MONOLOGUE WRITTEN BY CLYDE LEWIS

The media tries to simplify our world into mini sound bites and visuals. They neatly put every issue and every crisis into a box and beam it into your home. There are stories about struggles against all odds, miraculous births, untimely deaths, and global conflict.

I wonder if it ever occurs to the passive viewer that our planet is far more complicated than what they see on the screen. Or that a thirty-minute news feed can’t possibly give them perspective on how the daily routine is affected by not only those things we perceive but by those things that are entirely imperceptible.

Cultural narratives are now easily hijacked and we are learning that many of the things we thought had disappeared from the radar come back and haunt us and in some paranormal way we realize now that the being afraid and angry has become resurrected American pastime.

Exactly 50 years ago, the Manson murders took place and much like what we are experiencing today, it was yet another reason to buy a gun and lock the doors.

The savagery, the cruelty, the seeming randomness, of the killings of actress Sharon Tate and four others in Hollywood on the night of Aug. 8-9, shocked America in much the same way as last weekend’s spate of shootings in El Paso and Dayton.

The media has again turned the recent shootings into political grandstanding as both the President and opportunistic Democratic hopefuls have cast shade on each other.

The left-wing politicians have used the shootings as a way to not only showcase gun reform but to put a spotlight on white supremacist hate. Many have outright said that the President is a racist, that he is the embodiment of Hitler and that there is a race war that is underway in the United States.

This is an eerie parallel to the philosophies of Manson some 50 years earlier. We even demonstrated a direct through-line from Cielo Vista Mall to Cielo Drive with numerology and mystic synchronicity with Ryan Gable and Robert Phoenix. Chillingly, we began to see the mainstream spin stories of numerology and the significance of the date 8/8 which FBI Assistant Director for Counterterrorism, Frank Figliuzzi who reminded us that the half-mast flag honors for the dead in El Paso and Dayton would end on August 8th–or 8/8 and that these numbers are a neo-Nazi calling card because the eighth letter of the alphabet is H, which stands for Hitler and 8/8, means H H or ‘Heil Hitler.’

Once again when you draw a line through the connections between the killings ordered by a seemingly crazed hippie cult leader, in 1969, and the recent rise in mass-shootings in places like El Paso, Charleston, Pittsburgh, and elsewhere we realize that race war and racism are main ideologies behind such carnage.

Manson, lest we forget, was trying to start a race war. “Helter Skelter” or “Healter Skelter,” as members of Manson’s cult spelled it, in blood, on a refrigerator door in another of their murders was going to be the final, apocalyptic war between Black and White.

Manson and his followers were going to launch the ultimate race riot, by killing random white people and letting black people be blamed for it. After Armageddon, the victorious black people were going to be, of course, incapable of governing themselves, they believed. So Manson and his followers were going to come out of hiding and rule over them.

These and similar tragedies, in recent months, are forcing many Americans to more seriously confront the legacy of racism in the U.S. While racism is a scourge in this country, it is important to understand how we breed hate by focusing our attention on the extreme counterculture and giving it the spotlight.

The Manson murders were about the counterculture craziness in the late 1960s. It was about mind-control, sexual subjugation, drugs, and how the Hollywood culture actually gave birth to Charles Manson and his followers.

Here we are 50 years after the carnage of the Tate-LaBianca murders and Charles Manson has become a fixture in our culture and in a lot of ways is becoming as legendary as perhaps a Freddie Krueger or Jason Voorhees.

I am not saying by any means that Charles Manson is a cartoon or like a fictional character, I am merely saying that Manson is a controversial figure that is either looked upon with disdain, made the butt of jokes, or is seen as an icon of where counter-culture can become extremism.

Historians and journalists have crafted compelling works of nonfiction about Charles Manson and his followers, reading their strange history through various lenses while still sticking completely to the facts.

The murders that the Manson family committed in August 1969 claimed seven lives over two nights, and they struck dread into the hearts of people all over Los Angeles. It took months for the police to crack the case — which came to be known as the Tate-LaBianca murders, named after three of the victims, including actress Sharon Tate — and link them to the Manson family, which by then was falling apart, with members fleeing, defecting, and being arrested for a variety of charges.

The trial that followed captured the American imagination, and Charles Manson became that familiar archetype: the murderer both despised and revered by the public. His courtroom antics attracted national attention. During the trial, he received letters from young women who wanted to join his family, even though he was on his way to prison.

In the half-century following the murders, though, Manson has become another sort of icon — the lynchpin for a pop culture trope. He isn’t a serial killer, exactly, nor is he famous for being the leader of a cult. Instead, Manson family lore and especially the murders in 1969, have served as an inspiration to dozens of creators, and not just for documentaries and memoirs and biographies and true crime docudramas, as one might expect. It’s also been the basis for fictional stories.

