Mt Weather: Behold a Pale Horse pp. 119-124

Back in my conspiracy theorist days, I knew the FEMA conspiracy theory. This was the theory that FEMA the “Federal Emergency Management Agency” could suspend civil rights at any instant for whatever reason it wanted. The reason, according to the increasingly extremist NRA magazine “American Rifleman” (I was reading in the 1990s before they called all federal law enforcement ‘jack-booted thugs’ causing President George HW Bush to turn in his membership in protest), would be to seize all the American guns. This was inevitable and it was always just about to happen. I know this theory, what I didn’t know (or perhaps I have forgotten) is where the headquarters of FEMA was, luckily Cooper is going to remind us, “Just outside of a sleepy little town called Bluemont, Virginia, about 46 miles west of Washington D.C., in an area of wilderness covering what has been called the toughest granite rock in the eastern United States. The area is surrounded by signs marked ‘Restricted Area’ and ‘This installation has been declared a restricted area…”

Cooper does a good job setting the atmosphere, it has a very “horror movie” set up to it. I can hear the trailer’s voice, “It was a sleepy little town and little did the citizens know that underneath it lies FEMA.” I can see us finally getting the movie star duo of the Rock and Nic Cage, soundtrack by Taylor Swift. Maybe we get Fincher to direct, I’ve got ideas once the strike is over. FEMA is an unusual organization because it was not created by Congress, created by executive order in 1978 then recognized as an agency in 2002. 

FEMA’s powers are difficult to ascertain. For example, we discovered during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina that FEMA can do very little if they are not asked. It takes a special invitation for FEMA to enter an area. They cannot just go in and do whatever they want. Most of the conspiracy theorists citing FEMA (such as the first X-Files movie) seem to forget that there are legal restrictions on what FEMA can and cannot do. The most important restriction it has is that it is like a vampire, it cannot come in unless you explicitly tell it to. 

Cooper, and the conspiracy theorists of this time, either didn’t understand this or they didn’t care. The latter is very likely since, in their worldview, the law doesn’t apply to people like the Rothschilds, and Rockefellers, or to agencies like FEMA. FEMA was created in 1978 but Cooper has General Leslie Bray telling a Senate subcommittee in 1975 that he cannot say what goes on at Mt. Weather. There is, of course, a difference between not knowing and not being able to say. Without the question, it’s difficult to know how this exchange went. The problem that I have is that Cooper’s full quote from Bray is this, “I am not at liberty to describe precisely what is the role and the mission and the capability that we have at Mount Weather or at any other precise location.”

We move from Bray to Sen. John Tunney of California who chaired a subcommittee on Constitutional Rights in 1976. This is what Cooper is referring to with Bray’s testimony. Here, Cooper is claiming that Tunney claimed that the US government was holding 100k dossiers on American citizens, that the Mt. Weather computes were the best in the world, and could gather millions of pieces of information on any American citizen it wanted. Let’s be clear about what Cooper is doing. He claims not that Tunney said these dossiers existed but that he alleged they did, then Cooper says that during his days in ONI (Office of Naval Intelligence), he not only saw these dossiers but also that they were solely about American Patriots, those who would resist the coming New World Order. He’s doing an old conspiracy theorist tactic of postulating that something could exist and then speaking about it not only as though it does exist but also that he has personal experience with it. 

The trouble is that I have access to the entire report. The first mention of secret dossiers is in a warning by Alan Westin who was one of the first people to warn of the dangers of technology, privacy, and freedom in his “Privacy and Freedom (1967)” and “Databanks in a Free Society (1972).” Westin’s concern is that technology might be employed to keep records on people the way that totalitarian states did. Westin isn’t recommending it, he’s warning about the dangerous road that a state could go down. The rest of the mentions of dossiers is related to what Cooper is discussing. However, he needs to read the report. The military has dossiers on its own people for security reasons, and the government agencies have dossiers on their own people for security reasons, what Cooper is claiming is something different. I think we can set aside those accusations. Cooper wants to discuss the dossiers on Americans that the government thinks are going to resist.  

