found each other. Yeah. She was kind of ride or die for a while there. Yeah. Definitely seems to have been willing to stab a man for this guy. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Bill had relatively few real innovations he could claim to have brought to the world of ufology. Most of what made him unique was his ability to carve off chunks of other people's work and weave them into explicitly political theories that tied directly into the contemporary world.

And this is what Bill did best. Diet plagiarism. Yeah, but also like making UFOs political, like tying alien, not just alien conspiracies exist, but like tying them into things that are fucked up in the modern world. His work was unique in the notoriously scatterbrained and chaotic world of UFO nerds. Norio Hayakawa, one of the most famous ufologists in this period, ran into Bill during a UFO convention in West Hollywood. Quote, a lot of UFO meetings can be dull, but on this night they had Bill Cooper. I hadn't heard of him. He looked like a normal middle-aged guy, huge but punchy with receding hair. He could have been anybody. He made a couple of remarks and then read his secret government paper. He didn't look up, just read for an hour and a half.

But what he was saying, the authority with which he said it, was very interesting. Most of ufology avoids politics, but with Bill Cooper, everything was political. He was the first person to really take the UFO phenomena and extend it out as a way to talk about global politics, history, religion and society. It sounded so fresh to me, so intriguing. The most important thing I thought was to get Bill bigger and better venue so more people could hear what he had to say. Again, it's like he's using that military clout and that military delivery to sell the product. If you've ever watched, if you've ever spent hours watching lectures from different UFO conventions in the 1990s and late 80s. I have a feeling you maybe have.

Yeah, most of them aren't great at talking. A lot of people who never should have been in front of a crowd talking to crowds. Maybe not a big public speaking crowd to this period. Bill does have, he presents himself in a way that people take him more seriously than they do most people in this world. So this Hayakawa guy was responsible for booking Bill one of his first big speaking gigs at Hollywood High. And after this, Bill went through a brief spell as one of ufology's leading luminaries. Is it like in the world of UFOs is like having a talk at a high school, a big deal? This one was because it's a big high school.

It's true. It's Hollywood High School for crying out loud. Yeah, yeah. Child stars go there. Exactly. We beat them in basketball all the time in high school. I'm just putting out there. Yeah. You know what I didn't do just there, Sophie?

Selfishly plug yourself? No, I didn't make a joke about the horrible pedophile ring that has existed in Hollywood for decades. You did bring it up right now though. I did bring it up right now. So you want to throw in a show where it is like really difficult to lower the mood further. We really did just find a way to do it. Yeah. And that's evidence that growth only goes so far.

Right. You know, we can we can make some movements towards progress, but we always remain the people that we were born. Anyway, shout out to which one of the quarries is the one who's been talking about? Oh, wait. No, the quarries, the one that killed him. Oh, geez. I'm just going to. There are multiple quarries.

Yeah. That's the whole thing. This shouldn't have happened. I'm so sorry. I'm holding my beanie baby in a vice grip. Yeah. So Bill becomes kind of like a big name on the UFO circuit in like 1989, 1990. And his speaking skills improved.

And during this period, he drew the attention of a pair of Hollywood managers, Douglas Keen and Michael Callan. So like these guys are going to record and license Bill's lectures and there's kind of talk about like, oh, Bill might become kind of like a major major media figure. Like something like Alex Jones kind of wind up was briefly. Right. If you remember when Alex Jones was in movies and stuff. So there there's talk about this happening, but Bill kind of immediately gets into a giant fight with these guys and proves himself very difficult to work with. The fight, the dispute arises over the rights to the master recordings of some of his lectures.

And rather than like deal with this the way that an adult in a professional context would, Bill calls Michael up drunk, just absolutely hammered and threatens to murder both men. Oh, Bill. He tells them, quote, I'd suggest you be real careful. Don't ride no bucking Broncos. Don't do nothing you haven't done before because I guarantee you no one is going to hurt me and get away with it. Take care, Mike. Love you. And we're going to make sure you amount to something even if it's a pile of dog shit.

We miss you. We really do. And the next time we see you, we're going to get you a real good present. Oh my God. Yeah. He sounds like he's on an eight-chan board. Yeah. And the next morning, Dina wakes up to find out that his tires have been slashed.

And since Bill lived nearby, like it's kind of not a mystery. No. Oh, Bill. I mean, not a subtle man, not a subtle man. Not a subtle man. So, yeah, Dean reported Cooper to the sheriff and Bill later wrote that this was all part of a scheme to disrupt his work and stop him from educating the American people. Oh, sure. Yeah.

And that's, you know, kind of what Bill, Bill is big into the UFO scene until like the early 90s, really 1991 is when he starts to undergo a change of heart around the whole issue of UFOs and extraterrestrials. So what does that mean? That makes it like less than 10 years that he's heavy into that. Oh, wait. It's only really a couple of years that he's. Okay. So it's just really a passing interest for him. Yeah.

He's always partly in it. So basically he claims that he starts to become like convinced in the early 1990s that like rather than UFOs being like the hoax being around the government trying to cover up UFOs, the existence of UFOs is itself a hoax. He calls it the greatest hoax in history and it's being perpetrated by the government to like give people something to focus on while they ignore the real conspiracies that are going on. Which there's actually some evidence that stuff like that was going on that like the CIA and shit were, were kind of pushing conspiracy theorists to discredit in general like anti-government sentiments and stuff. Anyway. Sure. But Bill becomes convinced that like there's this grand conspiracy in pushing fake UFO beliefs to sort of confuse and discredit people who are going to speak out against the New World Order. It's like that's really what's going on.

And the root of his new theory came from a 1917 speech given by John Dewey, the famous educator and psychologist, the Dewey Decimal System guy. Bill became convinced that the Dewey Decimal System guy is kind of at the heart of the coming New World Order. So in this 1917 speech, Dewey had made the historic error of idly speculating that an alien invasion might be the only thing that could force humanity to unite and like save itself from, you know, wiping itself out in horrible war. And since this was coming at the end of World War One, you get where Dewey's coming from. Like it's a pretty hopeless time to be a human being. He's like, if only aliens would invade and we could all unite against something that like wasn't murdering each other. Right. But Bill Cooper was convinced that Dewey's words weren't just like the idle and somewhat desperate hope of an intelligent man staring out at the devastation of war and hoping for a way to prevent more death.

Instead, he became convinced that those words were a flagrantly clear signal of the secret plans of the New World Order. Oh, so I guess that that's where we divert in our thought. Yeah. Yeah. And it is kind of like, I think Dewey, you could probably argue, is kind of like the root of where like that whole theory, that whole part of the Watchman comes from. Like, I think Dewey's kind of the first guy to really be like, oh, it'd be nice if aliens came. Like maybe we'd stop murdering each other for a single second. Right. Oh, you can understand where it comes from and where the desire to want it to deflect the blame on what's going wrong in the world and in the country on to literally anything except the people that are already there and running it.

Yeah. Yeah. So Bill gets, you know, increasingly starting in like 1991, really into the New World Order conspiracy theory. And the New World Order conspiracy theory was like, you'd call it a super theory. It was really more of a whole conspiracist mindset rather than like a discrete conspiracy theory. So we're well outside of like the realm of, you know, JFK was murdered by the CIA, right? That's a simple conspiracy theory. You can explain it to anyone who's curious in a sec.

Yeah. The New World Order conspiracy theory is a mindset. And every new thing that happens in the world, like a believer is going to kind of filter, like file in somewhere in that conspiracy theory. It kind of takes, it's one of, yeah. And you could see the NWO is kind of an evolution of Majestic 12, you know, so Majestic 12 starting in like the late 80s is this theory about this, you know, secret government that gets set up after Roswell. And the New World Order is just kind of really an evolution of this and it comes at the end of the Cold War for a good reason. Michael Barkun writes that the theory came to quote, constitute a common ground for religious and secular conspiracy theorists. Because you could tie in these kind of apocalyptic Christian millenarian conspiracy theories, but you could also tie in like completely a religious conspiracy theories like, you know, the JFK assassination.

Like it all fit underneath the New World Order, just kind of depending on your own personal beliefs. Okay. And Bill Cooper was kind of the guy who very first plugs Majestic 12 and Roswell alien nonsense into the NWO. And depending on the point in his career, he either did it to claim that like the New World Order existed to kind of hide the existence of aliens from people. And then later that like, oh, the NWO is pushing fake UFO conspiracy theories to distract people, whatever. Like he takes both tax over the course of his career. This is a very like large umbrella of conspiracies. Yeah.

