“The Conspiracist Manual That Influenced a Generation of Rappers”
Original article by Mark Jacobson for Vulture
Milton William “Bill” Cooper (1943–2001), while largely unknown in the hated mainstream media, was the most important “conspiracy” writer and thinker of his time. Chances are individuals like Alex Jones, QAnon, and even Donald Trump would not have manifested the way they have without the influence of Bill Cooper and his book Behold a Pale Horse, which, 27 years after it was first published in 1991, remains the primer of the new American paranoid canon.
Cooper’s life, from his military service as a riverboat captain in the Vietnam War through intense exploration of the “fringe” culture of UFOs, the Kennedy assassination, the Knights Templar, radical patriot militias, and the 9/11 Truth movement, ended the only way it could have. In November 2001, as he predicted on his shortwave-radio show, “The Hour of the Time,” Cooper was shot dead in a gunfight with police on the doorstep of his hilltop home in eastern Arizona. Long before that, however, the influence of Cooper’s work had extended to unexpected places like Harlem and the New York housing projects that gave birth to hip-hop.
Nowadays you can buy a copy of Behold a Pale Horse from Walmart for $17.34 with two-day shipping. But if you want to know how Bill Cooper’s book came to Harlem, the fastest way is still the A train to 125th Street. From there, walk east to between Frederick Douglass and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevards, which is where, if he’s in the mood, you can find Bro. Nova at his sidewalk table across from the world-famous Apollo Theater.
All varieties of items can be bought from street vendors on 125th Street: vats of sheaf butter, aphrodisiac tinctures, copies of old Bruce Lee and Pam Grier movies, $12 Louis Vuitton pocketbooks made in Shenzhen. But even though he’s spent more than half his life as a 125th Street merchant, Bro. Nova, a tall and sleek man now in what looks to be his early 40s, has always stuck with books.
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