I believe the murders of JFK, RFK, and MLK were conspiracies involving people in and associated with government, notably J Edgar Hoover and Allen Dulles. That's a fairly common belief among people I know (though becoming less so due to the malign influence of NPR on people who tend to vote Democratic, which disparages any such thinking as "conspiracy theories"--a term CIA invented to describe critics of the Warren Commission Report and the Single Bullet Theory). I only began to think about this very much after I visited Dealey Plaza in 2013 (the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination). I've only recently started watching the Oliver Stone movie JFK which is excellent. I had previously bought the NPR/PBS/MSM line that the JFK movie was a big nothing (misleading and "nothing new"), but most likely nothing you've heard before, especially if you just listen to NPR/PBS/MSM, and all true.
To this list of famous assassinations during the 1960's, I always add one more, which most people don't think much about. That is the murders of Sharon Tate and her friends. Those murders were peculiarly important because the incessant publicity over the murders which were allegedly directed by Charles Manson (though he wasn't actually there) basically discredited the antiwar movement, hippies, and LSD all in one blow (even though he wasn't a hippy so much as an ex-con white supremacist, he wasn't leftist at all, he wasn't an antiwar activist, and LSD may not have been his daily driver). This was virtually the "end of the 60's" and I remember the shift very well. It vastly impacted my life. I expected to get my first LSD around September or October 1969 and of course it never happened. It had been cool and all of a sudden it was beyond evil.
Most strangely of all, I met Charles Manson in Chatsworth Park (about a mile from Spahn Ranch) on August 7 or 8 of 1969...just a matter of hours or days before the murders, and I disparaged him because of the swastika on his forehead. I ended with "I bet you people (Nazis) don't get any good drugs" (and of course, I was wrong...despite prohibiting drug use in Germany, Hitler had his own private physician who brewed daily conconctions, usually including meth and sometimes even LSD to relieve boredom). Immediately after the short argument I had with Manson, my best friend sold him a firecracker he had smuggled that morning from Mexico in my mother's car. My friend and I had been talking about LSD with some young American girls in Mexico the previous night. Just before selling it to Manson, my friend offered to keep it for us (it has nice colors, he said, we'd really enjoy setting it off) but I told him I wasn't much interested in firecrackers anyway, not thinking at first it might have been more than just that. He walked away with Manson to make the transaction out in the parking lot behind my mother's red 1968 Oldsmobile Cutlass. Shortly after that, my friend's family arrived to pick him up and take him home. Manson did not return to the picnic area and I did not see him again.
We were having a big party with some other family friends that my mother met when I was a baby. One of their children was having a party for some reason, and they decided to join my mother and I at Chatsworth Park, which was big and free, and they wanted to see it. They had one young boy who had long been my friend, at least once in awhile when we drove out to their house in Anaheim. These friends where French Canadians, and the father worked for Air Canada, as an inspector at McDonnell Douglas. They got free plane trips around the world. I considered them my Jet Set friends, and the boy was my expert on hard luggage (Samsonite!) and things like that.
After the party in Chatsworth Park, that evening my mother drove me back to Mexico, barely even stopping at our family home in Woodland Hills, in order to save time, to our mobile home right above the beach, in Rosarito Beach, Baja California. The French Canadian mother and boy were following us, so we couldn't waste any time. We stayed for a week in my mothers trailer, basically cut off from TV because it looked so bad then, we rarely watched. (I fixed it later to watch the second moon landing.) Because our guests were with us, I did not break away to go over to the Thomas trailer, 3 trailers over (where I had never been before either). Mom suggested it once though I'm not sure if that was on a later visit to Mexico. When I returned home to Woodland Hills there were endless update stories on TV with peripheral details about a murder that had been initially reported a week earlier and in which I had little interest in at the time. Why is it always Crime TV? Who was Sharon Tate anyway? The name did not seem familiar at all, and the only movie commonly mentioned was Valley of the Dolls which didn't sound like something I'd be interested in.
Next thing, I heard from a mutual friend that my best friend was moving across the country to New York state because his drug salesman father (working for Geigy, a Swiss pharmaceutical company, which later became part of Sandoz) had been promoted to Research. He already lived in a much larger house than me and his parents often had big parties. "It's Business," my friend said. "My father is a Drug Dealer," he bragged jokingly, as if he didn't care to distinguish between legal and illegal drugs--but even LSD wasn't even illegal until 1966...and perhaps the biggest party I saw had been right about then.
