Cooper announced the birth of his daughter Allyson Dovie Cooper, his fifth child, during the August 18, 1995, broadcast of The Hour of the Time. It had been a wild day, Cooper told the audience, and he was “just fried.”
He’d been tinkering around at the house in Eagar, “defragmenting a hard drive and loading in new facts.” Cooper noticed that Annie seemed to be pacing around, but she said she was fine, so he kept working. A few minutes later, she came back in the room and said it was time to go to the hospital.
The hospital was in Show Low, west along Highway 260. It was a two-hour round trip, but Cooper, ever cautious, thought it best to maintain a post office box in the town. It was part of Annie’s duties to drive over on a near-daily basis to pick up the orders for broadcast tapes and other Hour of the Time merchandise. In fact, Annie and Pooh had just returned from the run, which, on this day, included a stop in Taylor, a small mountain town where Cooper also kept an address. It was while in Taylor that Annie’s water broke, but she hadn’t said anything about it upon her return to Eagar.
It was “fifty miles to the hospital on winding country mountain roads,” Cooper regaled the HOTT audience, telling them how “every police car in Arizona has radar, so I hooked up the ECM, the electronic countermeasure, and loaded Annie and Pooh into the Bronco.” Then they were back on 260 headed to Show Low.
“Annie’s having contractions every five minutes,” Cooper continued, “and poor Pooh was beside herself, wanting to comfort her mother and not even really knowing what was wrong.” In the high-country twilight, it was hard to see, Cooper said. You could corner a mountain curve and find “a two-thousand-pound elk standing right in the middle of the highway . . . or a whole herd of antelope.” When they got stuck behind a slow-moving construction crew, Cooper said it was “possible that that baby was going to be born on that road.” He recalled the last time he participated in the birth of a baby. “It was in Vietnam a million years ago, and to tell you the truth, I don’t even remember what I did.”
When Pooh was born, the delivery had been difficult. Annie was in labor for twelve hours. “The screams were primal,” Cooper told the audience. “They came from somewhere I can’t touch, so it touched me deeply.” In contrast, the birth of Allyson Dovie Cooper was progressing fast, much faster than anyone had anticipated, Cooper told listeners.
Always the radio man, in the background, Cooper had added a nearly imperceptible drum-and-guitar track with a steady, hypnotic heartbeat, building the suspense. They got to the hospital just in time, Annie giving birth shortly after.
Later that night, after making it perfectly clear to hospital officials that there was not going to be any signing of a birth certificate, or applying for a Social Security number, or any of that government tracking nonsense, Cooper heard the baby crying. Annie had drifted off. “I knew Allyson needed somebody to hold her,” Cooper said.
“Everybody was so busy that finally I asked the nurse if she could get the baby, and she did. She brought her over, and, folks, I held that baby in my arms and she stopped crying instantly and just opened her eyes. I know that babies can’t see at that point, but she had the biggest, beautiful brown eyes and just appeared to be looking at me.”
The next morning Cooper got into a squabble with the hospital officials, who said they wanted to keep Allyson in the hospital for ten days. Her white blood cell count was too high, they said. She needed a regimen of antibiotics. “As you can imagine,” Cooper told listeners, “I wasn’t going to go for that.” Declaring that “the medical profession is full of people who sometimes think they are God,” Cooper said the only reason for Allyson to stay in the hospital “was to put more money in the doctors’ pockets.” A second blood test proved him correct, Cooper said. The baby was fine. So Allyson Dovie Cooper came home to 96 North Clearview Circle.
That night, The Hour of the Time featured Pooh as the cohost. She’d made her formal debut as an on-air member of the team a couple of years before. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Cooper said that night, “this little four-year-old girl surprised me the other day as we were driving home from Los Angeles. Annie was falling asleep in the back seat, when I heard something wonderful. . . . Pooh asked me if she could demonstrate what it was that we heard from the back seat of the Bronco. So without further ado, here’s Pooh.”
Pooh stepped up to her daddy’s microphone and happily recited the Pledge of Allegiance. It was a flawlessly cute, little-girl, pink version of the Pledge, yet delivered with the resolve of a fearless princess, hand over her heart. When she was done, Cooper was choked up. “Folks,” he said, “I don’t know where she learned that, but I am so pleased and so proud of my daughter Pooh.”
