Mark Jacobson’s Pale Horse Rider: William Cooper, the Rise of Conspiracy, and the Fall of Trust in America is a fascinating portrait of William Cooper, the man who might well be the most influential conspiracist most people have never heard of. His 1991 book, Behold a Pale Horse, is one of the bestselling underground texts of all time, passed around in prisons, barbershops, militia compounds, and hip-hop circles alike. The book, and the broader Cooper mythos, became foundational to the paranoia that has now swallowed American politics whole. Jacobson’s work is a study in the rise of conspiracy culture, but also an interrogation of the world that produced it. And that world, despite the book’s 2018 publication, already feels unrecognisably distant. The conspiracies have changed names, QAnon has replaced the Illuminati, George Soros has taken the place of the Rothschilds, but the structure of paranoia remains the same.
Cooper was a man who saw patterns everywhere. His radio show, The Hour of the Time, was fuelled by a relentless belief that the U.S. government was engaged in an elaborate, centuries-long plot to enslave the population. He described his philosophy as simple: “Listen to everyone, read everything, believe nothing until you, yourself, can prove it with your own research.” In some ways, it’s not bad advice, but Cooper’s version of “research” had a tendency to take him down rabbit holes of his own creation. His deep suspicion of government, first manifest in theories about UFOs and extraterrestrial treaties, later refined into a broad paranoia about the New World Order, made him a hero to those who felt disenfranchised, whether they were survivalists in Idaho or incarcerated men in Rikers Island.
The Myth of Cooper
What makes Pale Horse Rider so compelling is Jacobson’s refusal to treat Cooper as a mere oddity, a relic of the shortwave radio era. Instead, he traces how Cooper’s vision of America, as a country already lost to hidden forces, became an organising principle for a broad swathe of the right. Cooper was not just a purveyor of theories but a storyteller, and Jacobson captures this vividly: “For Cooper, truth and falsehood began with the document… the secret document contained the seed to be worked into the ever-expanding concept, a meme, the kernel of a new belief system.” Cooper’s methods were not unlike those of the intelligence agencies he loathed, collecting, redacting, reinterpreting, and turning documents into scripture.
Jacobson writes with a kind of engaged detachment, tracing the arc of Cooper’s beliefs without fully embracing or dismissing them. He understands that Cooper’s appeal was not just in what he said but in how he said it. His charisma and sheer force of conviction made his theories persuasive, even when they were demonstrably false. The review of FEMA as “an unelected government within the government” is a perfect example, based on real policies but distorted into a nightmarish vision of totalitarianism. Cooper’s effectiveness as a propagandist lay in his ability to present the most mundane government bureaucracy as part of a sinister plot, always embedding his claims in half-truths that made them difficult to fully dismiss.
Behold a Pale Horse and the Market for Fear
For a book that began as a self-published screed distributed out of a car trunk, Behold a Pale Horse became a staggering commercial success. Originally printed in 1991 by Light Technology Publishing, a small New Age-oriented press in Sedona, Arizona, its first run was modest: 3,500 copies, with only 500 in hardcover. By 2017, it had sold nearly 300,000 copies. But those official sales numbers barely scratch the surface of its actual reach. Behold a Pale Horse was one of the most stolen books in America, with copies routinely disappearing from bookstores (for some it remains hidden beneath the counter) and libraries. It also became a mainstay in U.S. prisons, passed from inmate to inmate alongside works like The 48 Laws of Power. As Jacobson notes, “It was not unusual for a single copy of Behold a Pale Horse to go through enough hands in the cellblocks of places such as Attica to break the book’s spine”
This phenomenon underscores an essential truth: conspiracy sells. Fear, suspicion, and the promise of hidden knowledge are powerful commodities, and Cooper understood this instinctively. He was not simply a theorist, he was an entrepreneur of paranoia. In many ways, he prefigured the later monetisation of conspiracism that figures like Alex Jones would take to industrial levels, where every fear became an opportunity for product placement, from survivalist gear to miracle supplements.
The Eternal Conspiratorial Mindset
Cooper’s belief in grand, orchestrated plots was nowhere more evident than in his take on the John F. Kennedy assassination. He was among those who believed that the official story was a smokescreen, but his theory took an even more radical turn. He claimed that the limousine driver, William Greer, was the true assassin, turning and shooting Kennedy at close range. Cooper’s supposed “proof” was based on blurry, grainy footage, and yet it captivated his followers.
Kennedy’s assassination remains the foundational conspiracy theory in American life, the lens through which all subsequent government secrecy is viewed. That’s why Trump’s 2017 promise to release all remaining JFK documents was so tantalising. In the end, much of the material remained classified. Now, in Trump’s second presidency, the question remains: Will the files ever be fully disclosed, or will the myth only deepen?
If the Kennedy assassination was the original American deep state conspiracy, then Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking ring is its 21st-century successor. The Epstein case, particularly the mysterious circumstances of his death, has united both the left and right in suspicion. The recent court-ordered release of Epstein’s flight logs has only fueled speculation, with figures from politics, finance, and Hollywood implicates.
This is the kind of event Cooper would have seized on, a scandal involving elites, hidden power structures, and a dead man who “knew too much.” Yet, as with JFK’s assassination, the deeper truth may be more mundane, buried beneath layers of speculation. The Epstein saga demonstrates that conspiracy culture is no longer a fringe phenomenon, it is the dominant way Americans process elite malfeasance. The question is not whether people will believe in conspiracies, but which version of reality they will accept.
A Lucky Guess or Calculated Insight?