Besides a deeply felt personal loss I also lost any future opportunities for scoring things like LSD (though, girls were most on my mind at the time, and I thought he could help with that). My best friend had been like a surrogate brother, not unlike The Fonz of a later TV series. Like The Fonz, he had gotten deeply involved in motorcycling too. He was also the one who introduced me to The Beatles, as just one example. No other friends have been as tuned in to pop music and culture as he was. Though actually the drug he mentioned most was Darvon (banned in 2010). We didn't talk much about LSD either, it just came up that one night we were talking with two US girls in Mexico, and the day before he sold a firecracker to Manson. We agreed that each of us would ask the others a question. My friend asked the girls to compare two different varieties of LSD (which he named). They answered. I have no idea if they were responding based on hearsay or personal experience. Or perhaps they just made it up.---kids do that even more often than adults, never wanting to say they don't know. They didn't speak in a personal sense, as in what had actually happened to them at one time. My friend tried to nail them down but they refused to get more specific. We were hanging out (not doing any drugs except possibly wine or beer...nobody drinks the water) at the dining room table of my mother's mobile home with an Expando living room. I don't know their ages, but I was 13 1/2.
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| "Elvira" and Wendy after describing two varieties of LSD |
Before taking the picture, we moved the beers out of the way, but a little bit got spilled on the Polaroid photo after it was taken by me. It spilled on table and I had to wipe it up. The girl on the right, Wendy Thomas, picked up my mother's cat, named Taco Bell. I think Wendy looks a lot like the Wendy image of Wendy's restaurants. However her likely age does not match any of Dave Thomas' known children...she's too old to be any of them in 1969. In nevertheless seems like a weird coincidence that Dave Thomas started Wendy's Restaurants by cashing out his investment of $3 million from Ray Kroc of McDonalds just two months after this photo was taken and other weird things happened as I'm describing here. $3 million might be a good number for hush money if something were really important. Dave Thomas became very active in the DARE to Keep Kids Off Drugs movement, as well as another one related to foster kids.
The cousin of Wendy's on the left was the one who most often came to the trailer park and was well known and liked by everyone in the park, who often affectionately mispronounced her name as "Elvira." She had given me a motorcycle ride the year before, after I was too scared to venture beyond the park on my own motorcycle.
I finally did come by for a first and last visit of the Thomas's in 1985 when I was helping my mother was move back to USA. Their lot opened up onto the beach like a bar. That Mr Thomas (not Dave Thomas...he was at least ten years older than Dave Thomas) right away asked what I'd like to drink and I asked for a White Russian. He had everything you could think of. I don't recall that I'd ever met him before but he knew right away who I was. He got right to the point. He said his daughter hadn't come down this weekend but would be coming down the next weekend. I told him that sadly I expected this would be my last day at the beach trailer park for a long time, and it was. After all this time, it was clear I should never have feared going over to his trailer when I was 13. I had thought he'd give me an inquisition, but in fact he was just as nice as his daughter!
In early 1989, I went to Club O in Tijuana several times to dance with another girl I had met dancing in San Diego, until she returned home to Australia 6 months later. I haven't been to Baja California since then.
My best friend of the 60's moved to a much fancier house and neighborhood in Rye, New York. Now it seems a little strange to me that a successful and established drug salesman moved away from his contacts, friends, and extended family to go into "Research" on the other side of the country, at about the age of 52. My friend hated Rye, too many Jesus Freaks he explained. He moved back west after graduating from high school, and drove the coolest new cars when in college. But he never moved back to California.
I effectively lost my best friend and alter ego at a critical point in my life, but my family's finances simply continued to go downhill, with my mother converting her Beneficial Finance loans into a 2nd trust deed to ease the growing monthly payments. For $1200 she bought a 1968 Plymouth Barracuda in 1972 which became my first car after her Vista Cruiser transmission was fixed. She sold the Woodland Hills house in 1974 for $40,000. By the 1980's it was worth $400,000. She then lived full time in Mexico, but commuted to work as a private nurse in San Diego until retiring in 1985 at the age of 70.
For about 5 years, until I found my first real girlfriend, this photographic moment seemed like the highest point in my life. It was just an hour of talk with two girls at the table, and sadly I never went to find either of them again, something I regretted a year later, but still never did anything about. I barely liked to go to Mexico at all anymore after my best friend left for New York, though my mother was always keen to have me go with her.
My next friend was a fan of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young style country rock which never excited me. Never mentioned LSD. He never had any interest in going to Mexico, and I lost that too.
