#1042: Mystery Babylon #8

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knock, knock, knock, knock knock, knock, knock, knowledge fight.

Dan and Jordan, I am sweating.

Knowledgeparty.com. It's time to pray.
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I'm sick of them posing as if they're the good guys, saying we are the bad guys. Knowledge and fight.

Dan and Jordan. Knowledge fight.

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Andy in Kansas.

Stop it. Andy and Kansas.
Andy in Kansas.

It's time to pray. Andy in Kansas, you're on the air.
Thanks for holding us. Hello, Alex.
I'm a fish-time caller. I'm a huge fan.
I love your room. Knowledge fight.

Knowledgefight.com.

I love you. Hey, everybody.
Welcome back to Knowledge Fight. I'm Dan.
I'm Jordan. We're a couple dudes.
Like to sit around, worship at the altar of Celine, and talk a little bit about Alex Joe's.

Oh, indeed we are. Dan.
Jordan. Dan.
Jordan. Quick question for you.
What's up? What's bright spot today, buddy? My bright spot today, Jordan, is the other day we had a little bit of a trip.

We took a little trip and we went to the dispensary. Sure.
And I was wearing my pinky ring. You were.
So I got to experience what it's like to go to a dispensary with a pinky ring. All right.

All right.

And it was kind of like just going to.

No one. no one,

it wasn't any different. No.
Yeah. I mean,

I think as far as Austin goes at a dispensary, you're going to find a lot more

visible characters. Right.
So that maybe a pinky ring doesn't show out as much as it would in other people.

I thought it would make me fit in more for sure. Sure, sure.
I mean, there's, you know, from my days,

you know, bling, bling. My pinky ring's worth about 50, bling, bling.
Every time I come around your city, bling, bling.

You know, like,

this is something I associate with

some cool weed days.

Right, right. I can't believe that it is not still cool.
Yeah.

Also, another pinky ring update. Last night, I was watching The Kingsmen with my friend Angela Lampsberry.

And what does he have? He has a pinky ring. that electrocutes people.
Nice. Yes, that's one of his little gadgets.
Oh, that's, you know what?

In our most recent episode of Matter of Time, there's the ring that poisons people. All right, you got to be doing more with your ring is what you're trying to say here.

Honestly, it's not living up to its potential as a James Bondi type gadget. Yeah.

And so I'll try to see if I can do anything with that. But I really think that once you get into like, I can hit a button and it does something, it's probably much bigger than

it would stick out a lot more.

You know, I was thinking about that and how they murdered somebody had the poison on the ring and then they scratched somebody and they die and I was like, man, that's such a great way to murder somebody.

Why isn't that how everybody murders people? And it's like, you're probably going to murder yourself.

There's a more, there's like a hundred percent chance you're going to accidentally touch it and then murder yourself. Of course you don't do that in real life.
You're dead. Right.

There's a there's a lot of external things that could go wrong. People shoot themselves in the leg all the time.
That's on your hand. Yeah.
Yeah.

Like in the in the Kingsmen, you put pressure on the inside of the ring. Anytime you make a fist, you're electrocuting it.
Yeah, absolutely. No chance.
No, it's a mess. Yep.

So, yeah, that's my bright spot. I went to the weed store with a pinky ring, and it was fine.
I like it. That's good.

I also tried the weed. I don't smoke.
I don't partake of the marijuana, but it's legal in Chicago. And so I thought I'd dabble around with it a little bit.
Yeah. It was fine.
It was fine. Yep.
Okay.

Good. Excellent review.
Yep. What's your bright spot? My bright spot is,

okay,

a little bit similar to when we were at the dispensary, you know, they had those things that you could classify the effects where they'd be like, this strain makes you feel blank, you know? Yeah.

That's probably relaxed, focused. Sure, fine.
Fuck you. Drop-down menu.
It's bullshit.

Probably, but whatever, right?

So my wife started doing physical therapy. She's got this shoulder thing.
Started doing physical therapy. Feels a lot better.
So we've got these resistance bands. And I figure, hey, my shoulder sucks.

I got a whole pile of stuff that sucks. I'll just do the same physical therapy.
You know what? Works great.

Works great. Yeah, I feel a lot better.
What does this have to do with the weed dropdown menu?

Because

it has the feel of something that people are like.

Okay,

it's just regular lifting weights. Okay.
Lifting weights is probably better than not lifting weights.

But there is something to do with these exercises that are specifically helpful towards the areas that I need to use. Towards the shoulder.
Exactly. And you're using the shoulder.

Well, because there's a resistance band thing, it's a whole different thing than what I used to do whenever I was lifting weights.

Right?

Yeah, it's similar in many ways, different in a few. Different in a few.
And those differences, very crucial.

Right?

Yeah. So I've discovered that I am getting free physical therapy by just

doing what my wife does. Bands and stuff like that, they probably utilize muscles in a more targeted way than a lot of what you would have done when you were lifting weights.
Absolutely.

So, yeah, but I don't think this relates to the wiki drop-down menu. No, because it reminds me, it reminds me of something like that.

It reminds me of that same thing where somebody might be like, oh, no, no, this stuff, it touches the muscles, right? You know, but it's like, okay, fine.

See, the thing with those drop-down menus are that there's like one of them you can get is this will make you feel creative. Right.
And that's entirely subjective. Yeah, exactly.

