Nov. 23, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:37:33
3907 The Truth About Charles Manson
On November 19th, 2017, the infamous Manson family cult leader Charles Manson died at the age of 83. While discussing the Manson Family provokes flashbacks to the gruesome murders in August 1969 by Manson’s followers, very few people examine the backstory which leads to these types of tragedies. You cannot understand Charles Manson as an adult without understanding what happened to him in his childhood. What is the truth about Charles Manson?Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson: http://www.fdrurl.com/Manson-Life-and-TimesManson in His Own Words: The Shocking Confessions of 'The Most Dangerous Man Alive’: http://www.fdrurl.com/Manson-In-His-Own-WordsYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
A life can be both full of sympathy and horror at the same time.
We may look at somebody who willfully smoked for 40 years and still have sympathy for the resulting disease.
We can have sympathy for the childhood of a man or a woman.
While at the same time morally condemning the adult decisions.
And I'm going to try and get that kind of complexity into your mind.
It is a challenging mosaic to look at the life of Charles Manson.
But we're going to talk about it in great depth and detail because I have as part of my life's mission the goal of bringing prevention into the realm of incipient evil.
Evil, when it manifests as adult, has usually been layered in so many sedimentary layers of abuse that it becomes almost an inevitability.
Enough trauma can, I believe, strip people of free will and turn them into bloodthirsty automatons of prior traumas and abuses.
The goal in philosophy is not so much the cure of evil, that is more the job for the police and the military, tragically.
The goal of philosophy is the prevention of evil.
Once evil has manifest, Preventing it becomes impossible.
Containing it becomes the only rational goal.
But here, in what I do, what I have done publicly for well over a decade now, is to talk about prevention.
So when I do talk about the horrors that await us in the examination of the life, and in particular the childhood of Charles Manson, I do want you to perform a challenging balancing act, which is to imagine his childhood occurring to you.
Or to somebody that you love, while at the same time not excusing his adult decisions.
So without any further ado, let us look into the truth about Charles Manson, who of course, November 19, 2017, died at the age of 83.
I want to mention two books here that are worth going through, if this is of interest to you.
Manson, The Life and Times of Charles Manson by Jeff Gwynn, and Manson, in his own words, The Shocking Confessions of the Most Dangerous Man Alive by Charles Manson and Newell Emmons.
Now, Emmons knew him for quite a long time in prison, but Charles Manson did have the chance to review the book before it went out, so although there was some paraphrasing, we can assume that there's a good deal of truth in it.
So, let us begin.
Ada Kathleen Maddox was born to parents Nancy and Charlie Maddox in 1918.
She was the youngest of four children and raised in a very strict religious Nazarene church household.
Now this, the influence of Christianity is really fascinating.
This is a more extreme sect, to put it mildly.
But the relationship of Christianity and the misinterpretation of the biblical commandment, spare the rod and spoil the child, a lot of Christians believe that this means if you do not beat a child, he will become spoiled and rebellious.
And what it really means is the rod is the rod of instruction, like the stuff that a shepherd would have when rounding up and controlling his flock.
It's not beating, it's instruction, but the relationship here is quite complex.
So Charles Manson said, Mom's parents loved her, meant well by her, but they were fanatical in their religious beliefs, especially Grandma, who dominated the household.
She was stern and unwavering in her interpretation of God's will and demanded that those within her home abide by her views of God's wishes.
If my grandfather tried to comfort Mom with a display of affection, such as a pat on the knee or an arm around her shoulder, Grandma was quick to insinuate he was vulgar.
The first warning sign for me is if a man is comforting his daughter, and that is perceived as inappropriate in some fashion, my first thought, it's not proof, but my first thought goes to what were the childhood experiences of the woman who says that, who says even a pat on the knee or an arm around the shoulder is vulgar.
Well, in my particular belief, that is indication of sexual abuse on the part of, in this case, the grandma.
Why would you be so fearful of a father comforting his daughter unless you had some primal memory of how inappropriate that may end up being around a pedophile?
Now, while the family was comfortable financially, Charles Maddox unexpectedly died of pneumonia in 1931 when Kathleen was only 13 years old.
17 months later, tragedy would again strike as Kathleen's older sister Eileen caught the same infection that killed her father and died at 20 years of age.
It's funny, you know, when you read these stories about the kinds of childhoods and illnesses that struck people, not that less than 100 years ago.
It is quite remarkable.
We can afford atheism in some ways now because death is not so omnipresent.
We have gained, to some degree as a result of Christian and Protestant discipline and a work ethic, we have gained the kind of control over our environment that has us, that leaves us with much less of an emotional need for God.
So growing up without a father and absent the guidance of her older sister Kathleen rebelled against her mother's wishes and the Nazarene Church's fundamental expectations.
According to author Jeff Gwynne, they were expected to dress modestly, no sleeveless dresses or tops, for instance, and very little of any makeup.
Girls were discouraged from cutting their hair based on biblical admonitions that a woman's hair was her glory.
Going to movies, dancing, interacting improperly with the opposite sex, cursing, and drinking alcohol comprised a don't list, informally known as the Big Five for Nazarene teens.
Such corrupting acts were to be avoided because they were clearly sinful.
According to Charles Manson, for mom's life was filled with a never-ending list of denials.
My mother ran away from home, was driven, might be a better description.
Her reasons for leaving home were no different than those of the kids I became involved with in the 1960s.
This pattern, this cyclical pattern of what happens in generations, when you draw back enough, it seems like one of those complex spiral forms that you see in nature.
Up close, you don't see much of a pattern.
When you pull back, you see this.
So when he became a cult leader in the 1960s, he lassoed in with his intensity and charisma and, I guess, steady availability of drugs.
Girls who, or young women, who had been driven out of their homes or left their homes with the illusion that outside of discipline is freedom.
Outside of discipline is self-indulgence followed by decay.
Outside of not exercising is not the freedom to not exercise, but a lack of freedom to climb stairs or maintain bone density.
So we'll get into those patterns as we go forward.
While willing to comply with some of the rules, Kathleen, Manson's mom, began sneaking out at 15 years old to go dancing at nightclubs in Ohio.
It was during one of these dancing excursions where Kathleen met 23-year-old Colonel Scott, an unemployed scam artist from Cattlesburg, Kentucky, and apparently a cliche out of a Tennessee Williams play.
Scott told Kathleen that he was an army colonel, plied her with alcohol, and proclaimed marriage intentions, but neglected to inform her That he was already married.
Now, I'm not saying you need this big five list, but we can see this right now.
It's going on with these endless rolling tsunami-like accusations of sexual harassment and more than accusations, sometimes outright admissions.
We need some control over youthful sexuality.
Oh! I may not be the first person in history to say it, but it seems to be a rather surprising thing.
Statement to make in the modern world.
Because here, oh, I got all these rules, you can't do this, you can't do that.
Well, she's like, I don't need no stinking rules.
She goes out at 15 and ends up with a guy eight years older, a scam artist, who gets her drunk and lies to her and seduces her.
Well, see, that's why some of these rules exist.
Because we'll see the dominoes that fell from her youthful desire to break out of these rules and where it led to, to two families in particular.
So despite the age of consent being 16 in Ohio, sexual activity ensued and Kathleen eventually got pregnant in the spring of 1934.
Upon hearing the news of the pregnancy, the fake army colonel was suddenly called away on military business but promised that he would return to Kathleen soon.
He never did. So, yeah, the Nazarene fundamentalist parents had an excessive point, but a point nonetheless.
This is before the welfare state.
This is during the Great Depression.
Now she's 15, she's pregnant, and now what?
But the welfare state, this is all decayed, which means deferred and worsened.
So, single, pregnant, and at odds with her family, Kathleen was determined to find somebody who could provide for her future child and decided to get married as quickly as possible.
Naturally, of course, right?
This kind of disaster means, especially if you're a woman who has just found out she's pregnant, you can try and rope a guy, before you show, you can try and rope a guy into marrying you, usually by firing the V-cannon at him as quickly as possible.
It didn't take long for Kathleen to find a suitor.
August 21st, 1934, she married 25-year-old former army unskilled machine shop worker William Manson.
Now typically, of course, a 15-year-old would require parental permission to get married, but Kathleen lied about her age when obtaining the marriage license, claiming to be 21 and hid the marriage from her mother.
On November 12, 1934, Kathleen gave birth to no-name Maddox, who weeks after birth was renamed Charles Mills Manson.
The birth certificate filed on December 3, 1934, listed William Manson as Charles Manson's biological father, but reports dispute if Kathleen's new husband knew the baby was the result of a prior relationship.
Was he cucked into raising...
Another man's child.
This is an old issue with regards to biological integrity and where you invest your resources.
The woman always knows that the child is hers.
The man, it's just a little bit more dicey, which is why the old saying, no hymen, no diamond, was particularly important.
It is a form of financial predation that is unbelievably destructive and horrible and evil to tell a man a child is his when the child is not his, because not only does he pour resources into the raising of another man's offspring, but he is also prevented from having his own children if no more children ought to be had. but he is also prevented from having his own children So not only is he supporting someone else's, but he also loses out.
Biologically, this is a complete no-no.
So there was a reason for these rules, as we can see, with increasing single motherhood, welfare, statism, and the giant pot of government money that is now attracting migrants from the third world.
I'm just saying, there are a few challenges with this situation.
