Fourth Reich Archaeology - #070 - UNLOCKED - She Harvey Oswald, Part 2, Side B

Episode Date: November 21, 2025

We are back with another installment of “She Harvey Oswald,” our ongoing miniseries about the two women who pointed a gun at President Gerald Ford in the fateful month of September 1975.  This week we continue our exploration into the life and times of the first of these two, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme.  This episode is “Side B” to part 2 of this miniseries, which covers Squeaky’s origins and which was only available to our P@treon community until today. Recall that in Side A, we started at the beginning, with Squeaky’s upbringing in the contradictory world of Westchester Los Angeles where the barbecues and manicured lawns were financed by the barbecuing of human flesh by the warplanes and munitions fabricated by southern California's booming aerospace industry.  It was against this backdrop that Squeaky developed a rebellious streak while in the custody of an overbearing and mentally unstable father.  As Squeaky entered her teenage years, the tensions at home escalated and she ultimately moved out of the house entirely. In Side B, we pick things up with Squeaky just as she is first approached by Mr. Helter Skelter himself, Charles Manson.  Manson clocked Squeaky on a bench at the beach, crying and distraught over her blowout fight with her dad.  From here, Squeaky would go on to join Manson and his growing “family” of girls, on a trip up to the Bay Area and the redwoods of Mendocino in the summer of love, 1967. Throughout their trippy times in the North, Charlie and the girls frequented the infamous Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, which the likes of Dr. Jolly West had turned into a recruitment center for test subjects; a laboratory for human experimentation on unwitting, disposable hippies.Squeaky’s coming of age under the wing of Charlie Manson gives us yet another sharpened lens through which to view the consolidation of the fourth reich, the integration of the spectacle, and the preemptive destruction of the burgeoning movement for radical social change that characterized the 1960s and 70s.Let’s get digging.

Everyone says, we know what you were doing with all those women. I said, no, you know what you would have been doing with all those women, and you think that's what I would be doing with all those women, because that's what you need to think. See, here's another thing you guys don't understand. thing you guys don't understand. You've got an underworld and an old world. You guys live in the old world. I live in the underworld. It's like you think the second war is over. Second World War is not over. You understand what I'm telling you? The second war is not over. Is Charlie

man some crazy? Or whatever that means, sure, he's crazy as man as a hatter. What difference does it make? You know, a long time ago being crazy meant something. Nowadays, everybody's crazy. So, I mean, you know, You know, synonymous, I mean, I heard me, man, for a pair of ducks. I mean, are you crazy? Dressed in black? You think I don't know everything that goes with that black and dressed me? Colonialism or imperialism, as the slave system of the West is called, is not something that's just confined to England or France or the United States.

Every nation, in every region, now has it. decision to make. It's one huge complex or combine. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. And this international power structure is used to suppress the masses of dark-skinned people all over the world and exploit them of their natural resources. We found no evidence of conspiracy. foreign or domestic, the Warren Commission, the science.

I'll never apologize for the United States of America. Ever, I don't care what the facts are. In 1945, we began to require information which showed that there were two wars going. His job, he said, was to protect the Western way of life. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders the more easy victims of a big lie than a small one. For example, we're the CIA.

Now here's a mile. See, there's so long as it died. Freedom can never be secure. It usually takes the national crisis. Freedom can never be secure. Pearl Harbor. A lot of killers. You get a lot of killers.

Why you think our country's so innocent? Now here's the CIA. Now here's a mom. My design. National global. Big Deadport flash is coming. This is Fourth Reich Archaeology. I'm Dick. And I'm done.

Welcome back to our show. We're so glad to have you here with us today. We promise you it's going to be a good one. This week we are coming at you with another installment of our series within a series, She Harvey Oswald. Now, Shee Harvey Oswald is our exploration into the life and times of the two women who in September 1975 pointed the respective pistols at President Gerald Ford and pulled the trigger. And they were convicted of trying to kill the accidental president. And our goal with this series is really try to figure out how,

it came about that these two women did what they did and what it all means for our broader look into the presidency of Gerald R. Ford as he operated in the Fourth Reich. So we've been taking these would-be assassins in order and have started our exploration into the first of these women who is Lynette Squeets Frommi, or as the Germans would say, Fromme, and we have been following her life, starting from her origins in Southern California as a daughter of a military contractor for that infamous government contractor, Northrop, which later became Northrop Grumman, of course, and we have been doing a bit of scene building, and that's exactly what this episode

is going to cover. This episode is Side B of our squeaky origin story. So, in fact, many of you, many of our Patreon listeners will have already received this episode as part of our Patreon. And that brings me to our moment of gratitude and preliminary housekeeping matters. First and foremost, I want to say thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who has. like the pod, who has subscribed to the pod, who has commented about the pod, whether that is online or dare I say in real life. Thank you very much to every single one of you out there in the Fourth Reich Archaeology community. Now if you are able and so inclined, please head on over to Patreon and give us a donation today in the amount that you think is.

