What I Am Reading: "Pale Horse Rider" by Mark Jacobson

               This book, subtitled “William Cooper, the Rise of Conspiracy, and the Fall of Trust in America,” was a biography of Milton William Cooper, a leading conspiracy theorist in the ‘80s and ‘90s. He operated mainly through the medium of shortwave radio, and through his magnum opus, “Behold a Pale Horse.” Journalist Mark Jacobson finds Cooper to be much more interesting than I do.

               Not that I don’t like conspiracy theories, mind you. When I was young, I had all manner of slapdash coffee-table books about Kennedy, UFOs, Atlantis, and the Illuminati. I was fortunate enough to discover skepticism in my teens through Carl Sagan; but that doesn’t mean that conspiracy theories can’t be interesting in a vacuum. Tracing conspiracy theories in an archaeological sense, and their impact in a sociological sense, is a very interesting topic, and this book does contain some such investigations. Cooper was a prolific synthesizer of conspiracy, combining and sublimating existing theories into his larger whole. Jacobson is most interesting when delving into the histories of some theories that Cooper brought to the underground-mainstream, such as the idea of FEMA camps. However, this history is crying out for analysis of how Cooper’s theories changed the political or cultural landscape. Jacobson has a long segment on the popularity of Cooper’s theories in the African American community, but the outcome of this (beyond relevant rap lyrics) is little explored. Jacobson doesn’t communicate to me why Cooper matters now. Though he references the 2016 election, he doesn’t spend much time talking about how the prevalence or proliferation of conspiracy in the right-wing political discourse mattered to the outcome.

               In fact, the Obama years are hardly discussed at all, as Cooper died in a shootout with local police in 2001. The book has more to say about Cooper’s later life, when he was broadcasting on shortwave radio regularly, than about his early life. A Vietnam veteran, Cooper often sourced his “inside knowledge” to documents he discovered while working as a Naval intelligence officer. He maintained this through his time in the ‘80s as a “revealer” of UFO conspiracies, though it had largely fallen off by the time he shifted to more of a New World Order/militia focus in the ‘90s. This intellectual journey is well-explained, especially as it relates to Cooper’s decline in respectability in UFO circles. However, a more journalistic investigation of Cooper’s early life might have been a good idea; the man was such a bullshitter that many elements of his autobiography must have been faked. Perhaps he wasn’t even in naval intelligence? I was surprised not to find any corroboration of Cooper’s background beyond interview anecdotes.

               The purpose of the book was not to debunk any of Cooper’s conspiracy theories. Many of them are self-evidently absurd; and Jacobson is often clear that despite his fervent defense of them, Cooper clearly invented or synthesized everything to suit his purposes at the time. However, I think that Jacobson lets his fondness for or fascination with Cooper get in the way of proper criticism. He goes to lengths to clear Cooper of charges of racism or anti-Semitism (despite Cooper’s reprinting of “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion” as part of his book); and presents his abuse and alienation of his family in a way that I find to be very neutral and matter-of-fact. Any criticism of Cooper or his theories is very left-handed, using terms like “creaky” or “overheated.” I think a considerably larger dose of moral indignation is called for, for Cooper’s personally-destructive actions and (what I would characterize as) his toxic effect on the body politic. The book starts in an interesting place, but ultimately misses the opportunity to dig deeper and be bolder.