Pooh became a regular on the HOTT broadcasts, part of the gang at the St. Johns Research Center. She was a natural-born radio raconteur. It wasn’t long before she started to take over whole segments of the show, choosing which records to play. When it was time for her to go to bed, she’d sign off with flair. “Good night, folks. See you when the moon turns green and the cows come home!”
Cooper had fathered three children and “lost” them all. That was how he put it: “lost.” He never mentioned the drunken rages, the wife beatings, the fact that the mothers of his older children had all run away from him; those things were edited out of the story. As Sally Phillips, mother of Jessica, said, “Bill had a lot of love in him. But you could never be sure what he’d do next. The other side was always in there.”
Pooh seemed to have changed that. Pooh was Cooper’s girl, a chip off the old block. From what can be heard during the Hour of the Time episodes, they were always together, taking rides in the country, walking the playful Sugar Bear, who would become Pooh’s dog, especially after Cooper got Crusher, the attack-trained Rottweiler. On the air they were a team, playing records by Sam Cooke, who they agreed was the greatest singer of all time. “Cupid” was Pooh’s favorite, especially its opening lines, “Cupid, draw back your bow, and let your arrow go . . .”
Cooper’s love for his daughter was “complete,” he said, telling the audience how when Pooh was just a little baby, he’d come in from doing the show around midnight. Annie always had dinner waiting for him. He’d eat it and then let Annie go off to sleep. “I’d spend the night holding Pooh and singing to her, talking to her and holding her and rocking her and throwing her up in the air and everything you can think of,” Cooper told the audience.
“We developed a pretty good friendship back then, didn’t we?” Cooper asked Pooh on the air the night Allyson was born. It was true, Pooh said.
“Pals to the end?” Cooper asked his daughter.
“Pals to the end!” she replied.
Cooper worried about how Allyson’s birth might affect Pooh. He said that he and Annie “had not been expecting another addition to the family. . . . In fact, I think Pooh kind of thought she was going to be the only one for a while. And her mother and father did, too.” Still, Cooper said, he had wished in his “heart of hearts for another child, so that Pooh would not have to be alone a lot of the time.”
It was not easy being the child of a messenger, Cooper told the audience during the broadcast. When he and Annie traveled to lectures and events, “it’s usually adults who attend these functions, and so Pooh doesn’t get to meet a whole bunch of other children. And, of course, we live up here on the mountaintop. There are no next-door neighbors, so her greatest playmates are her father and her dog, and when mother’s not too busy, her mother, too.”
It would be different if Pooh attended school, he said. There were several public schools in the Round Valley area, but Cooper wasn’t about to send his daughter to one. “When you hear the word ‘public,’ it really means ‘Socialist,’” he often said. Instead he chose to homeschool, at least as much as time permitted. Father and daughter talked about it on that evening’s Hour of the Time, when Cooper asked Pooh what she had done that day.
She said she didn’t really remember “because yesterday, I mean, I did the same thing and I did the same thing today, too! Because I just pretend I went to school and I did a lot of things really good. Because I like going to school. It’s a lot of fun.”
Cooper, coaxing, replied, “When you say you’re just pretending, that’s because you really don’t ever go to a school. You learn here at home, huh?”
“Yeah. Because it’s not really a school, it’s just my room.”
Cooper then addressed the audience. “It’s a room, but it’s got a lot of stuff in it, and boy, she learns to read with the real phonics, folks. She doesn’t get into this baloney that has so many illiterate people running around today.”
Cooper was happy that Pooh had been there the day Allyson was born, so she’d know her sister from the very beginning. On the way to the hospital, he’d looked into the back seat of the Bronco and seen Pooh sitting there “looking like a ghost.” At the hospital he lost track of her for a moment, only to find her in the recovery room, staring at her sister, simply taking in the scene, the change of the order of things.
Recalling the moment, Cooper told the audience, “I think she was deeply impressed and has a better understanding of what life is about than she did before.”