fair, because we are a fully ad-free and listener-supported program here. We strive to continue to be that, and the only way we can do it is through donations, through financial support from listeners like you. Now, there are some perks on the Patreon. We do shout-outs. I'll do a shout-out in this episode at the end of the episode to our supporters, and we also give out early releases. For example, this one today, if you were a Patreon subscriber,

you would have gotten it when it came out, I don't know, maybe a month ago now, because this is part B of the Squeaky Origin story, and for those of you listening only to the free feed, you'll note that we're well past Squeaky's origins in this series. So it's another incentive to please, If you can get on to Patreon and join our community there. We love our Patreon family.

We have an embarrassment of riches, I will say, when it comes to our listener community, some of the most insightful and intelligent and creative people that I've seen online today. And speaking about being online, I want to say that we do have social media accounts. We have an Instagram and a Twitter or X. or whatever account at Fourth Reich Pod. And last, we do love hearing from you. So if you are so inclined, please write us. We do have an email.

Our email address is forthrightepod at gmail.com. So please write us. Tell us what's on your mind. We'd love to hear from you. Turning to today's episode, it is, again, this is side B of our squeaky origin story. And inside A, we started right at the beginning with Squeaky's upbringing in the, some would say, contradictory world of Westchester, Los Angeles. This is the quintessential dystopian suburban community, one with barbecues and manicured lawns.

And it is where her father decided to settle the family because, again, he was an employee of the military. contracted north of aircraft which is of course the company that developed the aircraft the warplanes the aeronautic sciences that the military industrial complex of the 20th century just gobbled up and so you had squeaky growing up in this suburban dystopian community and of course as would just about anybody she rebelled as a young girl and in Inside A of this origin story, we saw that as Squeaky grew up, the tensions with her father, they just became so great that there was eventually a blowout fight in which Squeaky, who was still a teenager, decided to set out on her own. But little did she know as she was running

away from her father, her abusive father, who gave her so much trouble in her childhood. But little did Squeaky know that when she was running away, she was also running to, straight into the arms of Mr. Helter, Skelter, himself Charles Manson. And that's where we'll be picking up today with Squeaky out on her own for the first time in her life, truly free, looking out at the Pacific Ocean. when wouldn't you know it? She is approached by the man himself, Charlie Manson. And with that, let's get there. Have this girl down Have the scale down

Have this girl down Yeah I guess at this point we should say when Charles Manson approaches Lynn he's not like decked out in the hippie wear that we all imagine in our mind's eye when we think of Charlie Manson but instead he's sporting this like neatly cropped haircut

clean shave he's wearing a suit like a prison issued suit but he looks for all intents and purposes, like a normie, right? And at the time, he didn't really have the following, the family that he eventually is able to cultivate. I think he just had one other girl with him, right? Mary Brunner, who was the librarian from San Francisco.

That's right. Yeah, and she wasn't with him when he approached squeaky he was I think back down in southern California he had been released from prison in March of 1967 and had gone up to San Francisco for mysterious reasons to report for parole, it's mysterious because why wouldn't he just report for parole at the federal parole office in Los Angeles? There's a lot of reasons that that might be. Yeah, like usually that's the case, right? Like, they don't even want you to leave when you get out, like, you're supposed to stay where you are. Yeah, exactly. So he's there back down in the,

Southern California, having been in San Francisco for a little bit of time, sometime in the spring of 67, right on the precipice of the summer of love. And Dick, maybe you want to talk about this first conversation that they have, but it is just your classic case of a conversation with very different implications from the perspectives of the two different people that are involved in the conversation, like a very rashamon, prospectival divergence here as to his motives and meanings versus what Lynn perceived. But you want to walk through what he told her? Yeah.