So, following the guise of hate the sin but love the sinner, Nancy Maddox embraced Kathleen and her new grandchild, seeking to see Charles raised in a religious environment.
It didn't take long for Kathleen to resume her pre-pregnancy ways, going out, dancing without her husband, disappearing with her brother Luther Maddox for days at a time, and leaving her newborn child with unsuitable babysitters.
Now... Statistically, we know that if there is a man in the household and there's a child, and the man is not biologically related to the child, the child is over 30 times more likely to be abused.
So when you have a bunch of unsuitable babysitters, who knows what physical, emotional, verbal or sexual tortures were inflicted on Charles Manson as a baby.
Charles Manson said.
Like many young mothers, she was not ready to make the sacrifices required to raise a child.
With or without me, Mom still had some living to do.
I would be left with a relative or a hired sitter, and if things got good for her, she wouldn't return to pick me up.
After my grandparents or other family members would have to rescue the sitter until Mom showed up.
Naturally, I don't remember a lot of these things, but you know how it is.
Even in a family, if there is something disagreeable about someone, it always gets told.
So, she basically, the mom went out whoring around, went out sleeping around.
She's married, she's a mother, but she's out there having sex with, I assume, anything with a charm, a dimple, and five bucks worth of alcohol in his fist.
And this is his early experience.
And there are a lot of people who are...
Put in charge of Charles Manson who have no particular allegiance to him and are just doing it for the money.
The idea that parents can be replaced by hired help, by paid help is ridiculous.
I mean, just try this. Next time that you have an anniversary, say to your Wife, no, I'm not going out for dinner with you, but it doesn't matter because I've hired a Hispanic gardener or a Polish mechanic to go out with you instead because I'm pretty much replaceable by anyone, any hired help. Your wife will say, nope, but then she'll go and leave the kid in a daycare or have a nanny.
In early April 1937, we can assume because she got a sense that the marriage was disintegrating underfoot or under distant bouncing ass, Kathleen filed a bastardy suit against Colonel Scott.
Seeking child support, Scott didn't deny that he was the biological father of Charles Manson and the court ordered him to pay $25 up front and $5 a month.
Hmm. I wonder if female suffrage had managed to reform the court system just yet or make a welfare state.
Apparently not. Now that is not much.
He was ordered to pay the margin equivalent of $428 up front and $85 a month.
Now, Kathleen, he did pay the $25, but she never saw a single $5 a month payment.
But this may have been the first of only a handful of times that young Charles Manson met his biological father.
He's like three at this point.
On April 30th, 1937, William Manson filed for divorce, charging Kathleen with gross neglect of duty, and she didn't even show up to contest the proceedings.
The court found that, quote, there were no children the issue of this marriage and approved the divorce, of course, right?
I mean, so William and Kathleen had not had any children.
I guess he'd found, I mean, maybe he had found out that he wasn't the father of Charles or maybe he accepted that he would raise Charles even though he wasn't the father but found that his wife, sleeping around, riding the old carousel, It was not something that he found he could live with.
Charles Manson said, Whether the divorce was his fault or Mom's, I never did know.
Probably Mom's. She was always a pretty promiscuous little broad.
It's not the five-letter B word I was expecting.
Kathleen and young Charles stayed with various family members during this time.
And while there are no records of the young mother finding employment, she was on the hunt for another husband.
I just... Just by the by, everyone.
Like, I can't imagine...
I mean, obviously I can't imagine playing the race card, but I can't imagine having the vagina card, like having this big Ace V card where it's like, I do something, takes 5-10 minutes, and look at that, I have a home, and I have an income, and I have a protector, and it's just, it's a wild thing, and this power that women have is truly, truly astonishing.
On October 2nd, 1938, the Charleston Gazette reported that Kathleen was engaged to James Lewis Robey, a man with repeated convictions for bootlegging and theft.
The relationship never progressed to marriage, but further demonstrates Kathleen's, let's say, questionable decision-making.
Charles Manson said,"'One of Mom's relatives delighted in telling the story of how my mother once sold me for a pitcher of beer.'" Mom was in a cafe one afternoon with me in her lap.
The waitress, a would-be mother without a child of her own, jokingly told my mom she'd buy me from her.
Mom replied, a pitcher of beer and he's yours!
The waitress set up the beer.
Mom stuck around long enough to finish it off and left the place without me.
Several days later, my uncle had to search the town for the waitress and take me home.
Probably wasn't even imported beer.
Now... Of course, he's a pathological liar and a con man like his biological father.
And we'll touch on the genetics as we go forward.
Are these stories true?
Are these stories true?
Well, of course, there's no way to verify.
The people involved were dead.
It would be pretty impossible to find out whether these stories were objectively true.
But I would argue I'm not sure that it fundamentally matters.
If Charles Manson believes that they're true, then they're true enough.
And Charles Manson doesn't have a lot of stories about how wonderful his mother was.
So even if the specific details of this story are not true, which we'll never know, you can't possibly find out one way or the other after all this time, And it's sort of like, I remember seeing a picture of Ayn Rand years ago, and it was like Ayn Rand with this person and some other unidentified person.
Now, of course, nobody knows who this unidentified person is anymore, but back in the day, in that circle, oh, that so-and-so, right?
This knowledge can vanish like you can vanish.
If you don't leave a positive impact on those around you, you can vanish.
Just be an unidentified person.
We all, so many of us are headed for unmarked graves unless we turn around and do something in the world.
Even if this is not true, true, it's emotionally true.
Even if this was just a joke or a story, it still reveals an enormous amount about the family.
And the important thing is, if young Charlie heard the story, even if he wasn't there, even if it wasn't true, if this story was told as a joke, that is very, very important because it communicates to the child.
How disposable the child is, which completely destroys, I believe, the bond between child and parents.
On August 1st, 1939, Kathleen, her brother Luther, and his girlfriend Julia Vickers seduced, assaulted, and robbed a stranger named Frank Martin.
Kathleen and Julia met the wealthy-appearing Martin and devised a strategy to rob him, disgruntled that he had,"'Too much money for one man!' After Martin was led to believe that the young women were interested sexually, they lured him into a situation where Luther assaulted him with a salt-filled ketchup bottle and stole his wallet containing $27.
So, I guess about $500 in modern parlance.
Now, these are not...
I guess one guy's named Luther.
Trust me, his first name is not Lex, because these are not master criminals in any way, shape, or form.
The inept criminals were caught almost immediately as they made almost no attempt to conceal their identities and the women were regular known patrons at the bar where they met their victim.
Kathleen, Julia and Luther were arrested and young Charles likely saw his already barely present mother dragged away in handcuffs.
Now later by the way Charles Manson's mother is an official alcoholic, but I would argue, given she wants to go to bars, she's obviously, I assume she's pretty, guys are buying drinks for her, and she's making these kinds of decisions.
Drugs, alcohol, some kind of brain-deadening, soul-deadening escapism is occurring that makes these kinds of decisions seem oh so sensible.
Luther attempted to take full responsibility for the crime to spare the women of legal consequences, but both Kathleen and Julia confessed to knowledge of the robbery plot.
Julia was brought up on minor charges of aiding and abetting, but the Maddox tandem faced significantly harsher penalties.
After a seven-week trial, Luther Maddox was sentenced to ten years in prison for armed robbery, and Kathleen was sentenced to five years for unarmed robbery, both headed to West Virginia State Prison, At under five years old, Charles Manson was now without a mother or father.
Now, we haven't any particular records for this, although we'll certainly get to this as he gets older.
But I gotta tell you, this Kathleen, I mean, what a nasty, vicious, ugly piece of work she is.
If she's willing to pretend to want to have a threesome with a guy so that her brother can beat him half to death with a bottle, what kind of mother do you think she was?
What happened to young Charles Manson?
What kind of men did she bring home?
She's really... I'm scurrying down in the rat sewer level of hell of the lowest of the lowest.
I bet you she brought home pedophiles and I bet you she brought home sadists and I bet you she brought home people who enjoy torturing children and I bet all of that stuff happened.
And it's funny. There's no record of it directly.
There's no proof of it directly.
But there sure is a lot of blood written on the walls.
Charles Manson said...
While mom was doing time at Moundsville, it kind of fell on my grandmother to take care of me, want to or not.
So there I was, in the same household that my mom had run away from six years earlier.
Strict discipline, grace before each meal, and long prayer sessions before going to bed at night.
Don't fight, don't steal, and turn the other cheek.
I believed and practiced all that my grandmother taught.
So much so that I became the sissy of the neighborhood.
In his mother's absence, grandmother Nancy Maddox was the natural choice to take care of Charles, but due to their proximity to the West Virginia State Prison, the child was sent to live with his uncle Bill Thomas, Aunt Glenna, and his cousin Joanne in late 1939.
Now this is a bit of an odd story coming up.
He says, grandfather, I assume he means uncle because the grandfathers weren't around.
Charles Manson says, I remember my grandfather asking me to go for a walk with him.
Once outside the house, he became soft-spoken and kinder than I had ever remembered.
As we walked, we played games and ran races, and he would let me outrun him.
He put me up on his shoulders and carried me while I pretended I was a giant, and taller than anyone alive.
After a while, we sat down to rest.
He put his arms around me and, fighting back tears, told me, Your mother won't be coming home for a long time.