The little family was growing. It wouldn’t be the way it had been, those drives up and back from St. Johns, just Poppy and Pooh, pals forever. But it was life, life, and life only. Pooh, so wise beyond her years, seemed to know that. “Boy,” she said to Cooper, “I really like the show tonight because I love my family. I love you, I love Mommy, and I love little Allyson.”
Then, with the logical rigor of a budding mathematical mind, Pooh analyzed the bonds of the new family unit. “I wouldn’t leave without you and Mommy and Allyson, and you wouldn’t leave me and Mommy and Allyson, and Allyson wouldn’t leave without me and Mommy and Poppy, and Mommy wouldn’t leave without me and Poppy and Allyson.”
“That’s absolutely right,” Cooper told his daughter. “And I’m glad you understand that, because you don’t have to feel insecure ever.”
If the government strategy had been to set up McVeigh to destroy the patriot movement that had been rekindled on Ruby Ridge, they had succeeded. At the time of the OKC bombing, there were over eight hundred militia groups with a membership that numbered somewhere between 50,000 and 200,000, depending on who you believed. After McVeigh’s conviction, this number dropped steadily, bottoming out at perhaps 15,000 by the mid-2000s, before the huge rebirth that accompanied the election of the first black president in 2008.
Much of the early decline was due to increased and redirected police activity against what was now called domestic terrorism. The FBI hired 570 new agents within a year of the Murrah Building bombing. More significantly, as Danny Defenbaugh, who headed the FBI’s post-OKC investigation, said, “We were allowed to range more freely.”
Meanwhile, Cooper and Michele Moore continued to develop their OKC research. As the feds continued to lay the blame solely on McVeigh and the Nichols brothers, Cooper expanded his list of John Doe coconspirators. By the end of 1996, he was up to seven, having added the Elohim City Christian Identity pastor, Robert G. Millar.
Cooper competed on the John Doe front with such patriot commentators as Mike Vanderboegh, the self-identified commander of the First Alabama Cavalry Regiment. Editor/publisher of The John Doe Times, an often wry, gossipy chronicle of OKC lore, Vanderboegh attacked Cooper in a piece called “Oklahoma City Squirrels and Militia Looney-Toons: Michele Moore and Wild Bill Cooper Work Themselves into a Frenzy.”
As “a militia unit commander myself,” Vanderboegh said, he took exception to a secret communication from SCAR headquarters that Cooper read on The Hour of the Time. The commanding general, Cooper said, had ordered all militias of the United States to assume Red Alert status until further notice.
“Pray tell, Mr. Napoleonic Cooper, who gave you authority to issue orders to me and mine?” Vanderboegh replied, snarkily reminding John Doe Times readers that Cooper was the same guy who once “engaged in laser battles with Martians on behalf of Uncle Sam.”
Cooper’s response was to add Vanderboegh to his John Doe list, making him #8. This was not an empty gesture, as Gary Hunt of The Outpost of Freedom told me. “I don’t know why Cooper got mad at me, but he made me John Doe #4,” Hunt said. “Someone was supposed to have seen me walking past the Murrah Building a few minutes before the explosion. But I was in Orlando at the time. I could prove it. But a lot of people still believed Cooper. It took me years to shake that John Doe #4 label.”
Cooper’s biggest ally at the time was frequent Hour of the Time guest Linda Thompson, an Indianapolis lawyer and one of the very few significant female voices in the patriot scene. Author of the pamphlet The Clinton Body Count: Coincidence or the Kiss of Death?, Thompson caused a sensation with her 1993 film Waco: The Big Lie. Along with some very interesting footage supporting the Branch Davidian side of the initial BAFT gunfight, The Big Lie purported to show the feds setting fire to the Mount Carmel compound.
“The following footage proves beyond any doubt that the tanks intentionally set the house on fire,” says Thompson, narrating the film. “It proves that the Branch Davidians were murdered.” The video is murky, but Thompson directs the audience’s attention to a tank, which she says has “a gas jet on the front that shoots fire.” And there it is: an orange triangle that appears to be a flame close to the front of the tank. The fire leaps toward the compound building, which appears to combust. The vehicle pulls back and advances again, shooting what looks to be more fire.