So it's really, I mean, this is one of those moments where it's like really shows you that Charlie Manson was like, it's like not this shaman guru type, but really instead like a trained pickup artist or something like that, right? Because he goes up to her and he's wearing his, his, you know, prison issued suit, this sort of a fantasy. fancy bum look and she's on this bench yeah that was the words that she used to describe how he looked a fancy bum yeah and she's looking out at the ocean and he's like he immediately asks her like if her old man had kicked her out which she says she perceived as some sign of like clairvoyance on his part that he could really just see what was going on with her right and in reality it's It was a guess that's with like a 90% 95% chance of being correct given the time, place, you know, look and age of the girl he was talking to.

And Charlie Manson fully knew that, right? Like this is a guy who at that point had spent time in jail with sex traffickers, right? with pimps and he was very keen on learning the ways of sort of picking up on tells and picking up on context clues and all of that and using that to win friends and influence people and some of you might pick up on the fact that I'm talking about the Dale Carnegie book which again was something that Charlie Manson was a big fan of this sister. of being able to immediately recognize what makes a person tick just on these context clues and then also how to make a person feel seen using largely those same cues and also just

some tools to help along the way. So, you know, when Charlie Manson meets Lynn, he explains to her that he had spent most of his life behind bars and that now he was out helping people free themselves from the prison-like mental strictures imposed in the so-called free world yeah and just to hammer home like how obvious it would have been to him that Lynn was likely a runaway. She, as we mentioned, had really bright red hair, really extremely pale skin, and had been crying on a bench, looking at the ocean with a bag full of her books and some clothes and whatever she took out of her house when she was ordered to vacate by her dad. So a person with that physical appearance, you know, we all know

and love our ginger brothers and sisters. And crying, she would have had a lot of red in her face and her eyes, maybe even those characteristic splotches of red. in the rest of her skin and exude a real disturbed aura about her. So there's, and the fact that she, even 50 years later in writing her memoirs still imbues this interaction with some spiritual element or perceptiveness on Charlie's part says a great deal about how little she has glommed on to his ways over time and how much she has remained under his spell. And that's something to keep in mind for when we do get back to 1975.

but the pimping stuff continues a pace in this initial interaction so the next thing that he tells lynn is that he came down from the hate ashbury district in san francisco and that up there i'm known as the gardener because i water all the pretty flowers which like the fact that she wasn't creeped out by this is also kind of telling yeah so needless to say he convinces lynn to join him squeeze into a car with a couple of other itinerants and move up to the Bay Area. Before we continue the discussion, we are now going to delve a little bit into some of the relevant aspects of Manson's background and activities around this time.

But a disclaimer before we do, this is not a Manson podcast series. This is not a true crime exploration of the Manson crimes. We are going to consciously try to stay away from getting too deep in the weeds of all of that stuff just because it is such a deep rabbit hole. And there's a lot of other places where you can find... More information on that if you're looking for it, you know, in addition to the books that I mentioned and that other Pynchon focused podcast, there's also a podcast that I've listened to and found to be very well done by friend of the pod Dana Duda, aka Rodding Jewels, which is known as what is the process. podcast and you can find that on your podcast app if you want the deeper exploration of the Manson stuff but we're going to try to keep our discussion of Manson

limited to matters relevant to squeaky that will be important to be important to consider on her path to September 75. So in 1967, fresh out of the Terminal Island Correctional Facility, Charlie Manson was 33 years old, and he had spent the better part of his life in prison in some way, shape, or form. Most of his hard time was served in federal prison, which is kind of unusual for a petty criminal like himself typically well over 80% of prisoners are in state custody and prison was the main source of schooling for charlie you know he didn't really attend school a public school system

growing up charlie of course many of you already know had a very troubled upbringing as you know a child being ferried from house to house on the east coast in west virginia but the important point here is that it's in con college that charlie gets most of his education it's where he learns music it's where he learns the lingo and the style of the con man of the crooks and importantly it's where he learns the basics of manipulation, of mind control, of commanding the room. And part of this comes from his exposure to Scientology, from a cellmate who taught him the basics of what Scientologists call auditing, which is basically like aggressive questioning to wear down a person's defenses, like really invasive, aggressive questioning. And prison,

was also where Charlie learned the art of pimping, which, of course, we all know, ain't easy. And it wasn't easy for Charlie. I think the official line is that, you know, he wasn't very good as a formal pimp, and that's why he gave it up and decided to do something else. I think he got in trouble for it, too, but he wasn't very successful as a pimp. And pimping, of course, is a ancient practice of manipulation and mind control of men over women and finally he was subjected to hypnosis in prison and apparently became practiced in hypnotizing others and I guess there is an incident where he hypnotized

the actor Danny Trajo yeah yep But let me tell Charlie wasn't the guy that you saw on the TV specials, all right? He was a, God, he was like 5 foot 4, 5 foot 5, a little scrawny. He was poor, kind of like a bum, really. Some of the prisoners were going to take advantage of him because I'd take advantage of anybody in small. And we found out that he could hypnotize.