I don't know if the lump came in my throat because my grandfather had begun to cry or if it was because I realized what he was telling me.
And it's funny, when you have a kind of childhood like this, it's sort of like if you're in one of these endless North Pole winters and then one day it's really sunny and then it goes back dark again, you really remember that day.
The tragedy is how vivid the memory is of a kind moment that he experienced.
I don't think you need a lot of those to find a way to clamper out of the abyss of abuse and neglect.
But obviously he did not have enough.
It is frequently described as if the Thomas family didn't want to take in Charles, but they bowed to guilt and feelings of family obligation which were quickly turned to outright resentment.
Yeah, bowing to guilt, feelings of obligation quickly turned to outright resentment.
Not at all like the migrant crisis.
Cousin Joanne Thomas said, There was never anything happy about him.
He never did anything that was good.
Uncle Bill was a physically and emotionally abusive alcoholic who disliked sissies and had very specific hang-ups around males showing emotion or weakness.
As soon as Charles moved in with the Thomases, two challenging situations tested.
The patience of the adults in the relationship.
The young boy visiting his incarcerated mother in prison and attending a new school.
Author Jeff Gwynn, not a bad writer, but quite the white knight of mother excusing.
Jeff Gwynn wrote, Bill warned the five-year-old about behaving properly.
No snivelling when he saw his mother.
Real boys didn't do that.
If the sight of the forbidding outer walls and heavily guarded entrance doors didn't completely unsettle Charlie, the visit with Kathleen surely did.
Ushered inside the main entrance and down a hall to the left by Uncle Bill and uniformed prison staff Charlie was pushed onto a hard wooden slat seat in front of a thick glass panel.
On the other side was Kathleen.
Whatever love she tried to communicate to him was verbal.
Until the day she was set free, it is unlikely that Kathleen was allowed to touch, let alone hug, her child.
Hear that white knighting?
She was just tragically unable to touch her child.
Well, maybe if you don't promise to fuck a guy so that your brother can beat him half to death with a bottle, you end up being able to touch your child.
What if you, say, didn't whore around the neighborhood drinking and screwing everything that wasn't screwed to the ground?
Maybe, just maybe, you'd be able to hug your child.
Maybe if you weren't a terrible mother and a terrible human being, you might be able to hug your child.
But it was not the wall of glass between Kathleen and her child, Jeff.
It was Kathleen's decisions.
Again, I sympathize with her childhood.
I condemn her adult decisions.
In November 1939, the now five-year-old Charles was enrolled in elementary school and given a woman named Mrs.
Varner as his first grade teacher.
Quick question! Everyone out there, just curious what you think.
Given that every time fate seems to roll the dice with young Charles Manson, it comes up snake eyes, do you think that Mrs.
Varner is A, a wonderfully warm teacher who rescued him from the very fiery pits of hell he was destined to by his early abuse and neglect, or B, a sociopathic squid monster of childish disassembly and destruction?
We'll see. Mrs.
Varner, as it turns out, reportedly had a long-standing reputation of being incredibly abusive, To her students, and this trend did not stop when Charles Manson ended her classroom.
I guess, just another brick in the wall.
In Mrs. Farner's classroom, students were seated by perceived potential.
the bright students in the front closest to the teacher, and the worst students in the back and subject to verbal abuse.
With the reputation of his incarcerated mother preceding him, Charles was sent to the last row and repeatedly mocked for perceived defects by the empathy-deficient educator.
After a terrible day at school, Charles ran home crying with his emotional demeanor greatly displeasing his Uncle Bill, and further consequences followed.
According to author Jeff Gwynn, it didn't matter what some teacher had done to make him cry, What was important was to do something drastic that would convince Charlie never to act like a sissy again.
The next morning, Bill rummaged in his daughter's closet and picked out one of Joanne's dresses.
He ordered Charlie to put it on.
Since Joanne was three years older and normal-sized and Charlie small, the frock certainly sagged off him.
Then Uncle Bill marched the five-year-old back to Mrs.
Varner's classroom. Charlie had to wear Joanne's baggy dress all day.
As Bill intended, he never forgot it.
How's this all working out for everyone?
So far so good?
Beatings, neglect, humiliation, attack, abuse.
One more punch.
This kid is one more punch away from becoming a good person.
This is the first time Charles Manson's size is mentioned.
He is a bit of a demonic hobbit, to be honest with you.
I mean, I wonder...
If malnutrition played a part in how small he ended up becoming.
I mean, alcoholic, absent, whore-like moms not necessarily known for giving the most balanced meals in the history of the universe.
Charles Manson said, Now again, Now again, said, Now again, Now again, said, Now again, Now again, said,
But I think if you look back at your own history, at the light and dark spots in your own origin story and experience, you can find these turning points.
You can find these turning points.
In how you became who you became.
The bullying didn't stop at school, and when Manson saw the opportunity to be the bully instead of the victim, he took it.
Cousin Joanne describes an incident where seven-year-old Charles threatened her with a razor-sharp lawn sickle, leading to more corporal punishment from Uncle Bill.
And we'll see this sort of trifecta.
Bedwetting, cruelty to animals, arson, fascination with fire.
Mmm. Gotta tell you, if the seven-year-old is holding a lawnsicle to his cousin, I don't know that there's a lot of recovery possible at this point.
You know, parenting...
Parenting is like in the first five years.
This is why people call into my show.
I say, take the first couple of years off.
Be with your child!
Say, oh, I don't have time.
It's like, really? You can have a lot of time to bail them out when they're teenagers?
Mmm. I don't think so.
Prevention is by far the better part of cure.
Now, it's interesting as well because he's sensitive and he cries until he turns, right?
Because when a child cries, it is obviously an expression of inner sorrow, but it's also with the goal of Of eliciting sympathy.
And if all crying does is elicit more cruelty.
In other words, if you're like being tortured and you say to the torturer, that's where it really hurts.
You know, you go to the doctor and you say, it hurts when I do this.
You tell the doctor the truth because you want the doctor to make you better.
If it's a torturer, telling the torturer where it hurts only elicits more torture, more pain.
So you live in this upside-down universe.
And he's pretty sensitive until he becomes a bully.
And then let's just say, he really doth commit.
Cousin Joanne Thomas said, of course it didn't make any difference.
You could whip him all day and he'd still act however he wanted.
Right. And science utterly backs up her assertion here.
Corporal punishment against children may elicit an immediate compliance, but...
The behavior resumes almost immediately and often escalates.
Corporal punishment doesn't work.
It does the opposite of working.
It's really about discharging the sadism of the parent rather than instructing the ethics of the child.
Charles Manson said,"...their treatment of me was fine.
I got my ass-kickings when I deserved them and my rewards when I did something right." I was trained in proper manners and taught to wash my face, comb my hair, brush my teeth, and believe in and respect God like any other kid.
But if you don't belong, things just aren't the same.
I can still remember hearing grown-ups refer to me as the little bastard and the kids I played with telling me, your mother's no good.
She's a jailbird. Ha ha ha.
That treatment of me was fine.
This is the normalization, right?
If you're treated brutally as a child, you have a choice.
You condemn your abuser or you become your abuser.
That's my particular opinion and I think there's good life experiences to back that up.
But if you don't condemn your abuser, then you normalize the abuse and you say, well, if you're bigger and more powerful, abuse is virtuous.
And therefore, as a child, when you grow up and you become bigger and more powerful, abuse is virtuous, right?
Our foundational beliefs are the train tracks that we lay ahead of each other.
And we lay ahead of ourselves, right?
Whatever you believe is the train tracks.
And you get these...
Well, where do we have choice?
We have choice in how we process what happens to us.
We don't really have choice in the consequences of how we process what happens to us.
You know, we have a choice to smoke or not.
We don't have a choice as to whether smoking is good for us.
We have a choice to overeat or not.
We don't have a choice as to whether overeating is good for us or not.
We have a choice to exercise. You understand?
So once he said, oh yeah, their treatment with me was fine.
Abuse, bullying, when you have power over people, you screw them up, you harm them, you humiliate them, you bully them.
That's what happens when you say, my abusers are doing the right thing.
Everybody wants to do the right thing.
Our ethical assumptions are our physical inevitabilities.
On February 21st, 1942, hey, remember Luther, Mr.
Ketchup? Lucy Maddox broke out of prison by stealing an on-site truck, but he was apprehended three days later.
Kathleen stayed out of trouble while in prison and was paroled in late 1942 after serving only three years of a five-year sentence.
Charles Manson The day she came home was still one of the happiest days of my life.
I think she missed me as much as I missed her.
For the next few days, we were inseparable.
I was her son and she was my mom.
And we were both proud of each other.
I loved it. I guess my mom did too.
But a 23-year-old girl needs more than an 8-year-old son to complete her world.
And see again, the clouds open, the sun comes through, and it's like, you know, these dysfunctional, broken train wrecks of people, when they find someone, they call fusion, they fuse together, they merge, it's paradise, all past wrongs are forgotten, all future is rosy and optimistic, and they're going to ride the unicorns of megalomaniacal fantasy over the rainbows into the paradise of eternity.
And then four days later, they're screaming at each other for leaving the cap off the toothpaste tube.
This fusion, this joy, this glory, it doesn't actually make you happy.
Right? I mean, if you want to kill someone, you don't push them off a sidewalk, you push them off a tall building.
