One adherent, Jake Angeli, has intentionally made a spectacle of himself by appearing at Arizona protests wearing a fur hat topped with horns and carrying a weathered sign that reads, “Q sent me.” Angeli said he has researched the secretive groups he believes control the world - Illuminati, Trilateral Commission and Bilderberg group, among others - and felt validated by finding Cooper mentioned them in his book.Īngeli said that the government needed to kill Cooper to silence him. The anonymous source of the information is “Q,” named for the level of top secret clearance he’s purported to have. QAnon adherents believe an anonymous figure inside government is sporadically posting cryptic clues to corruption and the perpetrators of child-sex crimes using various online bulletin boards - the shortwave radio of modern times. Jake Angeli, who supports QAnon, shouts about reopening schools in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic at the state Capitol on Aug. The book has also attracted followers of the conspiracy theory known as QAnon, which falsely casts Democrats as doing the bidding of globalists in order to shield their perversions, including devouring babies for their nourishing blood. Also very scary,” a member commented in May 2018. “I’m almost done with ‘behold a pale horse’ which details deep state control using school shootings etc as political motives to control the USA. The Arizona Republic reviewed thousands of the group’s posts, comments, photos and videos shared between 20. Members of the group have also become influential in the Arizona Republican Party. In an invitation-only Facebook group, some members of Patriot Movement AZ, a group of far-right Republicans, traded their thoughts on conspiracy theories and their hatred of Muslims and immigrants.

One audience that found “Behold a Pale Horse” is the Patriot wing of the Republican Party. 'Behold A Pale Horse' by Milton William Cooper as seen from the property where Cooper used to live in Eagar on Aug. He was a forerunner to the conspiracy theorists of today such as Alex Jones - with whom Cooper feuded. The internet was not yet ubiquitous in the mid-1980s when Cooper started spilling what he said was clandestine information from top secret documents he read as a member of a naval intelligence unit.Ĭooper used not only his book, but also in-person lectures, mail-order cassette tapes and a show on shortwave radio to share his understanding of a master plan to destroy the world.Įven though many have never heard of Cooper, his dark, conspiratorial thinking has endured and been amplified. “I believe that any man without principles that he is ready and willing to die for at any given moment is already dead and is of no use or consequence whatsoever,” Cooper wrote in the creed that began his book.

And, in his book, he suggested it was an honorable way to die. That Cooper would die in a shootout with authorities seemed fated. “Unless we can wake the people from their sleep nothing short of civil war will stop the planned outcome,” Cooper wrote in the book’s opening pages. Citizens must soon fight for what they hold dear.Ĭooper saw his mission as increasingly urgent. If you think shadowy forces are pulling the strings, it is because they are.

→ Years before QAnon, Arizona radio host hatched same ideasĬooper’s work describes a conspiracy that is timeless: Nearly all that has been told to you is illusion.

→ How Arizona Patriots build community around conspiracies.

→ How 2 women became stars of Arizona's Patriot movement.

→ How Patriot movement’s extreme views took over GOP.

→ How the Patriot Movement AZ became a political force.Nearly 30 years after its publication, “Behold a Pale Horse” remains a bestseller, finding new audiences for whom Cooper’s warnings - of a cashless society, a socialist order that devalues work, the confiscation of weapons, global leadership usurping the sovereignty of the United States - still resonate. Global forces, it was thought, needed him silenced. Though the official story had Cooper killed as deputies tried to arrest him on a local criminal charge, devotees would make him a martyr. What might have otherwise been seen as an amateurish hodgepodge of ideas earned gravitas once its author was gunned down. His book would become a defining text for conspiracy-minded people.

Through his death in 2001, Cooper’s legacy was cemented. When authorities killed William Cooper in a burst of gunfire outside his hilltop home in eastern Arizona, he was an author and radio host who had attracted a rabid following among UFO buffs, prisoners and the militia movement.įor them, his book, “Behold a Pale Horse,” and nightly shortwave radio show lifted the veil on how the world actually works. A photo of Milton William Cooper printed on a program from his funeral is seen in Eagar on Aug.

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