And it's probably not a useful metric. For sure.
What you're describing with the physical therapy is like, this targets muscles in your shoulder. No.
Oh, wow. My shoulder feels better.

I mean, more like in the back of my head, it's always been more like chiropractic or something where it's like, this is clearly bullshit. You mean like resistance bands? No.
Or physical therapy.

Physical therapy. Oh, okay.

Yeah. It's got that vibe to me of like, oh, this is the thing people do to go to be told that they'll feel better about it.
You know what I'm saying?

Yeah, I think some connotations, some people are bad in physical therapy circles.

I'm sure there are. Yeah,

maybe you were biased by those things against the legitimate

area of physical therapy. Exactly.

That makes sense. Yep.

I think I had a similar experience with Pilates whenever I went and took a couple classes.

I had just associated it with some kind of like woo nonsense. Right, right.

But then I went and did it, and I'm like, oh my God, this is. Oh, it feels great.
Yeah, it's crazy.

So, I don't know.

The bad reputation of things often gets in the way. Yeah, I think the problem is a lot of stuff is bullshit, but some stuff really isn't.

And it's hard to know the difference. Well, today we're going to be talking about something that's bullshit.
All right. And we'll get to it in just a moment.

First, let's take a little moment to say hello to some new wonks. Ooh, that's a great idea.
So, first, the crab from the Bible. Thank you so much.
You're now a Palsywonk. policy I'm a policy wonk.

Thank you very much. Thank you.
Next, oops, I wonked it again. I wonked with the wonk.
Got wonk in the wonk. A wonky wonky.
You're now policywonk. I'm a policy wonk.
Thank you very much. Thank you.

And the king in yellow is a Greenland husky, and he thanks Forest Fire for introducing him to Knowledge Fight. You have a thousand episodes in you.
Thank you so much. You're now Palsywonk.

I'm a policy wonk. Thank you very much.
Thank you. And we got a technical credit in the mix, Jordan.

So thank you so much to the sexy beasts and chainsaw will burn this place to the fucking ground, Eddie. Thank you so much.
You're not a policy wonk. Technical.
Policy won't.

Someone, sodomite, sent me a bucket of poop. Daddy Shark.
Bomb, bomb, bump, bump, bump. Jar Jar Binks has a Caribbean black accent.
He's a loser, little, little kitty baby.

I don't want to hate black people. I renounce Jesus Christ.
Thank you so much. Thank you very much.
So, Jordan,

today we have

the primary ding-dong on the secondary burner. All right.

And we're going to be talking about Mystery Babylon. Okay.
We're going to be talking about Mystery Babylon number eight. All right.
And then maybe.

Maybe.

You know, you remember when Black Adam came out and The Rock was saying that the power balance of the DC universe was going to change? Sure. That may happen on this stream.
You think that, okay.

All right. Wait, in the literal sense that he meant it or in the actual sense in that it happened in the way that he did not want it to happen?

I mean it in the sense that it's really funny that he said it

in hindsight, considering how

that was a bomb. That's what I was thinking you were thinking.
Yeah. Yes.
I don't. The power balance of the Knowledge Fat universe is not going to change.
Right.

But it's kind of funny to imagine

something will change. I'll tell you that.

So we start here. We're going to begin lecture number eight of Bill Cooper's Mystery Babylon series.
And as is my tradition, I would like you to tell us what we know so far. All right.
Oh, shit.

Okay.

It's not Captain Lumia, but that's the name that I've given for Lord Maitreya. Lord Maitreya.
Yeah.

Lord Maitreya may not be that important a piece of this. No, but for some reason, Lord Maitreya, it's a very RPG villain name, right? Yeah, yeah.

Then we've got

there was no verb there. There was just a name.
You just have a name. Right, right, right.

It's not the Jews, but it's not the Jews. You know what I'm saying? It's not.

And

then there's the Seventh-day Adventists. Got to watch out for that seventh day.
You never know.

You switched the Sabbath from

Saturday to Sunday. It could all go crazy after that.
Right.

And then really, we're just reading pamphlets at the end of the day, I think, is where I'm at. Yeah.
You missed some of the ideas about Horace.

Well, sure, but I thought I've already re I've already re you know what I'm saying? Like I'm trying to keep up to date with what I've had because in my head, we're still in Egypt.

Yeah, because we don't know what the Knights of Malta are up to. No.

That's why

when I ask you for this, I'm looking for a synthesis. Right.
I'm looking for you to bring what you know about Horace and his gigantic penis.

And what does that have to do with the Seventh-day Adventists? Okay. Because ideally, we're supposed to be learning, right? I mean, this is supposed to be an illuminatory course, ironically.

Right, right, right. Okay.

So

if I was going to get to like

what's the conclusion I would draw from the information that we've received up to this point,

like the

basis of words being far more important than the actual etymology of them. Like soul, you know, that's the sun, even if it's not related to the sun particularly.
Right, it's also part of your shoe.

Right, exactly.

I would say

the bad guys,

if I was going to synthesize everything, the bad guys sound like us, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't trust us.

Okay, that's interesting.

I put you in an unfair position because there really isn't a synthesis you could make of this, but that's that's fair enough. Yeah.

Yeah, I find myself thrown by how disconnected everything really seems

in terms of the first seven installments of this series. Um, then Bill starts off here, uh, and I found myself once again uh suffering from whiplash.