You raise people up in order to drop them further.
This fusion, this glow, this we're together and everything's perfect, is the setup for the disappointment that is to come.
It is part of the sadism.
It's the good cop to the bad cop of bad habits.
Manson commonly describes his initial reunification with Kathleen as the happiest time in his life, but, unfortunately and inevitably, that period did not last long.
The Thomases wanted Manson out of their house, and Kathleen tried to raise him on her own, gaining employment as a barmaid, grocery store clerk, and other entry-level jobs.
Author Jeff Gwynne says, Charlie compounded his mother's frustration by showing up at the grocery during the days that he played hooky, asking for candy and often buying some with pennies he apparently cashed from store customers.
One of the first things Kathleen noticed when she reunited with her son was that he tried to manipulate everyone, especially women.
She realized that his interest in people was dictated by what they might be able to do for him.
Oh, Jeff. See, I wonder where young Charlie Manson might have learned to manipulate.
His mother was a sexual black widow, soul-sucking, other-sucking spider...
Who manipulated men to get what she wanted?
And the idea that...
Wow! Says the mom who manipulates to get what she wants.
Wow! My son is quite a manipulator.
I'd better keep an eye on that because it's a mystery.
Charles Manson said...
I didn't learn about it until years later but while she was at Moundsville some of the older dykes showed her that sexual pleasure didn't only happen between men and women.
I tell you, you put this in a book.
Nobody would believe you.
She was introduced into lesbianism at a place called Moundsville.
It's kind of on the nose, he goes on to say.
Of course, back then, gays were still in the closet, so mom was pretty discreet when it came to making it with another broad.
Tell me that I was at that age.
I didn't mind sleeping in the other room if she had another female spending a few days with us.
It didn't take long for Kathleen to resume her nightlife-oriented ways, pointing off Charles on a series of shoddy babysitters, becoming addicted to alcohol and prowling for another husband.
At some point, there was another fiancé who didn't pan out and an arrest for grand larceny where the charges were dropped.
Charles Manson said, It was some trip living with Mom.
We moved around a lot and I missed a lot of school and blew a lot of what my aunt and uncle had been trying to teach me.
Mom and I definitely did not live a routine life, yet I dug every minute of it.
I only wished I knew if the next day was going to find me with her or pawned off on someone else.
If I couldn't be with Mom in the city, my next favorite place was at Uncle Jess's in Moorhead, Kentucky.
One day, I pushed one of Jess's dogs off the porch.
Son, he told me, that hound wasn't bothering you.
You got no right pushing it around.
Don't mistreat no animals.
That said, he proceeded to give me a beating I've never forgotten.
Jess is a bit of a mystery, kind of a flyby character in this hellish Dantian tale.
There's no other references to him, so I'm not sure what his relationship truly is.
But here we have the child cruelty.
We get to the bedwetting, and I've heard reports of the fascination with fire.
But don't mistreat no animals.
And then he beats the living hell out of Charlie.
That's so weird. Like, my biggest video, The Story of Your Enslavement, has in it.
I'm talking about human enslavement from A to Z, and in it there's a video of a guy kicking a dog.
The number of comments that are not horrified by human enslavement from A to Z, but are horrified at a guy kicking a dog, it's astounding.
Kathleen eventually took Charlie to Indianapolis, where it is alleged she worked as a prostitute to pay the bills before finding her next husband.
Although, come to think of it, her definition of marriage does not seem that far from prostitution.
Don't make tell me, bro. I'm just telling you like it is.
Charles Manson said, She may have sold her body some.
I'm not about to knock her.
Knowing the things I know now, I wish my mother had been smart enough to start out as a prostitute.
You can sit back and say, a statement like that is about what is expected out of Manson's mouth, but to me, a class whore is about as honest a person as there is on earth.
She has a commodity that is hers alone.
She asks the price for it. If the price is agreeable, the customer is happy.
The girl has her rent and grocery money and the little teenager down the street hasn't been raped by a stiff dick without a conscience.
The teenager's parents don't have a molested child going through life trying to live down a traumatic experience.
The police don't have a case and the taxpayers aren't supporting some guy in prison for umpteen years.
Now, whether you agree with the argument or not, it is an argument.
In other words, still better than 90% of YouTube comments.
Oh, that's unfair.
98% of YouTube comments.
But that's astounding.
And the funny thing is, this guy was tested, based on his other test scores, it was calculated that he had an IQ of 107.
It's above average, about half a standard deviation.
And this, you know, for an illiterate guy, this guy has thought about things.
I'm not saying always sensibly, in fact, rarely, but here is an argument.
Now, the interesting thing here is that he's saying if a man doesn't get sexual satisfaction, he's going to rape a child.
And so it's better that the man pays for sex than he rapes a child.
So I guess my next question would be, if he was still alive and capable of honesty, would be, so Charles, tell me more about your babysitters or your mother's boyfriend.
Did your mother's boyfriend, one or more, come in if your mother wouldn't have sex with them and rape you?
Because this idea, well, you know, if the guy can't get sex, he's just going to go rape some kid.
Charles Manson went on to say, At some point, I no longer believed all my mom's lovers were uncles.
In general, I was cramping mom's style.
Some of the uncles liked me and others didn't.
But the feeling was more than mutual.
I didn't like any of them. I guess my jealousy and resentment of those uncles sleeping with my mom was pretty close to the surface and it began causing trouble between us.
Ah, single moms.
Such a complicated dating scenario.
And no man, look, let's be honest, no man with even half a shred of prospects, games, sexual market value or basic self-respect is going to get involved.
With a trashy, I assume by now, STD-ridden semi-whore like Kathleen.
I mean, it's not. Why on earth would you want to have anything to do with such a train wreck of a human being?
And this is what happens.
You know, this is what happens when you don't have marriage, when you have single moms.
Kids get abused and crimes fester.
And as people know, I've done the truth about single moms on this show.
A single mother household is an environmental toxin for children, boys sometimes in particular.
The negative outcomes of being raised by a single mother are almost beyond calculation, but huge and negative.
So, author Jeff Gwynn says, Increasingly dependent on alcohol, Kathleen began attending meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous.
At one, she met Lewis, a 27-year-old, who said he was trying hard to get straightened out, too.
Lewis had a lot to overcome.
His mother died when he was five, and his father spent several years in the same Moundsville prison where Kathleen and her brother Luther later served time.
Lewis was just out of the army.
The fact that he was released from service during wartime indicates that he was something less than a model soldier.
Currently, he was working in the property department of a circus.
Oh, man. Isn't that kind of an inevitable next step for Kathleen?
Now, she's gonna bang a carny!
Oh! Nice tooth!
Let's wreck! In August 1943, Kathleen married Lewis with hopes that he could provide a positive male influence in her son's life.
But that was anything but the case.
Kathleen was able to curb her drinking, but Lewis relapsed into alcoholism, was unemployable, had an incredibly short temper, and verbally abused Charles nearly relentlessly.
Unlike Kathleen's previous relationships, Lewis had one positive quality.
He desperately wanted to stay with her.
Well, sure, he's an alcoholic, he's unemployable, there's no welfare state, and he needs her to go and buy his grain liquor or rubbing alcohol or whatever the hell else he's dripping down his nose with a turkey baster.
So, yeah.
This is one of these horrible inevitabilities, that when you're down in this 23rd layer of hell, there are no decent people down there.
You know, I have talked...
In this show in the past about my positive relationship with Dungeons& Dragons.
You know, one of the things that Dungeons& Dragons did was it got me into the homes of middle class people with functional families.
I got to see how I opened the fridge at these houses.
And there was more than condiments and one old onion.
Like, it was incredible.
Like, there were pantries full of food.
There were people not yelling at each other.
There were bills that had been paid, no eviction notices.
You need to see that.
And where poor Charlie Manson was, there was nothing positive.
Nobody goes down there.
Nobody goes down and hangs with these people.
It's all an unbelievable crap sandwich from sea to shining sea.
As Charles grew with age, so did the range of his negative behavior.
As a frequent shoplifter...
I can't believe that guy got mad at Trump for getting his kid out of a 5-10 year prison sentence in China, but that's a topic for another time.
As a frequent shoplifter, Kathleen would confront her son when discovering items he clearly couldn't afford and Charles refused to take responsibility or apologize, often blaming her or Lewis instead.
Shoplifting was supplemented with Charles regularly running away from home and where he could have learned such behavior remains a complete mystery.
Well, I'm a completely irresponsible woman who half seduced a man into being half beaten to death with a ketchup bottle filled with salt, but I can't imagine, I can't possibly imagine why my son is shoplifting.
Well, also, you know, if you're in a society where you're treated terribly and nobody seems to care, you have no emotional allegiance to social rules.
Everything becomes what you can get away with.
And if your life is already hell...
There's no punishment that seems particularly important.
I mean, I went through a shoplifting phase when I was in my early teens.
No particular. I wanted a computer to learn how to program.
I was just like, yeah, maybe someone can steal one for me.
That never went through. That never happened.
I did end up buying one legitimately, but I can really understand.
Society doesn't care about me.
Why should I care about social rules?
People are breaking the law with me.
They're beating me. I have no respect for the law.
Remember, my mom called the cops on me once when I was in my early teens when we were having an argument, and I was trying to explain what I was going through at home.
The cop was just, well, what this is is a generation gap.