It's all about bringing people together really. Well, that's the thing. Bill and all these other, Bill is one of these guys who's just talking constantly for like 15 years and everything he says is adding something to the conspiracy theory. So if you actually really try to like to map out everything Bill believes and pushes in his life, like we would be here for days. We're going to gloss over too much of this stuff, to be honest. Like he invented, not invented, but he's the reason people know about the FEMA death camp conspiracy theory. Like he's the origin point for that one. Yeah, we're not even really going to talk about it because it's just one of a billion different things he's the origin point for.

Yeah, he's the first guy to publish that. Yeah. So fucking Bill Cooper. Yeah. Yeah. The NWO really took off after 1990 and Bill was its most influential prophet. His pivot away from aliens didn't isolate him from his fans. Instead, it opened up a whole new segment of the population to conspiratorial beliefs.

Vast swaths of the country who would never have been caught dead at a UFO convention start, but it started to feel like something was wrong with the way the country was going. Like these kind of people would listen to Bill Cooper. They never would have shown up to a Mufon convention, but they'd listen to this stuff because it rang true to them because they were looking for an explanation as to why things were wrong. That didn't involve like reading left wing political theory. Well, that's just a waste of time as we both know. Yeah. But also a lot of left wing guys get into this too. Like this is really, that's one of the things that's interesting about the New World Order conspiracy theory is that it's very influential in a number of sides.

And Michael Barkin writes, quote, New World Order theories seem to provide a graceful way of exiting the domain of international relations and refocusing upon domestic politics. This is in the wake of the Cold War ending. Although the forces of the New World Order are international, they are assumed to be concentrating on domestic agendas, particularly the alleged destruction of American liberties. So Bill was savvy enough to see that like as, you know, part of what's happening here, why the New World Order conspiracy theory gets so popular is that there's a lot of people like Bill. Who are will permanently be anxious for the rest of their lives because of the Cold War. We call these people baby boomers and they cause a lot of problems. And when the Cold War ends, a lot of these guys needed something else to justify the fact that they were always paranoid because they'd grown up under the shade of constant imminent nuclear annihilation. And the New World Order daddies are troubled.

Yeah, exactly. This is daddies are having a tough time. And this is what Bill taps into is the fact that all of these guys know that everything like can't not expect the end to come at any moment. And once the Soviet Union ends, they can't just lose that anxiety, right? And then they need an explanation for like, why don't I feel better now that the Soviets are gone? Could it be that most of the problems that people were blaming on the Soviets were actually just like the fact that my own culture is fucked up and we need to deal with? No, no, no, there's a different conspiracy. It's not the communist conspiracy. It's another one.

So Bill was savvy enough to see that he was watching the birth of a new movement in American culture and he knew that movement was going to need a Bible. And so in 1990, he sat down to write one. Behold, a pale horse would be published in 1991 through a bizarre little New Age occult press called light technology publishing. The book itself was 434 pages of fake documents and memos all purported to be top secret missives from inside the secret government working to bring about the New World Order. The centerpiece of it all, the primary document upon which Bill hung his ideology was called silent weapons for quiet wars, which is another great title. I suppose both of these kicked the shit out of the title of Bible. Yeah, silent weapons for quiet wars. Bill claimed it was an introductory programming model for new employees of operations research, a secret military intelligence organization tasked with preparing the country for authoritarian rule.

And the document opens with welcome aboard and informs its reader that they will be taking part in the Third World War, which has been going on for decades and involves the use of silent weapons on an unsuspecting public. I'm going to quote now from pale horse writer. Written at the level of an undergrad paper in electrical engineering, silent weapons for quiet wars defines a silent weapon as differing from a conventional weapon in that it shoot situations instead of bullets, originating from bits of data instead of grains of gunpowder. It attacks under the orders of a banking magnate instead of a military general. Because the silent weapon causes no obvious physical or mental injuries and does not obviously interfere with anyone's daily social life, the public cannot comprehend this weapon and therefore cannot believe that they are being attacked and subdued. The public might instinctively feel that something is wrong, but because of the technical nature of the silent weapon, they cannot express their feeling in a rational way. They do not know how to cry for help and do not know how to associate with others to defend themselves against it. Huh.

Yeah, you can see why this, um, this is attractive to some people. Yeah, yeah. And it's, I mean, now it sounds vaguely familiar, but if I had heard this at the time, I would have been like, huh? Yeah. Interesting. Okay. For a very long time, almost everyone assumed that silent weapons had been the creation of Bill Cooper himself. He opened the very first episode of his radio series, The Hour of the Time, by reading from this.

And his favorite line to repeat was a line from the paper stating that uninformed Americans were beasts of burden and stakes on the table by choice and consent. He would say it in nearly every episode. Okay, so he's got, he's got that branding. The reality, though, is that Bill was something of a middleman for bringing silent weapons into mass awareness. The whole paper had actually been cooked up by Hartford Van Dyke, a convicted counterfeiter who would essentially cobbled the thing together himself from bits written by other paranoid libertarian thinkers. Um, and yeah. Same band. Hmm?

Paranoid libertarian thinkers are e-pills out. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's interesting. So Bill, you know, Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars is kind of like that, that line in particular is kind of why Bill adopts the phrase, you know, wake up sheeple. Because like that, he was, he was referring to a specific thing. Is that like these New World Order people in their own documents? Because Bill believes this thing is real. Um, like think that you're, you're beasts of burden. Like they, that's how they treat you.

And like that's what you are. If you're not willing to like wake up and realize that you're being played. Bill was very abusive to his audience. So he would regularly like insult and attack the people listening to him for not doing enough. Well, sure. It's like if his, if his whole thing is if you're not participating in what I'm saying, you're a fucking idiot and you're, and you're going to be hurt. Like that's a, that's a place to start. Yep.

Yep. Yep. Yep. Um, so through, uh, his book, Behold a Pale, Behold a Pale Horse, Bill injected a lot of now, a whole host of now common conspiracy theories into the mainstream. Not just his theory about JFK, but, uh, postulations that AIDS was one of many secret weapons designed by the US government for use against its own people, actually to wipe out black people in Africa. Um, and this, yeah, we'll talk more about that in a little bit. As it turns out, very little in Behold a Pale Horse was original. Bill had just taken a variety of different pamphlets and like hoax papers that had been circulating, you know, over the conspiracy community and bound them together in a handsome volume with really good cover art.

You need, you should look up the book right now to see the cover art. Like it's, it's good. Behold a, Behold a Pale Horse. Yeah. Uh, cover. Okay. Okay. So all this stuff has been like circulating in sort of conspiracy nut communities, but you'd get it as like, you know, somebody hands you like a poorly.

It was like Disney concept art. Yes. Pretty. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty and it's, it's, it's, it's well organized and you know, this stuff had been existed for a while. But if you, if you came across it, it would be like you'd run into someone's poorly mimeographed copies of silent weapons for quiet wars at a gun show or something next to his like Nazi flags. And Bill puts them in this really like good cover art, like well bound, like actual book. And this is again, still a period of time in which books mean something to people.

Right. So this shit takes off and it's a problem that this shit takes off because everything in Bill's book isn't like silent weapons. Like silent weapons for quiet wars. Obviously it's nonsense. But it's hard to, it's not the most problematic thing in the world. It's just, it's just a fake military document. Bill doesn't just include stuff like that. Among other things, Behold the Pale Horse includes the entirety of the protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Yeah. So. Okay. Yeah. I want to say that that escalated, but it really is just the next logical step. And it's really funny the way he does it is kind of objectively hilarious. So if you aren't aware, the protocols are probably the most influential conspiracy theory of all time. They purport to be like silent weapons, kind of like a secret document from this organization that got leaked out.

And in the case of the protocols, it's this meeting of a group of Jewish Elders plotting the overthrow and domination of the Gentile world. Now, the reality is that the protocols were a forgery cooked up by the Ahranon, Zaris Russia's equivalent of the CIA. The protocols like they were, they were basically this Russian intelligence agency's like disinformation plot. And they were incredibly successfully took on a life of their own spread all throughout Western Europe. And obviously like help to spread this kind of specifics type of anti-Semitic conspiracy theory all across Europe. And most of the Nazis actually knew it was a fake and they thought it was a pretty clumsy fake at that. But they benefited from the conspiratorial milieu that the protocols helped to create in Europe, which like definitely helped to enable the Holocaust.