For this, we know these exist. We know that the FBI under J Edgar Hoover collected files of individuals he considered “radicals.” We know that the HUAC and Sen. McCarthy kept files on alleged Communists. The list goes on, that dossiers exist is not the question, the important thing is what happens with them. In 1971, according to the report the US Army was ordered to destroy a substantial portion of its dossiers and then failed to do so. From the report, it’s hard to say whether they were kept for nefarious reasons or just incompetence. From the people that I know who have been in the Army, I’m leaning toward the latter. The bureaucracy is too big for malice to be effective, like MK Ultra’s files I’m sure that someone just forgot to do it. 

Now, I don’t think that Cooper read this report, and usually I just figure that he heard something on an abandoned USENET post. However, this report actually contains the source that I am very certain Cooper used, a Washington Post article “The Loss of Privacy” by William Raspberry June 18th 1975 (pg 1037 in the report). This is an op-ed discussing the coming loss of privacy as the result of the use of these supercomputers that may exist in the facility in Mt. Weather. This is all supposition, the ARPA-Net was barely a thing at the time, and while the futurists would talk of a spiderweb of interconnected computers the problem for Cooper is that he has to establish these things exist. The dossiers that everyone is afraid of are only important with these computers. I agree that the FBI, CIA, and military intelligence should not be compiling dossiers on citizens just because they protest the government; but Cooper isn’t making a new accusation here, this was common knowledge, especially with Hoover’s FBI. 

What is Mt. Weather? Cooper gives us the cover story–it’s a continuity of government facility, like the Greenbrier hotel in West Virginia. Cooper doesn’t seem to understand the purpose. He points out that there is a room for the president and his cabinet at Mt. Weather but then asks who voted for this president and who appointed the cabinet. No one did you idiot, the place is for the president to evacuate to in the event of a nuclear war. There isn’t a secret president there, it’s just where he will go in case the worst happens. I cannot decide if Cooper is being purposefully obtuse or if he is legitimately this ignorant. 

Finally, Cooper claims that he “CANNOT FIND A PLAN OR EXECUTIVE ORDER ANYWHERE WHICH OUTLINES ANY PROCEDURE OR ALLOWANCE FOR THE RESTORATION OF THE CONSTITUTION AFTER A NATIONAL EMERGENCY HAS ENDED. THIS LEADS TO THE OBVIOUS CONCLUSION THAT NO RESTORATION OF THE CONSTITUTION IS CONTEMPLATED OR DESIRED BY THOSE IN POWER.”

You of course would not be able to find those, just as you would not find a federal directive on the disposal of unicorn bodies. The FEMA conspiracy exists because it is said that FEMA can suspend your constitutional rights. Yet no one ever expands on what that means. If they declare an emergency FEMA can forcibly evacuate you from your home and they’ll sort out the legality of that later. They can also create curfews if needed. They can’t suspend your right to free speech or take away your guns. The conspiracy leaves out the details for which this could happen. Oddly enough, it is the adoption of this conspiracy into the X-Files: Fight the Future movie that made it much more plausible, but we need an already established alien invasion for that plot to work out. 

National Insecurities: Behold a Pale Horse pp. 116-119

Last week Cooper declared that George HW Bush was the King of America because SB 2834 gave him more liberality in directing funds toward covert actions. It only did this provided that the president did not direct already allocated funds somewhere else and if it were provided in writing what the funds were for. The reason for SB 2834 was to prevent the president from selling weapons to hostile foreign states in order to fund illegal wars in South America. It’s a legitimate conspiracy that the bill was attempting to stop, it’s a bit curious that Cooper does not focus on Iran-Contra more than he does. I’m not trying to cast aspersions on him, this isn’t like how Alex Jones ignores all of the rules/laws that Trump broke/alleged to have broken, it’s just weird that he does not concentrate on it more. 

