If Bill Cooper’s ghost was elusive on the night of November 5, it proved palpable only three nights later. It was November 8, 2016, when the results of the presidential election blindsided the mind.
Throughout the campaign, fans pointed out that Cooper had been the first to alert the country to the possible election of someone like Donald J. Trump. This dated back to an interview Cooper did with CNN in 1992.
Looking hale and hearty in his customary button-bursting plaid flannel shirt, a genial Cooper sat on a couch and said that in the current climate, with the vast majority of politicians in the pocket of Illuminati overlords, it was now “impossible for another Abraham Lincoln to be elected president of the United States.” The only way to get rid of the corrupt cast of characters in office was “to stop voting for them.”
“Kick all the members of the secret societies out of the bureaucracy. Try them for treason, because that’s what they are, traitors,” Cooper told the interviewer.
The only way to restore the Constitution to its place as the supreme law of the land was to elect a president “who had never served in government before.” It would have to be done quickly, “in the space of a single election,” Cooper said in 1992. Twenty-four years later, the campaign of Donald J. Trump seemed to fit that description.
It is hard to imagine Cooper supporting Donald Trump with his cheesy gold-plate George the Third patina. On the other hand, he’d rather have been beaten with a truncheon than to see Hillary Clinton assume the highest office in the land.
Cooper made his feelings known about the Clintons early on, in the run-up to the 1992 election, when he correctly predicted that Bill Clinton, who was trailing in the polls at the time, would become the forty-second president of the United States.
The description of the Clinton skullduggery was classic Cooper, the product of a man who bragged that while others might be content to open “cans of worms, I open barrels of worms.”
The scenario was a snap for those who did their own research. With the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, the elites required a new man to preside over the American sector of the New World Order (NWO). George H. W. Bush, onetime CIA head, had been a faithful anti-Soviet servant. His presidency amounted to a gold watch for services rendered. But new times required new men, and Poppy didn’t even know what a supermarket scanner was. A more down-home, hot-sauce-drenched figure was needed, someone like Bill Clinton.
The fixers had been grooming Bubba since his saxophone-tooting days in the piney-woods home of his single mom. They snatched him out of the Arkansas muck and made him a Rhodes Scholar—a power apprentice course founded by the ultimate globalist Cecil J. Rhodes, builder of the Cape to Cairo Road, master of the De Beers diamond mines, the only man to have three countries (Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia, Rhodesia and Nyasaland) and a dog (the Ridgeback) bear his name.
Handicapping the election, Cooper said the third-party candidate, H. Ross Perot, was in the race “to make sure Bush lost.” Once, Perot was a nobody, a Texarkana Community College student. But now, according to Cooper, Perot’s longtime patron, David Rockefeller, was offering the deal of a lifetime. Perot’s company, Electronic Data Systems, Cooper told a cable TV audience, had been secretly chosen to be the exclusive manufacturer of “the implant,” the tracking device that would soon be inserted under the skin of every American.
The deal was worth billions. All Perot had to do, Cooper said, was run for president. His homey pie charts and psuedo-Libertarian tone would be a death knell for the hopelessly plutocratic Bush. As it turned out, Perot’s 19 percent was more than enough to swing the election to Clinton.
“Bill Clinton!” Cooper raged to the Hour of the Time audience. “Rhodes Scholar! Member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission! Draft dodger! Spent time in the Soviet Union when no other American citizen was allowed to travel there! Socialist, par excellence!” The same went for Hillary Clinton, Bubba’s First Lady Macbeth partner-in-crime.
This particular view of history was very much in play on November 8, 2016, as we settled in to watch the election returns at the Sugar Shack, a fun little joint in the unincorporated town of Concho, Arizona, about an hour’s drive from Eagar.
The political leanings of the crowd at the Sugar Shack had been made apparent when we’d visited the place a few nights earlier to sample the excellent Surf n’ Turf special, which proprietors Ray and Marie cook on a gas grill out on the porch. There was some drunkenness, and a soused lady took a header down the stairs. It looked bad, but after a quick check revealed no blood, people walked away.
“She’s a Democrat, let her lie,” someone said, to much laughter.