You just need to listen to your mom.
So, yeah, if you have that kind of history, if you have that kind of environment, it's really tough.
You know, if you want kids, young people, to respect the law, well...
The law needs to respect young people and not simply defer to parents and adults in all situations.
So, just a by the by. Charles Manson said, One night I was awakened by the sound of their booze-laden voices arguing.
The words I remember most were his.
I'm telling you, I'm moving on.
You and I could make it just fine, but I just can't stand that sneaky kid of yours.
And then mom's voice.
Don't leave. Be patient.
I love you and we'll work something out.
Poor mom. We'd long ago worn out our welcome with the relatives and friends who were willing to keep me for any length of time.
I'd become spoiled.
Spoiled. Again, this is the kind of distorted thinking that occurs.
And this...
I don't know.
Again, I'm trying not to sort of mirror this, but I... When you wake up in the middle of the night and you hear adults screaming, it really sinks into your soul.
And what is said, it's really hard to fight.
It's not becoming part of sort of a foundational story about yourself and the world.
So... The drunken ex-carny is threatening to leave.
The used-to-be-drunken kind of hoary woman.
And now she has to choose between her son and the drunken sodden abusive mess she's supporting.
I wonder which way she'll go.
With her son's problematic behavior becoming more apparent and continued resentment from her husband, Kathleen requested assistance from her mother and began researching foster care programs that assisted wayward boys.
Charles Manson said, A few days after I'd overheard the argument, my mom and I were standing in front of a judge.
My mother, in one of her finer performances, was pleading hardship.
She told the judge what a struggle life was and that she was unable to afford a proper home for me.
The judge said, Until there is capable earning power by the mother and a decent stable home for Charles to return to, I am making him a ward at the court and placing him in a boy's home.
So basically she sold him to the state for drunken cock.
Under the guise of doing the best thing for her 12-year-old son, Kathleen abandoned Charles again.
This is the great fear of victims of child abuse.
I could involve the authorities, but isn't it better to be under the power of the devil you know and can navigate?
The Gibralt School for Boys was founded by Catholic priests.
So I'm sure this is going to go great.
The Gibralt School for Boys was founded by Catholic priests to offer a, quote, positive learning environment to male delinquents, end quote.
But they were later replaced by secular administrators.
Charles Manson. By the time I was escorted to the dormitory I would live in for the next ten months, I felt sick.
I couldn't breathe. Tears ran down my cheeks.
My legs were so rubbery I could hardly walk.
Some invisible force was crushing my chest and stealing my life away from me.
I loved my mother. I wanted her.
Why, Mom? Why is it this way?
Come and get me. Just let me live with you.
I won't be in your way. I was lonely.
Lonelier than I'd ever been in my life.
I've never felt that lonely since.
I wasn't angry at her anymore.
I just wanted to be with her, live with her, under any conditions, not in some school locked away from everything.
Good behavior at the Gibralt School was demanded and enforced via corporal punishment using a yard-long board.
While school rules restricted corporal punishment to only three SWATs at a time, witness accounts suggest that physical abuse...
Wasn't at all restricted.
And for those of my younger listeners, when I was in boarding school, you got caned.
Charles Manson said, The answer to any infraction of the rules was a leather strap, a wood paddle, and lost privileges.
Since I had a problem with wetting the bed, it seemed like I was getting more than my share of whippings for something I had no control over.
Cruelty to animals, bedwetting, obsession with fire, arson.
And can you imagine you go to sleep because of your horrible childhood, you're wetting the bed at times.
Can you even fall asleep?
Are you worried you're just trying to get up and go to the bathroom one more time?
This fear, this anxiety, this lack of sleep, too.
Lack of sleep is a huge problem when it comes to decision-making.
I mean, studies are very clear. You start to lose sleep, you might as well be on drugs when it comes to decision-making.
And people with irregular, chaotic lives don't have the regular circadian rhythm system to go to sleep and get up at a similar time, to be well-rested, and it's bad all around.
I remember when I was in boarding school, not sleeping, just not sleeping.
It was long.
No computers, no tablets.
Of course, back then, I'd put my knees up under the blankets and pretend there was a volcano and people were running away from there.
Like, crazy stuff. I'd put my head down at the bottom by the iron railings to pretend I was hiding from Nazis.
It was... I just couldn't sleep.
Charles Manson said, I was exposed to a lot of things the average kid doesn't experience until a much older age.
It never happened to me there, but I saw kids forced into homosexual acts.
Charles Manson said...
Mom would come to see me sometimes, but not all that often.
If she said she'd see me next week, I'd be lucky if she showed up in the next couple of months.
When she did come, she'd tell me, It won't be long before I have a steady job and a nice place to live.
Then I'll come and get you and take you home with me.
We'd talk about how nice it was going to be when we were back together.
Yeah, remember this is the mom who complains that her son manipulates people?
He goes on to say, she'd leave me and I'd run back to my friends telling them, pretty soon I'll be going home, my mom said so.
The next visit would be the same.
Pretty soon, Charlie, were my mother's words, I waited and waited.
It didn't happen.
And there's a reason why his cult was later called The Family.
Author Jeff Gwynn says, Charlie was unhappy at Gibralt.
He soon fled to his mother in Indianapolis.
It hurt Kathleen to send him back.
Oh... Can you hear it now?
Can you hear it? It hurt her so much to send him back.
Because she wanted to be codependent with her sodden alcoholic ex-carny boyfriend, husband.
It hurt Kathleen to send him back.
Then and later he described Gibalt as a terrible place where the priests hated him so much that they encouraged him to run away.
But she knew Charlie was undoubtedly lying.
Even so, he came close to persuading her that he'd learned his lesson and would never cause trouble again.
After a few hours, Kathleen steeled herself and took him back to Gibralt.
Around Christmas 1947, Kathleen and Lewis were at each other's throats and Charles was poised to spend the holidays alone at the school.
Ah, yeah, I remember that.
It's funny, and I don't mean to overshare with my own experiences, but I don't want to have a thought arise in me and then pass it aside, because you'll see that in my face and hear it in my voice, so...
When I was in boarding school, I have a strong memory of spending Christmas with like two other kids and some very depressed teachers over Christmas.
So, not wanting to leave him alone on Christmas, cousin Joe and Thomas suggested Charles spend the holiday with the Thomas family.
The family quickly regretted the decision as Charles stole Uncle Bill's handgun and his disruptions made an inconvenience of the entire holiday.
After 13-year-old Charles returned to Gibralt, He ran away once again, breaking into multiple stores in Indianapolis, stealing cash and renting a room before being apprehended.
Charles Manson It was a little over a hundred dollars, more money, than I'd ever had in my hands before.
I rented a room in skid robe, bought me some clothes, ate as much as I liked, and spent the money like there was no tomorrow.
A few days later, I was broke and hungry.
And a Democrat! No, I'm just...
I put that last one in.
After another thwarted robbery attempt, a judge sent him to the Boys Town Juvenile Facility in Omaha, Nebraska.
After only four days at the school, Charles escaped by stealing a car with another student and driving to Illinois to meet the student's criminally inclined uncle.
Now, here we're really entering Oliver Twist territory.
Along the way, Charles and the student obtained a gun and committed several armed robberies before working as thieves for the aforementioned uncle.
After a two-week crime spree, Charles was arrested during another attempted robbery and linked to the previous armed robberies.
In 1949, a judge sentenced Charlie to the Indiana Boys Reform School, which specialized in housing juveniles connected to crimes like armed robbery and manslaughter.
So he's drilling down, he's drilling down, he's drilling down to this.
Absolute bottom. Author Jeff Gwynne said, Some staffers were devoted to disciplining rather than encouraging.
Boys could receive whatever amount of physical correction adult staffers deemed appropriate.
This ran a torturous gamut from simple whippings with paddles to duck walking, staggering painfully about with hands clasping ankles.
And table bending, arching backwards with shoulder blades barely touching the surface of a table, just holding that position for a few moments ensured that a boy could not walk normally for hours afterwards.
Even youngsters who behaved suffered physically on a regular basis.
When staffers weren't paying close attention on school grounds during the day, or in dormitories at night, bigger, older inmates had ample opportunity to physically and sexually brutalize Smaller boys, for undersized boys like Charlie, the ultimate goal at Plainfield was not to reform, but to survive.
Charles Manson. Believe it or not, a great many of them are there to obtain an outlet for their own perversion.
Confinement and punishment are necessary in the present society, but having sadistic, perverted assholes working in an institution that is supposed to rehabilitate is the biggest bunch of bullshit going.
Charles Manson. The shop had regular workbenches around the walls, but in the middle of the room was a bench that was specially designed for what was to come next.
It was about waist-high on the average man, bare-ass I was told to lay across the bench.
I hesitated, and Clark, an educator, planted a boot in my ass and told the detail boys to anchor me down.
Each of the detail boys grabbed an arm or leg and spread me out, ass up, on the bench.
I was in proper position for one of two things, a fucking or a beating.
When Clark picked up a leather strap, I remember feeling relieved at least I wasn't going to get fucked in my ass.
The strap was made of leather, about three feet long, quarter of an inch thick, four inches wide, with holes drilled in the leather and a strong wooden handle.
He hit the bench next to my head a couple times to loosen himself up.
I about pissed, just out of fear.
Stretch him out, Clark said, and they all tightened their grip.