However, he did go to Chatsworth Park later that year with me, and suggested that drug dealers could be attaching loads to my mother's car on her trips to Mexico with clips under the fenders. He pounded on the rear quarter panel, and sure enough it rattled slightly. A few months earlier, before Nixon's War on Drugs and the Manson Murders, no 13 year old kid would have thought of such a thing.
It was not my plan, but mother greatly wanted to have a station wagon, so she traded in the Cutlass for a 1970 Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser not long after that. From the very beginning, it didn't seem well made, stuff was peeling off the dashboard. The transmission failed at 40,000 miles and the dealer gave my mother a concession on fixing it. It was never as cool as the Cutlass, but it was also clear my mother needed a station wagon for her weekly trips to Mexico with her dogs and cats, even if I wasn't coming along. I had hoped she'd get a fancier Pontiac station wagon with power windows. The Thomas's always drove a Pontiac from their home in National City, and the big nose of the Pontiac Bonneville was one of the first things I noticed at the trailer park Skipping over a few other cars in between because she was wearing out a lot of cars driving to Mexico all the time, mother bought a 1976 Oldsmobile Custom Cruiser with power everything in 1980, and it was the most wonderful car of all, until she ran it into a river in Tijuana a few years later. That was during a heavy rain and there were detours all over.
*****
Just as with the JFK murders, books with alternative theories about the Tate murders abound, but not as many.
I've recently found the version of the Tate murder story written by "Miles Mathis" and it's shaken me up a bit. Although I don't know how much to believe someone like Miles Mathis as he's also a denier of the Sandy Hook massacre. I think there may be faults in his photographic analysis and genealogical analysis methodologies.
Basically, and not unlike with Sandy Hook, Mathis argues the murders never took place. They were simply staged by a handful of spooks, including Paul Tate (Sharon's father), Tex Watson, and probably Charles Manson himself, who were all high ranking intel people or assets. Tate recruited his own daughter Sharon, then 8 1/2 months pregnant, for a starring role because she had decided to get out of acting for a while and wanted anonymity, and this way her anonymity would be completely protected...she wouldn't need to worry about being hounded by fans. And Sharon may never even have been really married with Polanski (another spook in Mathis' version) but was having the child of her longtime sweetheart Sebring who would be going incognito with her.
I think Mathis' could be right about this one, though I'm not fully convinced about it either.
One of the obvious things is that while Tate might have temporarily wanted to exit the business and go incognito, or marry someone different (which would not be unthinkable), would she have wanted to sacrifice a potential career that could have risen to the top? There would be great value in being able to use her original name an identity, and not be merely Sharon's younger sister in the 1990's, even if she had wanted to wait that long (and why???).
Though he admits, it would not be beyond belief that CIA would have murdered Americans for a psyop as we both agree the Manson Murders were, in this case at least (he believes) they didn't.
My version adds an additional detail, that Sharon Tate and Jay Sebring knew something about the RFK assassination, because they and friends had been there, at the Ambassador Hotel in LA about a year earlier. And meanwhile Polanski had been thinking about a movie regarding the JFK assassination (which would take 40 more years to appear, under the direction of Oliver Stone). So there were additional reasons why the likes of Nixon, Hoover, and CIA might want Tate and Sebring permanently silenced, and Polanski muzzled. So in arranging to have "hippy" and "LSD user" Manson be the patsy for their being rubbed out for silence (all done by "A" student Tex Watson in my version, then decorated by Manson's tripping Family) conveniently killed two birds with one stone.
I don't actually know that Tate had been at the Ambassador Hotel...but as a nearby rich RFK supporter with time on her hands it seems likely. Many of my friends believed some director of merit would make a JFK movie by about 1970 or so, and Polanski was high on the list of plausible directors already (and his movie Chinatown, long one of my favorites, later seemed to prove that he could have done it well).
Even a 13 year old friend of mine had been at the Ambassador Hotel that day and as proof took a blurred picture of the floor during the melee that arose after RFK was shot. He had gone with his more political older brother. For a brief moment, a few months, RFK had become a galvanizing kind of antiwar hero. Most were unaware of his quasi-fascist ideologies (for example, HUAC) or didn't care much, as anti-Communism had been so thoroughly normalized, even among socialists and anarchists.
Mathis' gives plausible evidence that both Paul Tate and Tex Watson were in intelligence. One thing I hadn't even considered was that Paul Tate was only 46 in 1969 and living in San Pedro since 1962. I had imagined him older and still living in Texas.
