image: Sharon Tate in 1969, Wikimedia Commons (link).
August 8 - 9 marks the anniversary of the horrific murders which shocked the country and the world and which were used to generate a backlash against the counterculture movement which was threatening the status quo and opposing the Vietnam War.
The ongoing importance of this terrible event simply cannot be overstated. It marked a turning point in world history on par with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and in fact related to it. It deserves everyone's attention and serious consideration -- and we should never let its anniversary pass without contemplating the abundant evidence that shows that there is far more to these murders than we in the United States have been told by a controlled media which to this day continues to contribute to the cover-up.
Author and investigative journalist Tom O'Neill devoted twenty years to the study of this case and in 2019 published a magisterial book entitled Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties. His work absolutely demolishes the conventional storyline and proves beyond doubt that the Manson Family was an operation which was given official protection by high-ranking agencies, that the mind-control techniques which Manson used were part of an official, immoral, unconstitutional, and indeed highly criminal program of mind control conducted by unaccountable agencies in the national security agencies of the federal government which had previously been tested on unsuspecting members of the military in order to get them to commit actual murders of civilians and even young children, and that the prosecution of the case led by Vincent Bugliosi of Helter Skelter fame was a fraud, designed to propagate a storyline which omitted and obscured the deep involvement of the national security state in the killings, while simultaneously implicating the counterculture and antiwar movements and effectively bringing them to an end.
On this anniversary, everyone should try to read or re-read Tom O'Neill's book, as well as searching out all of the many podcast appearances that Tom O'Neill has made (just search for the words "O'Neill Chaos" in order to find them). In fact, starting with several of his podcast interviews might even be the best way to prepare for reading his actual book.
In Chaos, Tom O'Neill writes:
Talk about the murders long enough, and inevitably someone will bring up Joan Didion's famous remark from The White Album [the title of a book by Joan Didion published in 1979 and consisting mostly of a collection of some of her previously published essays]: "The sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969 . . . The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled." There's the germ of truth in that. But the process wasn't so abrupt. It began that day, but it wasn't over, really, until December 1, 1969, when the police announced the crimes had been solved and the nation got its first glimpse of the killers. Here was the final fulfillment of paranoia, the last gasp of sixties idealism. 25.
In a very real sense, the so-called Manson Murders marked the demolition of 1960s idealism and the youth movement that was challenging the direction that the country was going.
As I have written and spoken about previously, pioneering conspiracy researcher Mae Brussell realized by 1971 that the murders of August 1969 bore all the earmarks of a criminal government-sponsored operation, and that its purpose appeared to be to crush both the hippie counterculture movement and the Black Panthers, both of which were deemed to be extremely threatening to the status quo by members of the national security state.
Here is a link to a transcript of a broadcast done by Mae in October of 1971 in which she points out the overwhelming number of anomalies surrounding the Manson killings, and argues that they were part of an operation designed to turn ordinary Americans against both the Panthers and the hippie antiwar counterculture movement.
In that 1971 broadcast, Mae says:
I knew in the summer of '67—this was the spring when it was happening—that something very big in the United States was coming to a head. Because I live in the Peninsula here; I'm close to a movement that was growing [. . .] I realized that in this country we had a revolution. [. . .] I realized that it was going to be stopped in some way, because it was taking hold; It captured the basic good that is in people. I don't believe in the doctrine of original sin, I believe in original goodness. And these children had it -- they have it. Somebody was going to have to get them. [. . .] So I was watching how the hippie scene would be put down and what evidence there was that they had to crack it.
Almost fifty years after Mae Brussell broadcast those arguments, the research of Tom O'Neill has uncovered abundant evidence that appears to confirm much of the suspicions that Mae was voicing back then.
This gruesome event was cynically used to shut down opposition to the runaway trajectory that the United States was already on, following the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963 -- a trajectory that has only accelerated in the fifty-three years since the summer of 1969.
Tom O'Neill's research demonstrates that the so-called Manson Murders were part of a much larger operation, that this operation received a high-level coverup during the criminal trial process that followed, and that the media has continued to present a false and misleading picture of the significance of the events of August 1969 right down to this very day.
The implications of these conclusions are enormous, and absolutely relevant to everything that is happening in the world around us right now. We need to become informed, and then we need to demand accountability -- but that won't happen until a lot more people wake up to the lies we are being fed.