So the protocols of the Elders of Zion have made Zion maybe have the highest body count of any conspiracy theory in history. And after World War Two, you know, for obvious reasons, the protocols kind of languished. People didn't weren't so interested in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories for a little while. Yeah. Some bad PR for that? Yeah, bad PR for anti-Semitism. So they would only really surface when some, yeah, yeah, they would pop up every now and then, but it was only really like neo-Nazis who were willing to republish them.

And they never got any kind of wide distribution. George Lincoln Rockwell was probably like the most prominent guy to try to republish the protocols. Another sinister, three-name person. Don't like him. Yeah. Yeah, so nobody... You're right. I didn't even... Jamie...

Yeah. Jamie's onto something. That third name where the evil lies. Yeah, and you know where the evil doesn't lie, Robert? And the products and services that support this podcast? Sometimes I'm proud of myself and yes. Yeah. Yeah.

During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse.

And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match. And when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up.

Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space.

313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back. So the protocols of the Elders of Zion kind of languish in obscurity for decades after World War Two. Yeah, nobody really spreads them. They're not popular in the United States. They're not particularly well known in the United States. And then in 1991, Bill Cooper republishes them in their entirety in his book.

And to make it funnier, Bill was not an afowed anti-Semite. Bill definitely believed a lot of anti-Semitic things, but like it wasn't a motivating factor for him. He didn't believe the protocols were evidence of a Jewish conspiracy. He thought they were the real minutes of the Illuminati, basically, of the New World Order's conspiracy theory. And they'd been blamed on Jews to throw the world off of their scent. To me, that's even worse to be like... It kind of is. I'm just going to throw it in there because it seems like something that people...

No, no. He thinks it's true, but it's not the Jews. It's the New World Order. And the Jews, the New World Order blamed it on the Jews to hide the reality of what was happening. No. So Bill, before he publishes the entirety of the protocols of the Elders of Zion, he runs this note. And this is the only note he runs with the protocols of the Elders of Zion. Every aspect of this plan to subjugate the world has since become reality,

validating the authenticity of conspiracy. This has been written intentionally to deceive people. For clear understanding, the word Zion should be Sion. Any references to Jews should be replaced with the word Illuminati. And the word Goyim should be replaced with the word cattle. So he's like, replace Jews with Illuminati. But this book of this anti-Semitic conspiracy document is good stuff otherwise. Right.

They're like, otherwise it's basically right, but just take out... Yeah. Just take out the Jews. And I'm not going to take out the Jews myself. You got to do it in your own head. Yeah, he's not willing to do any sort of leg work. He makes it sound like a simple clerical error that was made. And unfortunately for the whole world,

Behold a Pale Horse went on to become the single most influential underground publishing hit in history. It sold well over 300,000 copies as of the publication of this episode. But that number vastly understates its influence. Because Behold a Pale Horse was and remains one of the most frequently stolen books in the country. And incarcerated people across the nation also started passing it along. So there will be copies of this still are in prisons all over the country that just get like handed to people when they come into prison. Yeah.

And it spreads through two different chunks of the underground community, the kind of right wing militia community where you'd expect it. But it also becomes incredibly influential among the burgeoning hip hop community of the early 1990s. I need this unpacked for me. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, we will. Don't worry. Yeah.

So Behold a Pale Horse resurrected the protocols of the Elders of Zion. And it kind of laundered them through a lens of general distrust with the state of the world. And as a result, Bill Cooper was able to ensure that this once obscure tract spread by like wildfire among segments of the American population it had never reached before. Primarily inner city black Americans like obviously the kind of people handing out the protocols of the Elders of Zion in the 30s weren't giving them to black people. But now this book starts spreading among like a lot of people who are like a lot of black men in the inner cities who have this. Again, this thing that is at the core of Bill Cooper's work.

They know shit's fucked up, right? And Bill Cooper gives him, here's a whole book on how everything's fucked up. And it happens to include the protocols of the Elders of Zion. And yeah. So as this kind of brings us to the thing I've been teasing for a while, which is that Bill Cooper is one of the most influential white men in the history of rap. And yeah, biographer Mark Jacobson explains, quote, In 1990 and 91, 5,077 people were murdered in New York by far the highest two year total in city history.

It was the crack plague and a new generation arose to speak truth to the ongoing trauma of urban life. Many of the rappers who emerged during the early 1990s, the great Wu Tangs, the formidable Noss of the Queensbridge Houses were deeply influenced by the five percenters, aka the nation of gods and earths. The movement had been founded in the late 1960s by Clarence Edward Smith, aka Clarence 13X and eventually Father Allah kicked out of Elijah Muhammad's nation of Islam for heresy and gambling. Father Allah had said that it was necessary for black men and women to become lyrical assassins. The tongue was the sword, Father Allah said.

And when properly sharpened, it could take more heads with the word than any army with machine guns could ever do. And for many lyrical assassins, Bill Cooper's Behold a Pale Horse became a key text. Rappers who have mentioned Cooper in his or his book include the Wu Tang clan, Big Daddy Kane, Buster Rhymes, Tupac Shakur, Talib Qweli, Noss, Rakeem, Poor Righteous Teachers, Gangstar, Goody Mob, Suicide Boys, Boogie Monsters, Wise Intelligent, Public Enemy, Ms. Maff, Aslan, Lord Allah, Raz Kass and the Lost Children of Babylon, who told their listeners to prepare to meet your fate like William Cooper when the stormtroopers breach your gate. A little bit of foreshadowing there. That's like everybody.

Yeah, that's everybody. The fucking one of the first albums that the Wu Tang clan produces is called Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars. Yeah, it is. God. Jesus. It's just like the side thing. It's Noss, not Noss. It's Noss. I'm sorry. Clearly I'm not on it. Mark Jacobson, Bill's biographer, actually talks to a lot of these guys and is really knowledgeable about hip-hop. I am not and I apologize. That is like, wow.

Old dirty bastard of the Wu Tang clan explained, behold a pale horse's appeal better than anyone else. Everybody gets fucked. William Cooper tells you who's fucking you. And unfortunately, one of the things he tells these people is it's the Jews. Like you just have to, like, he say, yeah, yeah, that's an unfortunate aspect of his influence. So you can see why black guys in particular living through inner city crime waves and like police, you know, crackdowns and violence and stuff would find documents like Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars compelling. Bill's framework of conspiracies fit in with things that many black folks already believed, like that the CIA had introduced crack to the inner cities. And there's obviously there's actually a decent amount of truth to that.

In an interview before his own death prodigy told Mark Jacobson, William Cooper wrote what everyone kind of knew. And that's like a big part of his influence is that he's he's giving people this really cohesive bound guide to all of the different things. All of the like, hey, your life is fucked. Like here's what like here's you can pick and choose which conspiracy theories you believe explain why. And just by like putting together, it sounds like the greatest hits of conspiracy theories of like, hey, if this one doesn't work for you, go to the next chapter, maybe this one will work for you. Yeah. Okay, okay.

Yeah. And he introduced his new followers to a whole world of other conspiracy theories, not just the protocols of the Elders of Zion, but some of Bill's more modern paranoia, like the idea that AIDS had been created in a test tube by the U.S. government to wipe out Africans. This theory spread like wildfire and even reached Manto Shablala Simang. I'm going to pronounce that wrong. I'm terribly sorry. South Africa's health minister, the new republic writes that he quote while still in office and at the height of that country's AIDS crisis, distributed copies of the chapter that argued that AIDS was introduced into the African population by a global conspiracy with a goal of reducing the continent's population.

Why? Bill Cooper's very influential. Yeah. Why? Because as is always the case with this shit, we'll talk about the crack epidemic at some point and how the real conspiracy there differs somewhat from the ones that most people believe, but the basic idea of it is true, which is that in large part due to the CIA, crack got to the United States in huge amounts. They played a major role in it getting here. It's just a different role than a lot of people think.

Likewise, the AIDS crisis gets so bad worldwide in large part due to the US government's complete refusal to give a shit about it. Yeah, it's just not the reason, but like something is fucked up there and people want, like, if you provide people with a convene, like a compelling theory that ties together what is really just inexplicable hatred and like a lack of fucks given about huge chunks of the population. Yeah. Yeah. That is easier. I'm not saying it's rational in any way, but for people who already perhaps have some held prejudices, who are looking for an explanation to something that is like the commonly held truth of like,

there are things going on in the government that we are not made aware of very intentionally, but then it's just like, well, what's a fucked up reason I could make up for why that may be? Yeah. Yeah. So, Behold a Pale Horse would probably see its most lingering impact on the hip hop scene. There's still actually a modestly popular artist named William Cooper who goes by that name today, but Bill's personal popularity as a showman would only grow narrower in the years following his book's publication. The Hour of the Time, his radio show, earned a sizable audience for what it was,

propaganda for the nation's growing militia movement, and The Hour of the Time did not, although now it is, it is a little more you can find in like, a lot of fringe soundcloud rappers and stuff. They'll cut in bits of The Hour of the Time, but yeah. A good fringe soundcloud rapper. I want to play you just a segment from one episode. This is the introduction, and this is how every single episode of The Hour of the Time started. Just so you have an idea of kind of how Bill's show,

like the emotional tenor it takes right from the beginning. Okay. The Hour of the Time. This does sound like fan-cloud rap in just... It's so long! Yeah, it's really long. Oh, I think I saw, I heard Santa Claus. I don't like it.