We were in Trump country. If anyone in the room had, however reluctantly, voted for Hillary Clinton, they weren’t talking about it.
The reason we’d come to the Sugar Shack was to cheer on candidate Doyel Shamley. Like Trump, Clinton, and the immigrant-hunting Sheriff Joe Arpaio down in Maricopa County, Doyel, known to Hour of the Time fans as Bill Cooper’s research partner and all-around right-hand man, was on the ballot this election day. He was running for supervisor in District 3 of Apache County.
This was no small thing. Apache County, a vast strip of land running along the New Mexico border from the Four Corners region down past the White Mountains town of Alpine, measures 11,218 square miles. That makes it the sixth-largest county in the country. With barely 70,000 people (Eagar, pop. 4,800, is the largest community), it is also one of our nation’s least-densely populated. Few places in the USA have more wide-open spaces.
When I started researching Cooper, everyone told me if I wanted to get the real story, Doyel was the guy to talk to.
As representatives of successive generations of American fighting men—Cooper in Vietnam and Doyel in the first Gulf War—they had a lot in common. The wars may have been twenty-five years apart, half a world away from each other, but as far as Cooper and Doyel were concerned, the conflicts were part of the same, corrosive, never-ending process. That made them brothers-in-arms, natural allies. Both ardent patriots and prodigious readers, they shared research on many matters, from the extent of federal jurisdiction to the ancient secret society the Brotherhood of the Snake to the symbolism of the Phrygian cap worn by fighters during the French Revolution. When their libraries were combined, there were more than fifteen thousand titles.
Doyel also worked on the Hour of the Time broadcasts, often appearing on the air, sometimes hosting shows with Cooper’s young daughter, Dorothy, whom everyone called Pooh.
After Cooper’s death, Doyel kept The Hour of the Time on the air. Along with webmaster Rob Houghton, Doyel helped put together The Complete Cooper, a digital archive of all 1,926 HOTT broadcasts (including repeats). If anyone could be called the keeper of the Bill Cooper flame, it was Doyel Shamley.
At the outset of my research into Cooper, I googled Doyel’s name. The first thing that came up was a six-minute YouTube video The End According to Doyel Shamley.
Accompanied by ominous strains of electronic music, the 2009 video begins with images of a cloud-crowned primeval forest, an untouched Eden. There is a stark image of the Java man, among the earliest of the Homo erectus species, followed by a home movie of a man berating his son. This morphed into a mass rally with swarms of faceless people holding up giant placards of Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai.
“Ever since the first slimeball came out of the ocean and developed into a stronger man than his neighbor, someone had the inclination to control someone else,” Doyel’s Okie-inflected narration begins. The life of the common man had been reduced to the constant hand-to-hand combat of Hobbesian natural selection. You could fight it, and if push came to shove, he would, Doyel said, in the front lines “alongside good friends.” But then again, he mused, perhaps it would be better to let the whole thing implode. That way, the survivors, “those who want to prosper and be free again,” could set about rebuilding a world worth living in.
A busy man, Doyel was abrupt when I first contacted him. After all, I was far from the first person to come around asking about Bill Cooper. Following the shoot-out on the hill, it seemed important to tell Cooper’s story and Doyel did, spreading details on the radio and in a 2003 documentary, The Hour of Our Time. But after a while, there were simply too many Internet posts saying things like “Bill Cooper Told the Truth about 9/11. Two Months Later They Killed Him for It.” Cooper had become a god to an increasingly eccentric flock.
You never knew who might turn up. One day a man appeared uninvited inside Doyel’s house. Reacting as any homeowner with Special Forces training might, Doyel pounced on the guy and jammed a large-caliber firearm into his midsection. The man explained that he found Doyel’s home via an arcane triangulation of coordinates based on images of Cooper’s home available online.
The stars had been rearranging themselves since the beginning of time, the intruder told Doyel. Soon humanity would look up and see the name JESUS spelled out across the firmament. The man thought anyone who had been Bill Cooper’s right hand needed to know that information. His message delivered, the man left.
After a period of text tag, Doyel drove up to my motel in a mud-splashed Toyota pickup with a battering-ram-type shield attached to the front bumper. Sporting an early sixties George Jones–style flattop, attired in camo pants and a sheepskin vest against the morning frost, Doyel leveled the gaze of his blue-steel eyes and said he wanted to get one thing straight from the get-go.