you. So we let him sleep in front of our cell to, you know, to make sure that nobody had hurt him. And he got us loaded on weed. And then he got us loaded on weed. And I said, well, get us loaded on heroin. So the three of us tried to get loaded on heroin. He got two of us loaded on heroin. One guy just woke up. And after I asked him, how come, why come he couldn't do him? And he said, he asked, did you ever get loaded on heroin? He said, no. But your mind, doesn't know how to work you understand your mind doesn't know how to react if i tell you to do something while you're hypnotized and you haven't done it before or you don't know how to do it uh you'll just wake up and that's what we kept happening yeah so you're saying that he got he got you guys

loaded up on heroin or weed but there was no heroin or weed in the room right he was doing this purely through hypnosis people know when i get loaded on heroin, my eyes, I get red under my eyes. And that's like, literally, uh, the first thing, you throw up, you dump. And I mean, uh, me and Chato, he's like, it's like, we both got moa. He dumped in the sink. I dumped in the, in the, in the toilet and looked like, hey, what's you know what you know what? And, and, oh, everybody was like, shocked. And it bears mentioning again, you know, this is, you know, this is. not unique to Manson. This is all atmospherics to establish that he's a product of his time, right? This is the height of the CIA's M.K. Ultra research, and it's a time when otherwise well-intentioned people in the psychiatric profession are seeking.

to cure maladaptive antisocial behaviors through these techniques, and oftentimes even the practitioners of this type of research were naively unaware of its roots in Nazism, its development, in the concentration camps and the fact that those Nazi scientists became a part of the establishment in the United States to undertake these experiments. And, you know, anybody conversant in M.K. Ultra will know that federal inmates, federal prisoners like Charles Manson, were often used as the pool from which to draw test subjects. And again, we don't really have the documentation. Remember that in 1973,

CIA director Richard Helms, who was introduced to our listener, certainly, in the Warren Commission series, having served as a CIA liaison to the Warren Commission, he ordered the files pertinent to M.K. Ultra to be destroyed. So we really only have drips and drabs of the documentary record of this stuff, which is partly why so much mystery shrouds the action. degree to which Charles Manson and the crimes that he's associated with have some intersection with intelligence operations and mind control research right there's a lot a lot of reasons to believe that there is a connection and those reasons are set forth most

comprehensively, albeit perhaps still incompletely, as many of his critics have pointed out, by author Tom O'Neill in his book, Chaos. And in that book, I think we wanted to cover a few of the highlights just because we ultimately are faced in this series with the perhaps unanswerable question of whether and to what degree was squeaky Frommies alleged attempt on Gerald Ford traceable back to an op of some sort. And in order to inform our exploration of that question, we'll need to take just a high-level tour through Charlie Manson's association by innuendo with the deep state, right? So in 1967, the same director Helms starts up Operation Chaos in the CIA.

This is similar, though of course not identical to what the FBI was doing with its counterintelligence program co-intel pro that had been going on at this point for several years, namely the goal was to infiltrate, sabotage, and otherwise disrupt and disable the counter-cultural and revolutionary movements that had popped up like so many mushrooms across the United States in the 1960s, in order to prevent a real serious challenge to the capitalist mode of production and to the American way of life based thereupon. So a few of the key facts that we do know about Operation Chaos and its potential tentacles into the world of Charlie Manson,

are first that we already mentioned, Manson was inexplicably sent to San Francisco for parole rather than Southern California, which is where he was released. And his parole officer was a guy named Roger Smith. O'Neill writes a lot about Smith in his book and describes how he was acting more like a handler of Manson than a parole officer. For example, Charlie was continuously getting himself arrested and into trouble when he was out in the free world and whereas ordinarily parole officer would seek revocation and would facilitate their purpose. rollee being locked back up given the high risk of recidivation that is suggested by the