Oh, a dog. A dog! Someone off the dog. You witness the parting of the iron curtain, the fall of the blend wall, the fracturing of the Soviet Union, and this is all supposedly toward a new worldwide democracy. Democracy is a code word for socialism, and that's why our forefathers established a republic. Okay, okay. I just love imagining flipping on that, past that on the radio by accident, just like barking dogs.

Trump and Stormtrooper boots. But you also hear Bill's delivery. He's figured out how to be a radio host in this time. Yeah, he's definitely improved. Yeah, his cadence is really good. He knew how to put together a radio show. He would broadcast entire songs that were popular songs that fit in with the theme of what he was saying that episode. He would have musical interludes and shit.

He was a good broadcaster, and he was able to draw in a lot of listeners, maybe even a lot of folks who wouldn't have listened to most other people in the crazy militia person, RadioSphere. And as a result, his work still resonates today, but unfortunately not with a group of people Bill would have been happy to resonate with. If you look up on where that SoundCloud link I sent you, it's hosted by someone named Conscious Sounds. They have 2,800 followers, and look at that Photoshop logo that they designed for Bill's show. Oh, that wasn't his. No, notice the Israeli flag sandwiched right in between George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden, and then the watermark, Ayn Volk, Ayn Reich, printed at the bottom of the image.

Okay, I did not. It's Nazis, it's Nazis. Oh, it's Nazis. Oh, yeah. And these guys, they're... Hashtag learning is how it's... There's Nazis who are trying to be a little bit subtle about it, and I think they see, they kind of recognize Bill Cooper is a good way to get people kind of on board with...

Once you're listening to Bill Cooper, you can be convinced that, like, actually he was wrong when he said it wasn't the juice. Because you already believe all this stuff, you're just replacing him with a Luminati. We just got to switch the juice back in there, and then you're good to go. Oh, my God, this is fucking dark. It's weird, because, yeah, Bill, again, was absolutely whatever else you can say about him, and again, it's mostly negative. He wasn't a Nazi, although he did work in the company of Nazis. The hour of the time...

How does that improve the situation? He just catered to Nazis and worked with them frequently. I don't think he catered to them. We'll listen to something in a bit. You may change your mind about that. He's more complicated than that, but he was broadcast by the shortwave radio station, WWCR. And by the time Bill got into his groove, his competition were guys in what's called the Patriot community, basically early preppers, including two guys named Chuck Harder and Tom Valentine.

And Bill didn't get along with either for a number of reasons. One of them was that Valentine had a better primetime slot than his. He was 9 to 11 p.m. Heady to the end, baby. Yeah, but also Valentine's show was sponsored by the Spotlight, which was Willis Karto's Liberty Lobby's Holocaust Denial newsletter. We talk about that in the war on everyone some. Yeah, other competition included celebrity hosts. Guys like William Pierce did radio stuff in this time. You know, G Gordon Liddy and stuff like would be on the same network.

So Bill is kind of in and among a bunch of like really bad dudes, right? Like his the other people who are kind of on the radio in and around him are like very violent and often have ties to Nazis. Like fucking William Pierce is a guest on some of the shows that are that are hosted in and around Bill's show. Bill himself was probably the most palatable individual personality in the patriot movement at this stage because he was like he was kind of the first person in this movement. Like everyone's talking about the Boogaloo movement and whether or not it's racist. And like a lot of these guys focus on like, no, we're, you know, we're pro gun and we're libertarians, but we're like anti racist and stuff. Bill was the first guy in right wing media to thread that needle. He was really the first one to do it in like a practical way.

And this helped broaden the appeal of the early malicious scene and the patriot movement, whatever you want to call it by drawing in these more libertarian Americans who wouldn't have listened to a show that was putting fucking William Pierce on, but would listen to Bill Cooper. Well, it sounds like the fucking YouTube algorithm where it's like, okay, here's something that is like, you know, a little like it's some stuff, you know, and then some radical ideas being snuck in. And okay, this is a familiar, this is a familiar model, I guess. Yeah. And Bill himself did go to like, when I say that he wasn't a Nazi, I don't think I'm giving him too much credit here. And for an example of like why I think that I want to play a segment from one of Bill's relatively few shows that touched on race to a significant extent. And this was the episode that he put out in the immediate wake of the LA riots, which were of course sparked by the acquittal of the cops who beat the shit out of Rodney King, right? That happens and you get the LA riots. And here's Bill Cooper's part of Bill Cooper's response to the LA riots. The entire nation and the world had been viewing an amateur videotape that had been taken on the scene, which showed over 50 blows.

And I believe the correct number was 56 blows in 80 seconds to a man who was lying on the ground, who had no weapon, who posed no threat, who did not attack anyone during this time. But nevertheless, 56 blows from clubs, what the officers called batons. That's a polite name for a club, a stick. And I believe no one believed that those officers would be found innocent. Okay. That is not what I would have expected from him. No, that's a pretty reasonable thing to say about the Rodney King beatings. That's basically the only way an honest person could, which Bill was not, but you can't really fault what he's saying there. And he went on to complain about the looting and rioting by people in Los Angeles and say that they were making a really dumb call by destroying their own neighborhoods. Well, he's catering to boomers, of course. Yeah. He reserved the bulk of his anger for white Americans as embodied by his listeners, telling them, quote, when you sit in front of your television on Friday and Saturday night and watch cops, top cops, lady cops, 911 cops, SWAT cops, detective cops, grandma cops,

you watch them break down doors without identifying themselves, without a search warrant, without a court order, rip people's mattresses apart, throw away their clothes. If they don't find anything, all they have to do is drop a little bag of white powder. You sit there cheering them on, get those scummies so and so's. And the reason you do it is because you're watching it happen to blacks, to minorities, poor white trash, Puerto Ricans, everyone who was a threat to you. So like Bill wasn't the always, yeah. He wasn't always the guy you expected him to be, right? That was one of the things that makes him interesting is like he would, there would be these moments where you'd like be, okay, Bill's going to have like a real fucked up take. And it'd be like, no, he was kind of, he was more or less right about that one. This one, Bill pretty firmly comes down on the right side of history.

Now, he also went on to complain that the judge who acquitted those LAPD cops was a mason and like... And then he always loses the thread and it's not here to speak. Bill, you started strong. Yeah, but you can see a lot of the same kind of discourse and the same style, the same kind of ideological statements that are being made by the Boogaloo folks today, right? Definitely. Yeah, Bill sounds a lot like a lot of the fucking guys that was watching on Facebook in the immediate way could the George Floyd protest. He would have been well at home in that organization, or not organization, but in that community. Now, in his role as the voice of America's new militia movement,

Bill saw his main duty as warning good conservative Americans that the government in the form of socialist politicians was coming to disarm them as a prelude to tyranny and mass to population. Bill's show popularized the conspiracy theory that the US government stages mass shootings in order to drum up support for gun control. And this was before the Columbine shooting. Bill starts this conspiracy theory off in the United States. And I'm going to the next thing I'm going to have you play is Bill reading a passage of his book on the air in 1991. So again, this is like what seven years before Columbine and like 20 something years before the Sandy Hook shootings and that conspiracy starts. Here's Bill laying the groundwork for all of that shit. The government encouraged the manufacture and importation of military firearms for the criminals to use.

This is intended to foster a feeling of insecurity, which would lead the American people to voluntarily disarm themselves by passing laws against firearms. Using drugs and hypnosis on mental patients in a process called Orion, the CIA inculcated the desire in these people to open fire on schoolyards and thus inflame the anti-gun lobby. This plan is well underway and so far is working perfectly. The middle class is begging the government to do away with the second amendment. So Bill starts that mass shootings are a government conspiracy conspiracy theory in fucking 91. Yeah. What do you make of that? That's amazing.