“I swore I would never spend another minute of my time talking about this, so let’s go,” Doyel said. I was to be the last reporter to hear what he knew about the Bill Cooper story.
As we drove around the cinder cones of the Miocene-vintage Springerville volcanic field, Doyel filled me in a little about his background. His people were Okies; they’d come to California during the Dust Bowl days. That was the old joke, about how there were supposed to be more Okies in Bakersfield and Stockton than in Oklahoma, Doyel said as we drove along US 191, which used to be called US 666 before the Mormons complained and the DOT got sick of people stealing the signs.
Several of his relatives were pickers, on the migrant circuit through the 1950s, Doyel said. “They went to Montana for the cherries, then to Washington for apples, back home for navels and Valencias. That was when the central valley of California was,” Doyel said with a dismissive laugh, “the breadbasket of the world, not the breadbasket of bankruptcy that it is now.”
Even if he was the sort of demographic that traditionally fill the ranks of the US Armed Forces, this did not appear to be Doyel’s destiny.
“I’m not saying anything, but I always stood out from others my age. I was an Eagle Scout, won every badge you could win. Did really well in school, college-level science and math, economics and political theory. I’ve got a kind of photographic memory. I can really take in a large amount of information in a short amount of time and retain it.
“I was on the high school debate team. All the rich kids, these pricks from San Diego prep schools, they said we were a bunch of Okies, and we cleaned their fucking clocks. We went to the National Finals in Washington and got a tour of the House and Senate. For years I thought I would go into low-temperature physics, superconductors, magic sort of stuff. Then there was the symphony, playing cello.
“They said I was a prodigy. I was the youngest person in the local symphony. We played the greats. Beethoven’s Fifth, The Rite of Spring, Mahler.”
Mahler was “a real sick son of a bitch,” Doyel said. “He was always writing in all these different time signatures just to torture the orchestra. Our poor conductor almost had a heart attack. We played Carmina Burana . . . I really liked that except when I was playing, I had images in my mind of all these monks running wild and raping nuns before they locked them up in the monastery. One time we went to the Azores to play for the king, that was cool.
“We already had these letters from Stanford. Probably could have gotten a free ride, on account of the cello,” Doyel said. “I would have had it made.
“But no. No college, no first seat in the philharmonic for Doyel. I decided what I really wanted to do was fight for my country.”
His father, John Shamley, a surveyor by trade, was military, but a “special kind of military,” Doyel said. He was attached to the Civilian Affairs Division as a photographer. He took pictures at events like Douglas MacArthur’s funeral. “Dad got right in there, open coffin, better stuff than anything that came out in Life magazine,” said Doyel.
“They sent him to New York and he’d walk around, taking pictures. As for what he was taking pictures of, who and why, he never said. There was one shot, a plane that crashed in the snow. I guess the idea was that he was supposed to be on the scene, but there were these other shots, too, where you’d see the plane was really a prop sitting on a soundstage.
“It was kind of humorous,” he continued, describing the day he enlisted in the service. “It happened to be my sister’s eighth birthday. They were having this little party. The recruiter brought me home. He went into the house and walks right over to my father, shakes his hand, and says, ‘Mr. Shamley, I’d like to congratulate you. Your son just enlisted in the United States Army.’
“My father jumped right out of his chair. He was screaming at the recruiter. ‘Get out of here! Whatever you told him is a lie! I know it and you know it.’”
Doyel went anyway, quickly sent off to Iraq to fight in Desert Storm. As an infantryman with top marksman scores, he sometimes carried the M60 machine gun, the one Sylvester Stallone rocks in Rambo. Capable of firing 500–600 rounds of large-caliber .308 bullets per minute, the M60 is a highly efficient killing machine. The main drawback was the weight. The fully outfitted M60 can weigh at least twenty-five pounds, not including the 100-round bandolier the operator straps across his chest like a modern-day Pancho Villa.