commission of additional crimes uh well roger smith instead let charlie walk he helped him get off and he was constantly lending charlie money entertaining charlie in his home uh he even tried to enable Charlie to leave the country and was always signing off like a rubber stamp on any ask that Charlie put to him to leave the jurisdiction of the Federal Parole Office of Northern California. And it got to the point where Charlie didn't even bother checking in because he knew that Roger Smith wasn't going to hold anything against him and dick you want to talk about why roger smith may have been so lenient and what other activities he was up to besides not supervising charlie manson not just not supervising but like enabling him yeah yeah i mean if you want to talk about

a big old question mark over someone's head it's like What is this P.O. doing in the hate Nashbury in the late 60s, in these popular hangouts for free-loving hippies? What's he doing in that milieu, right? Who's getting friendly with everybody where really his job function is supposed to be almost exactly the opposite of what he is doing? so smith rogersmith did maintain an office in the hate aspery free medical clinic which was this popular hangout for the hippies during the summer of love and beyond and manson came came there to check in with his poe and he also went there to get the free medical treatment that the clinic offered for himself and for his flock, where they would get treated for these typical STDs and other ailments common among the hippies of the time.

Now, the director of that clinic, David Smith, he was at the time conducting experiments on behavioral modification and the induction of violence using drugs and environmental manipulation now that sounds spooky to me and of course david smith denied receiving government funding for his work uh neil on the other hand uncovered documents showing that indeed the clinic was financed by cia cutouts yeah i think of david smith kind of like that character in Gravity's Rainbow because his experiments, at least as he wrote them up, pertained to rodents and rats and getting rats to commit violence against other rats. As I was reading that bit in chaos, I kept thinking of the scenes in Gravity's Rainbow with that scientist who has like the army of mice putting on musical productions and song and dance routines and everything.

And I think there is a little undercurrent in chaos suggesting that Smith, in fact, was relaying observations about human behavior potentially and projecting them onto the rats. But needless to say, it's a little bit on the nose that, using these drugs, in particular methamphetamines, and studying their effects on violent behavior, well, obviously that becomes highly relevant to what ultimately happens with the Manson, so-called family in the summer of 69,

a couple of years after their real locus in the hate in 67. Well, you stopped me in the middle of it, but, you know, there's more. The connections, they get deeper, they get stronger. So there's another fella hanging around the hate Ashbury Free Medical Clinic around this time, too, a guy who will be very familiar to our longtime listeners to our Warren Commission decided listeners, a guy who, who should be a household name for his nefarious influence on the consolidation of the Fourth Reich.

A guy who is very much not a friend of this pod. He's a hypnotist. He's a mind control consultant. He is the acid king. That's right. Everyone's favorite doctor. West. My name is Dr. David Smith. I've lived in this neighborhood since 1960. And I'm the founder of the Hade Ashbury Creek Clinic. So just this consciousness explosion that impacted on everybody, including me.

And then we start seeing all these bad trips. We were saying, well, you know, some of these people are freaking out. Nobody wanted to see the dark side of drugs. We start feeling ourselves as outlaws. Civil rights doctors trying to take care of the poor. Police were against his. Government was against us. We had to do it on our own.

Summer time will be a loving day. When I heard Jolly West, my money about the custody, And then I said, no, I got to kill an elephant with the last teeth. Yeah. So he had his own center in an apartment. He wasn't working with you or? Well, he studied people at our clinics. In a certain sense, he recruited subjects from our clinics.

He recruited subjects in our clinics. Such a strange vibration. And the epicenter of it was killed by speech. Speed kill not just a lot of people, but it killed a whole mood. And West basically used the free clinic as a lab, and he described it himself as a laboratory disguised as a hippie crash pad. So there you have it, folks. West was using this Hate Ashbury Medical Clinic,

as his own personal laboratory and so west often led patients from the clinic to another experimental CIA funded sigig he had going called the hate ashbury project nearby so he would take these hippies to a second location um and so while there's no documented proof that west ever met manson like we should be clear on that right the circumstantial evidence for sure effectively establishes the link right manson was reporting in this clinic and he is they're credible sources you know they're pointing to the fact that manson is regularly going to the hate ashbury freak medical clinic and all the time jolly west was there too and lucky for us Tom O'Neill has published a lot of his interviews on his YouTube channel,

and so there's a very interesting exchange where he confronts P.O. Roger Smith about Manson's potential connections with Jolly West. Roger Smith concedes and, in fact, boasts that he knew West, but, well, you can judge for yourself how credible Roger Smith's denial that Jolly West would have had anything to do with Manson is. He was working with, do you remember Jolly West? Actually, I met him, I think, when he was director of psychiatry to Oklahoma. And then he became director of psychiatrist in UCLA. Yeah. You know, he's the guy that killed me.