I found out later that if any of them let go during the lashing, they would get the same beating I was about to take.
Clark knew how to use that strap.
I wanted to shout the first time he laid it across my ass, but gritted my teeth and waited for the next blow.
After three more swats, the detail boy, holding my right arm, whispered, Grow no cry.
Don't try to be tough with this motherfucker.
He don't come until you cry.
Clark hit me twice more on that side, and whether I wanted to or not, I screamed and the tears burst loose.
He backed off and I was relieved because I thought he was through.
No luck. He was just changing sides.
I got an equal number on the other cheek.
When Clark was finished and the boys let go of my arms and legs, I didn't have strength enough to lift myself off the bench.
I just slid to the floor and lay there like a quivering puppy.
When I was able to stand, I noticed that none of the detailed boys would look at me.
But Clark had a grin on his face and with the strap still in his hand said, Manson!
We've been told you are a rotten little bastard.
And I'm here to tell you your ass is going to be full of scars before you leave here.
It was. In fact, it still is.
If you receive child abuse and it leaves actual physical scars on your body, it's very hard to outgrow that because the scars are always there to remind you.
Charles Manson said...
Back at the school, a guard gave me 30 lashes with the escape strap.
The escape strap was longer and thinner than the strap used by Clark.
It cut a lot more and brought blood instantly.
That lashing put me in bed for several days, and it was a couple of weeks before I could walk without wanting to lie down and cry.
Now, you do understand, everyone who's listening to this, who's watching this, I appreciate this.
This is going on all around you, all across the world.
This kind of abuse is going on all around you.
If we ignore it, we get blowback.
If we accept it and speak out against it, who knows how much evil we might avert.
Evil is not something that just magically appears in the world.
It must be summoned by brutality of sadists and indifference of the supposedly virtuous.
You want a virtue signal? Speak out against this stuff.
It's no longer a signal. It's reality.
Charles Manson said, About a week later, four of the bigger and older inmates cornered me in one of the feed bins.
Right away, I knew what they were up to.
I made a dash for the door, but two of the guys grabbed me and the other two stripped my pants off.
I fought like a wild man, struggling frantically.
I screamed and hollered, but they gagged me so that my screams were muffled.
Two of the guys held me while one tried to force his dick in my ass.
The fourth guy was standing point at the door watching for the man.
I broke loose but all four of them wrestled me to the floor and beat on me some more.
Two of them had time to rape me before the guy at the door shouted, The man is coming!
They tried to get away from the scene before fields arrived but they didn't quite make it.
I was crying and trying to get my pants back on.
All Fields said was, You know, I don't allow any wrestling.
You guys, get the hell out of here.
And you, Manson, go wash your face and stop all your crying.
After that, Fields himself started playing games with me like I was some joint punk available to anyone.
On numerous occasions, depending on his mood, he would tell me, Pull your pants down, Manson.
I want to see if you've been getting fucked.
First time. I thought he was just kidding, and I walked right on by him.
But he grabbed me and yanked my pants down around my ankles and made me bend over while he looked at my ass.
He always did this in the presence of several other inmates.
To add insult, he would pick up a handful of raw silage from the dairy floor, spit tobacco juice on it, and shove it up my ass.
"'I got him lubed!' he'd tell his pants,"'So fuck him if you get a chance!' The tobacco juice and silage burned and I got an infection from it, but the humiliation was worse.
Humiliation and rejection.
Humiliation and rejection.
Charles Manson went on to say, Carr was an ex-marine, a big son of a bitch, whose favorite thing was to run a jawline.
He had a couple different versions of his jawline.
One was to make two lines out of all the inmates in the cottage.
The lines were about four feet apart, good swinging distance.
The sucker being punished ran between the lines, while the others swung at him with closed fists.
If one of the blows knocked him off his head, he had to get up.
And try to get through again. If Carr thought someone wasn't putting enough force into his punches, that guy would have to run the line.
Carr's other jawline held more personal satisfaction for him.
He'd place you about 20 or 25 feet from him.
Double up his fist, hold his arm at your jaw level, and then say, Run!
You had to charge into that fist.
If he felt you hadn't charged at full speed, he would make you do it again and again until he was satisfied.
If the blows were severe enough to require medical attention, broken nose, cut lip or damaged eye, he would give you a pass to the infirmary, listing the cause of injury as slipped in the shower or fell while horse-playing.
Carr was another guy like Fields.
He'd turn his back while some of his snitching pets would try to fuck someone.
Jeff Gwynn says, During Charlie's time at the boys' school, his mother was not often in touch with him and may not have visited her son at all.
Kathleen was still trying to salvage her marriage to Lewis on several occasions.
Fed up with his drinking, she left him.
Though the length of their separation varied greatly from only a few days to a later, longer span of several years, Kathleen didn't find herself able to completely break away.
Kathleen didn't stop loving Charlie.
Instead, she hoped that reform school and professionals, expert in combating delinquency, might yet transform him into a better boy.
Just note the language.
She didn't find herself able to completely break away.
No. She chose a disastrous abuser, a drunken ex-carny, over her son.
Kathleen didn't stop loving Charlie?
What does that even mean?
How on earth would you know whether she loved him or not?
All we have is the evidence.
And the evidence is...
She was pretty indifferent to the guy.
If you send your child into a brutal rape dungeon because you want to hang out with your drunken ex-carny...
Sorry, I don't think there's a Hallmark card for that.
Charles Manson said...
At an age when most kids are going to nice schools, living with their parents and learning all about the better things in life, I was cleaning silage and tobacco juice out of my ass, recuperating from the wounds of a leather strap and learning to hate the world and everyone in it.
When I was 16, I finally made a successful escape with two other inmates.
You see why he wanted to get out?
And this is the law, you understand?
He's not trapped in a mafia dungeon.
He's not trapped in a criminal. This is the law.
This is where the law, the judge, and his mother, and the system have placed him.
Do you expect him to respect rules?
These are the rules. In October 1949, Charles made his fifth boys' school escape attempt with six other boys, and while some of the other escapees avoided immediate capture, Charles was quickly apprehended while trying to break into a gas station.
In February 1951, 16-year-old Charles tried to escape once again by sneaking off campus with two others, stealing a car and breaking into several gas stations for resources along the way.
The three boys were caught several days later at a police roadblock and faced federal charges for stealing a vehicle and driving across state lines.
After describing the significant abuse they were experiencing at the boys' school, they were ordered to attend the National Training School for Boys in Washington, D.C., until they were 21 years old.
But Charles was soon transferred to the Natural Bridge Honor Camp in Virginia on October 24, 1951.
This was, to some degree, a step up.
In February 1952, Charles was scheduled for a parole hearing, and if he avoided trouble, there was a good chance of him being released early at 17 years old.
Despite the previous bad experiences, the Thomas family had approached school administrators and promised to not only provide Charlie with a home, but to help him find employment.
In January 1952, Charles' chance of parole vanished as he was discovered sodomizing another boy while holding a straight razor to his victim's throat.
Consensual homosexual intercourse wasn't even allowed at the honor camp and the forcible rape led to an immediate transfer to the high-security federal reformatory in Petersburg, Virginia.
Between his January arrival at the Federal Reformatory and August 1952, Charles committed, quote, eight serious disciplinary offenses, three involving homosexual acts, sparking another transfer to a maximum security reformer in Chillicothe, Ohio. Administrators and psychological staff believe Charles Manson to be beyond rehabilitation and even worried about his suitability for the Chillicothe institution.
Sure, that pronunciation is wrong.
Administrative review of Charles Manson.
In spite of his age, he is criminally sophisticated and regarded as grossly unsuited for retention in an open reformatory type institution such as Chillicothe.
See? The guy was found sodomizing someone with a straight razor to the guy's throat.
I don't know that this is really the best place to put him, but the government is as competent in fixing children as it is at everything else.
having fallen as low as he could go in the reform system.
Things changed in the fall of 1952 when Charles stopped committing serious infractions and dedicated himself to academics.
Functionally illiterate, Manson worked to raise his skills from a fourth to a seventh grade level in a short period of time and applied himself to various mechanical work.
There are these moments, true or not, sustainable or not, there are these moments when Charles Manson appears to be terrified.
By the course he's going on and reform himself.
I mean, I had a very, as I mentioned before, a brief stint stealing things from stores when I was in my early teens.
And I, did I have some big moral awakening?
No, I just got scared. I got scared of the path I was on.
And have apologized.
Sorry, Mr. Gameways, I have apologized in a way by promoting property rights ever since and respecting them.
So there are these times where he's like, he seems to be trying to shake it off and turn himself in the right direction.
But, but, Shockingly, on January 1st, 1954, Charles Manson was presented with an award for meritorious service.
See, that's not a sentence I ever thought I was going to say in my life.
Four months later, the young adult previously thought beyond rehabilitation was released to live with the Thomas family, his grandmother, and occasionally his biological mother, who were now all in close proximity.
Upon release, Charles found work at low-end jobs and attempted to socialize with young adults from the local Nazarene church.
His grandmother required him to attend as a condition of occasionally living with her.
Socializing didn't go well as Charles tried to impress his new strictly religious peers with stories of stealing cars, reformatory fights, and even his experience shooting up.
I don't know what that means.
No particular evidence he used heroin, but this is what is reported.
Charles Manson said, All I knew was jail.
