The New York Times ran an opinion column Tuesday claiming that Charles Manson – the now deceased infamous cult leader who orchestrated the gruesome deaths of nine people in Los Angeles back in 1969 – wasn’t so much a warped product of his times as he was a crazy right-winger.
Because nothing says “conservative” quite like establishing your own cult, having rampant orgies on a secluded ranch, doing a whole bunch of drugs and convincing mentally ill children to murder a bunch of innocent people. Hands up, ya caught us.
There really aren’t sufficient words in the English language to describe what a giant literary dumpster fire this article is, though I’m willing to give it a go.
The Times bases this week's edition of utter lunacy on the fact that the Manson murders were, according to the cult leader himself, Manson's attempt at sparking a race war between blacks and whites (and, ultimately, Jews). He hypothesized that the murder of several rich white suburbanites in L.A. would immediately drive the police to suspect blacks of perpetrating a hate crime. Blacks would then assumedly retaliate, and all hell would break loose. That didn't happen, of course, and Manson and several of his followers were shortly arrested for their brutal crimes.
The Times is now claiming that Manson's 1960s-era murder spree makes him an early paragon of the political right which supposedly hates blacks. Author Baynard Woods points to what he sees as right-wing hysteria over the Antifa movement, claiming that white conservatives have built up false premonitions of a coming apocalyptic war with the left-wing activist group. (Never mind, of course, that it's masked Antifa crusaders who are beaming people upside the head with bike locks and throwing Molotov cocktails at the cops -- that's apparently neither here nor there to Woods.)
Aside from making wild claims about the right's alleged paranoia while ignoring the violence of the left, what Woods conveniently ignores are the myriad characteristics that Manson actually shared with the progressive movement. After utterly failing to become one himself, his victims were the mega-rich – the one-percenters, if you will (along with a few unfortunate others who happened to be standing nearby). And aside from his “Free Love” lifestyle that celebrated substance abuse and promoted a sexual promiscuity so perverse it’d make a Cosmo writer blush, Manson was also an environmental extremist who often complained of humans’ harmful impact on Planet Earth, later becoming an outspoken proponent of global warming propaganda.
To purport that Charles Manson was in any way right-wing is ridiculous at best, and ignores slews of pertinent facts about the man and his life. In fact, it's more than safe to argue that Manson’s attempt to ignite a war between the races with the purpose of exterminating the black community falls much more in line with the goals of one Margaret Sanger, the staunch eugenics enthusiast who founded Planned Parenthood with the self-admitted intention of halting the procreation of black Americans through birth control and infanticide, and with whom the Left has aligned itself like two sides of a zipper. In fact, if I took lines from Charles Manson ("Do what blackie didn’t have the energy or the smarts to do") and put them side-by-side with quotes directly from Sanger ("We want to exterminate the negro population"), you wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
Contrary to the garbage that the New York Times has apparently sunk to peddling, crazy racists and black-targeting murderers aren’t in fact “right-wing.” They’re nutballs. They don’t have the password to our tree house. We don’t invite them to our tea parties. They’re socially fringe loonies who don’t likely don’t have much in the way of political affiliation at all and we denounce them en masse. White supremacist leader Richard Spencer has publicly admitted to having voted for candidates from both political parties – including John Kerry back in 2004. As far as we can tell, Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof had no partisan identity.
On the other hand, the stark parallels between Manson’s “Helter Skelter” vision of black genocide and Planned Parenthood’s single-minded targeting of urban communities and the Black Lives Matter movement’s open hatred of whites seem bone-chillingly comparable.
Of course, you won’t find that op-ed in the New York Times.