Illuminati Goals & Methods: The New World Order Conspiracy

This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Behold a Pale Horse" by Milton William Cooper. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.

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Who are the Illuminati? What do they want? How do they intend to get it?

According to William Cooper, Illuminati operatives are everywhere, and they always have been. They’re getting all of their ducks in a row and will one day establish a global totalitarian socialist state—the New World Order.

Continue reading to learn about the Illuminati’s goals and methods, according to Cooper.

The Illuminati’s Goals

Behold a Pale Horse is primarily focused on what Cooper calls the New World Order (NWO) conspiracy. He writes that, since the dawn of civilization, a secret organization of self-styled intellectual elites called the Illuminati has worked from the shadows to manipulate economies, governments, and religions for their own gain. The Illuminati has members in every significant economic, political, and religious organization in the modern world. Cooper addresses Illuminati goals and methods in his book.

When the Illuminati feel that the time is right to move—Cooper doesn’t give an exact timeline, though he suggests it will likely take place in the early 21st century—they will dissolve all of the world’s governments and form the New World Order, a single, centralized and socialist body led by a council of the politicians and businessmen who already control the Earth’s natural resources and armies. All private property will be seized and the masses will be electronically tagged and tracked before being forced into detention and slave labor. Physical force and mind control will be used to suppress resistance.

(Shortform note: Cooper repeatedly refers to the NWO government as “socialist,” but it’s not clear from his description how that term fits—seizure of property from the masses for the benefit of the elite is not the same as socialization of property, and the NWO doesn’t seem to have any of the other characteristics of a socialist government, such as a strong welfare system and collective ownership of businesses. Cooper may simply be using the term to invoke a comparison to the USSR, which many of his fellow conspiracists saw as the absolute worst example of what a state could be.)

According to Cooper, the Illuminati believe that their takeover is necessary for the survival of humanity, as well as for future economic prosperity and scientific advancement. Most of humanity is too weak and unintelligent to be allowed to govern themselves, and the NWO will prioritize the lives of the most gifted while exploiting the rest for resource extraction. The source documents Cooper refers to call this disposable population “cattle.”

(Shortform note: Though Cooper criticizes the Illuminati’s eugenicist position that some people are simply born better than others, he used similar language against his own radio audience, denigrating the “sheep” who refused to accept his message. He may even have been the origin of the phrase “wake up sheeple,” though it’s now used more as a joke at the expense of conspiracists than a genuine exhortation.)

Illuminati Methods

Cooper names several core tactics the Illuminati will use to establish and maintain their power, namely reducing people’s self-sufficiency and increasing their dependence on the federal government, disarmament, and undermining the democratic process.

Method #1: Economic Shocks and Dependency

According to Cooper, the global economy is a massive system of social engineering run by the Illuminati. Recessions and economic booms are deliberately triggered at random intervals to destabilize people’s lives. Having lost their job, savings, or property, people become more trusting of “big government” initiatives supposedly designed to ease their suffering, such as tax hikes or the seizure of assets from corporations. In fact, these initiatives increase the government’s power and force people’s participation in welfare programs, which Cooper claims are used for surveillance, along with tax records, the census, and electronic payment systems like credit.

(Shortform note: Opposition to the “big government” initiatives Cooper describes is common among libertarians and center-right American political groups, who argue that free enterprise can regulate itself through recessions and government interference can only hurt businesses. Many also oppose welfare, less because they share Cooper’s belief about surveillance than because they argue that welfare encourages a parasitic relationship between citizens and government—over time, this relationship weakens both parties, depriving the system of its resources and the people of their self-sufficiency.)

Though completely insulating yourself against Illuminati-engineered economic shocks is impossible, Cooper advises withdrawing from these systems of government surveillance and stockpiling as much concrete wealth (mainly in the form of precious metals, like gold and silver) as possible. Though he argues that cash is safer than credit, he also feels that cash in America has been significantly devalued by the elimination of the gold and silver standards in the 19th and 20th centuries. When the government has total power to determine the worth of a dollar, the average person’s wealth is not fixed, and their savings can be made worthless through government intervention.

(Shortform note: Cooper’s advice to stockpile gold and silver draws mainly from the survivalist or prepper movement. Preppers collect large amounts of canned food, weapons, farm equipment, and so on in preparation for an apocalyptic scenario (what this scenario looks like varies among members) that will wipe out modern society and render paper money useless. In the post-apocalypse, people will trade for what they need with food, tools, fuel, or services. While precious metals are less obviously useful, they’ve remained valuable throughout history for their beauty and can be used to construct electronics and other machinery.)

Method #2: Psychological Warfare

Beyond economic shocks, Cooper believes that the Illuminati manipulate people through pop culture and the news. These popular narratives encourage people to trust the Illuminati-led federal government, while those like Cooper who refuse participation in the system (by, as he advises, not paying taxes or providing the government with records, or by running their communities without government oversight) are depicted as backward, violent, or extremist.

Ruby Ridge and the Waco Massacre

Cooper gives examples of this kind of manipulation in Behold a Pale Horse, but the quintessential case for him and the patriot militia movement as a whole would be the coverage of the assaults on Ruby Ridge in 1992 and Waco in 1993, in which the FBI led sieges against communities of political and religious extremists who were suspected of stockpiling weapons. Ruby Ridge resulted in three deaths, including a 14-year-old boy, and over 70 people died at Waco after their compound caught on fire.