Recently Manson and his followers become the foils in a film by Quentin Tarantino called “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.”

It is one of those films where you believe that you know the story and you know where it is headed but then you realize this is a film that wants to right the wrongs of history – it is an attempt to give us back what we lost back in 1969.

However, it still reminds us that Charles Manson still is in charge of a lot of the pop culture tropes that we are subjected to.

The enduring legacy of the Manson story is a curious one. Why this story, of all true-murder tales? What is it about Charles Manson, his followers, and the horrific murders they committed that keep uninterested — not just the facts, but in a lot of the occult and conspiracy theories that endure about the counter-culture hippie turned devil.

Many of the theories and occult stories about Manson when revisited can make your blood run cold.

Manson was just one of the few who obviously had synchronicity against him. In the years before he ordered the murders, the media foretold of his coming in an odd sort of way.

The connections to Manson go beyond the paranormal. They are actually a poetic Apocrypha scrawled out with blood and guts in the handwriting of the media machine that dares to dance with the devil.

Manson came on to the scene when the United States was suffering from religious paranoia. It also was suffering from racial tension – much like the racial tensions we are in now.

The religious world was thinking that they were in the end times and waiting for the arrival of the antichrist.

The very idea of an antichrist coming into the world was fortified in what was to become the powerful ultra-right-wing.

Articles in Time magazine asked the question “Is God Dead?” and the very story of the birth anti-christ was ripe for the telling in a motion picture and book called, Rosemary’s Baby, written by Ira Levin and directed by Roman Polanski.

It was a film that put forward the idea that the child of Satan can be conceived through black magic.

The story tells of a Satanic coven living in the heart of New York City and their successful attempt to inseminate an unwitting female with the child of the Devil. It was Roman Polanski who decided to helm the project of bringing Rosemary’s story to the screen.

Manson, of course, was referred to as the Devil in the media and he even named himself the God of Garbage People and the devil out of his own mouth.

Ironically, he was the very same Devil who ordered the deaths of Polanski’s wife, Sharon Tate her eight-month-old unborn child, along with the others.

Although Rosemary’s Baby was released a year before the Manson Family murders, one can argue just how prophetic the movie was.

It set the stage for the arrival of the Garbage Messiah – the hippie antichrist.

Both the Tate Murder and the Rosemary’s Baby story deal with a woman who has ties to the glitz of Hollywood.

Rosemary’s husband is an actor. Sharon Tate is an actress married to a notorious director.

Both Sharon and Rosemary are pregnant both women are subjected to the consequences of the Devil, and both Rosemary and Sharon Tate realize that they are both trapped by a cult that kills without conscience.

Towards the movie’s end, Rosemary realizes that her husband has made a deal with the Devil. It is then she realizes it’s too late for her.

Sharon Tate may have ironically found out the hard way that deals with the Devil are made every day in a world that questions if God is dead.

Polanski decided Rosemary’s Baby deserved respect to detail and began to do some things that most people claim tempted fate. The lead role of Rosemary’s husband went to John Cassavetes.

This was a bizarre coincidence when you realize that in the film, the “son” of the High priest black magician, Stevan Marcatos, changes his name to Roman Castavets which is dually remarkable when you see they are interchangeable anagrams that can be arranged to spell the sentence “Satan craves most.”

What Satan craved most was the attention that Polanski gave freely. The attention was to the detail. The movie was set in 1966 like the book. June of 1966 to be exact: 666. Using the beast’s area code wasn’t enough for Polanski. He had to hire a consultant for the movie, who was Anton LaVey.

Who better to consult in all things Black than the High Dark Prince of the Church of Satan? LaVey also negotiated with Polanski the part of Satan in the film.

The movie introduced quite well the possibility of The Devil’s Child being born to a world. A quiet world that was unaware of what was to come. The movie was loved by the people yet panned by the critics. Polanski was accused of being a Satanist.

After all his work was done so authentically one would be tempted to question if maybe he knew about it all from experience. After the death of his wife and unborn baby he obviously brought it all upon himself, right?

Perhaps the Devil had an account to settle. The Paranoia was unbelievable. Mia Farrow the actress who played Rosemary didn’t attend the funeral of Sharon Tate fearing that perhaps she would be next.

She worried that there were police informants and spies that were hunting down and killing Hollywood actors and actresses because of their political views.

Manson allegedly was a police informer as well while he was in and out of the system with ties to the FBI and an indirect link with psychological operations or MK Ultra. He also had ties to the Process Church and the Church of Scientology.

The Church of Scientology, of course, was led by none other than L. Ron Hubbard who you may remember was involved in a little Black Magik stunt called the “Babylon Working” with John Whiteside Parsons in the 1940s. The very thing that Rosemary’s Baby is about.