“The life expectancy carrying that kind of weapon is about eight minutes, so they like to give it to the short guys because you were a smaller target,” said the five-foot-nine Doyel, who despite his relatively modest stature retains many of the deadly skills learned in combat training. Once asked the size of the mountain lions who roam the White Mountains, he said, “Oh, I don’t know. Just imagine me on all fours.”
Things between Doyel and me took a turn for the better when we drove over to the 26 Bar Hereford Ranch, west of Springerville. The handsome spread had once been owned by the Duke himself, John Wayne. Back in the 1960s and early 1970s, Wayne used to come in for the cattle sales, often stopping in for the first-class breakfast at the Safire Restaurant on Springerville’s Main Street. The star’s presence was a source of pride to the local community, which still holds an annual John Wayne Days festival. After Wayne’s death in 1979, however, the 26 Bar was put up for sale. The buyer turned out to be the Hopi Indian Tribe.
“I love that,” Doyel snickered as we sat in the truck, overlooking Wayne’s old ponderosa. “He kills a million Indians, now they got his ranch. HAHAHA.”
But what really broke the ice between us was the mention of the notorious punk rocker GG Allin. Reputedly born Jesus Christ Allin in New Hampshire in 1956, GG was legend for his transgressive, i.e., gross, live shows. He was known to defecate on the stage while playing songs like “Shoot, Knife, Strangle, Beat, and Crucify,” “Darkness and a Bottle to Hold,” and “Bite It You Scum.”
Allin’s name came up while we were barreling down old 666, listening to Cannibal Corpse, Deicide, and for old time’s sake, Slayer, on Liquid Metal, Doyel’s favorite Sirius XM channel. I mentioned that I’d once seen Allin and his band, the Murder Junkies, play in Tompkins Square Park in New York’s East Village, and Doyel got a delightedly goony smile on his face.
“Oh, man, I love him. I got everything he ever did,” Doyel said, breaking into a couple of lines of “Die When You Die.”
After that, Doyel and I became friendly, at least friendly enough. My wife and I traveled to Eagar a number of times, attending the 2014 and 2015 Skills and Research Conference, a continuation of the meetings Cooper organized during the middle 1990s. While Cooper’s conferences generally involved much sitting in classrooms listening to lectures on Freemasonry and tax protesting, Doyel’s version tended to be a lot more hands-on, heavy on preparation for WROL (without rule of law) situations, and plenty of target practice. He would set up some targets supposed to be a guy hiding behind a bathroom stall door and yell to “shoot right through it.”
As part of an ad hoc cultural exchange program, Doyel and his significant other came to visit us in Brooklyn. It was a kick, showing them around the Big Town, eating at Peter Luger’s, taking them up to Arthur Avenue in the Bronx to have a real slice of pizza. We did the tourist things, riding on the Staten Island Ferry and going to the top of the Empire State Building. It was a different place, Doyel had to admit, riding the subway on the uptown Lexington Avenue line, reading a copy of Battlefield Ballistic Wounds he bought at the Strand bookstore, wondering if his interpretation of the Second Amendment would hold up during rush hour.
Our guests loved the cheesecake at Junior’s on Flatbush Avenue, so we sent them one for Christmas. When his brother-in-law, a cop, started to open the package by mistake, Doyel intervened, saying, “Keep your government dick-beaters off my cheesecake.”
In 2016, however, there was no Skills and Research Conference. Doyel was campaigning full-time to win election as the Apache County supervisor in District 3. It was a job that would offer Doyel a larger opportunity to influence local policy, especially in the all-important issue of land rights. Surrounded by huge stretches of federal property, it was Doyel’s position that the land should be under local control, with county jurisdiction playing a leading role.
When we first met, he was leading the fight against the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s introduction of the Mexican gray wolf into the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests. The feds claimed the forest was the animal’s natural habitat. Doyel said this was crap. The Mexican wolf wasn’t even a real species; it was a hybrid that had never been native to the area, he said. The animal was preying on ranchers’ cows, destroying whatever mom-and-pop commerce remained in the area. The feds, making their environmental policies in Washington, DC, didn’t care about that, Doyel said.
Asked what progress he was making, Doyel flashed his best Dennis the Menace smile and said he was kicking the butts of “the douche spout greenies. The lady from Sierra Club in Phoenix, she hates my guts.”