Though the FBI’s handling of these crises was widely condemned, most news outlets also reported on evidence that the Weavers of Ruby Ridge had been white supremacists, and the Branch Davidian religious sect of Waco may have sexually abused children. In contrast, Cooper and fellow conservative radio host Alex Jones argued that the sieges were evidence of an overbearing, fascistic federal government unjustly persecuting people for their decision to live outside mainstream society. They dismissed claims that the majority of the Branch Davidians had killed themselves, and Cooper called the siege “the second [failed] American Revolution.”

Cooper warns that, once the NWO is established, these subtle forms of manipulation will be replaced with more direct ones, like implanting mind-control devices in people’s brains or giving them chemical injections to reduce their emotions and ability to think clearly.

(Shortform note: This idea may sound outlandish, but the U.S. government has experimented with mind control via chemical engineering in the past. Most famously, the CIA program MKUltra tested the use of psychoactive drugs like LSD to force prisoners to be compliant, truthful, and obedient. Subjects were often dosed without their knowledge, and the program resulted in several deaths. While mind-control devices are generally only seen in Hollywood science-fiction dystopias, Cooper’s fears persist in the public suspicion of new technology like cell phones or the Covid-19 vaccine.)

Method#3: Disarmament

Cooper is a passionate defender of the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees the right of citizens to carry guns. Cooper argues that its purpose is to provide citizens recourse against government tyranny and that the Founders were both asserting their right to carry weapons against the British and preparing for the possibility of a just democratic revolution against their government in the future.

Interpreting the Right to Carry Guns

The question of how to interpret the Second Amendment—the right to keep and bear arms—is controversial in American politics, particularly when it comes to debates over how to prevent mass shootings and other incidents of gun violence. When it comes to the Founders’ intent, many historians agree with Cooper’s explanation, arguing that some Founders feared that the American government would become authoritarian and fought to give the states and the general citizenry tools to defend themselves, be it through rhetoric or through violence.

On the other hand, those in favor of gun control argue that guns in the Founders’ time were far less deadly than they are today, and so the Second Amendment alone isn’t enough to guide modern gun policy. They suggest that gun control legislation that restricts access to certain guns, forbids carrying weapons in public places, and requires a criminal background check to own a gun could justifiably make the U.S. safer without undermining the Second Amendment or leaving citizens helpless in the face of an armed, tyrannical government.

Any attempt to limit people’s access to guns is therefore an attempt to weaken popular power. Cooper decries anti-gun and gun registration laws as inherently authoritarian and accuses the Illuminati of further using the media to demonize guns through extensive coverage of violent crime and mass shootings. He suggests that the Illuminati may even stage some of these incidents in order to drum up support for anti-gun legislation.

(Shortform note: While Cooper mentions the possibility of staged shootings only in passing, this theory would gain popularity in the 2010s through Alex Jones. On his radio show and website Infowars, Jones repeatedly claimed that terrorist attacks and mass shootings were “false flag” events staged by the government in order to manipulate Americans into supporting gun control legislation. In 2022, several families of the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre successfully sued him for damages after he accused them of being “crisis actors.”)

Method#4: Undermining Democracy

Cooper argues that, in addition to attacking the Bill of Rights, the Illuminati are attempting to undermine the “checks and balances” system laid out in the Constitution by increasingly empowering the Executive branch at the expense of the Legislative branch. Most presidents have been members of the Illuminati, and Cooper condemns the use of executive orders and presidential vetoes to bypass Congressional votes.

(Shortform note: Confusingly, Cooper praises the Constitution and the Founders even as he argues that the U.S. government is controlled by the Illuminati. This apparent contradiction, in which America is both an ideal and hopelessly corrupt, is sometimes seen in the patriot militia movement as well—but patriots typically explain it away by arguing that the system was once perfect and has only gradually been infiltrated by authoritarians who want to deprive Americans of their rights. Cooper simply ignores the inconsistency, which has led some critics to call his work “incoherent.”)

Cooper also points to the expansion of the National Security Council’s powers under Nixon and the 1986 Iran-Contra affair as evidence that the White House has repeatedly gotten away with carrying out military or diplomatic actions against the wishes of voters. If the president has the power to declare war or a state of emergency without oversight, Cooper warns, he may one day use that power to install the NWO.

Ultimately, Cooper claims that the Illuminati already have all the pieces in place to establish the NWO. They’re simply waiting for the right moment to act.

Curbing the White House’s Ability to Wage War

The Iran-Contra scandal was a secret arms deal orchestrated by the Reagan presidency, in which the White House sold weapons to Iran and used the profits to finance the Contras, a right-wing rebel group in Nicaragua that opposed the country’s Marxist government. This action violated both the embargo on trade with Iran and several Congressional bills banning the government from dealing with the Contras. Fourteen members of the administration were criminally charged, but this didn’t include Reagan or Vice President George H. W. Bush.

Cooper’s argument—that the White House shouldn’t be able to carry out military or diplomatic actions without first getting approval from Congress—is largely supported by both political parties and was the basis for the 1973 War Powers Act, passed in reaction to the revelation that the Nixon administration had secretly and illegally bombed Cambodia throughout the Vietnam War. While virtually every president since Nixon has been accused of violating it, none has faced serious consequences.

Illuminati Goals & Methods: The New World Order Conspiracy