Curiously I visited the San Pedro harbor exactly once in my life, also in 1962, and staring up at the top of the bridge I thought I saw the earth moving (it was just clouds, I was told, easy mistake for a six year old). I also fell in love with Sharon Tate the first time I saw her on TV on the Beverly Hillbillies in October 1963, but I never got her name and didn't realize this mystery woman I had only once seen on TV was Sharon Tate. Back when I saw that show, I was very upset when it seemed like the character that Tate was playing was cut from the second half of the show and replaced with a horrible girl. After the show ended, I started coughing and then wheezing and couldn't catch my breath, my mother and grandfather rushed me to the hospital but I blacked out before we got there. I was diagnosed with double pneumonia and regained consciousness in about 7 days under an oxygen tent. Strangely, right after I got out of the hospital after that, a lot of changes happened in my life. I got a new best friend (1973-1969, the one I'm talking most about here) and my old best friend left for the Bay Area. Then the Kennedy assassination happened. And then my father moved in with us for the first time in my life. We had a whole new lifestyle, much of it involving towing a trailer to many places across the country. I subsequently didn't watch Beverly Hillbillies again until my father had died and we got a color TV in 1968 and Sharon Tate was no longer a frequent guest star on the show. So I never saw here again. I didn't figure out what Sharon Tate had meant to me until 2013 when I saw a book by Bugliosi about the JFK assassination at the Book Depository Museum and started to rethink the Manson murders again, starting by figuring out who Sharon Tate was. It was also only then that I realized that the swastika flashing small and cranky man I had met in August 1969 was Charles Manson. I thought Manson was supposed to be a hippy...
Meanwhile, the friend who might have sold the smuggled firecracker to Manson, had been a big fan of both Fearless Vampire Killers and Rosemary's Baby, movies he frequently mentioned but I had never seen until recently. Sharon Tate had to be his favorite movie star, and he might have mentioned her name a few times. I saw the Playboy issue with Sharon Tate in his parent's bathroom when it had just come out in 1967. He told me to go and look. I hesitated but he insisted. But still the name didn't stick probably because I'm so bad with names, and I certainly didn't make a connection to the girl I'd seen on Beverly Hillbillies in 1963.
Also my friend's extended family was deeply in to TV production, including some well known TV stars. Tate's murder must have come as an enormous shock. Maybe even personal. But he's never mentioned it in the few times I've seen him since. The biggest shock for me was his leaving before the end of the year in 1969. One of the things he sold me was a very nice big metal reel to reel tape recorder. Together with my newer friend, we recorded a Halloween tape for 1969 on my mother's 1915 Kimball Organ and an upright piano. By that time, though the social atmosphere had fundamentally changed, and I wasn't even thinking about the Manson murders anymore. I was thinking I had this cool tape recorder. My mother bought me a Dual turntable with Shure V-15 II cartridge at Pacific Stereo for my birthday in 1970, securing my "audiophile" status. I remember it cost $169.
Mathis' claim that no murders took place takes away some murderous responsibility from the shoulders of Nixon, Hoover, and CIA as well. They weren't so evil as to simply have sacrificed and innocent American (at least in this case, though he admits that wouldn't have stopped them).
When dealing with the issue of what happened to Roman Polanski later (his being framed for rape and getting exile in France) Mathis' concedes my longstanding contention that there are "Red" and "Blue" aligned intel forces. And sometimes they go after each other...and then Polanski was rescued by foreign intel.
One thing that Mathis doesn't make clear is how Manson was not only not "leftist" (a world barely used in 1969). In fact was a right wing white supremacist and often wore a swastika carved into his forehead (as he did when I met him) which turned me off from the first minute.
The media never took any note of this, describing him mostly as LSD using hippy. (Like other right wing white supremacists, he probably used a lot more meth than LSD, but meth was never mentioned either.)
Given Sharon Tate's attraction to RFK, that would suggest she was in the blue camp. And therefore likely her father. (BTW, that's also what I think of Beverly Hillbillies, which makes most fun of a banker, and Roman Polanski, who made a movie about corrupt rich people.)
So, the story either has the red and blue teams working together against hippies, OR (in my version) Red is attacking Blue (as they did later with Polanski, in Mathis' own admission) and willing to silence people by killing them (well, that happens a lot in Mathis' own stories) for reasons related to that.
Thus it appears my version is more "Blue," and Mathis' version more "Red."
