Hidden Hand

A distressingly timely new book about the GODFATHER of fake news.

- Ron Rosenbaum

Have you heard of William Cooper? I used to think I knew all the big players in conspiracytheory culture. After all, I was there the summer after the JFK assassination when Warren Commission “critic” Mark Lane gave a primitive PowerPoint presentation “proving” that someone had Photoshopped a picture of Lee Harvey Oswald holding his rifle so that the shadow pointed in. . .the wrong direction. Which proved. . .I don’t know, but it became an iconic data point in JFK conspiracy-theory lore.

And it was in this very magazine (September ’77) that I was able to bring national attention to the overwrought gothic rituals of the Yale secret society called Skull and Bones. And to its network of powerful graduates, who all too many gullible souls had come to believe were the secret rulers of the world—along with the Illuminati and the Bilderbergers, of course. I later assembled a team of Yale videographers to clandestinely tape the dramatic climax of the Bonesmen’s weird “throat slitting” initiation.

I’ve followed truthers (9/11 was a “false flag” op) and birthers (Obama was Kenyan-born). I’ve choked down my disgust at “Pizzagate,” the conspiracy promoted by Alex Jones and Mike Cernovich, who posited (on the basis of zero evidence) that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring out of the basement of a D.C. pizza parlor (which had no basement).