Charlie Manson was 34-years-old when he arrived in Haight-Ashbury, a fatherless child, abandoned by a prostitute mother, in-and-out of jail his entire life. The teen hippie subculture was easily penetrated by anyone growing their hair, even those in their mid-30s, and Charlie assembled a harem of runaway girls captivated by his prison power games. Charlie had been introduced to Scientology while in jail and mastered the e-meter while developing an understanding of sexual hang-ups.
Scientology was all about confronting your hang-ups. Pretty soon, the girls decided Charlie must be the second coming of Jesus Christ, something Charlie never disputed.
Charlie had been briefly housed at the notorious Boy’s Town outside Omaha, Nebraska, an orphanage employed for decades as trolling grounds for recruiting teen sex slaves for CIA entrapment schemes. (If you find that allegation hard to swallow, just google “Franklin cover-up.”) So far, attempts to document Charlie as an MK/Ultra remain unproven. Either way, I believe Charlie was splattered all across the media because the powers-that-be were seeking an evil hippie icon to derail the peaceful counterculture revolution that had been pulling teens out of their middle class homes for years.
The most enduring element of the Manson case was Charlie’s deployment of lyrics as secret message and he eventually keyed in on Paul McCartney’s proto-heavy metal Helter Skelter, Paul’s attempt to produce the rawest, loudest rock song possible. An early take lasted over 20 minutes but when they sped up the tempo, Paul’s vocals got wilder, George began walking around the studio with a flaming ashtray on his head, while Ringo threw his sticks across the room, complaining of blisters. When the song was released in the fall of 1968, Helter Skelter ignited a shift in Charlie’s raps. Suddenly the universal love rap was gone, replaced by fear as the path to enlightenment. Charlie lost a few converts, most notably his second-in-command Paul Watkins, who were smart enough to get out before the bloodbath began.
When you get to the bottom
You go back to the top of the slide
And you stop and you turn
And you go for a ride
Then you get to the bottom
Then you see me again
Helter skelter (left) is a children’s amusement ride found at English carnivals, essentially a tower with a spiral slide. Charlie convinced his flock the song was actually a secret message sent from the Beatles to Charlie, and it was his job to spark the coming race war that had been predicted by the Process Church of Final Judgment (the spookiest of the pseudo-hippie cults). The Process was pushing fear buttons just like Charlie, which is why he was so attracted to some of their dogma. Was the Process “controlling” Charlie as hinted at by Ed Sanders and others or was Charlie was running his own movie?
Post Manson it suddenly became difficult to hitch-hike, something hippie teens had been doing for years, crisscrossing America at will. Longhaired freaks were no longer harmless buffoons, but potential mass murderers in the eyes of the mainstream.
As time goes by, more evidence emerges Manson was an MK/Ultra robot under someone else’s control, and I can’t help but notice his technique of reading secret messages in the mass media has become the go-to strategy employed by the Tin Foil Hat disinfo machine keeping mud in the conspiracy waters. Back to the Future is a sterling example of this disinfo technique. Twin Pines mall, we are supposed to believe, is a reference to the Twin Towers. Is it worth noting this meme was created by Apophenia Productions and apophenia is the attempt to connect dots that don’t connect? Whenever you find ridiculous theories constructed from reading secret messages in the media (and this is the favorite technique of “researchers” like Mark Passio), rest assured you have entered the magical realms of Apophenia. If nothing else, Charlie has demonstrated how delusional that sort of thinking is.
Very little is known about Mary Ann McClean. She was reportedly born in Glasgow in 1931 and abandoned by her parents. She claimed to have moved to the United States for a brief time and married Sugar Ray Robinson before returning to England. However, no evidence of any relationship with the boxer ever emerged. It’s assumed Mary Ann made her living as a high-priced prostitute during her formative years. At left is the only known photo, likely taken around the time she met Robert Moore at London’s Scientology headquarters, where they rapidly advanced to auditor class.