Cooper is going to continue with his grand mistake. His mistake, I should be clear, is that he is going to attempt to understand a law while lacking the legal knowledge to do so. As someone who holds a Ph.D., I understand that I can come across as a bit condescending or pretentious–especially when it comes to statements like I have just made. I’m not saying that lay people should not read laws, bills, or scientific literature; my claim is that if you are going to do so understand while they may be written in English they are not written in the same language that you and I speak. Prepare, if you undertake one of these tasks, to either not understand it, be bored, or just have another tab open to search terms and phrases. I teach my students how to read scientific papers, there is a method to it. I teach my students how to read court decisions, there is a method to it. If one merely reads it like one would read a novel, it will not work out. 

Today’s focus is on National Security Decision Directive 84 (NSDD 84) put forth by the Reagan Administration in 1983. Cooper claims it restricts the free speech of government employees and government contractors. He describes it, “Those with access to classified information were required to sign a nondisclosure agreement; those with access to a special category of classified information were made to agree to prepublication review of any future writings. The use of polygraphs was authorized.“

Cooper’s description is mostly accurate when it comes to the facts of the directive. He then describes that there was congressional opposition to the Reagan directive and that the tone and consequence of the directive were then later toned down. Reagan’s own secretary of state George Schultz threatened to resign over the polygraph requirement because he felt that “fear and intimidation is not the way to promote and protect security.” Let’s put aside that polygraphs do not work and only function in fiction (they were invented by the same person that invented the Scientologist’s E-Meter); the requirement amounted to nothing more than a loyalty oath because Reagan’s White House was just leaking information and this was Reagan’s attempt to stop it. 

I’m surprised it took until 1983 for this directive to happen considering Nixon was president once. Putting aside the polygraph requirement, it’s not a bad rule to prevent individuals working with classified material from taking it home and leaving it in their bathroom. I don’t like that this is an NSDD instead of a law. 

Our author takes us through a few more NSDD 17 which was the Iran-Contra plot, but he gives it five sentences and then we move on to the next one. NSDD  77, this was a program to increase the favorability of US actions across the world. It had a direct effect on Iran-Contra as one of its goals was to paint the Sandanistas of Nicaragua as villains. Cooper ends his description with this, “How many other covert propaganda programs do you think are operating against the American Citizens? I can assure you that there are many more than you would ever believe.” 

What’s infuriating about this last statement is that he’s doing this in a list of NSDDs so if there are more than he should be able to list them. He’s assuming that his readers will just agree with him that there must be more, but only one of these is an example of an internal “propaganda” program. As we would have said in the 80s, “Where’s the beef?”

He continues with NSDD 138 which is about preventing terrorism. That ends the list. The problem with this list is that Cooper is correct when he claims that NSDDs are becoming de facto legislation for rules that would never pass the normal legislative process which only governs the security state. This is a real problem that needs addressing, but Cooper removes any ability to agree with him when he claims that there exist NSDDs that suspend the Constitution, we can’t see them because they are still classified. This is like when 9/11 “truthers” claimed that Bush wasn’t telling us the whole story behind the attacks but then claim that his silence was because Cheney and him did it on purpose with a space laser or whatever. The first part was true (though later most of that information regarding the Saudis was declassified) but the problem becomes that agreeing with the first part implies that you are in agreement with the second part. 

How will the Bush White House suspend our rights? Through FEMA of course. Could this be the origin of the FEMA conspiracy that was so popular in the 90s? Probably not, but this is going to be one of the places that made it popular. Cooper is going to enlighten us about a place called Mount Weather, and that will be next week’s post. For now, though, we have to rewind a bit. 

Back in his discussion of NSDD 84 Cooper claims that the order “indicates that John Lear, Robert Lazar, Bruce Macabbee, Stanton Friedman, Clifford Stone, and many others may be active government agents.” 