From Tinkerbell to Artie Shaw to George Bush's Thousand Points of Light, America has been mesmerized by Stardust since its very inception.

And now America is beginning to learn what all these references to the star, the morning star,

worship on a star, stardust, really is all about.

There was

something very strange about the classical mysteries, something which attracted people to them, and having attracted them, made their initiates, with very few exceptions, permanent devotees.

In Egypt, Greece, India, Rome, and a dozen other places and countries, sacred initiations took place in specially prepared sanctuaries, usually in a cave or underground.

So that opening about Tinkerbell and what have you, I was like, this doesn't match tonally with the stuff you're clearly reading. Yeah, what do we read?

There's gotta be a point where we jumped from Bill saying something

about Tinkerbell and Shaw and the Thousand Points of Light. That's him.
And then he jumps to text.

So that's just him. The rest of it is just him reading from a book called A History of Secret Societies by someone named Archon Darul.

This was a pen name that was used by a man named Igrius Shaw, who was a proponent of Sufism. Okay.

Sufism is generally associated with Islam, but Shah's particular take on the belief was that it's applicable across religions.

There is a universal wisdom in his form of Sufism that could benefit everyone. Sure.

Shah wrote a whole lot, including a book from 1964 called The Sufis, which is largely credited with bringing Sufi mysticism to a Western audience.

That was a pretty impactful release, but a couple years prior, he'd released two less successful books under his alias Archon Darul, which one of them was this book, The History of Secret Societies, and the other was titled Witches and Sorcerers.

We're close.

God damn it! So Bill is just stealing the text of this book, but he's also depriving the audience from understanding the perspective of the person who wrote the original words.

This is a text written by an influential Sufi thinker who's published this book on secret societies under a pen name, which is worth thinking about why.

Why would that be? Why wouldn't he put his own name on this? Why would there be

that context is missing. But there's just all of this is out of context.

And by taking that context away, Bill isn't allowing the audience to know that this book isn't about secret societies in the way that he usually talks about them.

This book considers secret societies to be anything from the Freemasons to tribal hunting parties.

It's about the inherent desire among members of civilization to create in-groups and how that can be good or bad depending on your perspective.

From the foreword of this book, quote, This book does not pretend to be an exhaustive account of secret societies. None such has ever been nor ever will be written.

But in these pages will be found some of the characteristic forms which secret societies and cults have taken, successfully or otherwise.

None of them can be regarded as good from every point of view, but all of them can can be considered evil from one standpoint or another.

Democracy by autocrats, banditry by the law-abiding, mysticism by the materialist. So, you see, what this is kind of saying is that these groups,

no group can universally be called good, but every group that fits into this category has something that some group would consider evil. Yeah.

And that's interesting. Bill's not dealing with it at all.
So, he's just reading from chapter 11 of this book titled The Cults of the Ancient Mysteries,

which

is chapter 11. There's a lot before that.
All right. Do you think it's the same reason we had Chris Gaines?

Yeah, Chris Gaines could do things that Garth Brooks couldn't. You know what I'm saying? Like, are we in a reputation kind of change thing?

Or do you think perhaps he's just trying to get rid of his whole Sufi thing in general? Hmm.

I think that from what I can tell from his bibliography, which I haven't read a ton of Archon's books or

Idreus's.

I think that maybe these two books that were these are a little bit off the beaten path.

I didn't read Witches and Sorcerers, and I didn't read all of The Secret Society's one,

but I think, yeah, I think they might be at Chris Gaines.

What we don't remember is that back when Chris Gaines happened,

country was a very restrictive genre. Garth Brooks, there was only so much he could do within the world of country without everyone turning on him.

He had to do this. He had to create this alter ego.
And that's why he became Lil Nasax, right? That's, again, country would not allow.

Not going to happen without... Yep, that makes sense.
So Bill reads on from this text.

What were the mysteries?

Until relatively recently, and relying upon comparatively scattered fragments such as Apollesius' Golden Ass, historians and religious writers had formed an opinion of them which has been shown to be extremely naive, if not outright false.

They knew that at the ceremonies symbolical teaching took place, and hence inferred that the mysteries were a relic of the times when academic knowledge was guarded by the very few, and scientific truths such as Pythagorean theorems were given only and only to the elect.

They knew also that orgiastic drumming and dancing formed a part of many of the rituals, and therefore told their readers that this was a degenerate form of religion or a mere excuse for licentiousness.

They found that stories of ancient gods and heroes were recited, and were sure that the mysteries constituted little more than an underground survival of prehistoric religion, magic, or tribal initiation.

Or maybe that's exactly what they wanted us to believe, knowing full well that it was false. Wait, what? And of course, if those who did the writing were members of the mysteries, they would never

have allowed the secrets to be revealed to the profane. So, everything after he said tribal initiation.
So, when he went into the maybe that's what they want you to think. Yeah.

That's not from the text. That sounds right.
That's Bill adding his own shit to this, which is fraudulent. Yep.

You have to have it one way or or the other.

You have to be reading this person's point and refute it

and bring your own context to it with the, like, allowing the audience to understand, this is the point that this author is making, and this is what I'm bringing to it.

You can't blend those things together. It's just...