One of the most enduring aspects of Cooper’s legacy is his eerie prediction of the 9/11 attacks. On his June 28, 2001, broadcast of The Hour of the Time, Cooper warned his listeners: “Something terrible is going to happen in this country. And whatever is going to happen, they’re going to blame on Osama bin Laden. Don’t you even believe it.”
Less than three months later, the Twin Towers fell, and bin Laden was immediately blamed. Cooper’s prediction has been mythologised as either prophetic brilliance or a stroke of paranoid luck. His reasoning, however, was not mystical but based on his deeply ingrained suspicion of government manipulation. He had long believed bin Laden was a CIA asset, stating: “They created him. They’re the ones funding him. They supported him to make their new utopian worlds . . . and he has served them well.”
Cooper did not believe the official narrative for a second. As mainstream media quickly framed bin Laden as the culprit, Cooper interrupted his own live broadcast in disbelief: “How do they know who did it? If the United States government had no warning like they say, if they didn’t know who was going to mount these attacks, and there are no survivors from the people in these planes, how do they know Osama bin Laden is behind it?”
His critique foreshadowed the emergence of the 9/11 Truth movement, which would later develop theories of controlled demolition and government orchestration. While Cooper didn’t claim the attack was an “inside job,” he suggested it was an event that powerful interests had anticipated and were prepared to exploit. His warning about the aftermath was just as prescient: “Get ready for it, folks, because that’s what you’re going to be hearing in the next weeks and months on radio and television: Nothing will be the same after today… Because I’ll tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that’s what the people who really did this want you to think.”
Cooper’s accuracy on 9/11 raises an important question: Was this an instance of genuine foresight, or simply a case of a lifelong conspiracist eventually landing on a correct prediction? Given his history of warnings about false-flag operations, the deep state, and media manipulation, it’s likely Cooper was following a pattern rather than making a lucky guess. He had already seen the government use domestic terror events to justify crackdowns, Ruby Ridge, Waco, Oklahoma City. In his worldview, 9/11 was inevitable, not because of prophetic vision, but because he understood how fear is weaponised (The Power of Nightmares).
The Evolution of Conspiracism
If Cooper was the prophet of modern conspiracism, the internet became his church. While he relied on shortwave radio and self-published books, today’s conspiracies spread through YouTube algorithms, Telegram groups, and Twitter (X) threads. The internet has transformed conspiracy culture from a series of isolated movements into a global ecosystem, where ideas mutate and reinforce each other in real time. Unlike Cooper’s meticulously assembled documents, modern conspiracies are crowdsourced, with users contributing new details, evidence, and theories as they unfold.
Jacobson hints at this shift, noting that “The most recent high-profile addition to the Cooper canon are the postings of ‘QAnon,’ a reputed government insider who claims to have access to classified information… Sales of Behold a Pale Horse immediately spiked.” Cooper’s model of paranoia, where every new event is retrofitted into an overarching conspiracy, is the template for today’s internet-driven movements. Unlike Cooper, who saw himself as a singular prophet, today’s conspiracies are participatory, encouraging believers to be both consumers and creators of disinformation.
Reading Pale Horse Rider now, against the backdrop of Trump’s second presidency, one realises just how completely Cooper’s worldview has been absorbed into the American right. Figures like Kash Patel, appointed FBI Director in 2025, and Tulsi Gabbard, now Director of National Intelligence, are part of a broader trend of integrating conspiratorial thinkers into state power. Unlike Cooper, who remained an outsider, today’s conspiracists are using the machinery of government to act on their beliefs.
Trump and his allies no longer fear the deep state, they control it. The same logic that Cooper used to challenge government control is now used by those in power to purge government agencies of political enemies, silence dissent, and justify authoritarian measures. Conspiracy theory has become a governance strategy, where real abuses of power are masked by a constant churn of paranoia, misinformation, and deliberate destabilisation. Jacobson’s book is a necessary warning that conspiracism is no longer a challenge to power, it is a tool of it.
Conspiracy culture is no longer just a belief system, it is an industry. If Cooper saw himself as a rogue truth-teller, today’s conspiracists understand that paranoia is a business model. Figures like Jones, Steve Bannon, and Trump himself fundraise off conspiracy theories, turning fear into a lucrative enterprise. The lawsuits against Jones, particularly the massive damages he was ordered to pay to the families of Sandy Hook victims, exposed how the machinery of conspiracism operates: it preys on insecurity, builds loyalty through fear, and then sells the solution.
Jacobson touches on this transformation, noting that “Cooper’s influence endures not because he was always right, but because he taught his listeners to think in a particular way—to doubt, to suspect, to seek patterns.” (p. 157) But today’s conspiracists have monetised that doubt, turning it into an endless cycle of outrage, crisis, and cash flow. Cooper would have balked at how his ideological descendants turned his paranoid worldview into a commodity.
The Legacy of Cooper
Jacobson’s book is not just an excavation of a single man’s delusions; it is a warning. Cooper’s America has become our own, a place where fear and suspicion are leveraged by those in power rather than directed against them. If we fail to understand how conspiracy culture has been absorbed into the machinery of the state, we risk mistaking spectacle for resistance, paranoia for critique. Pale Horse Rider is a vital text, not just for those fascinated by conspiracies, but for anyone trying to chart a way forward in a world where truth itself has become a battlefield.
William Cooper believed in hidden truths. But the greatest trick of all may be that the real mechanisms of power do not hide at all. They are structural, systemic, embedded in capital and empire, not buried in redacted documents or coded messages. Jacobson’s Pale Horse Rider is an essential work not just for understanding Cooper, but for seeing the real forces that shape the world. To mistake conspiracy for critique is to fight shadows while the architects of inequality operate in broad daylight. The challenge now is not just to understand, but to act.
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