First off, I have read NSDD 84, it does no such thing. Secondly, these names are infamous names in the UFO community. These are the people that Cooper would have come up with in the UFOlogy groups in the 70s and 80s, before he pivoted to Illuminati conspiracy theories and being such an insufferable asshole that they kicked him off the UFO circuit. John Lear, the son of Lear Jet founder Bill Lear, was the leading voice in the UFO community in the mid-80s. Lear brought Cooper into the UFO community. Robert Lazar claimed to have been employed at Area 51 and then a secret facility in Area 51–he’s also a liar who cannot substantiate a single claim that he makes. His implication that he stole the power source for the UFO Moscovium (Element 115 back then) is absurd given that the element has a half-life of .46 seconds. Again though, Lear is the one who brought Lazar to the most credulous reporter outside of an Iraqi WMD investigation and thrust Area-51 into the popular culture. I’m not familiar with Macabbee, so I’ll skip him. Stanton Friedman was THE name in UFOlogy for a while. His claim to fame was that he was the first civilian to document the Roswell crash site and he testified in front of Congress about the visitation of UFOs to Earth. He wasn’t a crazy UFO guy either, a large reason that Lazar was debunked was because Friedman couldn’t accept his claims. 

The point is not to go down the UFO hall of fame, but that NSDD 84 has nothing in it which substantiates Cooper’s claim. If Lear et al were telling the truth it would certainly apply, but this is too far of a jump even for these works. 

Getting Mark Twain Right: Behold a Pale Horse pp. 113-116

Mark Twain is one of the best American writers in our nation’s history. It’s really hard to beat his sarcasm and wit, especially for the time he was writing. He’s also one of those people in history that gets misquoted quite frequently, so when I saw a Twain quote to open chapter 5 I immediately went to the internet to find out the real quote. Here is the quote as Cooper presents it, 

“It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.” 

The line, presented without attribution, is correct. Cooper claims Twain wrote this in 1885, but that’s an error–Twain wrote the book the line in “Following the Equator” as a follow-up to a trip he took in 1895. The book was first published in 1897. Even in the book, its presence is abrupt. It opens a chapter that discusses Twain’s encounter with the fauna of Australia. It’s about as non sequitur as one can get, even for Twain this is strange. 

It fits in with the chapter in Cooper’s book where he is going to discuss the end of the USA and the beginning of the New World Order. This is a strange topic because hasn’t he already done this in every chapter except the first? 

Omni-conspiracy theorists like Bill Cooper do not have consistent worldviews. Cooper has claimed that a secret, possibly alien, force had conquered the entire world thousands of years ago. Then, as a result of their dominion, they created the world through the events that we read about in history books. At some point, this resulted in creating the United States. There is no way around it. Even an amateur historian would know that the American Revolution was basically a proxy war between the UK and France. The secret masters of the world did not let France fund the Revolutionaries without permission. The entire thing is part of the plan. When people like Cooper say “Goodbye USA” they can only mean that part of the plan is over and a new part is beginning. A knight in chess is always subject to the whim of the player, and the existence of the US–by Cooper’s own reckoning–is only part of the whim of the secret masters. 

Cooper believes that Congress is full of criminals but this is a cliche unless he starts naming crimes. The only crime he can name is that they don’t represent the people, “It is paradoxical that the government body most representative of the American citizen is the one that has been the most easily subverted. Through PACs, payoffs, pork-barrel politics, professional politicians, Congressmen who are members of secret societies and through greed and fear, our Representatives and Senators quit representing us long ago..”

Cooper has at least a couple legitimate griefs here. Yes PAC contributions are a problem, as are bribery and what he calls professional politicians. The problem is obvious: funding. PACs (Political Action Committee) and “payoffs” or only effective because they donate to campaigns and represent a too influential thumb on the scale. Cooper is writing before the decision in Citizens United which removed the limits on how much can be spent; so I wonder how much he would have written about that today or if he would have descended into right-wing lunacy like so many other conspiracy theorists. 