I got a new best friend in 1970 who never had access to LSD. And I feel that a serious Changing of the Guard occurred in the country as a whole just then, which would only have happened if this was a successful hit by Red on Blue. Though I suppose it could have been a "hit" without actually killing Sharon. Roman Polanski managed to get away fast when he needed to also when framed for rape by the Blue side in 1974.
I don't think Mathis' long lists of claimed aristocratic geneologies are all that useful. I don't think the US Oligarchy is organized or even much cognizant of such things. Much of his analysis boils down to an examination of poor quality photographs, which we know can go terribly wrong. The fact that these photos are the only ones in public doesn't mean they are the only ones that exist. It seems especially strange if Sharon Tate had been using the alias Patti Tate in her later years, as Patti was supposed to be 15 years younger, and even 9 years younger than sister Debra who went to some parole hearings. One might wonder why she'd use the Tate name at all, if she wanted to remain underground.
On August 9, 1979, I went with a friend (same one who had been to the Ambassador Hotel in 1968) and his Australian girlfriend out to Spahn Ranch. It was specifically in memory of the victims of the Manson murders. Or I said that, he just said "Manson Murders." Coincidentally I had come up from San Diego (where I lived then) for a visit, and he immediately floated the idea of going out there. Spahn Ranch had long been closed but it was still possible to rent horses nearby, which we did. My horse barely moved, so I saw nothing, but meanwhile my friend and his girlfriend took off on their horses and checked out the area which apparently still had a few of the old Spahn Ranch buildings standing. Now there were many layers of tall fencing between Chatsworth Park and Spahn Ranch; it hadn't been that way in 1969.
A Catholic first cousin of mine married a lady with the first name Sharon in 1971. I attended the wedding and visited a year later with my family. It seemed like heaven. But it broke up badly in a couple years, his Sharon departing to marry a Mormon sailor in Alaska. (She may have had good reasons, but that thought didn't even cross my mind until spending a week with him in 2000.) I was troubled by that tragic breakup when I dated a lady named Sharon 18 years later in 1989. Sharon Tate never even entered my mind at the time. But I was more interested in another girl at the time anyway and my Sharon dumped me after I embarrassed her on Labor Day weekend in 1989. We've had two friendly meetings since then and I met her husband. I never got anywhere with the other girl, though I always felt supported by her friend from Texas, who I've never seen since those days, but it's weird or possibly prophetic because I moved to Texas three years later.
In August 1989 my first cousin and I buried our beloved aunt Catherine (whom he had lived with nearly all his life except his brief marriage and military service) at the Holy Cross cemetery (same as Sharon Tate). I had helped pay for the expenses. One of Catherine's faults was a strong racism against blacks. But I had always thought of her as my most fun relative, after we'd spent a day together at Pacific Ocean Park in 1962. It was only later I found out she probably was crazy, she reportedly threw a typewriter at my cousin's wife Sharon in 1973. Back in the 1920's, she had dated the bodyguard of Howard Hughes, then had been forced by them to have an abortion, and then she took it really badly spending ten years in the mental hospital at Camarillo. My cousin sent Catholic priests to console her, counselling that it had not been her fault and she was forgiven. She had mostly seemed chipper during the time I knew her. So it now looks to me like both my cousin and aunt were at least partially crazy, which apparently runs in the family because my grandmother had been in an asylum for the last half of her life. In my case, however, this trait has been mostly expressed as genius, though it took me awhile to learn how and when to keep the quiet parts quiet, etc. I did however spend a week at the UCLA psychiatric hospital in 1977 primarily because I was hoping to get better drugs. I played up all my problems to the maximum to get myself admitted. I was still pining for something like LSD instead of the highly variable marijuana I was getting which usually didn't have as much kick as I wanted. But the drugs and the overall experience in the mental hospital were so awful I went AWOL during an outing and never returned. After that they told me that since I was a voluntary assignment, I could have just left at any time--but it certainly hadn't seemed that way. It seemed like a virtual prison where every minute was monitored and controlled. I can tell you from personal experience that antipsychotic drugs do the opposite of getting you high, but nevertheless getting off of them is hell. While I was at the UCLA psychiatric hospital, I was sure I saw at least one well known TV personality. A few years earlier I had worked a summer job at the adjacent UCLA "Brain Research Institute," then simply called the Neurophysiology Department though it still had the BRI plaque. In 2003 that same set of buildings had become the Genetics Department, and I visited a colleague (and former girlfriend) of my boss to help her with the genetics program for which I was then the chief programmer. She worked in one of the basement offices that had been Facilities in 1974 where I had gone to get a someone to fix a doorknob that seemed to be broken.