That is, I know, I'm just like I'm trying to wrap my head around that. And he knew what would take off because obviously this conspiracy theory takes off. And if you look at the YouTube video, it was like a YouTube video of people being like, see Bill Cooper revealed the government's plan to stage mass shootings. It couldn't have been a lucky guess because file cabinet. Interesting. So Bill had a real gift for weaving farfetched fantasies about the Illuminati and mind control weapons in with down to work earth like folksy rants about modernity. Like that was his gift is he would take this crazy shit and he would weave it into real shit. And it would it would it would that that draws people in like he didn't he didn't he didn't sound the same way that again that guy with like a box full of like photographs or mimeographed zemes at a gun show seems like.

Right. Like there there's like a groundedness to it that you don't usually get. I do kind of wonder. I mean, because you were saying like he just like spoke nonstop for 1520 years. Like, I mean, for everything like this that feels kind of like a wow, maybe he's, you know, this was a pretty like, you know, valid comment. How many hundreds of bullshit that makes no sense to counter that. Yeah, I mean, Bill was was like every day of his life was bullshit that was that happened. And then I mean, if you talk that much bullshit, you're bound to hit on something useful every once in a while.

Yeah, I mean, it's and it's not like, well, I mean, it's not something that's true because obviously mass shootings are a product of a wide variety of unhealthy things in our culture. And I don't think any reasonable person thinks the government is even competent enough to fake that sort of thing. But just hitting on the idea that it would be an appealing idea. Well, that that's what he understands is like what what people want to believe. And he what people need is like, here's this real problem mass shootings. We need to explain, you know, the soaring violent crime rate in the early 90s. I need to explain it with something that blames it on, but like makes it a part of this conspiracy. Like that was Bill's talent is weaving that shit together.

And he would do it by like, yeah. One of the I think the most revealing rants that he put together that they sort of shows you his appeal was was him sort of complaining about automobiles. He stated, I've gone from driving automobiles that I could take apart and put together blindfolded by myself as a teenager to cars that I can lift the hood on and not even recognize most of what I'm looking at. Except that I know it's an engine in there, some kind of system that ignites the fuel. And this was like Bill was basically taking with this sort of thing, these kind of feelings of inadequacy that were very common and increasingly common in this chunk of American men who's like jobs, good factory jobs, one that had been eliminated. These guys were a lot of them lived in like rural communities that were were very rapidly dying as the country increasingly urbanized. So he would take these feelings of like being bowled over by the complexity of modern technology and feeling left behind to weave them into this conspiracy about the new world order. As his biographer notes, Bill basically argued that stuff like, you know, the increasing complexity of automobile engines wasn't just a factor of developing technology.

It was quote, one more way the controllers separated you from the utility of your person. This was how silent weapons work, how they stuck the dunce cap of helplessness on your head. And a big part of Bill's appeal was that he provided his listeners with a way to feel as if they were part of the solution actually fighting back against this new world order, rather than just sitting helplessly and watching it eat everything. He created the Citizens Agency for Joint Intelligence or Cajie, which Bill marketed as a sort of volunteer civilian answer to the CIA, the FBI. Cajie. Cajie. Yeah, the Citizens Agency for Joint Intelligence. Citizens Agency for Joint Intelligence. Yeah. I mean, I both made the same face. Any of his listeners could join Cajie and start collecting and submitting intelligence which Bill would read on air if he liked it. And so this had a couple of benefits. Number one, it let his listeners feel like they were part of this like insurgent movement fighting back against the new world order.

And it filled up airtime because Bill could just read bullshit that his audience sent in as if it was intelligence that his agency had brought up. Another like 24-hour news cycle, a little head of the curve there. Yeah. It's very smart. Filling up time. It's very smart. And Cajie wasn't just like an institute off on its own. It was the intelligence wing of the Second Continental Army, which Bill claimed was a secret nationwide militia dedicated to the preservation of the values that the U.S. had been founded under. Bill refused to give up the name of the commanding general of this August force because it was him.

But many of the promotion papers that he handed out were signed by George Washington. Oh. Yeah. It was always like really cagey about who was in charge. It was obviously it was Bill. Yeah, because it was him. Yeah, because it was him. He was the whole army. Yeah. But then he's like, but who knows? It's hard to say.

Yeah. So over his years on the air, Cooper engaged in a number of objectively ridiculous stunts, like all right wing ideologues, Bill nursed an abiding hate for the mainstream media. But he tried to do something about it, organizing his listeners in a scheme to buy up millions of shares of Gannett media, owner of USA Today. And the plan was that all of his listeners would buy enough of Gannett media to have a controlling voting interest. And then they would basically put Bill in charge and he would fire everyone who didn't want to put out right wing propaganda. It didn't, it didn't work. No. Oh, but Jesus Christ.

Yeah. You know what will buy up all of the shares of Gannett media? Tell me, Robert. To put out right wing propaganda. Uh huh. The products and services that support this podcast. Oh, I hope so. Yeah.

During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse.

And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And on the gun badass way. Nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match. And when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up.

Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space.

313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. Okay, so in 1994, Bill threw his support behind the newly formed Constitution Party, which had been made by some Hollywood libertarian dude. I think it was part of a grift. You know, sounds like it. Bill announced his like new membership and support of this movement, essentially acting as it's like the voice of the Constitution Party by announcing America is no longer a two-party country, ladies and gentlemen. Problems obviously cropped up almost immediately.

The chief issue was that Bill and the party he joined were pretty much straight up libertarians. Meanwhile, many of his listeners were hard right religious nut fucks. They hated two major planks of the Constitution Party, which were, and again, Jamie, this is another place where you'll be surprised, legal legal abortion and the right to be homosexual. And in another surprising turn, Bill took to the airwaves to defend both planks on the matter of abortion. He said, we are firm, ladies and gentlemen, God put us here to make choices and the moral choice is the woman's. And if she fries and what some of you would call hell for eternity, that is her choice for it is she who will fry. But it is not the business of the state to say yes, no, maybe or anything yet, but it's a woman's choice.

Like he's whatever. Okay, I mean, I'm being like, you know what, let the lady burn in hell if she wants to. I don't think he's saying that. I think he's saying that like, if you think she's going to hell, it doesn't matter. Like it's still not the state's business to say if she does it or not. Right. I actually don't think Bill cared at all about abortion. Clearly, I mean, clearly not there.

I can't. I mean, it's like, you know, personally, we don't we don't claim this man, but I guess it's nice to not have him actively against reproductive rights. That's yeah. So it twists with this guy. It says a lot that that like he has to yell at his listeners over shit like this because like they're all such bigots. And Bill is just not quite as bad. And actually like his bigotry a little more focused in. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, he just hates the government. That's really Bill's whole thing is he hates the government and wants wants to destroy it because he thinks it's an evil quasi satanist conspiracy. It's weird. He's a weird guy. Like his defensive homosexuality was actually like pretty good. I'm telling he told his very religious listeners quote, the most you can ever hope to do is force them back into the closet so that you cannot see them. And then you will be living a lie just as we have been living lies throughout our history and lies must stop.

Which is interesting because he's also he's he's still putting like it's your you who will be living a lie by denying these people exist and like that's why you shouldn't do it. It's a weird defense of not criminalizing gay people. Bill's a weird guy. There's a lot of like moments like that with him where I was like, what the fuck are you? Yeah. And I don't want to be watching him here because these are like these areas where he's surprisingly decent. Kind of just have been used sometimes by folks to obscure the fact that he was fundamentally a man who believed that anything that vaguely smacked of socialism was tyranny and had to be violently opposed by men with guns. And so while he would be doing stuff like saying, hey, it's fine if you're gay. He would also be saying you should have as many guns as possible so that you can kill people who try to, I don't know, give health care to folks.

Like what? Yeah. Okay. I mean, I still hate the man. You should. But but there are some there are some twists here. Yeah, he's not. I mean, do you think it is just like it has to do with like he wants to keep the focus on what he really cares about and is like, you know, kind of like, okay, like I get that this is something that bothers you.

But like, don't worry about that. Yeah. Worry about like, look over here. This is my show and we're worrying about the things that I hate. God damn it. You have the radio show, you can hate your own shit. There's a shitty radio show for that other hateful thing you think. Stay focused.

Yeah, it's on the same network. Like you don't have to wait long. Oh yeah. You don't like it. Wait 45 minutes. Yeah. Bill's show hosted an 18 hour long series called treason, making the case that US government officials were committing a daily barrage of unconstitutional acts that demanded some sort of response. He also told us listeners to watch 2001 a space Odyssey because it included secret messages hidden by the Illuminati.