Waco: The Big Lie had a profound impact on many horrified by what happened at Mount Carmel. Among them was the comedian Bill Hicks (1961–1994), whose reaction can be seen in two Waco-related YouTube videos. In the first, Hicks is goofing around near the “Camp Boredom” press area. He mocks the Branch Davidians’ name, referring to them as “the church of the Latter Day Saints of Jaw-Way.”
The second video shows Hicks, whom many regard as perhaps the foremost social comic after Lenny Bruce, doing a stand-up gig. It starts with some jokes. David Koresh had no choice but to change his name from Vernon Howell, Hicks says. “You got to call yourself Jesus, that’s part of the Messiah deal,” Hicks says. “What are you going to say, ‘Vernon speaketh, and He saith, we’re gonna stop and go for beef jerky’?”
Then, interrupting his own flow, a palpable anger overcomes Hicks. “I have seen footage that has never aired on network television,” he says, referring to Thompson’s film, “footage of Bradley tanks shooting fire into the compound. The Branch Davidians did not start that fire. They were murdered in cold blood by the pussies, the liars, the scumbags, the ATF.”
The feds knew Koresh was “really trying to finish that Seven Seals horseshit he was doing,” continues Hicks, already suffering with the pancreatic cancer that would kill him within a year. “They burned those people alive because the message they want to convey to you is, State power will always win. . . . We’ll say any lie we want over our propaganda machine, the mainstream media, and we’ll burn you and your children in your fucking homes.”
Another person buying into Thompson’s version of the Waco fire was Timothy McVeigh. He insisted the movie be played at his trial so everyone would see the motivation for his actions. The problem was that, according to most observers, however criminally the feds might have acted at Mount Carmel, their Bradley tanks almost certainly did not, as Thompson said, “shoot fire.” Jim Pate, who covered Waco for the now-defunct Soldier of Fortune magazine, said, “When you look at the unedited video, it’s obvious when the vehicle backs out, that it [the flame] was debris being reflected in the sunlight. The question then became, does Linda Thompson believe this, or did she know better but edited it to pander to paranoia?”
In many ways Thompson’s fire-shooting tank, a quirk of the visual record that occurred at a decisive moment, recalled Cooper’s contention that William Greer shot President Kennedy with a shellfish-toxin pellet gun. It opened a plausible portal through which the true believer could see exactly what they wanted to see. Perhaps recognizing a kindred spirit, Cooper remained a Thompson supporter long after most patriots deserted her.
In late 1996, Cooper abruptly left WWCR. He’d done 944 broadcasts under the station’s call letters, reaching what he claimed to be ten million listeners. Now he was doing his last program, saying that the station’s call letters really stood for “World Wide Christian Hypocrite Radio.”
The problem began when Cooper asked to change his time slot. He was paying for the 11:00 P.M. to 12:00 midnight time slot, which meant his show didn’t end until 1:00 A.M. on the East Coast, too late for many fans. Cooper claimed he’d been promised by WWCR general manager George McClintock that if an earlier time period opened up on the evening schedule, he’d get it. Cooper especially coveted the two-hour slot held by the venerable right-wing radio figure Tom Valentine and his powerful sponsor, Willis Carto’s Spotlight newspaper. Cooper began targeting Valentine, producing “proof” that Valentine was actually an Illuminati mole and a high priest of the Mystery Schools, and he referred to Valentine’s program, Radio Free America, as Radio Free Masonry.
When Valentine eventually did leave his time slot, Cooper called McClintock to remind him of his promise. Yet, to hear Cooper tell it, McClintock reneged. “He told me The Hour of the Time was too controversial on a Christian broadcasting station to put on any earlier.”
Cooper hit the ceiling, pointing out that if WWCR was so pious, why did they carry a program called The Anti-Christ that was hosted by a man who actually claimed to be the Anti-Christ. Cooper told listeners he’d given WWCR operations manager Adam Locke thirty days’ notice. He had no intention of staying at a radio station that was capable of such “blatant dishonesty and manipulation,” Cooper told the manager. He and his listenership, which Cooper was then touting to be as large as “twenty-five to thirty million,” were leaving. It was meant to be a bluff, but Cooper had overplayed his hand. A few days later, when he attempted to smooth things out with Locke, the WWCR boss said, sorry, the station had taken Cooper’s thirty-day notice seriously and was already closing a deal to rent his transmitter time to another host.