Another problem he seems to have is that he doesn’t quite get how legislation gets made. He asks, “How is that our Legislature has allowed and at time encouraged the Executive Branch to write law?

This is a good question if that’s what actually happens. He’s confusing an expression, the “Biden infrastructure law,” with the reality of the law itself. Biden didn’t write the law, a bunch of people working for the Democratic party, Congress, and the Biden Administration wrote a law; because they are on the same team. The executive branch signs it into law, but the entire idea is that the legislature can prevent it if they feel the need to. In Cooper’s ideal world, I suppose, he wants Congress and the president to be “black-boxed” so that the president only sees the law when/if it passes Congress. That may be a feasible approach, but I don’t think it is practical that people with the same ideas and the same goals wouldn’t work together. 

However, Cooper also brings up another actual problem–the power creep of the executive branch. He laments that the president effectively imposes laws through the use of Executive Orders, National Security memos, etc. 

Ok, this isn’t a bad criticism but it fails to understand what these are. An executive order is an order over the agencies and departments of the government that is within the executive branch’s oversight. If the president wants the FBI to de-prioritize a certain type of crime (like felony possession of a drug) he can issue a directive to the Justice Department. President Kennedy, in another example, attempted to desegregate the South by issuing an executive order that all federal contractors working with the Executive branch take affirmative action (this is where the phrase comes from) by hiring a diversity of individuals or they would lose their contracts. This is a problem because the government has grown quite a bit and the presidential power is greatly expanded since the 1990s. 

Cooper claims that this began under president Bush in 1990 with the passage of the “Senate Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1991. Specifically, because of “tide VII, S.B. 2834.” 

First, he means “title” and not “tide.” He also means VI because there is no VII. VII is a problem, it allows the president to issue orders for covert action provided the president feels that the action will support the foreign policies of the United States. There are a few caveats to this: the first is that it has to be done in writing, is not retroactive, specifies who is going to be conducting it (and whether they are subject to US law), and that there is no violation of the Constitution. The bill was in response to the Iran-Contra affair where Reagan authorized the sale of weapons to Iran in order to fund operations in South America. The bill places enough limits on the president that Reagan’s actions could not be repeated without a paper trail but the idea that the president has the sole determination of whether an action is to support American foreign policy seems to give the office more of a free hand than I would like. It does not, as Cooper claims, make Bush (or any president) king of America. 

Cooper’s complaints in this section are all, sort of valid. It’s hard to write that sentence because he misunderstands so much; but if you want to talk about runaway executive authority or private interests influencing policy, I agree. Criticisms like this need to be accurate because otherwise, you appear to be a person like Cooper screaming about lizards controlling the FBI. His next complaint concerns National Security Directives, and this is a separate (though related) problem; the only trouble is that Cooper thinks it legitimizes a certain group of people from his UFO days.  

Padding: Behold a Pale Horse pp. 108-112

Sometimes, when looking at student papers I’ll find some strange things. Usually, the problem is that a student feels the need to write to the minimum length so they’ll add whatever they can to their work. As long as it stays on the subject, it’s fine, but I’ll still deduct for what is often irrelevant commentary. The problem is that most of my students are taught in high schools that they need to write for length. I don’t know why this lesson is drilled into them, because, as a college instructor I don’t grade on length. The lengths that I assign are general guidelines. If the assignment says 1000 words, I’ll take an 800-word essay if it is good.  My colleagues are like this as well, there’s no hard and fast rule. 

This is even less the case with a work like Cooper’s. There is no minimum word count for a book. Sure, there are definitions: a novel is a certain length (around 40k words) and a novella is between 10k and 39k. These aren’t definitions that serve any other purpose than to categorize writing. If Cooper turns in his book and it doesn’t contain a certain amount of pages they won’t reject it, it’ll just be categorized as something else. 

