Rush talked about this yesterday, reminding us that some liberals, uh... do not think rationally.

"Mr. Manson was not the end point of the counterculture. If anything, he was a backlash against the civil rights movement and a harbinger of white supremacist race warriors like Dylann Roof, the lunatic fringe of the alt-right."

Complete article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/1...-counterculture.html

Opinion | OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

Charles Manson Was Not a Product of the Counterculture

By BAYNARD WOODSNOV. 20, 2017

The Manson murders — the seven killings committed by Charles Manson’s followers in two days in Los Angeles in August 1969 — are often thought to mark the end of the 1960s, as if those brutal slayings were the inevitable outgrowth of the counterculture, the dark consequence of long hair, free love, casual drug use and a general breakdown of authority and social norms.

This sentiment was most famously expressed by Joan Didion in her book “The White Album.” She wrote that “in a sense” it was true that “the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brush fire through the community.”

But with some historical distance, and after Mr. Manson’s death on Sunday at age 83, we can see that the simplistic counterculture dichotomy of “freaks” versus “squares” caused people to lump Mr. Manson in with the freaks (for he certainly wasn’t a square). Apart from the long hair and the casual sex, however, Mr. Manson, who spent much of his life in prison with a swastika carved into his head, had more in common ideologically with far-right groups like the John Birch Society than he did with the anarchic leftism of, say, the Yippies.

Mr. Manson was not the end point of the counterculture. If anything, he was a backlash against the civil rights movement and a harbinger of white supremacist race warriors like Dylann Roof, the lunatic fringe of the alt-right.

Mr. Manson was famously inspired by the Beatles song “Helter Skelter,” which, as he understood it, described a race war that he had been prophesying. Like many reactionaries, he saw race in America in apocalyptic terms. He believed that African-Americans would soon rise up and begin to murder white people. Mr. Manson and his followers would be spared; they were going to hide beneath the desert in Death Valley until the war was over, when they would surface from their underground lair and rule over the black population, which, Mr. Manson claimed, would be unable to govern itself.

Sut when this race war proved too slow in coming, Mr. Manson urged his followers to set it in motion themselves, to “do what blackie didn’t have the energy or the smarts to do — ignite Helter Skelter and bring in Charlie’s kingdom,” as Tex Watson, a member of Mr. Manson’s “family,” recalled. Mr. Manson assumed that the murders of wealthy, white Angelenos would be blamed on African-Americans and the race war would begin.

Joan Didion described them as “senseless killings.” But they were not senseless. They were racist.

Today, this sort of logic is all too familiar to us. The paranoid, racist and apocalyptic ramblings of Mr. Manson are the DNA of the reactionary alt-right. In the days leading up to Dylann Roof’s murder of nine black parishioners at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., he talked to his friends about a “race war” and later used the same language in interviews with investigators. He was an enthusiastic reader of alt-right websites.

In recent months, the far-right media have become fixated on the idea that left-wing “antifa” activists will spark a new civil war. Gateway Pundit, a far-right website, claimed that “millions of antifa supersoldiers will behead white parents,” and Alex Jones, the conspiracy enthusiast who runs the website Infowars, predicted that the antifa activists would lose such a war.

White supremacists like Richard Spencer have realized, of course, that by wearing slick suits and sporting stylish haircuts they can be both edgy and respectable at once. They are fighting a culture war (and have even embraced the term “counterculture” in recent years). In that spirit, a recent essay by Vincent Law on AltRight.com, Mr. Spencer’s website, granted that though “I love fantasizing about RAHOWA” — racial holy war — a culture war among “good” and “bad” whites will have to come first.

This sort of rhetoric, like Mr. Manson’s, is predicated on manipulating the Tex Watsons and Dylann Roofs of the world, of making them do the dirty work to bring about the world in which their masters will rule. That is not the inevitable outgrowth of the 1960s counterculture. That is the apocalyptic racism of too many eras, including our own.



Baynard Woods is a reporter and editor at the Real News Network and the author of “Coffin Point: The Strange Cases of Ed McTeer, Witchdoctor Sheriff.”

Jesus Christ ...

That is Bizarro World sponge-worthy bullshit.

Really, can't they figure out that there are people out there that are just plain evil.... born evil and nothing more... luckily not very many... but they do exist and the best and most 'human' solution when you encounter one is the put it down, just like you would a rabid dog.

If that author had been in a room with Manson for about 5 minutes, he have had an entire new understanding for the word "evil".

Manson was what they stereotype the right to be. Read "Helter-Skelter." He was no Abby Hoffman. His ramblings were similar to Dylan Roof's crap. Mostly just evil, though.

There was an old chaplain in one of the older prisons where Manson was housed. Manson was in an open-bar cell on a lockdown range for acting like a jerk. Manson, a little man, called for the chaplain to approach the cell for a private chat. The chaplain, about 6'4" tall and 285 pounds, came close. Manson quickly reached out and tried to jerk the chaplain into the bars. The chaplain grabbed both of Manson's wrists and threw himself backwards. Manson was rendered unconscious and sustained a concussion.

That one always give me a chuckle, the thought of Manson's skull impacting cold rolled steel.

So are those who falsely allege they've been attacked or who spray paint racist slogans to "raise awareness" not products of the counterculture either?

What difference does it make? It's only a label. "Counterculture" has been rendered meaningless because those who claimed to be part of it moved into leadership positions in government. Remember radical Hillary working for Sirica? Jerry Brown-total sellout. There never really was a counterculture anyway, it was all just communism with a headband. Besides, it's the New York Times, total crap anyway.

Manson and his minions were the result of the 60's era counter-culture. While multiple celebrities and various other talking heads were buying into all the Summer of Love balony, clowns like Mansion took those ideas and went to a deep dark place that leftist don't talk about.

I wrote a report back in college about how the 1970's, San Francisco was the most violent place in the US. Mansion, Jim Jones, Angela Davis, Symbionese Liberation Army, Black Liberation Army, Weather Underground...all of them radical leftists, exposing virtues of far-left social upheaval and change through violence was fomented in the late 60's. The entire decade was one year after another of assassinations, bombings, assaults and extortions. There's a reason why the Dirty Harry and Death Wish movies were such a hit.