Just disastrous. It's remix culture.
Like, remember how, okay, think about it this way. So

there's that song, Under Pressure,

really great song. Yep.
And Vanilla Ice was like, Let's blend that together with my own song. And then he made a new song out of their song.
Right? It's the same thing. Yeah.

It worked out. It worked.
This should work out about the same as that did. Because that didn't go well.
No, it did go well. He did steal it.
That was the problem, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Or like that bittersweet symphony.

Yeah. It was just fucking

to the Rolling Stones. Really

messed that one up, huh? Yeah. Yep.
So Bill starts talking about the Eleusinian mysteries

out of Greece. Okay.
So let us return to a sketch of the conventional knowledge about the mysteries. And those of Eleusis celebrated in Greece.

The candidate had to undergo fasting or abstinence from certain foods.

There were processions with sacred statues carried from Athens to Eleusis.

Those who were to be initiated waited for long periods of time outside the hall in the temple where the rites were to be held, building up a tremendous tension of suspense.

Eventually, a torchbearer led them within the precincts, usually underground. So, Bill is adding to the source text that this initiation ceremony happened underground.

He's choosing to plagiarize his entire script from this other person's book, but he doesn't make the full point that he wants to with it. He can't.

It doesn't include these things, so he adds those details.

This is an act of lying.

In this particular case, there may be some actual truth to the idea that initiates into the Eleusinian mysteries were taken underground for a brief time, because that mystery school was in honor of Demeter, the Greek goddess of the harvest.

As her story goes, Hades, the god of the underworld, fell in love with her daughter Persephone and kidnapped her to make her his wife.

This was done with the blessing of Zeus, but after they pulled off their plan, Demeter gets super pissed off that her daughter had been taken.

She flexed her superpowers a little bit, which caused the world's plants to stop growing, and then humans are going to run out of food, which would cause this trickle-up problem for the folks on Mount Olympus, who required people to worship them.

Zeus sends Hermes to go get Persephone back from the underworld, but Hades had given her six pomegranate seeds to eat, and it's custom that if you accept food from someone, you've got to come back to their hospitality.

Makes sense.

Persephone is returned to her mother, and plants grow again, but she's got to go back and live part-time with her husband in the underworld, which is why there's a winter and crops don't grow. Got it.

It's a story that lends itself to going underground and then re-emerging. So a mystery school that's based on Demeter would probably make that part of its symbolic action.
Sort of rebirth. Right.
So

I don't get,

I don't know.

I don't care.

I think ultimately there's two problems with this source text. One,

any good secret society cannot, by definition, be in this book. Well, no, that's one of the things that's actually interesting in the beginning of the book.
Right.

It talks about how some secret societies aren't actually secret. Right, exactly.
And that's a problem for them. Which makes them bad secrets.
Well,

sure, but that makes it a problem for Bill. Right.
It does make it a problem. It's not a problem for the book in and of itself because it's an interesting assessment of these types of in-groups.
Sure.

You know, like that's that's what it's interested in. Sure.
The secretness of it is almost secondary. Yeah.

Sometimes some of them have a characteristic that, like, membership is secret. Right.
Sometimes their rights are secret. Right.

But sometimes they're not. Yeah, this is a problem for.
Yeah, this is a problem for him. Yeah.
That's what I was. Yeah.

Yeah.

That's why he shouldn't be using this. Yes.
Yeah. Exactly.

Yes.

I

find myself unamused

by any of this.

I think that

I feel deflated. I feel like I'm out here thinking we're going to get Mystery Babylon, which is in my head, there's an ideal version of this that is a sweary-carry

tangent, you know? Like we're on some of the same track, but instead of going to space, we're going to Olympus. You know what I'm saying? So we've still got magic.

We've still got all the good stuff going on.

And instead, we're getting

a guy stealing books from people. Yeah.

And I think that I would be more fine with it if it seemed to make a point.

Like, I think one of the downsides and one of the difficulties of plagiarism is you're beholden to the texts and paragraphs of the person you're plagiarizing. Yeah.

And so episode one can't lead into episode two or three or four or five. No.

He's just reading these things and demanding that they be connected and they're not.

He hasn't done the work of connecting any of this stuff to make it a palatable and worthwhile exercise in communication. And that's infuriating.
Yeah.

I mean, it reminds me when I was in, when I was reading

way early on, the only teacher that I liked was like just explaining, hey, keep notes. Keep notes in the margins of your books.
Keep notes to show where it is that you think this is doing.

And then you can refer back to it. And it's like,

that's not supposed to be me reading the book and then then adding my little notes in. That's not how audiobooks should work for me, right? No.
Like, I'm not going to...

Like, I'm reading Harry Potter and then being like, and also, Cho Chang is kind of a racist name. Let's face it.
I mean, it's a little bit of a racist name.

Anyways, Harry Potter was then doing the, you know? That's neither an audiobook nor is it a worthwhile

product. of analysis that you're doing.
Right. It fails on both counts.
Yeah. And that's what's going on with Bill.
Yeah.

So one of the reasons I went back to cover these Mystery Babylon episodes were because I said that we were going to do it. And I feel like what I want to do is make good on some of these old ideas.

Like finally getting around to these things that seemed like a decent plan, but we never put them into motion. But I find this content to be intolerable.

I can't handle this shit.

There's an ethical aspect to it where Bill is just reading other people's books and trying to obscure that fact and present this context as being his own creation.