Cooper found himself in the radio wilderness. Nothing in shortwave matched the strength of the WWCR signal; it was the top of the line and Cooper had tossed it away. Trying to put the best face on the situation, Cooper told the audience it was time to “take back the airwaves.” He would set up his own far-flung satellite network “completely free of obstacles like establishment-controlled media and people like George McClintock.” It was a big vision that would require huge sacrifices of “time, effort, and money.” He urged patriots who were really committed to saving the Constitution to open their wallets and “get in on the ground floor of this new network.”
But now, instead of cuddling up to your Sky Buddy shortwave radio to hear Bill Cooper’s planetarium-style readings of great tales of the Knights Templar and the mendacity of the secret lodges of Mystery Babylon, you had to have an Orbitron SX-7 dish, a Pansat 3500 receiver, 100 feet of RG6 coax cable, and who knew what else. Cooper was selling the full kit for $485, plus $10 for handling. It was the cheapest price possible, but still beyond many budgets. Installation could be a hassle; the instruction manuals were an inch thick. While many followed Cooper to satellite, most did not. His audience dwindled.
It was around this time that Cooper’s tax problem flared up. The IRS claimed Cooper and Annie were in arrears. This was a lie, Cooper said. He and Annie had always paid “all legal and required tax.” This did not mean, Cooper said, that he was “a taxpayer.” Paying legitimate taxes did not make you a “taxpayer.” That only happened when you signed your name on the 1040 form on the line where it said “taxpayer.” That’s what cemented your contract with the bill collectors who had seized control of the government. It was a trick, Cooper told listeners, he had no intention of falling for, ever again.
The fact, Cooper pointed out, was the nation itself was based on tax protest. Eight years before the famous Boston Tea Party of 1773, the British attempted to raise money to finance their imperial presence in the New World with passage of the Stamp Act of 1765, which placed a tax on the issuance of commercial and legal papers. John Adams and Patrick Henry were among those who opposed the new laws.
After the Revolution, however, the shoe was on the other foot. In 1791, now in power, the newborn American central government levied its first federal tax, on the production of distilled beverages. Farmers from western Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Virginia who raised the grains to run the stills protested, setting up an angry confrontation that was labeled the Whiskey Rebellion.
It was a critical moment; how would the former Revolutionary leaders who now made up the new federal government react to local political and economic concerns? George Washington provided the answer when, in full regalia and astride a white horse, he personally led a column of thirteen thousand fully outfitted troops to quell the insurrection of about five hundred farmers with pitchforks. The precedent for federal power was set.
The most literary of American tax protesters was Henry David Thoreau, who in 1848 went to jail for refusing to pay taxes to support the Mexican and Indian Wars as well as the continued tolerance of slavery. When Ralph Waldo Emerson came to bail out his friend, he asked, “Henry, what are you doing in there?” Thoreau replied, “Ralph, what are you doing out there?”
More than sixty years prior to the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment, which created the Bureau of Internal Revenue in the fateful year 1913, Thoreau, a nineteenth-century survivalist, had already written the lines that would become key talking points for modern-day tax protesters like Gordon Kahl of the Posse Comitatus, the Montana Freemen, and untold numbers of militiamen and women, Bill Cooper included.
Thoreau said: “If I deny the authority of the State when it presents my tax bill, it will soon take and waste all my property, and so harass me and my children without end. This is hard, this makes it impossible for a man to live honestly, and at the same time comfortably, in outward respects.” He also said, “When I meet a government which says to me, ‘Your money or your life,’ why should I be in haste to give it my money?”
Cooper advanced his own tax protest position during HOTT broadcast #28 (2/28/93) entitled “Income Taxes Are Voluntary.” The reason paying taxes was voluntary, Cooper told listeners, was not, as many ill-informed patriots believed, because “the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution was improperly ratified.” Nor was it “because of the definitions of wages or incomes, or because form 1040s don’t have an OMB number, or because the IRS is a corporation, or because you’re free, white, and twenty-one, or because in 1933 the United States went into bankruptcy, or because the Victory Tax was repealed in 1944, or because you signed documents with UCC-217 above your name.”