Hippies were definitely inched down by the media coverage of the Manson murders. However, hippy-like styling (long hair, blue jean bell bottom pants, etc) nevertheless became mass fashion around 1970 and ever since. LSD is still pretty much unavailable but marijuana also became big around 1970--not long after Nixon's War on Drugs was announced, and ever since. I remember kids sitting in circles smoking marijuana in the far reaches of my suburban high school athletic fields from 1970-1973. Just as there had were circles of younger people smoking marijuana on the beach near my mother's mobile home from 1968-1972. I never bothered to visit either one by myself because I'm fairly introverted and hanging out with mostly unknown people makes me uncomfortable, but my best friend had taken me down there in mid 1969.
I pointedly did not wear blue jeans until my freshman year in college when it was almost impossible not to. I told a Princeton alumni interviewer in 1973 I was opposed to using drugs, and he predicted (correctly) that I'd be using marijuana before the end of my freshman year in college (though not at Princeton because they rejected me). By the late 1970's, my friends were very hopeful that Governor Brown would legalize marijuana. Instead, we got Proposition 13 which cut property taxes and eliminated nearly free college education in California. I finally got a chance to try LSD in February 1992, and in a friendly social context in the desert east of San Diego it was very illuminating. When lacking that context, it heightened paranoia more than enlightenment. Marijuana is mostly less illuminating, but only rarely paranoia heightening.
I sold my home in San Diego California and moved to Texas in the second week of August of 1992. I then made the 30% down payment which enabled my mother to buy a house there with her social security income, and I lived with her until her death in 1997, with a brief stint working for a dot com startup in San Francisco in the Castro district (near Haight-Ashbury) in 1996, but otherwise working at two different leading institutions in California for 8 years and Texas for total of 23, all in computer programming for engineering and science respectively. From 1979 onwards nearly all of my colleagues have smoked marijuana, just like all my friends in College. Meanwhile I have not known anyone who was a regular LSD user since my brief exposure to it in 1992, or known about it anyway.* Some still believe myths such as that it causes chromosome damage.
(*It's been my belief that basically elite spooks and others of some kinds (like upper management of big corporations) use psychedelics including LSD and MDMA in bonding exercises on retreats, etc. But you have to be one of them and initiated in some way that you are compromised and controllable. The uncompromised cannot be trusted not to blab about it, etc. I suspect I've been in initiation scenarios a few times and flunked every one by not taking sufficient risk to compromise myself. I've also failed in many situations to take risks to get ahead in my love life, so that's not surprising, but maybe it's not so good to compromise yourself anyway for anything but love.)
The "Manson murders" clearly changed the US social milieu and fast. They were an exceptional event. Did the Sandy Hook murders do that? Were they a kind of exceptional event? No, they were just one in an endless and accelerating stream of mass murders enabled by US gun culture and laws. Anyone seeking to discredit them is seeking to defend that gun culture and doing so by de-contextualization instead of the re-contextualization I try to do.
In Mattis' version of the Manson Murders, red intelligence assets (Charles Manson and Tex Watson) are working together with blue assets (Paul Tate, Sharon Tate, and Roman Polanski). Mattis' analysis seems roughly to be "this guy is related to aristocracy and in intelligence, and that guy is related to aristocracy and in intelligence, so they must all be working together." (Following orders from the ghosts of their ancestors??? Following some central command???) It's more easy to believe that such alliances are unusual and not that easy. Paul Tate may have been living in San Pedro and in Naval Intelligence but that doesn't necessarily mean he had a clue about what Red Intelligence was planning to do to his daughter living on Cielo Drive for the biggest psyop (and leak stopping, in my version) of the decade. Generally cells are kept as small as possible because they can't get too big before leaks start occurring. Mattis' downplays the possibility of leaks, even among different intelligence tendencies.
OTOH, I do believe that Red and Blue could possibly have worked together then, as the country had not yet become as fractured then. I never paid attention to religion or politics in my early years of girl chasing (and probably why it wasn't very successful mostly). I believe the big change in the possibility of such alliances occurred during the Obama administration, and was visible in how clearly Intelligence (by then dominated by Blue) worked against Trump (Red Intelligence Tendency) in the Russiagate myths. Or perhaps it had started under George W Bush, but no such division occurred prior to George W Bush (otherwise, George W Bush would not have ascended to the Presidency, as it took a lot of inside help.)