But there's another aspect of this that's just boring. It doesn't build to a larger point.

These are just disconnected chapters from random books Bill's reading and pretending that in the process he's risking his life to uncover a mystery religion that secretly runs the world.

If Bill were making a compelling argument and any of this made sense, I might be able to tough it out and make it through the rest of these episodes. But this is just shit.

There is no reason to take this seriously, and the existence of this series is an indictment of Bill Cooper's legacy and embarrassing. It should be the end of his legacy, honestly.

Quite frankly, it's the end of my concern with it. Yeah, it really, this really should, like, if anybody brings up Bill Cooper, you should listen to this, and then you'll be like, oh, aww.

Yeah.

And even still, I could maybe have kept going if I thought that we were eventually going to get to witches.

But I made a classic mistake of looking at the titles of the upcoming episodes, and there's no witches to be found.

I think eventually Bill starts breaking down some of the eventual plot of the Assassin's Creed games, but looking over the list of what's to come, I'm cutting bait.

I made it to episode eight, and honestly, that's way too far for anyone who approaches this with a critical eye.

I'm closing the door on Mystery Babylon, and we can consider this item on the checklist checked the fuck off.

However,

before I leave this behind entirely, I wanted to point out that episode 17 of this series is titled Bibliography.

I'm sorry? Yeah. How fucking dare you? Right.
Okay. Well, it's worse than you think.
I believe that.

I saw that title and I thought, well, here's where Bill's going to cop to the fact that he's just been stealing other people's work this whole time and list off all the books he's been reading for the previous 16 episodes.

That's what a bibliography of this might look like. I thought,

but it's not. Nope.
The episode is reading off, basically a reading list that's supposed to make Bill look smarter.

The sources that we've seen him pull from so far have been pretty low level in terms of credibility and

respectability. Chris Gaines is one.

Here's a little snippet of Bill's Mystery Babylon bibliography. Okay.
Most people, though, sit back and say, oh, I don't know where to find it. I don't know anything about doing restart.

Why don't you tell me?

That's not the way to do it, folks. Not the way to do it.

The second book I'm going to recommend here that you get is a book by Joseph Campbell, probably the world's foremost authority on myth and mythology.

This book is entitled Primitive Mythology, The Masks of God.

Again, it's by Joseph Campbell, Primitive Mythology, The Masks of God.

And I believe it's printed by

Penquin Books.

Okay.

Next one is also by Joseph Campbell, Occidental Mythology, the Masks of God.

It's by Joseph Campbell, entitled Occidental Mythology, The Masks of God. Also published by Penguin, Penguin Books.

Now I've got all these books stacked up around here, so if you're a moment of silence, because I'm reaching for something, I literally have surrounded myself with stacks of books.

I'm going to give you the title, author, and publisher of as many as I can, starting with the most important for you to use to get started with and working on them.

Next one is by Joseph Campbell again.

The title is Creative Mythology: The Masks of God. So, in these episodes that we've listened to, Bill has not used Joseph Campbell as a source at all.

He's read out of weird books by weirdos and pamphlets. This bibliography is not the works that Bill's used to make this series.
It's a bibliography of what he wants the audience to think he's used.

Right.

I'm not going to sit here and say that Bill's never read read any Joseph Campbell or anything like that, but I am going to say that he did not read out of those books.

He plagiarized from other things that would be more embarrassing to list off in your bibliography, probably.

I would say

that regardless of whether or not his eyes have

looked at the pages of a

book written by Joseph Campbell, the evidence of the structure of this series

suggests that he, if he did read Joseph Campbell, Joseph Campbell would have hit him with a book. Yeah, like this is.
He is not doing good storytelling in terms of this series. But ironically,

other

people have created quite a Joseph Campbellian myth around Bill Cooper. That is a good point.

So he himself is the subject of a mythological cycle, and yet he is not able to tell a story in a coherent way. Yeah, yeah, I mean,

that is ironic. It is ironic.

Yeah.

Oh, the hero does not have a thousand faces. No.
No. No.
But

there's some other things that he says in the course of this bibliography episode that I thought were quite interesting. Okay.

Well, I'm really going to have to hurry to get a substantial amount of these books. I hear somebody out there screaming and pulling their hair.
I can't possibly read all these books. Yes, you can.

I've done it. I've read every book in the book for my folks in my libraries,

city libraries.

If I can do it, you can do it. The only thing that will stop you is because you don't want to do it.

And if you learn how to do productive research, some of them you don't have to read the whole books, believe me. You just have to learn how to do that.
I'm sorry?

You have to understand what the context of the book is before you take anything out of context. You can get in big trouble doing that, believe me.

Next book is A History of Mathematics. Okay, he did not cite a history of mathematics.
This is ridiculous.

I think that there's something like amazingly accidentally revealing in him saying, you have to know the context of this before you can take it out of context.

That implies intentional lying. I mean,

wow. Listen.
You don't have to read the whole book, Dum-Dum. Believe me.
I know you think it's intimidating because you think, oh, all these words, they probably have meaning. Wrong.

Wrong. You just got to prove that you looked at them.
If you catch a vibe off a book,

then you can just take anything in it and use it.

Oh, the Principia Mathematica.

We got to have that one in there, obviously. It's nuts.

I don't know. That to me,

it's almost too honest. You know?