No, Cooper said, paying federal income tax was voluntary because the law said so. It was as simple as that. The proof was right there in Title 26 of the Code of Federal Regulations 31.3402(p)-1 under the heading “Voluntary Withholding Agreements.” In the very first sentence, it said an employee and his employer “may enter” into an agreement under 3402(p)(3)(A). It was Cooper’s contention that since the money was not going to the employer but rather to the government, the phrases “voluntary” and “may enter” carried legal significance.
Understanding tax law wasn’t that hard if you were willing to do your research, Cooper told his listeners. All you really needed “was a copy of Black’s Law Dictionary, a good brain, and a few hours.”
Then, acknowledging that even tax-aware patriots sometimes require assistance, Cooper went into selling mode, suggesting every red-blooded American get in touch with the Pilot Connection Society, a Stockton, California, firm offering the “Untax Package.” Selling for $2,100, “or 10 percent of your existing tax problem (if any), whichever is higher,” the Untax Package came with Pilot Connection founder Phil Marsh’s book, The Compleat Patriot, a copy of the Constitution, a text of Psalm 91, and a picture of Marsh and his wife, Marjorie, “suitable for framing.” If there was any problem with the Pilot Connection services, Cooper said, listeners could call him and he’d get “in touch with Phil Marsh directly” to sort it out.
Two years later, in 1995, Cooper offered more tax-avoidance information in the article “BATF/IRS—Criminal Fraud,” which ran in the September 1995 issue of Veritas, and continues to show up online. While most citizens believed the BATF and the IRS to be legitimate agencies within the Department of the Treasury, this was not the case, Cooper explained. The truth was that both agencies owed their very existence “to a broad, premeditated conspiracy to defraud the citizens of the United States of America.
“Magic is the art of illusion. Those who practice magic are called Magi,” Cooper wrote. It is the job of these Magi to create “obfuscation and confusion in the law.” These Magicians had “frightened” Americans “into filing and paying ‘income taxes.’ . . . Millions of lives have been ruined. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people have been imprisoned on the pretense they violated laws that do not exist. Some have been driven to suicide. Marriages have been destroyed. Property has been confiscated to pay taxes that were never owed.”
The IRS was a front, something that didn’t actually exist, Cooper said. It was “a fiction, a legal fiction.” He had done his research on this, spent weeks going through the IRS deception, from the Lincoln-era “war tax” through the alleged passage of the Sixteenth Amendment. He’d studied reams of the Congressional Record, searched through the entire United States Tax Code. Nowhere did he find a single reference to an entity called the Internal Revenue Service. The fact was people paid taxes to the IRS because they were afraid not to. It was the biggest protection racket in the history of the world. It was time to wake up to that fact. Taxes were nothing but a tribute. “A tribute paid by slaves to their masters.”
It mattered little that Wayne Bentson, with whom Cooper wrote the BAFT/IRS article wound up in jail for following his own text remedies, as did Phil Marsh of the Pilot Connection and Hartford Van Dyke before him. “Successful use of this material requires a lot of study and an excellent understanding of the legal system,” Cooper wrote in Veritas. “It is not enough to discover this information. You must know it inside out, backward and forward, like you know the smell of your own breath.”
It is not clear when Cooper, in his words, “had the guts to stop” filing his income tax returns, but a September 30, 1996, letter he sent to Janet Napolitano, then US Attorney for the District of Arizona, is tagged “re: Proposed Cooper criminal prosecution.” On The Hour of the Time, Cooper railed at Napolitano, who would go on to become Arizona governor and Barack Obama’s head of Homeland Security. She was “the puppet of Phoenix, a slave in the service of the murdering Janet Reno,” Cooper told listeners. His personal correspondence with Napolitano, however, took a more moderate approach.