I couldn't talk about what school I'd graduated from or even gone to.
There weren't any yesterdays or last months that I could refer to without exposing my past.
For employment, I had to look for jobs no one else wanted.
I did janitor and bus-by work weeded gardens and worked in a service station or two.
I even shoveled shit and fed the horses oats at Wheeling Downs.
How do you reintegrate when half your childhood and the traumatizing aspects of your teenage years have been trying to survive rape gangs in government reform schools?
Author Jeff Gwynn says, On Halloween, the youth group had a combination costume party slash hot dog cookout at one girl's house.
For once, Charlie enthusiastically participated.
It was his first costume party, and he decked himself out as a carnival barker, complete with arm garter and a big black hat.
But when Charlie arrived, none of the kids, except the embarrassed young hostess and her cousin, would even speak to him.
He gamely posed with them for a photograph, but the rejection stung.
I gotta tell you, I don't...
I think it was the parents' job, the family's job, and the state who took him over his job to make Charlie a better person, which they made him a worse person, of course.
I don't know that it's the job of some kids having a party to welcome with open arms this guy who is a violent rapist, according to the report, right?
I just don't think it's their job at this point.
Well, we'll talk about that later.
The life of Charles Manson took a detour when he met the divorced and outcast cowboy Clarence Willis at the racetrack.
Cowboy and Manson hit it off, and before too long, Willis introduced the young man to his 15-year-old daughter, Rosalie Willis.
And the fine parenting continues.
Charles and Rosalie began dating, and after only a few months, they announced plans to get married, with local speculation suggesting the involvement of a secret pregnancy.
Ha! See the patterns, the swirly patterns?
I was talking about...
Mom gets pregnant at 15 and has to get married.
Charles, 15-year-old girl, gets her pregnant, apparently.
Charles Manson says...
The first girl I ever made it with, I ended up marrying.
She whispered, I love you, and goosebumps tingle all over my body.
I was loving someone and she was returning my love.
A huge void was being filled.
For the first time in my life, I felt I could conquer the world!
And again, you see, this is the lift up that presages the fall.
This is the hope which fuels the anger when it is inevitably violated.
On January 13, 1955, 20-year-old Charlie and 15-year-old Rosalie applied for a marriage license at the Marshall County Courthouse in Moundsville, both lying about their ages.
Rosalie's parents were required to give consent for their underage daughter to marry, and four days later, the young couple were married in a Nazarene church.
Kathleen Maddox didn't even attend her son's wedding.
Jeff! I thought you told me she continued to love her son!
Love. Didn't even bother to attend his wedding.
While the newly married Mr.
and Mrs. Charles Manson spent several months as typical newlyweds, Rosalie's pregnancy strained to the couple's finances and Charles supplemented his income by stealing cars.
You wouldn't want to be a car around Charles.
He's kind of crabby.
Charles Manson said, You know, it'd be kind of nice, be kind of nice, ladies, if you stopped having sex with really violent sociopaths like this.
Just a thought! Just a thought.
I mean, Charles Manson ended up with, what, 17 young girls that he had regular orgies with?
It'd be really, really nice if you didn't bang people yearning to set fire to the entire planet.
That would just be excellent, given, of course, that significant portions of the personality are genetic.
It'd be really, really nice if you aimed your sights heights just a little bit higher than someone like Charles Manson.
There are still people obsessed with the guy.
Didn't he get married shortly before he died?
I don't know. With his mother Kathleen having moved to the West Coast, Charles and Rosalie planned a visit, stole a 1953 Mercury, and drove across the country from Ohio to California because I guess they're just crazy about a Mercury.
Oh, I got that song in your head, didn't I? Sorry.
Shake it off. Shake it off.
Enjoying the West Coast, Charles and Rosalie stayed with Kathleen, who was separated from Lewis at the time, until a police officer discovered the stolen 1953 Mercury and arrested Manson.
While in custody, Manson admitted to transporting another stolen car across state lines, bringing about federal charges under the Dyer Act.
The judge involved with the case ordered Manson undergo psychiatric testing, and while finding that the suspect was a poor risk for prebration, the incentive of a new wife and upcoming fatherhood might encourage him to straighten himself out.
Manson also admitted to domestic abuse towards his pregnant wife during the evaluation, acknowledging that he needed to better...
Control his temper.
But she was a great kid, apparently.
On November 7th, 1955, the judge sentenced Manson to five years probation, despite his lengthy criminal background.
Manson wasn't legally out of the woods, though, as he still faced charges related to the second stolen car transported across state lines, but it is generally assumed that would have only led to additional years of probation.
Instead of facing the additional charges, Manson and Rosalie fled!
To Indianapolis, leading to a violation of his probation and a bench warrant to be issued in his name.
On March 10, 1956, Rosalie gave birth to Charles Manson Jr.
About four days later, Manson was taken into custody.
I guess thus the baby saw what Charles saw when his mother went to prison.
On April 23rd, 1956, Manson's probation was officially revoked and he was sentenced to three years in prison at San Pedro's Terminal Island Penitentiary in Los Angeles.
See, that's not the reason why the welfare state...
I mean, just throw money at these people.
Terminal Island was intended to house low-risk, non-violent prisoners, and with his new family waiting for him, Manson exhibited model behavior and was on a path to an early release.
Then suddenly, Rosalie Manson stopped visiting her husband in prison, and everything changed.
This is another one of these, can he make it out?
Can he get to the sunny side of the street?
Turns out, not so much.
Author Jeff Gwynn. Kathleen had to break the news to Charlie that his wife had moved out and was living with another man.
Charlie, who thought he understood women so well, was taken completely by surprise.
Rosalie soon returned to Appalachia with...
Her new beau taking Charlie Jr.
with her. Charlie was subsequently served with divorce papers.
His marriage was over.
Again, trying to reform.
Boom! Again, I'm not saying it's her responsibility to fix this guy.
But you understand. This is the mom.
His mom. This is Kathleen all over again.
Right? So Kathleen ends up shacking up with a new guy while she's pregnant.
In this case, the baby's born, but...
The bomber got pregnant at 15, is shacking up with a new guy, and he has become his biological father.
Charles Manson said, Those first few months I went about doing my time with a positive attitude towards becoming a straight person.
My wife wrote to me almost daily and came to visit as often as she could.
I marveled at her new son during our visits and knew that I would break my ass to give him a better childhood than I had gone through.
But... And it seems like in my life there has always been a but before the baby was a year old, she stopped visiting.
To this day, I have never seen or heard from her or the son that came from our marriage.
When I gave up on her, my attitude of wanting to be Mr.
Straight left me.
See, that's the passive thing.
You know, you can find her, right?
Or could have. He says, I also knew that the letdown I experienced when I realized I had lost her was a turning point in my life.
I figured, screw all that honest John bullshit.
I'm a thief. I don't know anything else.
And that's...
That's bullshit.
I say this confidently because he's dead.
But no, this is bullshit, right?
I mean...
What happens to you is one thing.
What you say about it to yourself and the meanings that you extract out of what happens to you is your choice.
Your choice. Please don't blame the environment for who you become.
Charles Manson never saw his son again, with Charles Manson Jr.
also meeting a terrible fate, committing suicide in 1993.
Despite an April 22, 1957 parole hearing, which would almost assuredly grant his early release, Manson attempted a prison escape on April 10th, 12 days to go, leading to his parole being denied and an additional five years of probation being added to his sentence.
On September 30th, 1958, Charles Manson was later released from prison due to overcrowding after serving two years and five months of his original three-year sentence.
Unsurprisingly, Manson didn't change his ways and instead began a new career with limited success, professional pimp.
No, I'm not talking about being a mainstream media reporter.
That is a total insult to pimps.
Only seven months later, on May 1st, 1959, Manson was arrested again when attempting to cash a forged $37.50 United States Treasury check that he stole from a neighbor's mailbox after foolishly admitting to obtaining the check via a mailbox.
Adding to an additional federal charge, Manson tried to dispose of the evidence.
Post-interrogation police report was, the check itself has disappeared.
The agents feel certain the subject took it off the table and swallowed it when they momentarily turned their backs.
I think it's committed.
Despite Manson's antics, the case against him proceeded.
On July 19th, 1959, Manson's grandmother Nancy Maddox died in West Virginia.
Author Jeff Gwynn, in mid-September, 19-year-old Leona Ray Musser met with Charlie's probation officer and informed him that she was pregnant with Charlie's baby.
She pleaded for the charges against Charlie to be dismissed.
Then she and Charlie would get married and he would go straight.
Leona wasn't pregnant. She was working for Charlie as a prostitute, but she managed to elicit sympathy from the parole officer and the court.
A deal was struck.
Charlie would plead guilty to forging the check, and the male theft charge would be dropped.
Manson was ordered to undergo additional psychiatric testing, and coincidentally was assigned to the doctor who described him as poor probation risk related to the previous auto theft charges, only to be later ignored by the judge.
This time, the doctor emphatically suggested Manson was a terrible risk for probation and recommended that he be returned to prison.
At Manson's trial, Leona Ray Musser again put on a tearful performance for the judge, claiming she was pregnant, and the judge bought it, sentencing Charles to a 10-year suspended sentence and releasing him on probation.
See, this is the origins of our capacity to act, not mine, but lots of other people's capacity to act.