In the way that

an exact lie is something of the truth. You know, if you are exactly opposite the truth, then in a way you are telling the truth because the truth exists, obviously, as a response to your lie.
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

You don't have to read all these books because the utility of actual research is finding things that confirm to the conclusion you're entering the source with. Yep.

So sometimes the source is going to be, you know, he says in this episode too, he's like, you know what, these books are good, but sometimes the writers get caught up in the exoteric.

And so it's like, ugh. Okay, so

just believe what you want to believe about these sources then. Oh, my God.
Anything that doesn't conform to the belief that you have already is.

Well, the writer's good, but they just got tricked by the xoteric beliefs of the cult. Sure, that makes sense.
Okay.

Yeah,

that's what I'm saying, right? Like, if Bill Cooper says you don't have to read the books, then you know the truth. Because the truth is you have to read the fucking books.

Otherwise, you're you're that. And,

you know, he's proof of concept that that is a thing. Exactly.
And I think that Alex took that ball and ran with it. And ran with it.
You, listen, I have stacks of books.

I don't need to read the books or to understand them. I need to have the stacks.
Yeah, him having these piles of books

doing the same thing.

God damn it. Yeah, it's very similar.
Oh, the illusion. So, the Elusinian mysteries? Something along those lines.
Or the illusion. I think the regular mystery is, like, what are people up to?

What are people up to with this shit? You know? Who done it? Yeah, that's a regular mystery. Sure.
I prefer that one.

So there's some sources in this bibliography that Bill is giving almost an anti-source

vibe to. Okay.
And one of them, one of the things he warns against is the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Next one is the Dead Sea Scrolls. Be very careful about the Dead Sea Scrolls, folks.

Bill Mike. everyone's had their hands on them has been in the pay of the Rockefeller family.
And the people who are translating them now are in the pay of the Rockefeller family.

And they say that some of them have leaked out and that you're getting the real version. You don't know that.

This could have been intentional leaks, and nobody, none of us know how to really translate these things. So the Rockefellers basically are telling us what the Dead Sea Scrolls say.

And I can just about tell you what they're going to tell us right off the bat, that Jesus didn't die

and all kinds of things.

And

just wait and see. That's so, Alex E2.
Like, I'm going to tell you in advance what this source says. I already know.
I don't even need to.

It's crazy.

I'm just going to prime you so you'll feel confident whenever you don't even look at it. Yeah.
Yeah. And just in case there's anything in these sources that's threatening to the ideas that I have,

that's the Rockefellers. They're lying to you.

That is absurd.

This isn't a good use of a bibliography space.

It's such a great way of dramatizing the act of not reading, though. You know, like, oh, listen, I know you're looking at those Dead Sea Scrolls with mouth watering.
Oh, I want to read those.

Dangerous. Be careful with those.

You could get into trouble.

What? But like, you're going to catch a stray word from the Rockefellers and be like, oh, these ideas are the best. Yeah, you'll be poisoned against Bill.
What the fuck are you talking about?

Absurd. Absurd.
So there's another thing that's in Bill's bibliography that I thought was crazy. Yeah.
And I'm not sure if this will hit you. Pray love.
No.

Another one that's very important is called Time Bomb. Time Bomb.
I'll give you the roots of the Liberty Lobby and the Spotlight and America Free Radio.

And we'll open your eyes on the Nazi influence in this country. Time Bomb by Pillar, published by Arco.

Arco.

And this is

very revealing. So the inclusion of this book on his list is part of what makes Bill such an interesting historical figure, even though he sucks and I hate him.

Time Bomb is a book that was written by Emmanuel Pillar, and it was published in 1945.

The Liberty Lobby wouldn't be founded until 1958, so right off the bat, you should be able to tell that this book is not about the Liberty Lobby or Spotlight or America Free Press themselves.

Time Bomb is an anti-fascist text. From the book, quote, the fact which escapes most Americans is that fascism is not beaten.
We've defeated it in open battle.

We've defeated its armies, but we've not beaten the idea. We've not defeated all the fascists, nor all the people who would like to see fascism dominant in our country.

Unless we defeat them, they may defeat us, and they can easily grow strong enough to do it. It's been estimated by Dr.
L.M.

Burkhead, an outstanding authority on the subject, that some sort of fascist propaganda has been, in the past few years, placed in the hands of at least one American out of every three.

This is a book that's very invested in protecting the rights of minority groups and specifically with advocating for labor.

From the end of the text, quote, if Americans are economically secure, they can feel that they're participants in a democracy which they understand and appreciate, fascist propaganda is unlikely to interest them.

In that case, the promotion of fascist principles would interest only those who would wish to enslave their fellow men, and free Americans would reject it utterly.

This book is antithetical to the current version of what Bill Cooper's radio tradition embodies.

Pretty much all of the people who are in his lineage have become xenophobic, business-supporting Trump loyalists, and their antics are directly called out by Time Bomb.

For instance, the current right-wing is obsessed with nationalism, which the text points out was used as the emphasis for groups like the America First Party and the Nationalist Party.

And quote, this is not the first time that this has been used as a protective coloration by pro-fascists in America. Indeed, nationalism has been a favorite word of fascists in every country.

German nationalism, Italian nationalism, Spanish nationalism, Argentine nationalism all used the same patriotic slogans to the same end.