They opened their own version of Scientology, calling it Compulsions Analysis and began recruiting Robert’s friends to sign up for courses. Meanwhile, dominatrix Mary Ann began working on a total makeover for Robert, fashioning him into her new age messiah. Rich new acolytes were recruited by Mary Ann’s crew of hippie goddess super hotties and encouraged to sign over their possessions and bank accounts while taking vows of celibacy and poverty. Robert was working on a new cosmology constructed on top of Christianity, one that unified good and evil as parts of a whole. It was the same-old religion hoodwink, only one that incorporated many new elements from a wide variety of sources.
Robert’s knack for public relations is evident in this photo. Not only could he place the magazine in the hands of significant celebrities, he also had a knack for pushing buttons in the collective unconsciousness. Sadly, the core group who did almost all the work of recruiting, auditing, meditating, publishing, didn’t realize their mentors (now known as “The Omega”) were employing most of the group’s funds maintaining personal lifestyles. While the group willingly experienced great privations, Mary Ann and Robert lived in the lap of luxury. I’m reminded greatly of the Weather Underground who appeared a few years later, run by Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, a heavily-armed pseudo-hippie commune that practiced violence, while the Process just preached it.
So how did the love generation move so quickly to the dark side? By the time the Process arrived back in England, they were dressing in black and employing a swastika-like sigil. “Unleash the fiend within you,” became Robert’s mantra, and rumors of sex with animals began to emerge, while their magazine specialized in images of sex magic and battlefield gore. According to Mary Ann, Jews in Germany marched willingly into gas chambers because it was their karma to do so. Robert preached love for the devil, because wasn’t the devil Christ’s enemy? And didn’t Christ preach “love thy enemy?”
I can’t pretend to peel every layer of this onion, but I find it telling that Mary Ann detested children. Although many babies were born into the group, they were taken from their parents instantly and typically kept in dungeons. In many cases, the fathers were never determined. One group of malnourished Process toddlers was discovered in Chicago living in filth and being tended by a heroin addict. If some of these children were being sold into sexual slavery, as speculated, no hard evidence ever emerged. But it’s clear that although Mary Ann was a devoted animal activist, she had zero interest in children. Even more disturbing was her great love for fascism, especially her favorite: the Nazis, which is why the Process emblem was designed to resemble a swastika. She only wrote one essay for the Process magazine, an attack on men attending birth, something the counterculture was pioneering. In fact, Ina May Gaskin, the most enlightened of the emerging hippie midwives realized a positive and sexually-charged connection between both parents during the birth process was helpful to alleviating the primary issue in childbirth: fear. The real hippie culture was bathed in compassion and fomenting and instilling fear was a weapon deployed exclusively by fundamentalists and fascists.
After serving 22 months in the Army, Hugh Romney attended Boston College on the GI bill and ended up studying the newly emerging improvisational theater movement (created by Viola Spolin). After college, he moved to Greenwich Village to become a comedian and was initially managed by Lenny Bruce while sharing an apartment with Tom Paxton and becoming close friends with Bob Dylan.
Charles Manson drove out to the Hog Farm one day in the late 1960s. He arrived in his all-black tour bus. Manson had already made contact with one of the Hog Farmers, Shirley Lake, whose daughter Diane would eventually join the Manson family. After arriving at the commune, Manson gave Romney the title to his black bus and then tried to seduce Romney’s wife Bonnie Jean (today known as Jahanara) in a nearby shed. He was undoubtedly planning on merging his family with the Hog Farm and usurping Romney as the leader of the commune. Romney managed to break up the seduction and Manson retired to his black bus with his female followers in tow. Sensing Manson was channeling the wrong vibes, Romney gathered his troops and began an OM circle next to the bus.
Suddenly, Manson burst out of the black bus, holding his throat, choking, followed by his female followers who were quite alarmed. They tried to stop the OM circle, as they believed it was killing their leader. Manson began leading his group in an evil OM to ward off the vibes coming from the Hog Farmers. Eventually, Romney was able to persuade Manson to drive away and not return. The following year, Romney would change his name to Wavy Gravy and become famous as the emcee of the first Woodstock festival. Manson’s family would soon become the most famous serial killers in the world.