By Mr. Curmudgeon
Everyone has read the horrendous events surrounding the Manson Family slayings. The History Channel recently told the story of the Tate-Labianca murders through interviews with those who were willing members of Manson’s clan. Central to the program was Linda Kasabian, the lookout during the Tate murders – who has been in hiding since her testimony sent Charlie Manson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Charles “Tex” Watson to prison in 1969. Her’s is a cautionary tail for weak-minded souls drawn into personality cults.
Kasabian’s friend Catherine “Gypsy” Share invited Linda to join the Manson cult when Kasabina’s marriage fell apart:
I told Linda that we were a group of people that took care of each other, and loved each other, and we were one…Linda was very quick and open to coming to the ranch..being with people who would love her and take care of her and Tonya (Kasabian’s baby daughter).
Spahn Ranch was very peaceful. Everyone was very loving to each other. Everyone was trying to get away from the cities and society.
Kasabian recalls Gypsy’s build up to meeting Manson:
She did mention that Charlie Manson…he was a man that everybody looked up to. She told me he was beautiful…and ‘he would take care of you and your daughter.’ It would just be lovely.
Linda Kasabina’s first act on behalf of her new family was to steal money from her husband:
I was willing to take money – I didn’t do it to hurt my husband – but for acceptance within the family. Stealing $5,000 from somebody was a major thing. It wasn’t like taking, you know, five dollars or stealing cigarettes out of your mom’s purse.
After I had brought the money back to the ranch, I finally got to meet him. Meeting Charlie for the first time was very exciting.
There was a magnetism about him – charisma, charm, power. He gave me the feeling that I would be cared for.
Linda Kasabian was a desperate person looking for someone to care for her and her child. She found a community that offered the trappings of a traditional family. It was a small step to pinch others money to deepen the acceptance of her new “family” and its leader. Such is the nature of personality cults. Unlike traditional families, where love is freely given, counterfeit families charge admission. It includes abandoning any sense of individuality to advance the interests of the group. The price that is paid is usually at someone else’s expense. Does any or all of the above have a familiar ring to it?
Nowhere is this desperate need for a counterfeit family more on display than at Obama’s Organize for America website:
The American People Are on the same page, and We all want better lives, healthcare, peace prosperity, and security. The American people are unified and are walking in complete solidarity when it comes to the Great People of the United States of America Advancing to greatness and prominence.
That’s quite a declaration. The assumption that everyone agrees unquestioningly with Charlie…err, Obama, is nothing short of stunning.
Of Manson, former Los Angeles assistant district attorney Vincent Bugliosi said:
He was a very…sophisticated con man…but he tried to cleverly masquerade behind the common image of a hippie.
Manson’s strength was his ability to attract the weak to his family in order to dismantle what little remained of their individuality. He could then exploit them for his purposes. A community willing to be “organized” by definition isn’t comprised of people willing to think for themselves. Linda Kasabian said of Manson:
I eventually felt very safe and protected. We were like his children…we were his children.
That “safe and protected” family was willing to perform unspeakable acts at the bidding of its counterfeit father. For the soulless thralls at Organize for America, the United States of America is nothing more than a transcontinental Spahn Ranch.
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