It’s funny how things go full circle.

It was suspected that perhaps Manson was a triggered Manchurian candidate – or was certainly a tool of intelligence operations hell-bent on destroying the hippie culture.

Religious authorities at the time said that the world at the time should have expected a Character like Manson as they claimed: “A Godless undercurrent exists in the nation and that there will be a leader that will appear to be a Christ but is far from him.”

Manson was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby was predictive programming – the tension in the country fueled by racism was a catalyst for the idea of civil upheaval and Manson thought that he could take advantage of the fact that people were waiting for Armageddon.

It just seemed so odd that Polanski was trying to send a message to his audience. Sharon Tate was stabbed to death. She was killed by cult members, in her living room, with her friends.

The movie, Rosemary’s Baby, tends to foreshadow the events of the Manson family murders.

In the film, Rosemary has a knife and she enters a room with the cult members as they want the child in the final moments. It is too late.

Her fate is sealed.

In Sharon Tate’s case the cultist murdered her and her baby.

What is eerily synchronistic is that the apartment scenes in Rosemary’s Baby were filmed at the Dakota Apartments in New York, which was the very place where John Lennon was killed. John Lennon was shot at the Dakota by a fanatic of his music. Mark David Chapman was another MK Ultra Lone Nut like Manson who was allegedly triggered into killing by the book, Catcher in the Rye.

Manson was inspired by Helter Skelter, a song created by Lennon and his bandmate Paul McCartney.

Manson was obsessed with the Book of Revelation, especially Chapter 9 and he was also claiming that he heard messages in the White Album telling him that revelations were about to be fulfilled.

Manson was inspired by songs like, Happiness is a Warm Gun, and, Blackbird, which he believes was the message for the blacks and their moment to arise.

The George Harrison song, Piggies, was allegedly about the fat establishment needing a damn good whacking The Whites were the establishment and the Blacks were the ones who would arise and whack the pigs.

“Pig” was written on the walls of the Polanski home in Sharon Tate’s blood. The Manson family had hoped that it would give the impression of a racial killing, igniting a racial war pitting Black against White.

Revolution #9 is a collage of strangeness that for some is unlistenable.

A chant of the words Number 9… Number 9 that allegedly says: “turn me on dead man,” when run in reverse. The word “Rise” and the sound of machine-gun fire can be heard on the tracks as well. Some say that they were strange trigger words that were probably programmed into the heads of his followers who were in reality sleeper assassins.

The basic method of “brainwashing,” is to subject the victim to repeated indoctrination of key or trigger phrases which will later enable the subject to do a destructive act of violence.

So the arguably the program mechanisms were probably both Rosemary’s Baby which was the almost prophetic floor plan of some Satanic ritual killing and the Beatles White album an enabler used in the virtual brain washings of the Family.

When the bodies were found the message was sent. A satanic conspiracy existed and someone needed to pay for the crimes.

After Manson was caught and his family exposed, the Hippies lost all of their appeal. The Flower Child era was killed and the Summer of Love was reduced to the summer of bloodshed and hatred.

The Tate-LaBianca murders profoundly shook America’s perception of itself. They upended ideas of safety, security, and innocence, and effectively sounded the death knell of ’60s counterculture, ushering in a new decade of darkly psychosexual, conspiracy-laced cultural exploration of America’s seedy underbelly. The ritualistic nature of the killings set the stage for the rise of Satanic Panic, a phenomenon that never fully went away.

The new Satanic Panic is the rise of White Nationalism and it certainly looms as large as Manson himself.

We are learning that both the shootings in El Paso and Dayton were carried out because of both fueled hatred and racism and in the case of the Dayton shooter, a devotion to Satanic philosophies.

The recent shootings and the Manson Family murders are a kind of psychic attack on America itself.

Hate crimes of recent years, like the ones in El Paso and Charleston, are often committed by self-described “race warriors” whose motive seems to be, above all, fighting for their own group, their “kind.” There’s no evidence that Manson’s motive, at any point, was anything but himself.

But the point is, he used racism. More, it was the very focus of his scheme.

The Dayton shooter had a plan to fuel the fires of the left and give them a reason to demand gun control and socialist reforms. He stated that he was in league with the devil and that devil guided his actions.

Both of these ideologies reflect upon the same ideologies of Manson.

The very fact that Manson was a smorgasbord of ideologies, some of them New Age, and some of them old-school intolerance, is another way in which Manson feels oddly pertinent.

Satanic Panic and racism seem to resurrect again and again in the United States.

Back then it had long hair and hippie beads – today it wears fatigues and carries assault rifles.

Written by Ron Patton