Doyel had run for office before and lost. But his knowledge of local issues was impressive enough that his victorious opponent brought him in as the county natural resource coordinator, where he helped develop environmental policies for the county. For the current election, Doyel was putting in the maximum effort. By the beginning of November he’d put several thousand miles on his truck, driving great distances to drum up the vote. His black-and-white posters were slapped on fences from the ski resorts of Alpine to Window Rock, the capital of the Navajo Nation three hundred miles north.
The Navajo reservation, which makes up most of the county north of Interstate 40, was Doyel’s chance. The vast majority of the tribe, solidly Democratic, were for Hillary. But after years of battling the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Diné, as the Navajo call themselves, liked what Doyel had to say about the overbearing tactics of the federal agencies. As one local leader said, the US government “stole our land once and they’re not going to do it again.”
Still, Doyel remained the underdog. His opponent, Gary Davis, held formidable advantages. He was a well-liked boss at the local Salt River Power Plant, where many in the southern part of the county worked. Far more imposing, however, was Davis’s status as a bishop in the Church of the Latter-day Saints. The Mormons, everyone said, had controlled Apache County politics back to before Arizona even became a state. If he won the supervisor job, Doyel said, he’d be the first non-Mormon to hold the office since 1879. “That’s one hundred and thirty-seven years,” Doyel said, “which is a long time.”
On election night at the Sugar Shack, the Trump victory was taking people by surprise. Even if they’d voted for him, few in town thought he was going to win. People favored Trump’s position on Obamacare, which they hated, along with everything about else about Obama. Trump had his flaws, to be sure, but at least he was a human being.
“Hillary is Satan,” said one of Trump’s voters. Better known as “Killary” or “Hitlery,” Clinton was the personification of the Evil One. Relatively speaking, that made Trump, as one supporter at the Sugar Shack said, “God’s man in the race.”
A woman wearing a MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN cap said she was offended that corporate media outlets kept preaching it was her duty as a female to vote for Hillary. “I’m supposed to vote for her because we’re the same sex? How insulting is that?” the woman said. Trump’s lewd talk didn’t bother her. It was disgusting, but that was how men were, disgusting. But how could Hillary put up with her husband’s philandering? “She stood by and let him humiliate her because she couldn’t bear to give up power.”
The Clintons had to be stopped, another woman said, bringing up Pizzagate, the ambient conspiracy charge that the Democratic Party candidate was involved in a global pedophile ring run out of the basement of Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in northwest Washington, DC. The sexual trafficking of underage children—John Podesta, Clinton campaign manager, was said to be spending time in hot tubs with six-year-olds—was exactly the sort of satanic ritual that always went on in Washington, people said.
“Pizzagate is real,” the woman in the Trump hat said. Asked how she knew that, she said she’d “done her research. . . . I try to read everything I can, I talk to as many people as possible. But I don’t believe anything I read until I do my own research.”
The phraseology rang a bell. I asked the woman if she was an Hour of the Time fan. She had never heard of it. I provided a short Cooper bio, including details of the fifteen-year-old shoot-out that occurred only forty or so miles away from where we sat. Again, there was no recognition.
The woman and her husband weren’t native to the area. “We’re snowbirds,” the couple said in unison. But they agreed that Cooper’s dictum to find your own Truth made sense. Who else could you trust?
It was about then that the TV networks declared Florida for Trump. The real estate developer was sweeping the battleground states. Ohio fell, then Pennsylvania. Jubilant shouts filled the Sugar Shack.
My cell phone was ringing. People from back east, friends from California, were calling, saying they couldn’t believe it. Donald Trump? President? This couldn’t really be happening, could it?
“Where are you?” one caller asked. “What’s that cheering?”
I told him I was in Arizona, at the Sugar Shack, where everyone voted for Trump. That was why they were cheering.
“Well, everyone here is crying,” the caller said, bitterly, before hanging up.
The lady in the MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN hat was exultant. “Well, if this doesn’t wake up the sheeple, I don’t know what will.”
“Wake up, sheeple,” I replied. It was another famous Bill Cooper phrase, I explained.
“Really?” she said. “Well, everyone will be shouting it from the rooftops from now on.”