Referring to previous communications in which he had enumerated “various reasons why I should not be indicted for federal income tax crimes,” Cooper’s letter to Napolitano discusses the elements of his case. There are a lot of code citations and references, including a discussion of the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980. Even though the stationery letterhead was hand-typed (“From the desk of M. William Cooper”), it’s clear that the author intended the correspondence as an exchange between equals: Citizen Cooper to Citizen Napolitano. In a more perfect union, one where The People truly had representation and access to legitimate government, this might have worked.
But this was not the world envisioned by the Founding Fathers. This was 1996. This was the middle of a blood struggle over whatever was left of the nation. Napolitano was a politician on the make, Cooper was an economically stressed father living on a hilltop in the poorest county in Arizona. The idea that he would be taken seriously in the quarters of power was a naive pipe dream.
As 1997 turned to 1998, Cooper suffered repeated financial setbacks. He complained that he was making “nothing” from the ongoing sales of Behold a Pale Horse. His dream of establishing his own satellite network was in tatters. The Hour of the Time could still be heard over some shortwave stations, including WRNO and WRMI, but their reach was nothing like WWCR. Outages were common, signals intermittent.
A tired-sounding Cooper talked about his growing money problems during a 1998 show. He said that he and Annie had “exhausted ourselves, we’ve exhausted our resources. We don’t have nice furniture and things. You guys look up here on the hill, if you live in the Round Valley, and you think this is a wonderful house up here. Well, we do have a wonderful view, but everything is falling apart. The furniture all has holes in it. Annie and I have had one vacation in about ten years.”
The financial failure of Oklahoma City: Day One, and the out-of-pocket expenses incurred by the Constitution Party boondoggle, had taken their toll. Cooper wanted to keep publishing Veritas as a full-size newspaper, but it was difficult. Months would go by without an issue. Faced with such obstacles, “most people would have declared bankruptcy,” Cooper told the audience one evening. “They would have taken the money and run.” There was no way he was doing that, Cooper said.
During this period, Cooper finished his last major essay, the 15,000-word reworking of his earlier “MajestyTwelve” piece. Published in the May 1998 edition of Veritas and later appearing in an expanded version on the HOTT website, the deeply pessimistic “MajestyTwelve” attempts to update the various strands of Cooper’s thought over the previous decade.
“The following is fact. It is not a theory, it is a genuine conspiracy,” Cooper began, citing the Admiral Cleary documents certifying “the following information is true and correct to the best of my memory and the research that I have accomplished. I will swear to it in any court of Law.”
The cache of secret papers that once seemed to reveal the alien presence on Earth and then the ongoing takeover by “a One World Totalitarian Socialist Government” had now taken on a religious tenor, predicting the rise of an Anti-Christ-like benevolent dictator, who “will be presented as the Messiah.”
The long-running mind control programs were nearing full strength, Cooper wrote. Soon no one would either know or care that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights had disappeared. Anyone who even remembered the days of individual rights would be considered crazy. It would be a state where only a relatively small “internal police force” carrying only “minimum weapons [would be] needed to maintain internal order.”
When this process is completed, “the human race will be shackled to a computer in a never-ending cycle of debt. No action or movement will ever again be private.”
For a preview of this new world, Cooper suggested readers “see the movie They Live,” a cheapo 1988 film made by Halloween director John Carpenter that stars former wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper. The well-cast Piper arrives in a near-future, dystopian town that has been taken over by an alien/satanic race. The evil interlopers remain invisible and undetected until Piper’s character, a good-hearted drifter with primo fighting skills, finds a pair of sunglasses that enable him to see the demonic truth behind the everyday facade. Justly lauded for Piper’s signature line, “I’m here to kick ass and chew bubble gum, and I’m all out of bubble gum,” They Live became a cult movie for the newly paranoid after the 9/11 attacks, but, of course, Bill Cooper, his sunglasses always on, was there first.
On June 18, 1998, Cooper and Annie were indicted on tax evasion and bank fraud charges, the latter stemming from some alleged misstatements on a loan application. Now, Cooper was watching as a federal marshal started walking up the hill toward 96 North Clearview Circle with papers in his hand.