Bill recommending this book and saying that it explains the root of the liberty lobby and the spotlight would put him directly at odds with the prevailing strain of right-wing ideologues who have taken over their propaganda apparatus in the last 20 years or so.

The inclusion of this book in his bibliography is fascinating because on some level it makes the argument that in terms of his legacy, he's lucky he died when he did.

His fight against these imaginary mystery religion folks was about to get much harder because he was about to get a ton of allies coming to his side.

Allies that he shouldn't side with and he knows he shouldn't side with because they're fascists.

The inclusion of time bomb here has to mean that Bill would have faced a crisis as the far-right wing ideas that he preached became more mainstream.

I still believe that he probably would have sold out whatever principles he had

and fallen down the same path that many people have because a lot of the principles are imaginary to begin with. But

well, if I'm if here's the here's the thing. I understand what you're saying,

but that's because you're thinking like a person. If I'm thinking like a fascist, right, I'm thinking, how do I sell fascism?

Obviously, the best way to sell fascism is by telling people that it's anti-fascism. And anti-fascism is far more popular.

So you say that you're the anti-fascist. And the only way to convincingly say that you're the anti-fascist is to know what actual anti-fascists would say.
So you read an excellent book.

It makes sense. Yeah, So there's a number of things.
There's some things in his bibliography that are like

the vein of

this, read this book because it's people who disagree with us and you'll know what they think. Sure.
You know, the same way that Alex says, you got to read what your enemies believe.

Right, right, right. But see, you have to embody your enemy in order to steal your enemy's people.

You see what I'm saying? No, not totally. This is so.

When Alex is against the Iraq war, you have to embody that anti-war stance in order to steal people from the anti-war to get them onto the fascism team, which then turns into the pro-war team. Right.

Right? Sure. So

you got to embody the anti-fascist. This isn't learn to avoid.
This is learn to steal.

This is gain the power of your enemy to steal it. Yeah.

Sure, but I think that

that book is about fascist propaganda and shit. Bill citing it and specifically saying that it's the roots of the liberty lobby,

I think would put him directly

like he, if he said,

this is a book that

teaches you how the left wing tries to attack patriots or something like that. You know, like get into the headspace of the people who hate us right-wingers and call us all fascists or whatever.

If that was the way that he was presenting this, I would say that that inclusion is not weird at all. Sure.

But because he's saying this is a valid attack on people like Willis Cardo and folks who had such a big part of growing the right-wing media ecosystem,

I think.

I'm bringing this to the table, admittedly, but it makes me think that he would have had a much more active process of selling out than someone like Alex.

Do you mean he would have had to

go through the steps

in an actual struggle to get to the fascism, as opposed to Alex, who just kind of was like, surprise, motherfuckers, I've been here the whole time. Yes.
Gotcha.

And

to the extent that there isn't a, I've been here the whole time for Bill,

I think that he,

with the sense that I get is he would have to become a knowing participant more than Alex, who is able to slide. Sure.

I see what you're saying. And that's interesting on some level, mostly because he died at just the right time to not have to, will never know the answer to that.
To never confront this concept, yeah.

Yeah, whereas we have,

you know, on Monday, we had our episode that covered Kelly Rushing. Yeah.
You have this snapshot of Alex present and past.

You don't have Bill Cooper's actions as it relates to the 2016 election. Sure.
We don't know. We don't know.

I think my position is that he would have gone similar paths to everyone in his media space. Yep.

But maybe he'd be more like David Icke, where there's like an insistence and a need on being like, no, I'm my own person. That's possible.

And what that would look like.

What does that look like in more post-9-11 modern terms is interesting. You know,

I think I don't know what he would say about that.

But in my opinion, anybody who would just read books on the air and then act like they're theirs could not ever be their own person because they aren't. Do you know what I mean?

Like, maybe, maybe in some way in his own mind, he could be the person who stands up and says that whole thing. But based on the evidence that I'm seeing, he would go along.

He would go along because there'd be a book that he could just read on the air.

Yeah, my instinct is that he would go along, but in a way that attempted to preserve

the independence and autonomy that he views himself as having. He tried to do both, and then everybody'd see him wilt like a little flower.
Yeah, maybe in the

larger internet era and time, that would be the case.

And one of the reasons that I think that this is

particularly of

interest is that this is

right at this time when Bill's doing the series, he gets

like precious metals sponsor.

And so there's the change

of that in some way. The like, please mail me a check to cover the expenses of putting the show on WWCR, yeah, to I now am telling you that you should go buy silver from this guy.
Oh, man.

You know, you see these kind of

transitions that Alex went through, or in some ways, didn't have to go through super publicly because he had a gold sponsor at the beginning. Right.

But it makes you wonder: like, does this

inevitably go to fascism, or does somebody who's aware that fascism is what underlies the Liberty Lobby and these sorts of groups, does somebody who knows that,

are they able to resist?

See, I think, and I think this is,

you know, I think this is almost the exact same question in a different format, right? Because

I do see where you're coming from from a purely like

think perspective from like an abstract perspective this person as we understand what they say about themselves could behave in either of these directions but for me it is literally like well he took the gold sponsor so done do you know what i'm saying like it is and i think that's valid it's the doing moment of like that's the real choice is when he took that gold sponsor he picked trump you know i find i find it difficult to not agree

i i i think i'm less absolute about it but i definitely get where where you're coming from, and I think that that is an inflection point, or it at least represents that in some way.