It could be therefore that the Manson Murders represented simply a Change in Plans rather than a cross-tendency intelligence hit. The vision, apparently shared by Red and Blue prior to 1969, was (and still might be) Drugged America (much as in Brave New World). But the Red side (especially?) decided psychedelics in particular had ideological dangers and needed to be stopped, so they arranged a psyop under Nixon. Meanwhile the Blue side held on to mass marijuana use if not LSD. I don't recall Manson being described so much as a Marijuana user (I think it's likely he was more of a meth user, he looked like that to me).
In 1989 I took a trip with my mother to visit the wedding anniversary celebration of some second cousins near Modesto, California. I put a NORML sticker under my rear window so it could be seen, but not too conspicuously. My conservative Republican mother didn't notice or complain. These second cousins were very rich and very conservative Evangelical christians, heavily involved in global proselytizing. The husband was actually a medical doctor, but he leased his farm to an actual farmer. During our weekend stay, a nearby building on an adjacent farm spectacularly burned down. It had apparently been a meth lab. Meth use is strongly associated with Red political tendencies. It helps people work hard and then play even harder. It's great for people who relax "actively" with hobbies like boating where you need to stay alert for days on end. It's great for soldiers of fortune (and often real soldiers). But it doesn't help with any kind of enlightenment or critical thinking. While the fire was still burning, some other relatives (who did know what it meant) warned me about the sticker, and I discreetly removed it,so as not to attract any police attention. 20 years later the evangelical doctor's wife died in her 50's from brain cancer.
I've always found the La Bianca murder threatening. My mother always went by the first name (she made up) of "La Nore" (and she insisted it be that way, with a space, though many automated systems wouldn't allow it). I've sometimes worried that murder was Manson sticking his finger back at me. Maybe getting confused and looking up the wrong name in the phone book. But it's been explained in other ways that seem more convincing. I think Mattis is probably right that it was a gangland hit having nothing to do with Manson. A copycat. But they decided to throw it in to the Manson case just to emphasize just how evil that pernicious Hippy influence was.
One can believe that Manson was very jealous of show business people. He had tried and failed to record a hit record, with help from Terry Melcher who had lived at Cielo Drive. He didn't particularly like liberal types like Tate and Polanski either, and the Cielo Drive groundskeeper might have pissed him off. And, there's a very very far out chance I might have pissed him off so badly with my slur it kicked off the whole thing. But more than likely, it wasn't his decision anyway. He could get what he wanted (an easy retirement) for playing his bit, of being the patsy for what was essentially a contract hit, arranged by CIA and FBI, for both paradigm shifting mind control and leak protection. He was treated so well afterwards, it couldn't have just been his personal vendetta. I think Mattis is right, he might well have spent much of his life on the beach at Big Sur, and come in for guest appearances. That's what he looked like.
Not really being sure what a swastika looked like at 13, I was more thinking he was some kind of kooky Christian, though even more cranky and obnoxious and far right than just kooky. I did not want to stare too much at the strange cross on his forehead to figure out if it really was a swastika. He did not look so evil then as he has since, just annoying. (AFAIK he mixed a record with Beach Boy's Terry Melcher and was recommended to top record studio executives. He hung out in all sorts of Hollywood artist circles.) Given that, I wouldn't even be surprised if it was my mother who sent him to talk to me in the first place because she was also far right (they could have traded a few words, such as him saying something about the lazy communists in our midst, and with her saying "tell that to him") and my mother wanted me to cleave to that fold instead of hanging out with left wing Jewish friends (she had many converted jewish friends though--it wasn't so much racist as ideological--she believed Jews were socialists, communists, etc, but if you converted you lost that). My mother was also associated with political tendencies that many now regard as something like Nazi, and if you said the right words (along these lines) you had her ear. She had been an America Firster in WWII, and had then become a fan of Phyllis Schlafly and most of the far right tendencies which followed from that. Strangely, I've also come to advocate principled US neutrality, but differently. During the 1960's mother wouldn't tolerate any negativity about the Vietnam War and turned off the TV in 1966 when my father was listening to Walter Cronkite make some negative comment about the war. So it seems to me that my mother's feeling about foreign entanglements was highly selective as to whether we were fighting communists or anti-communists. It was important to fight Communists, but not Nazis. My inspiration comes more from the universalism of the Prime Directive of Star Trek, which has always made sense to me. Only after that I learned about the many destructive US sponsored coups and military operations around the world. Then how the US wars in Korea and Vietnam had worked. It may be easy to believe the US is always on the side of good if you just listen to most US newscasts and don't think much. But knowing the history, and a bit of understanding of human nature, it quickly because clear that the US has been running a murderous hegemonic empire since WWII purely for the gain of rich investors and the Military Industrial Complex that Eisenhower warned against (after having promoted it all his life). Other major powers may have also had a few imperial designs in this period which are easy to overstate (or possibly misinterpret) but none have come close to being involved with so many people, so many lives lost, and so many living in empire-controlled client states--the literal opposite of the "democracy" we claim to promote, which is actually the enemy of self-determination.