And this is like, this is a thing you're hearing QAnon stuff now. There's this like widespread belief that like the, the cabal, this like elite group of satanic demon worshipers hide like the secrets of their, like there's all these weird Hollywood movies that are real. Like the born identity is like, there's act, like there's real, like it is like fundamentally real. It's just like, yeah, yeah, because the elite have to hide the truth about what they're doing in plain sight. It's this thing that they need to do. And Bill thought that it was because of like this weird kind of occult tradition that where you basically have to, in order to like provide power to your occult rituals, you have to like tell people about the evil things you're doing in the open. And so like they would hide all this stuff in a Hollywood. Like that was an innovation of Bill's that is like one of the things that the core of QAnon today.

And he's the first guy to be like, and it was with Bill, he would watch a movie he liked and then would be like, and here's why like this is reveal some truth about the Illuminati conspiracy. Okay, I've done the thing Alex Jones does too. Yeah. Now it was the Waco siege that really made Bill Cooper the multi week assault by the ATF and the FBI on a peaceful religious compound in the middle of nowhere. It was exactly the kind of violent overreach that he'd spent his career warning people about. It was like the perfect thing for Bill Cooper to focus on, right? Like he's been saying for years, the government's going to come to like kill all Christians and stuff and, you know, institute this new world order. And here they go after this compound of weirdos in the middle of nowhere, Texas.

So for weeks, Bill would, you know, basically tell his listeners that Waco was a test case to see if Americans would put up with the NWOs plans to eliminate millions of people. Like they're seeing if you're going to rise up, you know, if a bunch of militiamen would just show up at Waco and like, stand around it, they would back off and like, then, you know, we could, we could turn the tide. But of course, nobody was willing to actually do that. So for weeks, Bill would cover the federal government's treachery. And when the real victim, like, you know, the government, by the way, was committing a ton of horrible crimes at Waco. Like the whole thing was one horrible crime pretty much. He always is like, you know, attached to something where it's like, well, yeah, there is something clearly very bad going on here.

Yeah. Yeah. But he would also, because he was a liar, it wasn't enough, the actual fucked up shit that was going on. So he would like, he invented this claim that the FBI had sent in tainted milk that had killed two children, which he would repeat for weeks, which is like, there's had no basis in fact. It wasn't necessary because the FBI killed 70 something children at Waco. You don't have to lie about tainted milk. They burnt kids to death. Like it's not, it's not necessary, Bill. He was also adamant that David Koresh was monogamous and does not play around on his wife, which is... What's the point? I think that's like a more, that's more of a hymn thing than a politics thing.

Well, Koresh had to be a good guy and the people at Waco had to be like fundamentally heroic, rather than like a bunch of flawed and fucked up people themselves who still didn't deserve to be burnt alive. Right. Right. Yeah. Oh boy. So obviously Bill was as horrified as the rest of the world with the FBI. All the hills to die on for David Koresh, that is a very easily disproved one. Not just defending David Koresh, but picking the hill David Koresh was faithful to his wife. Right, like... That's what we all know about David. He didn't fuck a ton of random women.

Oh my God. Yeah. I mean, especially since we all know David Koresh had incredible abs. I mean, just... Stop it. Stop it. David Koresh's abs were as cut as Bernard Sanders was good at shooting people in a moving vehicle. I'm going to cut my own beanie baby's arm off. This is so stressful. So Bill was as horrified as the rest of the nation when the FBI's final raid on the Branch Davidian compound ended in, you know, dozens of children burning to death in just a horrible, horrible literal war crime.

Yeah. On his first broadcast back after the siege, Bill opened the show by declaring, America, the beautiful is no more. He told his listeners that the second battle of the Second American Revolution had ended and folks, we lost. The first battle was Ruby Ridge. So, I mean, you know, it... That was, you know, Waco was one of the things that's interesting about Waco is that for a lot of people who had been kind of reflexively pro America and pro the government, just because it was America and they were kind of like patriotic bumblefucks,

Waco was the thing broke a lot of them. And it's kind of the foundational movement of the patriot movement and the militia movement that exists with us today. There's a reason the Boogaloo Boys put the names of like the Weavers who died at Ruby Ridge and share Waco meeting so much. It's because, like, this is where that starts. This is where, like, the insurgent right in this country really starts to grow. And Bill Cooper is the one nursing it. Like, the violent right had not been a big thing since the end of World War II.

That had really put an end to it pretty much. Like, you'd had the KKK in some parts of the South during the civil rights movement, but, like, not an insurgent force aimed at overthrowing the government. That starts now. And Bill Cooper is its first prophet, right? Like, he's directly saying, like, you the listeners are, like, part of a war against your government now because of Waco. Hi, yeah, yeah. Okay. I mean, and it's unfortunately, like, you can see what he's, like, creating these things for people that you can understand why people are taking the opportunity. I mean, whether... If you believe Bill Cooper, the only thing to do is kill people in the government,

is murder members of the government. And by the way, his most famous listener decides to do just that because Bill's biggest fan in this period of time was a young military veteran named Tim McVeigh. Oh, my God. Yeah, Tim McVeigh, baby. Yeah. Tim McVeigh, always a pleasure when we get to you, Timmy. So Tim loved the hour of the time. And in the months prior to the Oklahoma City bombing, there's even evidence that he visited Bill Cooper's,

the place where Bill Cooper recorded, and, like, met with Bill Cooper. And, like, this almost certainly happened. It's pretty widely believed. And the most credible version of the story suggests that, basically, Bill was kind of sketched out. It was like Tim and some other guy, and they were, like, clearly weird and unhinged. And Tim asked him, like, if I get stopped by a cop, should I shoot him rather than accept a speeding ticket? And Bill was like, no, you shouldn't shoot a man over a speeding ticket. But, like, yeah, it's this really sketchy story where, like, there are a couple of people who were around Bill at the time who all were like, yeah, this guy who, after the Oklahoma City bombing, we all recognized as Tim McVeigh came by

and was like, I'm your biggest fan, Bill, and asked him weird questions about shooting cops. And it's worth noting that the reason Tim got caught is that he got pulled over, driving away from Oklahoma City, and he had a gun on him and chose not to shoot the officer who was pulling him over, which is why he got caught. So... Wow. So listening to Bill is what got him caught? It saved one guy's life and got, like, 168 other people killed. Well... I mean, obviously, we talk a lot about Tim McVeigh and the war on everyone.

There was a shitload going on in Tim McVeigh's ideological development, including a lot of Nazi shit. I think people do tend to put too much of the blame on Bill. But in the immediate wake of the bombing, Bill actually does get a lot of the blame just because it kind of immediately comes out that Tim McVeigh's favorite radio host is this, like, right-wing nutjob Bill Cooper. Like, I think the president mentions Bill Cooper and stuff. Like, Bill becomes... Bill gets a lot of the immediate blame for radicalizing Tim McVeigh, when really things like the Turner Diaries, like, there's a lot of other things. But it's also for, I mean, for people who are inclined to agree with Tim McVeigh, a lot of free press.

Yeah. Yeah, it is. It is a lot of free press. And it's, yeah, it's an interesting tale. So when McVeigh, you know, did that thing that McVeigh did, Bill Cooper immediately knew what was really going on. This was not, you know, a right-wing militia dude carrying Bill's ideas to their logical extent and declaring war on the government, which is what actually happened. This was a false flag attack aimed at taking down the militia movement and justifying a government crackdown, which is actually kind of the opposite of what happened, really.

But yeah. So Bill had one of his Kaji agents start collecting stories for a book on the first 24 hours after the blast to document how the media spun events to fit their narrative. And they actually like published, like put together like this whole gigantic book about the first day after Oklahoma City that they thought was going to be like the new, the next, you know, the rightful follow-up to Behold a Pale Horse. But nobody bought it because it was like boring and dumb. Yeah. Now, Bill grew increasingly unhinged in the days and weeks after the Oklahoma City bombing. He warned his listeners that the end was nigh. He told them that mock American cities were being built in the desert for the military to train in

to prepare to like purge the United States of dissidents. He'd started talking about black helicopters circling areas with too high a population of real Americans. And of course, he started talking about FEMA camps being set up to incarcerate a newly disarmed American populace. Yeah. And of course, a big part of it for Bill is that like, oh, the government's going to use the whole militia thing as an excuse to take our guns and they did pass an assault weapons ban not too long after this. So like there's a lot of things keep happening that make Bill seem really credible to the fringe. Right. It's like Bill said they're going to take our guns and then they passed this law to take our guns. Not considering that it was part of Bill's work that created the problem.

