Did the CIA Brainwash Charles Manson?

group of brainwashed hippies into the home of sharon tate killing her and four others at her home in los angeles i felt nothing i had absolutely nothing for her the scene at her house in benedict canyon was pretty messed up not only was tate pregnant manson and his band used her blood to write the word pig on the front door nothing could have been more horrendous than what happened that night but you already know that if these weren't already the most famous murders in u.s history tarantino cemented their mythical status no i was dumber than that something like rex

wasn't who you thought he was in fact he might have been a cia construct before you accuse me of lunacy listen to these three facts number one spawn ranch where the manson family lived was under surveillance months before the tape murders if the police knew they were plotting the murders why didn't they stop them number two there was a mysterious guy named reeve whitson who would constantly hang around sharon tate's house a lot of whitson's family and friends admitted that he was probably cia the morning after the tape murders whitson was at

tate's house before the police arrived implying he was either keeping the house under surveillance or somehow had inside knowledge of the murders number three this is where we get crazy manson committed a lot of petty crimes in the 60s but whenever he got caught and thrown in jail his parole officer a guy named roger smith negotiated his release beyond his legal prowess smith was an expert in lsd amphetamines and their effect on violence manson and smith were bizarrely close i've never seen any parolee parole officer

relationship like that in fact manson affectionately called smith jubal the doctor and lawyer from manson's favorite book the 1961 sci-fi thriller stranger in a strange land by robert heinlein it was his de facto bible in fact that's where the manson family got their ritual water sharing ceremonies manson even named his son after the main character in the book valentine michael smith there's one problem manson was basically illiterate how would a book like this have had such a profound effect on him if he couldn't read it well maybe it was

read to him while he was on lsd the police used to watch over the people now they're watching the people okay that's enough of a cliffhanger if you follow this channel you're probably wondering why charles manson is the center of this week's episode of american alchemy i don't know well he's actually not journalist and author tom o'neil is his best-selling book chaos charles manson the c.i.a in the secret history of the 60s throws the conventional manson narrative completely on its head they're running in the street the true story and it's a great example

of journalism of a bygone era you know the journalism where you work your ass off on a real story over a long time horizon and risk your reputation for the sake of the american public knowing the o'neill tears apart the conventional narrative that charles manson was simply a crazy cult leader listening to secret encoded messages by the beatles this was the theory set forth by vincent bubliosi in his best-selling book elter skelter a book that shouldn't really have been taken seriously or at least as unbiased because bugliosi was the lead prosecutor

of the case against manson after 20 years of painstaking journalism o'neill presents a far more solid alternative in short it involves the cia their top secret mind control program called mk ultra and the government's long-standing aim to destroy the hippie cause it won't be here long you [ __ ] without further ado let's talk to this week's american alchemist tom o'neill different parts of the brain have different activities but you know that don't you

maybe you should interview me an old western movie set in chatsworth where the mansons lived and plotted a lot of their murders there's a picture of the manson family that was in life magazine of a group of them after charlie and the others were in prison this is where madison used to gather the

girls to sing what was that song you were just hearing it was actually a young charles manson at one point manson was just an average five foot seven scraggly-haired guy trying to make it in the music business like everyone else in la for a while he even lived with dennis wilson of the beach boys i was curious about how manson became manson you know how he went from a very fairly literate con who spent half of his life institutionalized and in under a year had become this hippie guru leader who had complete

control over by 69 as many as 30 or 40 people who would do whatever he told them to do including kill absolute strangers and have no remorse for it after the fact so how did charles manson go from petty criminal and aspiring musician to mastermind murderous manipulator whose followers believed that he was both jesus and the devil at the same time you know what you are as i know what i am ironically this dark transformation all began in the summer of love 1967 in haight ashbury of san

at that time there was a guy named david smith that ran the hate ashbury free medical clinic the clinic would see any sort of walk-ins off the street if they needed medical attention he anticipated correctly that there would be this invasion of kids who were coming for what became known as the summer of love charles manson was actually a frequent visitor and david smith publicly said we're not doing anything any research or anything like that we're just providing medical care nothing more but the medical help came with a little catch enter one dr jolly west

as the chair of ucla psychiatry department but we now know was deeply involved in the cia's brainwashing program mkultra mk ultra began in the early 50s around the korean war and it involved giving people lsd to brainwash them and cause them to kill on command despite all of the program's records being destroyed we now know because of correspondence between jolly west and the cia's sydney gottlieb that jolly was top brass at mk ultra what's even crazier is that jolly west was actually jack ruby's psychiatrist in case you're

a little foggy on american history jack ruby was the guy that shot and killed the supposed lone gunman of jfk lee harvey oswald but ruby had no violence in his past i never used the term angry that's not in my vocabulary i didn't know where he was when he was killing lee harvey oswald if you're in one of these fugue or one of these psychomotor epileptic states you're unknowledgeable of what you do then there can't be capital punishment jack ruby didn't remember actually killing lee harvey oswald he sort of blacked out right after he shot oswald a

couple times he said how did i get here why are you doing this to me i'm jack ruby this is exactly what wes in his earliest letters to gottlieb said he was going to accomplish for them to induce mental illness in a person without without their knowledge just months into ruby's prison sense jolly west goes in to treat him for a few hours with no cameras present wes comes out of that session saying that ruby has had a psychotic break and from that point forward ruby was not psychologically stable

did west and the cia want to silence him for more on that you might have to watch an oliver stone documentary but the point is it is very clear that jolly west was implicated in mk ultra now back to charles manson jolly west was using the haight ashbury free medical clinic the one that manson went to as a recruiting pool to find hippies dose them up with lsd and do all sorts of crazy stuff with them this is now a declassified cia program that was called operation midnight climax he studied people at our planet so our clinic was where they came in and then people from our clinton

in a certain sense he recruited subjects from our point charles manson was more than likely one of these unwitting test subjects in 1967 is exactly when he transformed from random petty con man to cult leader sex god with what seems to be intense mind control over a band of followers but why would the cia brainwash charles manson and turn him into a cult leader that would kill one of america's darling actresses and sharon tate that makes no sense what was the motivation hoover especially and reagan

believed that the youth movement was funded by communist russia and china communist indoctrination communist subversion it's no secret that the government was deeply threatened by the hippie movement and wanted to marginalize it at all costs in fact there were programs run out of the fbi and cia called cointelpro and chaos which basically tracked dissident members of the hippie and free love movements so when manson was identified on december 1st of 69 the media had pictures of you know guys with long hair

and beers and buckskin jackets and women with long hair no makeup breastfeeding who were accused of killing a bunch of people for no reason at all except that they were all burnt out on acid and would listen to anyone who told them what to do i never had a long hair before i got busted i never had a beard before i got busted i went to shave and the guys know you can't shave someone get a haircut it's nobody want to change your appearance so when a bunch of long-haired hippies suddenly turned into cold-blooded killers the free love movement lost a ton of charisma and

that's why you have the author joan didion saying august 9 1969 was the day the 60s abruptly ended was charles manson an mk ultra patient tom o'neal admits there's no smoking gun honestly i'm not quite sure myself but it's very obvious that the conventional narrative that we've been spoon fed is completely off what do you think about all this leave a comment with your craziest conspiracy theory hit the like subscribe the bell for notifications and tune in next time my name is jesse michaels and this is american alchemy