On that night’s episode of The Hour of the Time, Cooper described the encounter. It was all about knowing the law, he told listeners. “You can’t give up jurisdiction voluntarily. . . . When the federal marshal came to my home, I could have invited him in and allowed him to do whatever he wanted to do, if I was a sheeple. Instead, I understood his lack of jurisdiction and I told him so. Most people would have volunteered to be served, to go to jail, to be tried, and all the other things that happen to people unlawfully in this country every single day.”
Cooper reported that the marshal stood in the middle of the road looking like a little child having a tantrum. “He said, ‘I do have jurisdiction! I do have authority!’ I said, ‘No, you don’t, you’re trespassing. Get off my property now.’ He had no answer. He held up the papers and asked, ‘What am I supposed to do with this?’ I told him those papers were made out to a legal fiction. To be served in a fictional jurisdiction. Which did not exist.” Cooper told the marshal to serve his fictional papers in that fictional jurisdiction.
The frustrated marshal yelled at Cooper from the road. “He told me we were being summoned to appear in federal court in Phoenix, Arizona, on July 1, 1998. He said that if we did not appear, a warrant would be issued for our arrest.
“Well,” Cooper told the audience, “they can issue whatever they want to and we will not appear, because the court has no jurisdiction or authority over us. We will stand and fight. We will not be like the Jews of Europe, or the Gypsies, or the Poles and gather our little belongings and march off, peacefully, to the boxcars.”
Cooper felt he had won the first skirmish, but the battle wasn’t even close to being over; it had barely started. On July 2, 1998, one day after Annie and Cooper chose not to appear in federal court, another representative of the federal government appeared on North Clearview Circle. This time it wasn’t some faceless marshal, a lackey IRS delivery boy. Cooper recognized the visitor immediately.
It was Special Agent Steve Fillerup of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who, two years earlier, had met Cooper on Highway 191 to ask about Timothy McVeigh.
Cooper described his second meeting with Special Agent Fillerup this way: “He approached the bottom of the hill and honked his horn. He attempted to entice us to accept a document that he held in his hand. We refused the document and refused to enter into discussion with him. I told him he was out of his jurisdiction and cited the documentation and Supreme Court cases to that effect which we have in our possession. I told him to inform his traitor supervisors that they ‘stepped on their dicks this time.’ He replied, ‘I think we probably did.’ He got back in his Blazer and drove away.”
Fillerup confirmed Cooper’s account, more or less. In Heaven’s Hammers, the retired agent writes that he thought Cooper was right. “We, the feds, ‘had stepped on our dicks,’” but not necessarily for the reasons Cooper thought. Fillerup thought it was outrageous that the IRS hadn’t bothered to advise the Marshals Service “that Bill Cooper was not an ordinary citizen who had fallen behind on his taxes.”
As Fillerup told me in 2016, “When I first met Bill during the McVeigh investigation, I got the impression that no matter what he said on the radio, he got some kind of thrill out of talking to a real G-man.” The Bill Cooper he encountered only two years later was “a different man,” Fillerup said.
“The truth was I hadn’t come to arrest him. I felt the Bureau had suckered ourselves into incidents like Ruby Ridge and Waco by acting like tough guys. No one wanted anything like that again. I just wanted to talk to him, to open the conversation. Since we knew each other I thought I could be effective that way.
“But he wasn’t going to listen. When you have been in law enforcement as long as I was, you get a sense about people. I looked at Bill up there on the hill and thought, here is a guy who could take it to the grave.”
Fillerup’s impression resonated a couple days later, on July 6, 1998, when Cooper issued “A Public Notice” on his website.
“WARNING!!” Cooper’s notice read. “Any attempt by the federal government or anyone else to execute the unconstitutional and unlawful arrest warrants will be met with armed resistance. Any person who attempts to kidnap our children will be shot upon discovery. We are formed as the Constitutional and Lawful unorganized Militia of the State of Arizona and the United States of America and have made many public statements to that effect since 1990. All of these statements are on record on tapes of our lectures and broadcasts. These tapes are dispersed in the hands of Americans across the nation.
“Therefore a STATE OF WAR exists between the Citizens of the Union States and the corporate United States. We will be Free under Constitutional Republican government guaranteed to us by the organic Constitution for the United States of America or we will be dead.
“This is the land of the free and the home of the brave. We have drawn our line in the sand.”