Mystery Babylon Exposed [Trenchant Edges]

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes, 47 seconds. Contains 1357 words

Hello again my friends.

This is Trenchant Edges, a real newsletter that exists and will continue publishing regularly. Oh yes. For realzies this time. We look for the weird shit at the frayed edges of the maps we live in and try to make some sense of it all.

I’m your host and master of ceremonies, call me Stephen.

This isn’t a normal episode.

(there will be one coming out on Thursday)

This is going to be something of an advertisement I’m afraid. Yes, I know. But I’ve been talking about it vaguely here without addressing it in its own thing: As an enticement for subscribing to the newsletter, I’m offering to make… a podcast about Bill Cooper’s 43 hour long Mystery Babylon series.

In short: At 100 & 121 paid subscribers (100 subscribers with & without comp’d subs), I’ll commit to a podcast. And we’re currently at…

And 69 (nice!) without the comp’d subscriptions. So, we’re pretty close to getting the ball rolling on this.

If you don’t know who Bill is, I wrote a pretty good introduction to him 2 years ago here.

Last week, I also wrote an introduction & pitch about the project which you can read in the next section. If you’ve already read it, just skip this bit and we’ll get to the last section.

The Ghost of Bill Cooper

“Old Bill Cooper, notorious militia radio host and kind of actually the guy Alex Jones pretends to be, believed the world was secretly run by an ancient secret cult.

He laid out this theory in a 43 part series called MYSTERY BABYLON.

I've been wanting to really go through it with a fine-tooth comb and pick it apart for a few years.

But to really do that right is going to be something of a project. Requiring not only a massive amount of extra reading but interviewing what will likely be at least a dozen experts because the claims he makes in this series are so wide ranging they're beyond even my hubris as an autodidact.

I'm still working out what kind of form that'll take, probably some mix of audio and writing and it'll probably end up semi-stand alone.

What makes Cooper interesting is that he's both obviously a brilliant guy and apparently gullible for the right kind of information. His book, Behold a pale Horse, is filled with documents that are obviously hoaxes. Like, transparently hoaxes.

I simply can't believe that he thought Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars, for example, was a real military report. And Cooper has the dubious distinction of recognizing the protocols of the elders of zion was a fake document, but thinking it was essentially true. A distinction he shares with Adolf Hitler.

Cooper, of course, insists he doesn't mean that in an anti-Semitic way. And he may even believe that. But that doesn't really make his promoting the protocols any better. Anti-Semites can just ignore his disclaimers as the price for getting their word out.

Point is, Bill's a useful nexus of influence and influences. By looking at his work thirty years later we can get a real sense of where the Anti-NWO movement was.

A lot of my research over the last few years has traced both conservatism and it's more paranoid expressions to reactions to the French Revolution, which brought anti-Masonry to a new prominence and many of those tropes merged with anti-Semitism over the 19th century.

And Bill as a fascinating nexus of all that.

Ready for the pitch? OK. Good.

What I'd like to do is a stand alone essay/podcast series exploring this zany web of associations as a kind of reward for enough people becoming Paid subscribers of Trenchant Edges.

Right now I've got 60 paid subscribers and another 21 people I'm comping. There will never be any ads on anything I do except stuff I think is interesting.

I figure that gives us two big whole numbers to shoot for: 100 total subscribers & 100 people paying. And this project is going to require a huge commitment of time and energy.

What I'm thinking is a two-season structure: The first a relatively short introduction season doing an overview of of Cooper's life and views, with some relevant interviews on the subject.

Maybe 6-7 episodes.

With a second season more focused on the actual radio show, probably taking an episode or two at a time. Hopefully 20-30 episodes.

If by some strange chance I get a lot more than 100 people subscribing, we can pretty easily expand the project. But this is something I can put together mostly this year. I'd expect a 2-3 month gap between hitting a milestone and release.

And obviously, paying subscribers (and anyone who's interested enough to ask me to comp them, which I've always done because paywalls are bullshit) will get more content earlier.

Anyway, that's what I've got in mind now. I think it's cohesive but I may change it depending on what my audio engineer says.

As with everything I do, it will not be approached as a debunking but more as an active exploration of the subject that clearly delineates fact from speculation. There will almost certainly be a lengthy segment about, "How would we know if this idea is right or wrong?"

One of the problems with conspiracy theories, and one of the reasons I think the term is a legitimate pejorative, is because most of them neither explain how to test if they're true nor give guidance on how live if they're true. Mostly they're just evangelical/cult/MLM recruiting games.

Get people to believe and once enough people do it'll fix itself.

And that's crap. We shouldn't tolerate that kind of shoddy thinking, especially when it shows up in leftist circles.”

Say what you will about Bill or his ideas (and I plan on it, at length), but this is some incredible cover art. 10/10 work here.

So, The Project’s First Season.

I’ve got a few moving pieces already rolling for this.

Once we hit 100 paid subscribers (which could happen this week), I’ll lay out a project plan for everyone.

I have a pretty good broad idea where I want to go with this. I think six episodes is good enough for the context I want to bring into the first season, with a few more longish interviews with experts and other relevant people.

So it’ll end up with between 6 and 10 episodes, I think. Maybe more depending on how many interviews I can get.

Let’s talk time:

I expect a 2-3 month turn around for this project from it starting. I know roughly what needs researched & where to find it, but I won’t be able to record anything until I’m past college classes in May. So it’ll probably come out in June unless post-production takes longer than I expect.

I plan on following the model from the excellent podcast Blowback: Subscribers get full access to the podcast immediately, free listeners get it drip-fed out week by week over a couple months.

Pay walling sucks, but this is absolutely a commercial venture.

I don’t want to speculate too much about the second season, but I think it’ll be broadly in line with what I speculated about.

There are a couple other things about Cooper I think would make for interesting work on their own: Taking apart the documents in Behold a Pale Horse, Going through the last few months of the Hour of the Time (he died a few months after 9/11, which he claimed to have predicted), Covering his views on the Oklahoma City Bombing, and seriously going through MJ-12 all come to mind.

But those are very, “Stretch goals I don’t want to define” until the podcast is actually in the can unless I really need to. Like, if we end up within 5-10 paid subscribers to 150, maybe that makes sense.

I think the exact topic will be decided by a paid subscriber poll.

Oh, Important note: This will be in addition to the usual TE going out. Both will happen at once.

Alright, that’s the “pitch” such as it is.

Should be a lot of fun honestly.

I don’t really want to do constant podcasts, but the idea of limited series very much appeals to me.

Alright, y’all.

See you on Thursday.

Thoughts and feedback absolutely welcome:

-S