Chaos: The Truth Behind the Manson Murders deservedly continues to generate debate and sales six years after it was published. It was adapted by Netflix this year and featured on Candace Owens’ Book Club.
It reveals that shady government agents from a variety of departments, the judiciary and law enforcement were working in the background of the gang of hippies who gruesomely killed pregnant actress Sharon Tate — and between 8 and 23 other randomly targeted people — in and around Los Angeles in August 1969.
But that isn’t the most alarming thing about this story. No, the alarming thing to us today, more than 50 years later, is that the pernicious forces behind this horrific crime have never really gone away. In fact, they’ve become worse.
One of the nagging impressions I got from Chaos (which I read in one sitting on the weekend while convalescing from a nasty virus) was that it felt almost nostalgic for a simpler, more innocent time, when the enemies of civilisation could be easily identified by their smell (if they were genuine hippies) or their fake tie-dyed T-shirts (undercover agents).
The west remains in the grip of the 1960s counterculture, which, for all its great music, also destroyed the conventional family unit through free love, destroyed our prosperity to save the environment, and replaced our once glorious civilisation with a vague notion of “multiculturalism”, a concept so deluded that it could only have been devised under the influence of acid.
The enemies of our civilisation today might not get their kicks by getting high and sneaking into your house at night armed with knives and guns. But that doesn’t mean they don’t want to ruin, or at least sadistically control, your life. And they work on a far wider scale than randomly selected individual victims.
Chaos is the gripping story of how two seemingly opposing forces momentarily developed a toxic synergy. The story of how this unfolded to the author is itself extraordinary.
American journalist Tom O’Neill was commissioned by Premiere magazine in 1999 to write a story to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the Tate murders, by the followers of violent ex-con and pseudo-hippie guru Charles Manson, in 1969.
Despite there having been dozens of books already published on the subject, O’Neill discovered that the most popular interpretation of the crime, based on the book Helter Skelter, by Vincent Bugliosi, the trial’s chief prosecutor, had deeply suspicious loose ends and omissions.
He became so immersed in the story that he missed his deadline. He was still working on it by the time the 40th anniversary rolled past. By then, Premiere magazine no longer even existed.
When O’Neill finally published his story in 2019, it was a 436-page book, he was on his second publisher; had at one stage been half a million dollars in debt; interviewed hundreds of people (including Manson himself); spent thousands of hours sifting through dusty police archives digging up false testimonies and unsolved crimes; broadened his purview to secret operations in Vietnam and, you guessed it, the JFK assassination; and still somehow managed to maintain his sanity. (This is no small feat; I know a journalist who was seriously disturbed after spending only a year investigating a violent-crime book.)
O’Neill wasn’t to know it, but his book was released on the eve of the coronavirus hoax, which was to distract the world’s attention somewhat, especially those who would be his initial primary market, people who exalt in conspiracy theories.
Perhaps that was a good thing. It’s enjoyed a slow burn. Other conspiracy theories — about chemtrails, banking, vaccines, high-level pedophile gangs and so on — have since become so elaborate, and often so persuasive, that Chaos now looks positively mainstream by comparison. I should point out that Chaos reaches no concrete conclusions, but it does dig up evidence that makes government involvement with the Manson gang irrefutable.
The motives for this take two main forms. First, that the FBI and the CIA were both obsessively trying to shut down 1960s counterculture, which they saw as incubating communism on home soil, “an aim that, coincidentally or not, described exactly the effect of the Manson murders”. In other words, allow the Manson Family to have their Helter Skelter, and watch the front-page news destroy the myth of peace-loving hippies overnight.
The other is that the Manson Family were lab rats in MKULTRA, the bizarre, top-secret CIA unit that investigated chemical forms of mind control from 1953 to 1973. Its objective was to create, among other things, hypnotised assassins who could be deployed against high-level enemies of the United States in espionage or war.
The CIA, in a rare moment of clarity, if not conscience, destroyed most of MKULTRA’s records in 1972.
Through sheer persistence and blind faith, O’Neill unbelievably uncovers a cache of correspondence between MKULTRA employee Louis “Jolly” West and his boss Sidney Gottleib, in which West describes his desire to find ways to chemically extract memories from people (willingly or not), implant false memories, and “inducing in them specific mental disorders”. He was also interested in “the induction of trance-states by drugs”.
“Needless to day, (these experiments) must eventually be put to test in practical trials in the field,” West said.
A decade later, West moved to San Francisco and began working undercover as a researcher at the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Centre, a government-funded hippie hangout masquerading as a health clinic, specialising in curing sexually transmitted diseases, around the corner from an apartment where Manson and his fledgling Family (essentially a harem of underage runaways) were living, and where Manson himself spent a lot of time. Conspicuous, no?
There are myriad other less sensational but equally troubling cover-ups and outright lies revealed throughout the book, which O’Neill pursues doggedly and with admirable impartiality even when the people he interviews are evasive, hostile or threaten massive lawsuits.
One of the things that struck me about the book is that it could never have been written in Australia. To win a defamation lawsuit in the United States, a public figure must prove a defamatory allegation was malicious. O’Neill doesn’t seem to have a malicious bone in his body, so his book was always going to be reasonably safe. (Most of the people who are defamed didn’t live long enough to see the book published anyway.) In Australia, the essential defence against a defamation charge is truth, so unless you have rock-solid evidence of an allegation, it’s usually not worth publishing. Journalists instinctively shy away from even looking at stories where the truth is ambiguous or unknowable. Our democracy is infinitely poorer for it.
In some ways, O’Neill’s claim that the Manson murders were a jarring, tragic coda to the 1960s is correct. People like Candice Bergen, the Beach Boys’ Dennis Wilson, Mama Cass and even Doris Day — who all helped define some of the brighter moments of the 1960s — also wound up playing essential parts in this sordid tragedy.
But, as history records, Woodstock, “three days of peace and music”, was held on the other side of the United States only a week after the Tate murders shocked the nation. The CIA has been implicated in that too, as a cover for an experiment in mass drug use, but that theory seems unlikely.
Woodstock instead undid the damage Manson caused to 1960s idealism. The Woodstock legacy is the anti-conservative, anti-industrial ideology that is now embedded in the western psyche. As I said above, this has manifested in free love destroying the family, environmentalism destroying our prosperity and multiculturalism destroying our civilisation.
Perhaps most bizarrely, it has also led to Chris Bowen, one of the least hip politicians in the world, being appointed to manage a project not even John Lennon would dare to imagine: shutting down our coal and gas-fired power stations and replacing them with groovy “renewable” solar panels and windmills.
Stoned hippies might perceive all these outcomes as positive but, hey, they’re stoned. As far as I know, Bowen and the rest of the progressive political cult don’t have that excuse. It’s difficult to imagine they are unaware of the destruction they are wreaking because the evidence is already all around us: broken families, ethnic ghettos, social fragmentation, rising violence, home-grown terrorism, illiteracy, homelessness, cultural ennui, censorship, low trust… the list goes on. Whether they know it or not, their 1960s-style idealism is making Helter Skelter look like a church picnic.
Like I said, the 1960s were a more innocent time.