Yes. Yes. The bill really helped create the system where they were like, oh man, it seems like a lot of people have military grade weaponry who are violently unhinged. Maybe let's try to do, which I'm not a fan of the assault weapons ban either. But maybe let's not like encourage, let's create a media show where we're encouraging it. It's a great way to get it taken away. Yeah. He has a big impact on why that happens. He has a big impact on the growth of the militia movement. Real feedback loop developing here with Bill. Exactly.

It's the same thing with like these Boogaloo guys who are obsessed with like being second amendment absolutists and who are going to guarantee massive restrictive gun control legislation comes in if a Democrat ever gets into office again. Because you guys have been such like violent lunatics in public waving guns around and scaring people. And like, yeah, thanks. Yeah, you did a great job. You're looking to create the problem that if there is a crackdown, it's like, well, that is, you know, in no small part, your fault. Yeah. So in August of 1995, McFay's old friend Michael Fortier did an interview with a far right newsletter where when asked what led to the bombing, he replied, I can't say a whole lot, but we heard lots of tapes and saw videos and read things.

There's this guy with the radio station in Arizona, Bill Cooper. He keeps calling people sheeple and was mad that they do anything to change things. Well, we got to thinking that's right. Things need to change. Tim really responded to that. In 1996, James Nichols testified in federal court that he, his brother Terry and Tim McFay listened to Cooper as often as they could. They called him the voice of the militia movement. So, yeah, Bill, Bill helps to cause all of the things that cause all of the things that he's scared about. Right. So it's, I mean, with that kind of like, you know, looking at it now, you're like, well, of course he may have seemed right about a lot of these things. He was anticipating potential consequences to problems that he was able to create.

Like, yeah, it's like government isn't guilty of the stuff like that themselves. I just, ay, ay, ay, ay. It's, it's like when, when I, when the FDA eventually raids my compound and burns dozens of children to death in our basement, I'll seem like a profit for having predicted it. But really by constantly engaging in this battle with the FDA for years, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm in a way creating the situation myself, which is why you should buy. I really can't wait to be associated with this clip when it inevitably, you know, surfaces after, after your prediction turns out to have been true. You know what you should do, Jamie, is buy one of our new FDA approved to cure all diseases masks, which are in fact FDA approved to cure all diseases.

That's official FDA approval. So buy it, buy the mask. He just did that entire thing to plug his new merch, just so you know. Do you accept Bitcoin? I am, I am digging up metaphorically the corpses of the dead at Waco in Oklahoma City and Ruby Ridge in order to sell face masks and spark a fight with the FDA. That's, that's what, because I am a monster too. I'm just as bad as Bill Cooper. I'm putting that on your Wikipedia page.

Thank you. Thank you, Jamie. So coming up in the biggest trial in American history as the inspiration behind a mad bomber was not a great move for Bill's long-term career, especially since he'd stopped paying taxes in 1992 and also lied on a loan application. So he starts getting warrants issued for his arrest for again, committing crimes. And he lives up on top of a mountain in Arizona at this point in time and the sheriff of Apache County where he lived was actually a pretty smart guy and was like, if I try to arrest Bill Cooper, he's going to go down in a hail of gunfire and it's going to be just a terrible. It's going to be another Ruby Ridge and I'm not going to fucking do that. Like he can live on the top of his mountain for another 50 years for all I care. And he tells the FBI of this, the sheriff's like, I'm not like arresting this guy and the FBI are like, yeah, it seems like a really bad idea to arrest this guy. Anything that happens to Bill Cooper to him is like a confirmation that what he was saying was right.

He's like, well, I'll probably be, you know, taken out or arrested. It's like, well, yeah, because you're evading your taxes. But yeah, yeah. You've created. That's exactly what Bill does with it. So like the actual law enforcement in his area just kind of leaves him alone. Like he regularly will go to a local Mexican restaurant and get enchiladas and shit. And like nobody tries anything because again, nobody wants the bullshit that would come with trying to bring Bill Cooper in. Imagine being so annoying. Yeah.

But Bill becomes a massive drama queen about the whole thing. Breathlessly talking about the siege of his compound and like bragging about it, like how he and his wife and his little daughter like aren't leaving and won't leave, don't leave for years and are like living under. And he'll talk about how like they've got anti helicopter countermeasures and like secret militiamen guarding his compound with him. And, you know, he'll vaguely discuss all his security measures and shit, which was all bullshit. He had one friend who was like a vet who would like hang out with a gun with him sometimes when he got scared. And he had like some cans strung up like he had no, there was no like security network set up like he was. It was canned. His security was. I may be, I may be making that one up.

But it was, he didn't have any sort of meaningful security network because he was broke and living in a crumbling house on top of a mountain because he had no money. Right. Yeah. And, you know, it's, we don't know a lot. We don't know a huge amount about his situation with his wife, but at least one of his friends catches him having like this really vicious screaming fight with her where he's like at least mentally abusive. And you get the feeling he was probably physically abusive to her. And we're taking his past history into account. Almost certainly. At the same time, it becomes really clear to anyone listening that like really the only thing keeping Bill kind of tethered to reality is his daughter.

And he'll have, she's a little kid at this point. He'll have her on the show a bunch. She hosts it with him sometimes. Oh my God. And he's like really, yeah, like it's kind of heartbreaking. I don't want to go into too much just because it's a real bummer to listen to them together because eventually Bill's abusiveness forces his wife to leave him. And she like flees with their daughter and he never sees her again because of what happens next. But yeah. And that like, yeah, that like again, she did absolutely the right thing because Bill at this point is a hardcore alcoholic. He's continued to be mentally and probably physically abusive. He's locked them away in a mountaintop compound hiding from the fucking feds and the police.

He's directly tied to the Oklahoma City bombing. He's directly tied to the Oklahoma City bombing. Like Annie makes the right call in getting their kid the fuck out of there eventually. And again, Annie deserves some blame because she stays for a long time. And she's a pretty, at least for a chunk of his career, a very willing participant in the Bill Cooper thing. Also a victim too, but also like, I don't know, it's a fucked up story. Everything about this guy's relationships are fucked up. Thankfully she does get the, and I don't know anything about his daughter today. And I'm not going to look it up because she deserves to have some chance to get away from Bill Cooper.

Yeah. Yeah. Bill's last remaining years were spent putting out a series of increasingly morose broadcasts and occasionally watching the conspiratorial seeds. He'd sown bare fruit. Like when he watched the 1998 X-Files movie and recognized huge chunks of Behold a Pale Horse served up as entertainment, which he found very exciting. Oh, you liked it. Okay. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. As Bill's life shrank to the confines of his increasingly decrepit home, he himself sunk into alcoholism. But many of the ideas he'd popularized were working their way into popular culture. They'd just grown beyond him at this point. On June 28th, 2001, Bill Cooper made what would be his greatest prediction yet.

He told his listeners that a major attack on the United States was coming and that it would be blamed on Osama bin Laden. Really? Yep. Yep. June 28th, 2001. Name's bin Laden in the broadcast. Now, again, not much of a prediction because bin Laden had bombed the World Trade Center a couple of years earlier and was one of the most famous terrorists in the world at the time. Oh, wait. Hold on. Wait. What year is this? This is 2001. This is 2001. So this is like before. Right before 9-11. Right before 9-11.

But after the first World Trade Center bombing. Like, bin Laden bombed it before. Right. So it's not. Okay. Okay. You're right. You're right. So he gives this prediction and then in the immediate wake of the attack, like he's obviously really horrified, but he also kind of, he's the very first truther. Like he's one of the very first guys who starts talking about like how the building shouldn't have fallen the way it did and like steel doesn't work that way. All this stuff that like would like. Oh, he's like a jet fuel doesn't melt steel beams.

And in fact, a lot of folks will argue that loose change, that documentary, a huge amount of it was plagiarized from stuff Bill Cooper had started saying in the immediate wake of 9-11. Which is wild because he dies like two seconds after 9-11. He dies two seconds after 9-11, but that's the way Bill's mind works. He's immediately spinning conspiracies. He can't not do it. So he leaves the world with 9-11 trutherism. And he leaves the world with Alex Jones, who Jones in his early career talked about Bill Cooper a lot, clearly admired him deeply, had Bill on as a guest once. And Bill fucking hated Alex Jones and ranted about him a couple of times on his own show and basically saw him as a charlatan and everything that was wrong with America. Oh, well, I mean. Yeah, which is ironic because like a lot of like Alex Jones made a bunch of money in his early years selling like golden shit to people over the radio and Bill Cooper was the first guy to do that.