Where does it come from? It comes from faking tears to elicit sympathy and manipulate people.
That's why so many actors are crazy.
Unfazed, Manson continued his prostitution business and was again arrested on federal charges for transporting women, including Leona, across state lines for the purpose of prostitution.
While that on bail, as authorities prepared their case against him, Manson was arrested twice by the LAPD for the use of stolen credit cards and grand theft auto, But both charges were later dropped due to a lack of evidence.
As Manson was about to be brought before a federal grand jury to face the prostitution-related charges, he married the now legitimately pregnant Leona to prevent either of them from being forced to testify against each other.
Facing federal charges and a second child seemingly on the way, Manson did what he typically did in the face of such problems.
He fled town to avoid the responsibility.
Pregnant and looking to avoid prison, Leona testified against Manson leading to a formal indictment, the revocation of his 10-year probation and a bench warrant being issued for his arrest.
On June 1st, 1960, Manson was arrested in Laredo, Texas and transferred back to California.
Weeks later, a Los Angeles court sentenced Manson to serve his previously suspended 10-year sentence at the McNeil Island Penitentiary in Washington's Puget Sound.
But Manson appealed.
So, looks like he's finally caught, and this growing stuff in the 50s, this sort of Marxist sympathy for criminals, or criminals are a natural outgrowth of the capitalist ownership of the means of production and alienation, labor theory of value and all this, you know, that it's environmental, that you can't blame the individual and so on.
This is one of the reasons.
And we swing back and forth in society from the sympathy for criminals to lock them up, save society.
In early 1961, Leona gave birth to Manson's second child, Charles Luther Manson.
See, you want the middle name to be your uncle, who beat a man half to death with a ketchup bottle.
A child that would never so much as meet his biological father.
Manson's appeal delayed his transfer to McNeil Island for nearly a year.
But after the appeal was formally denied in June 1961, he was off to prison.
At 26 years old, Charles Manson had been supervised in custody or on probation.
For nearly 14 years.
So, good job helping him, government.
And good job, Mom, for dumping him in that hellhole.
And also, by the way, not so good job Charles Manson.
The appeal just basically added another year to his sentence.
In August 1963, Leona served Manson with divorce papers seeking full custody of Manson Jr.
and the separation was formally approved in January 1964.
Manson had lost... Two wives and access to his two children while his mother Kathleen Maddox was dealing with the death of her mother and an increasingly erratic on-again-off-again marital relationship.
Kathleen made the effort to visit Manson in prison on a more frequent basis which only led to further heartbreak.
Without access to the traditional trades taught in prison due to his past behavior, Manson dedicated himself to playing music in the hope of developing a skill which would allow him to earn an honest living and Once he left prison.
Reportedly, Manson would practice guitar for hours a day and receive lessons from other inmates with musical backgrounds.
Charles Manson. After I got heavy into the music trip, I asked Mom if she would shop around and maybe spend a couple hundred dollars on a decent used guitar for me.
Her answer was, gee, Charlie, I'd really like to, but we don't have an extra dime.
For me to even visit, I have to steal from our grocery money.
Knowing what it's like to be broke, I told her, it's no big thing, and if you can't afford it, I understand.
Author Jeff Gwynn, the next time she came, she had a surprise for him.
Kathleen wished she could somehow go back in time and raise Charlie Wright.
That was impossible, but now that she was back with Lewis, she decided to give motherhood a second try.
So she came to visit Charlie at McNeil with an infant in her arms and proudly informed him that he now had a sister.
She and Lewis had just adopted the baby, who was named Nancy after Charlie's grandmother.
Charlie shocked Kathleen with his reaction.
How much had adopting the baby cost?
When Kathleen said the fee was $2,000, Charlie exploded.
How could she waste that kind of money on adoption when she just told him she didn't have enough money to buy him a guitar?
He shouted that he never wanted to see Kathleen or the baby again.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume that it was a government agency that approved the adoption of this little girl into the fine arms of Kathleen and Lewis.
When will we finally understand that government power turns absolutely everything to irredeemable shit?
Charles Manson said...
About two months later, my mom showed up for a visit with a little girl in her arms.
She greeted me with,"'Charlie!
Meet your little sister!'"'Wow!' I said.
"'How in the world did this happen?' Mom explained.
"'Well, for the last several months we've been trying to adopt a little girl.
Last month the agency informed us that they had found a child for us.
Isn't she the sweetest thing?' All kids are sweet to me, but at that moment, call it a jealous rage, or maybe just the memory of what my childhood had been like, there wasn't any joy in hearing my mother's words.
Especially when she told me the fees for the adoption had run well over two thousand dollars.
I flipped and said some pretty nasty things.
Fuck you and your daughter.
Two months ago, you couldn't afford a lousy $200 to buy me a guitar.
When I was a kid, half the time you were pointing me off on somebody else.
When the somebody else's ran out, you had a judge lock me up so there'd be no strings in your life.
You lied to me when you said you didn't have a dime.
Kathleen's second attempt at motherhood Went just about as well as you'd expect, with her eventually divorcing Lewis in May 1964 due to his rampant alcoholism and inability to keep a job.
In October 1965, Kathleen remarried once again.
She was always on the hunt for a husband.
It's funny because I thought generally parasitical proboscuses went out, but I guess in her case, it's kind of an innie.
While in prison... Manson turned to Scientology and credited it with helping him escape depression, although I think about after 150 hours of studying it, he thought it was kind of nutty even for him.
As Manson was being released in prison on March 21st, 1967, he actually asked if he could stay.
Charles Manson. I asked if I could stay.
That is true. I had spent the last seven years of my life looking forward to the day when I could get out.
I had dreams and plans, but as I was being processed for release, I knew the dreams would never be realized and the plans were nothing more than wishful thinking.
I told the officer who was signing me out, You know what, man?
I don't want to leave. I don't have a home out there.
Why don't you just take me back inside?
The officer laughed and thought I was kidding.
I'm serious, man. I mean it. I don't want to leave.
My plea was ignored.
I was 32 years old, and over 17 of those years had been spent in jail or some form of confinement.
Jeff Gwynn.
Modern experts in child psychology, juvenile justice, and the history of the American reform school system in the 1950s agree that Charlie's adult pattern of law-breaking and violence was virtually guaranteed by the experiences of his childhood.
He had no nurturing father figure.
While his mother loved him, Kathleen often battled her own demons at the expense of her son's emotional security.
Just battling her own demons.
No choice, no agency, no responsibility.
No equality. Charles Manson.
Would it change things to say I had no choice in selecting my mother?
Or that being a bastard child I was an outlaw from birth?
That during these so-called formative years I was not in control of my life?
Hey listen, by the time I was old enough to think or remember I had been shoved around and left with people who were strangers, even to those I knew.
Rejection, more than love and acceptance, has been a part of my life since birth.
Asking me not to break the rules of society is like telling your kid not to eat candy because it's bad for him.
The kid will continue to eat candy until you take it away, or until you prove why he shouldn't.
You also need to provide substitutes for the candy you have denied that child.
I was told often enough what was bad, but I was never given a substitute or the opportunity to try another world until I had already become so defiant and twisted I no longer cared about somebody else's right or wrong.
Ah, you see? Rational, peaceful parenting.
Out of the mouths of demons can come gems of truth.
You need to prove why he shouldn't.
You need to make a reasoned argument.
Who did? He said, By then, I could not see enough honest faces in the world to pattern myself after.
Your Bibles didn't mean anything to me.
A Bible had driven my mother from her home.
The people you chose to raise me beat and raped me and taught me to hate and fear.
From what I have seen throughout my life, the laws of the land are practiced only by the little guy.
Those who have money and success abuse every law written and get away with it.
Wow, ain't he the Hillary predicting prophet?
So when you think of Charles Manson, you can think, of course, of how you would have handled his childhood.
Put yourself in his shoes.
Who would you be like?
Who would you be or what would you be like if you had gone through what Charles Manson went through?
That is a very, very powerful question.
And it's not to excuse what Charles Manson did as an adult or his followers.
It is to prevent this kind of stuff from occurring in the future.
Who would you be if you'd been born with your brain into his body or your being?
What if you had been switched at birth and you had been raised in this environment?
Who would you be? What would you be like?
Would you be the person that you are now?
Birth is an accident.
Family is a roll of the dice.
And we better start learning this.
It gives humility to those of us who were raised well to recognize how lucky we were.
You're not all that great.
You're lucky to a large degree.
It doesn't mean you can't have pride in what you do.
But the real pride should be in recognizing how lucky you are and helping other people become better, helping the wounded.
This doesn't mean go and live among the refuse of society and subjugate yourself to their craziness.
We're talking about children.
Ask people in your life what their childhood was like and listen and empathize.
It's so, so important.
So yeah, by the time he became an adult, he needed to be in jail.
He needed to be in jail, and the state failed to keep him in jail.
The last point I want to make is that really fixing society is not about hitting kids.
It's not about throwing people in jail.
That, throwing people in jail who are adult evildoers, sure, that will diminish the amount of brutality currently manifest within society.
But that's sort of like...
Yeah, we can give people who are diabetic their insulin, but the whole point is prevention.
And prevention comes out of humility, it comes out of empathy, it comes out of understanding.
That if we wait until people are so broken, society itself can never be fixed.
Thank you everyone so much for listening, for watching.
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