I bring all of this up because this entire chapter is a mystery to me. Cooper presented very little context for the last chapter’s “oath,” and here he presents no introduction. The chapter title is the only thing that we are given “Secret Treaty of Verona: Precedent and Positive Proof of Conspiracy.”

That’s it, the rest of the chapter is just quoting the Veronese treaty and then a document dealing with American foreign policy. This document could be interesting because it is a “secret” but a secret then and a secret now are two different things. Because of monarchical rule in the past, a secret treaty just meant a treaty between aristocrats. The Treaty of Verona was merely one of several meetings and solutions to questions that were raised about the state of Europe after the Napoleonic Wars.  

The other problem that I sometimes run into while grading is the student that crams anything into their paper. Just any thought that pops in their head will end up on the page and sometimes it makes for an interesting read though almost always a terrible grade. I would like to say that this is an example of the latter, but the trouble with the Treaty of Verona is that Cooper had to find this. This isn’t a document a person might just have on hand. 

This leads me to the hypothesis that Cooper is merely using everything that he has in order to inflate the book. Conspiracy theorists, pseudoscientists, and misinformation peddlers; have this mistaken impression that “more = better.” Their book will be taken more seriously the thicker it is. If Cooper’s work has as many pages as a copy of Herodotus then the book must be as serious as that. I would love if there was some other reason for this inclusion but without Cooper, as unreliable as he is, has to introduce it properly, otherwise we’re just reading a treaty.

The claim in the chapter title is that this is proof of the conspiracy, but it’s not. We can read it, this treaty is about settling a question concerning Portugal and Spain; it thanks the Pope for having intervened already in the matter, and that the Spanish conflict, once ended will probably require another congress to meet. Then the ambassadors from the four involved nations sign it. 

The second half of the chapter is the words of Senator Robert L. Owen commenting on why he has read the treaty into the Congressional Record. It’s an interesting twist because Owen is using this to present a long argument for women’s suffrage. Treaties like those of Verona, can only be signed by the aristocracy and there is some anti-democratic language in this treaty when it argues in Article 2 that the popular press is the “most powerful means used by the pretended supporters of the rights of nations to the detriment of those of princes, the high contracting parties promise reciprocally to adopt all proper measures to suppress it, not only in their own states but also in the rest of Europe.”

Remember, in the last book when Robison was arguing against the Illuminati and the German Union’s attempt at teaching literacy throughout Europe? This is that. The powers of Austria, France, Prussia, and Russia; promise to do their best to quell the democratic rumblings in Europe. Owen’s argument appears to be that exclusion of the population is how such aristocratic governments work thus to combat that, on principle, we should grant the vote to the other half of the population. Owen’s argument is a little clunky but his point is that the more people participate in government the less likely such censorship can happen, thus giving women suffrage is necessary for the continuing existence of the United States. 

Buried at the end of the chapter, is Cooper’s reason for inclusion. You could criticize me for being so hard on him in the beginning, but the conventions of writing are such that you have to introduce a 4-page quotation that spans two different documents, then you close it out. Cooper’s commentary is profoundly uninteresting because he is claiming that the signatories of the treaty are secretly the Black Nobility, but they aren’t. These are not the defenders of the Pope in 1870 against the Savoy. The names here are not even Italian, but people like Cooper see the phrase “Black Nobility” and think of evil. The members were never secret and it was a term of honor to be named a defender of the Vatican at the time. The ultimate problem is that the United States is not mentioned in the treaty nor does the treaty apply to the US. Owen was using it as an example, but that’s the only relationship that exists. 

Is it padding? In a normal document, yes. However, in a conspiracy document, it could be relevant. Even for a conspiracy document, Cooper has not done the work to tie it in with his omni-conspiracy. 

That’s all of Chapter 4. Chapter 5 we return to Cooper’s writing as opposed to his long quoting with “Good-bye USA Hello New World Order.”