We left the Sugar Shack before Trump hit 270. All things considered, it was better to be here, among the revelers, than in front of the TV in Park Slope, where everyone was slitting their wrists. It wasn’t going to change the result.
Besides, we liked these people, in spots at least. We hoped they felt similarly. That was part of the mission: détente—an attempt to restore the supposedly washed-out transit between “our America” and “their America.” To see if there was any “America” left between us and them.
These were worthwhile goals, but there was a limit. There was no way we were hanging around the Sugar Shack to watch the country go completely down the tubes. It felt a moment of real change, a point of no return. It made you think how you got to this precarious place.
Driving back to Eagar, the only car on US Highway 60, surrounded by the immense blackness of the Arizona night, my thoughts turned back to Bill Cooper holed up in his house on the hill, a lone and lonely soldier behind his microphone, hurling insults at his New World Order tormenters.
Within weeks of the shoot-out on Cooper Hill, the New York–based pulp house Global Communications released William Cooper: Death of a Conspiracy Salesman, edited by the mysterious “Commander X,” whose other titles include Mind Stalkers: UFOs, Implants, & the Pyschotronic Agenda of the New World Order and Invisibility and Levitation: How-To Keys to Personal Performance.
Likely the least successful “quickie” book put out to capitalize on “celebrity” demise, William Cooper: Death of a Conspiracy Salesman, not unlike Behold a Pale Horse itself, has the aspect of a hastily thrown together collage of newspaper clippings, murkily reproduced photos, reprints, and memorabilia.
That said, Commander X’s title cannot be beat. Bill Cooper was a conspiracy salesman as sure as Willy Loman carried a battered suitcase. Perpetually hard-up for money, in many ways he recalls the mythic figure in the green visor who sits in an office at the end of a long, narrow corridor, feverishly typing out every dirty joke you ever heard, ten dollars a punch line. A P. T. Barnum of dread, Cooper lived by the darkening edge of his conspiracy stories and his capacity to find an audience willing to hear and believe them. It was an ethic he practiced until the night of his death.
In one of the obits that appears in William Cooper: Death of a Conspiracy Salesman, Kenn Thomas, esteemed writer and a close observer of what he called “parapolitics,” said that despite Cooper’s often outlandish pronouncements, “he was right in his broad strokes. He certainly was not alone in looking into the political and cultural environment and seeing an evil monster, but he was more articulate than most in getting across what that feels like.”
By now I’d been listening to Hour of the Time programs for the better part of three years, reading Cooper’s overheated works, tracing his incongruous, almost Zelig-like spread through the cultural landscape. Once you got through bluster, the hucksterism, and the name-calling, there was mostly anguish. The nation was in decline, sinking lower every day. If there was one thing every Fox News and MSNBC viewer could agree on, it was that America’s assumed status as the land of the free and home of the brave was under assault. Cooper’s prescience, and his curse, was to understand this quicker and more deeply than most. He went around the country asking his audience, “What is America, what’s it all about?”
People raised their hands, and Cooper, the stern professor, called on them, one by one. “Recognition of God-given rights,” “individual liberty,” “no King but King Jesus,” “sound money,” came the responses. But the real answer was never in doubt.
“Freedom,” Cooper said, that was what America was all about. The freedom of the individual human being as guaranteed by the Constitution was what separated the US from every other country ever invented.
Cooper spent his whole life fighting the enemies of freedom. He fought them in Vietnam, or so he thought at the time. He fought them when he imagined they were coming from outer space. He fought them when he believed they were evil plutocrats, followers of secret religions dating back to the beginning of recorded history.
Cooper found the enemy in the people around him, in those he tried to love, within himself. These realizations only made him more determined to resist. And where had the fight got him? To the hilltop, with the blaring sirens, the barking dogs, the tramping feet.
Sometimes, he’d talk to his Hour of the Time audience with an air of quiet despair. “I’ll tell you right now, folks, whether you’re religious or not, it doesn’t make a difference. Whether you believe in God or not, it doesn’t make a difference. It is all a big battle between Good and Evil and most of it, I got to tell you, exists in the minds of men. Some of it is real, some of it isn’t. The question is what’s real? What’s deception, what should we be paying attention to . . . what is it that is driving us insane?”