Also strangely, around 1967 my mother had gone to some kind of conservative event and came back complaining about how stupid it was. She brought some bullet casings which had apparently been all around there, as a souvenir. "It was an awful meeting, but at least we brought you these." I know now they did have conservative events at the ranch...the owner was far right wing and he invited such groups, which was why he tolerated Manson in the first place...who mainly considered him a far right christian with a lot of girl friends. Mom could have even heard from or about Manson then, when he was a mini right wing celebrity in 1968 at least, because (like Trump later) he'd drop all pretense of political correctness.
Back in those days, I wasn't antiwar either, though it seemed like nearly all the other kids were. I felt I should do my duty, whatever that was. I identified with my mother's Republican Party, and cheered on Nixon in 1968 and 1972 (even becoming a Junior Republican and hearing Edwin Meese III in Sacramento). Meanwhile my best friends were always Democrats (who have now become Republicans) so it's like we've switched sides. In my last year of Elementary School (1967) we had a big Christmas party at Eliot Sturman's house. (Only later I found out that Sturman was Mama Cass's maiden name.) They had a big fancy stereo and I danced with my elementary school "girl friend" (not girlfriend) and people started disparaging the war. My Japanese-American girl friend rebuffed them, and I stood up for her. Her father was in the Air Force. They moved somewhere else in 1968, which left me girl friendless for about 6 more years.
Manson was apparently a very talented shape shifting ex-con actor. Ideal for being involved in MK/Ultra as Mathis many others allege and I think is almost certainly true. The Tate murder was one for which he was trained to be the patsy he was. As a meth addict and probably compromised in other ways as well, he could be counted on not to deviate from the script given. MK/Ultra probably didn't know the Tate was going to be the target when it started, it was just to be there, ready for a social psyop when the time had come, with some target of convenience. But perhaps it had been predetermined to be Tate for some time, if Mathis' version is true and the whole thing was fake, they needn't make such a high level last minute decision. None of my story takes away from that possibility. Some even seems to reinforce it in a peculiarly paranoid way which I cannot assume is true, such as my "falling ill" after first seeing Tate in 63, immediately thereafter meeting a friend who would later show me nude photos of her as his favorite star in 67. And Mk/Ultra closing down would well explain why my best friend's father was transferred to Research--quite possibly he had been doing research all along...covert research for Mk/Ultra. But such things would probably be more likely coincidence than these particular explanations. Thus no honest added weight for Mattis' version is given from my story, at least as I've been able to figure without throwing in connections which are too paranoid to give any weight to.
Looking back through my fly-on-the-wall role in all this, it almost does seem like I was part of or adjacent to Mk/Ultra as well. And this isn't the only such story I can tell. But they closed down the well before I got my turn. Or it might have happened the same way had I just been some other kid. So you can see why I'm still pissed. Though I'm glad I never fell in with Manson's detail. And while I believe psychedelic drugs should be generally available, they should probably be restricted to administration by licensed therapists. Not just "kids" (though I believe my friends described here were "responsible" enough, we got old early in those days--and some may well have been undercover deputies themselves). You certainly need a guide the first time on LSD...I suspect all my friends knew that. Only marijuana is pretty much safe enough for anyone. And that's what was being passed around sometimes in the circles of people on the beach, along with mere stories about LSD mostly.
We know that psyops were considered for other purposes. Kennedy turned down recommended fake terrorist attacks on Americans to build support for war on Cuba. The Tate-Murder-As-Psyop was primarily designed to build rejection of LSD and support for the War on Drugs. Whether there were real murders or not I do not know. If the murders were real, a secondary effect may have been lessening Hollywood interest in JFK and RFK conspiracy movies. Maybe that wasn't necessary anyway.
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