And you just wonder, is the awareness enough to tamper that inflection point? Yeah. That choice? Yeah.
Is it enough?

And when I was thinking about this, as I was going through all of this, I realized how much more interesting it is to me to think about Bill Cooper and what he might have done

and how not interesting he is.

He sucks. He's he's you know what like if I'm if I'm analyzing these two conversations that we or these two questions that we just had a conversation about

he's a good bet

if that makes sense. Do you know what I'm saying? Like because maybe you're right.
Maybe he could maybe he couldn't. Where are you going to put your chips, right?

It's a good bet, especially because it's unanswerable. Exactly.
As long as we never find out the answer, because if we find out the answer is more love this shit, then the bet is is trash.

You know, it wasn't even fun to do. Yeah, this is like Schrodinger's cat, but you can never look in the box.
Yep. Never look.
Just don't look at the box. You can't, though, because he's dead.
Yeah.

So is the cat.

And so this is where the balance of power and the universe shifts. Yeah.
And that is that I'm done with Bill. We're done.
Done with Bill. Yeah.
Time to be free.

I was kind of done with him in some ways before, but there was this lingering, dangling thread of the mystery Babylon. Yeah.

And like the enticement of, I'm going to teach you about the religion that runs the world secretly.

And it's been such a massive disappointment as a work that he's put out. He's dumb, a plagiarist, angry.

And

if you have eight episodes of my time,

if you have, if I've given you that long, and I sincerely don't really know what your point is,

That's bad.

Almost Cambelian, if you will. It's unforgivable.

And so

I bid

a nice adieu.

Yeah, it sucks because I really do think there is what I'm imagining in my head. I think there's an analog to Sweary Carry.

There's as much magic as you want in angels and demons. There's as much bullshit as you want in secret societies controlling things with fucking treaties.

It's all the components are there to make a grand story. And instead, he's just, he's reading kind of shitty books.

And I think that one of the lessons that I learn about

these

kinds of whimsy

is

that when they are imposed on you, they are no longer fun. Yeah.

Like space people and all that shit is fun. It's fun to think about aliens,

but once they are secretly running the world and have treaties with governments and things like that, then there's an implied connection to your life, whether you accept their existence or not.

Yep, these aliens are being forced upon you in a way that, like, there's an anger, there's a hostility to it.

And I think that that

has a tendency to overtake the whimsy. Sure.
And I think that Carrie has that for sure. Yeah.

I think Bill has that.

It's the hell conundrum. You know, it's always a delight talking about how the gods are fighting each other all the way up in there.
Ah, look at that. They're crazy.

Who knows what they're going to do next? But then you go, and if you don't listen to them, you're going to go to hell. You're like, I just got here, man.
I just woke up. Yeah.
I think fantastic ideas,

you know, in terms of fantasy and things that are outside of our observable reality and

have to do with magic and all that stuff. Miracles could happen.
Right, but a lot of that has to be accompanied by humility. Yeah.

It has to be accompanied by a sense of: if you don't believe this, it doesn't matter to me. I'll get over it.
Yeah. Yeah.
Because I'm having fun with it. I enjoy this magic.

And I think that a lot of these folks do not have that. Yeah.
And that is why their beliefs tend towards

like this isn't fun anymore. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I think there's definitely an impulse of if you're imagining, right?

And what you're imagining, you want to be real.

It can be as long as you're only around people who also imagine the exact same thing as you do.

But once you're around people who don't imagine that thing, then they kind of make it less fun because they're like, oh, it's different. You're like, well, that's not fun.

And then you find a war over it. That's basically the history.
But

it doesn't have to go that way. No, it doesn't.
If people believe in fairies and wizards

and stuff,

I'm not, I don't want to take that away from them. Sure.
Like, as long as it's not being used in some kind of malicious way to Trojan horse

racist ideas or something.

If you just sincerely believe that the world is more fun if butterflies are fairies, who cares? Oh, man. Harry Houdini and Charles Dickens.
They care? Yes. Oh.

Because Dickens went hard into fairies, and Houdini went hard into telling people that fairies weren't fucking real. Right.
Yeah. The two of them are both not fun.
No, they're both not fun.

People who have whimsical beliefs in supernatural

and people who can tolerate people with whimsical ideas about supernatural things are fun. Go have fun.
Yeah. Everybody else, Bill Cooper.
Get the fuck out of here. Get the fuck out of here.

Get out of my bar. Yeah.

So anyway, Bill Cooper sucks. I'm done with him.
And I'd like to apologize to everyone for taking this many episodes to ditch this loser. There's the dream, you know,

hope only dies when you give up on it, right? Yeah. And it's tough.
It can be tough. It can be tough, but it's time to let the Babylon go.
Yep. Yep.
Because there was nothing there to begin with.

That's the problem. Anywho,

we'll be back with another episode about our primary ding-dong. But until then, we have a website.
Indeed, we do. It's KnowledgeFight.com.
Yep, we'll be back. But until then, I'm Neo.

I'm the O, I'm DZX Clark. I am the Mysterious Professor.
Woo, yeah, woo, yeah, woo. And now here comes the sex robot.
Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. Thanks for holding.

Hello, Alex. I'm a first-time caller.
I'm a huge fan. I love your work.
I love you.