Or not the first guy, but like the first conspiracy nut to do that. So yeah, that's cool. That's that's that's neat. Yeah, so Bill, you know, starts 9-11 trutherism as kind of a last hurrah. And in July of 2001, so less than a month after, you know, his big prediction, Bill makes the stake mistake of threatening a local doctor named Hamlin. And so yeah, like basically Bill lived on top of this mountain. And the mountain, most of it was like public property, like anyone could come on to Bill's mountain if they wanted. But Bill thought it was his mountain and people who drove up onto it perfectly within their rights to do so were like damaging his security measures.

So he would regularly come out with a handgun and threaten to murder people for driving onto public land. And yeah, this got him in trouble. And in 2001, you know, the county had a new sheriff, the guy who'd been like, it's not worth it to go after him is gone. And this new sheriff is like an idiot. He's like a reckless dumbass and is like, we can it's time to finally do something about Bill Cooper. It'll be big news if we do it. Like it'll be good for my career. So not all that long after 9-11, this sheriff launches a raid on Bill Cooper.

And like the idea is to basically pretend to be, you know, a motorist who's like wandered up to his mountain. Bill comes out and you kind of can surround him and arrest him. And it kind of relies on Bill not being the most paranoid man alive, which Bill is not going to work out very well. No, Bill immediately realizes that like the cops are trying to trap him and he tries to like run him down in his car. And yeah, the whole thing degenerates into a gunfight and Bill shoots an officer dead before going down himself in a hail of gunfire. Well, yeah, I feel like if he had to go, I mean, he I'm not unhappy. He went down, but I feel like he was probably satisfied with. Yeah, I think on an emotional level, Bill Cooper needed to needed to go down being murdered by cops and like a dawn like in like a raid.

Like that was the way he expected to go for years. And it also validates his own like perception of himself. Yeah. And he's he was clearly he was sick. He probably wouldn't have lived that much longer. It's a shame he killed a random guy on his way out. But also a guy was a cop who was fucking with him. So whatever. Right. It's whatever. Kind of a wash.

It's kind of a wash. It's if you're looking at like how most of these guys leave the world, like Alex Jones is going to have a much more depressing ending than Bill Cooper. Bill Cooper kind of got what he wanted in the end, which is he's going to die of like gout or something. Yeah, no, he's going to live to be a hundred and fucking 20 and become the secretary of state. I don't know. Just like dear God is going to live to be the grand dom of conspiracy theories just rotting in a house. Yeah. And there's a bunch of bummer like the book Pale Horse Rider.

It's an interesting biography. I think it's pretty good. The biographer is very sympathetic to Bill probably more than his fair at points. It's kind of hard not to be. I think when you get that into somebody's life. But he definitely gives Bill more credit than I think Bill deserves in a number of things. But like his his last days were sad as shit. Like at one point one of his daughters tries to reconnect with him and like comes to his house and she lasts like a week before the like because he's an abusive prick.

And he like scares her away. Like he's down to like he's barely had alienated all of his remaining friends at that point. It's like this lonely crazy old man with a bunch of guns at the top of a hill threatening passersby with a pistol whenever they drove too close to his house. Like those that was the last days of William Cooper. Well again I I mean I while I do think that you know the links to like his life as a military brand and then the very clear PTSD that like dogged him throughout his life are sympathetic entry points. He seemed to have really lived out a life full of problems he created by himself. Yeah. Bill is a guy who's dealt a rough hand of cards and throws the cards away and starts pooping in a box and then demanding people treat the poop as if it is a deck of cards. And when everyone else is like no Bill that's that's clearly poop.

He gets angry at the entire world and starts a radio show. Is that a good and when has that ever gone well for anyone. Yeah. So you know don't become a conspiracy icon at the cost of your own happiness and loved ones and instead become a fashion icon and also render yourself immune to all diseases with our new FDA approved FDA approved to prevent all diseases mask. This is a really good. This was this whole episode was an ad right. Yeah absolutely. Yeah OK just checking. Like Bill Cooper I have decided to cash in on the fact that I'm a fundamentally broken antisocial person with a head full of PTSD and I'm choosing to do it with masks.

Oh good. Well I'm glad that you could find someone to connect with on this show. Yeah. Oh boy I also threatened random people with a gun for driving on the public land but that's that's a separate that's a kind of a more of a more of a kink than anything to be honest. That's your that's your little Jackie moment. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So. So. Jamie how are you feeling. What's up. He said how are you feeling and you're like I can't answer that question. You know. Thanks for checking in. Not good.

I don't feel good about it. I feel this is a this is a more complicated not good that I'm used to on the on the show. But yeah he's a complex man a complex fundamentally abusive person whose toxicity left him alone on a mountaintop. Yeah. Yeah. Oh boy. Yeah. This was a this was a dark one and tell you what.

It's not great. How do you feel. I feel I feel like I'm not at all looking into my own future. I have a. With each passing day you know we get worried we worry about you and we get more worried about you and each passing day. That's actually my full time job. I get closer to having that mountaintop compound. You really are edging your way up the mountain as time goes on.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that I can get into my last great fight with the FDA fucking cowards go down at the hands of the FDA. You know. It'll be so funny. It'll be so funny. Oh my God.

Yes. What a great punchline to an incredible life as a as a human being. You owe a responsibility to try to like leave something entertaining for the children and like another person dying in an old folks home. No kids going to like but some you hear about this this podcast host who started a war with the FDA that got 70 kids burnt to death in a basement. Like that's a story people are going to tell. I really need the kids cut out of this equation. I know. You being murdered by the FDA.

Everybody. This is why everyone still loves David Koresh. Look, he got 70 kids killed and now he's the sexy guy with abs on a fucking Netflix special. So he did have too many abs on the Netflix show. It's clearly fine to get a lot of kids killed. I don't even think it was Netflix. I think it's just on Netflix. Oh, well, that's where I watched it.

I don't want. I somebody. He didn't have too many abs on the show to the point where I was also like is it for him to have this many abs on the show. Whoever made it, the actor who played him was very hot and that guy was very not. It was a bold choice to look at it a man who fucked 14 year olds and had illegal child brides and say, we got to rehab this dude. We got to rehab this dude. The answer to be like, let's make him sexy. We got to have him play in a rock show right before the FBI kills it.

And it was on Paramount Network. Somebody told me we were wrong last time when we gave credit to Netflix for that. Whatever. Terrible. What a ridiculous series. It was a mess. I mean, the fucking The Unabomber series was problematic too. But at least they like got a guy who looked like a dangerous shut-in to play The Unabomber.

They didn't have David Koresh like drop a rap album right as the FBI comes into his fucking house. He's just like playing guitar. I think the only series that I think is worse than Waco in terms of like this genre of TV is the assassination of Gianni Versace. Oh my god, it was so bad. It was ridiculous. I hate it. I thought the OJ one was pretty good. The OJ one was great.

The OJ one was really good. The Gianni Versace one is a fucking mess. Darren Frost plays Andrew Cunanan. It's a disaster. Yeah, Ross from Friends really changed my opinion of that Cartascian guy. I like what he says juice. Whenever he says juice, I'm laughing. Where do you call some juice? Juice.

You believe it. You believe it. You believe that Ross from Friends not only calls his friend that, but because he's such a fan of his friend, he's so excited to get to call him juice. You hear that in him. It's really heartbreaking. I like that. The trial of OJ Simpson.

Solid. Jamie, do you want to plug your Puggables before we plug any more docu-series that we don't have claim in? I'd like to plug the OJ series. I like it. I watch it maybe about once a year when I get sick. Yeah, when it's time for Ross from Friends and his love of OJ Simpson to be tested. It's good TV for when you get sick. Then I also have a Twitter account that you can find if you want.

You can listen to my year in Mensa and the Beckville cast if you want. You can find me on a mountaintop in Idaho with dozens and dozens of young followers as I await the violent hands of the FDA. I'm just not allowing this to happen. Are you trying to protect me for myself here, Sophie? Yes, I am, sir. It's what I do. Sophie does not want to do the episode on you when you were killed by the FDA. I just can't.

I really don't. I can't stop wake-o-ing. I can't stop wake-o-ing. There's some merch. I think we should end the episode before you do anything else that upsets you, man. Is there any other way you'd like to perjure yourself before? Let me give you my feelings on... And that's the episode.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.