Yeah. You're the great story. Wonderful story. He always told it. And the only reason I got to know him was because as a result of that research, the dissertation that I did actually. I got on this kind of this professional circuit with psychiatrists and basic researchers who were looking at high dose and amphetamine news.

And Jolly West was very involved in that. His name keeps popping up in the Manson story. story and I don't know if they I have no idea why it would he was in San Francisco working at the clinic researching and David told me that he used the clinic to recruit subjects for his LSD studies I have no idea that was going on

yeah and I was wondering and so to just basically sum it all up and get us back to our main track in this episode It should be clear at this point that Manson, one, had a very developed background in mind control techniques learned during his time in federal custody. Two, Manson had connections to ongoing M.K. Ultra subprojects being run out of the hate in the late 1960s, in 1967 to 68.

And three, Manson was at a very minimum on the radar of, of Jolly West and other CIA researchers seeking to use LSD and other drugs to study the induction of violent behavior through drugs and mind control. Yeah. And now is probably a good time to build on this idea of Manson the Pimp that we have begun to develop. to introduce another aspect of Manson's game that it's often overlooked and it's also a quality that bears resemblance to more contemporary political deep issues of our day today, namely the fact that Manson's target demographic was very young.

you know there's a lot suggesting that there's a wide range of ages and that it really was not so targeted but we are talking about a wide range the upper end of which was like 24 25 i think the oldest girl that he got really close to him was sandra good who was 24 at the time that she joined up. And part of her appeal was that she came with a lot of money to the group. But on the younger end, he was looking at teenagers, many of whom were underage. And so Lynn, having been 18 years old, when she met Charlie, was already kind of on the upper end of the age range of the girls and boys that would enter the orbit of Charlie Manson over the subsequent couple of years that they were together and obviously the parallel that

I was referring to was to Jeffrey Epstein and I think those points of similarity will recur as we discuss the two years approximately that Squeaky spent with Charlie, but for now just put a pin on that parallel and consider that Roger Smith was also aware of Charlie's predilely. election for underage girls. He was aware of arrests with underage girls and still did the opposite of disciplining or reigning Charlie in. Yeah, and just to put like a finer point on that Epstein connection, which I think is a pretty good sort of analogy, the whole Manson operation, it wasn't just a.

like Charlie Manson picking up all these young girls like he would use others in the network like maybe the older women or the maybe the younger boys to carry out the like recruitment

right like he would rely on his you know the good looking people in his flock or the young looking people in his flock as weapons to further recruit. So where we left them off, back to our factual narrative, Lynn is in the backseat of a fully loaded vehicle, and it is en route northbound up the highway, that famous coastal highway of California

towards San Francisco and she is at this point pretty apprehensive but desperate I would say is her mentality she feels like she is above these people

and as she describes it her bourgeois programming is strongly giving her red flags in her mind that she should not be mixing up with this element. Nevertheless, she does, and she joins Charlie, these other people, one of whom, who is driving the car, is a rough-and-tumble sex worker that Charlie was pimping at the time named Darlene and the group of them all drove up and met with Mary Brunner

at her apartment in Berkeley that Charlie had made his home base at the time. Remember Mary Brunner, she was from Wisconsin. She was highly educated, had a college to go. was a professional librarian at the University of California, but not for long. I believe it was then in the summer of 67 that she quit her job and joined Lynn and Charlie on this real trip that kicks off in the summer of love.

They are surrounded by a rotating cast of girls and boys who come and go around them, but the nucleus, at least in those earlier days, were the three of them. They're in San Francisco. They are spending time at the Hate Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, and they also spend a lot of time that forms a real strong, wrong moment in Lynn's memory palace in the woods of Mendocino County among these old growth ancient redwoods and it is there where Lynn enters the acid lifestyle dropping acid a lot communing with nature and

expanding her sexual horizons with Charlie and with Mary, although interestingly, and this speaks to the real fallocentrism of the Charlie Manson thought. She was very clear that there was nothing homosexual about these sexual experiences that involved members of her same sex and that it was always about breaking down the ego and whatever. But what it's really about is keeping Charlie at the center, which is where he liked to be for all that Lynn in her memoir kind of evades that concept and

tries to make out like it was this great spiritual oneness I think that that's a little bit bullshit and there are

the woods, it gives Charlie the opportunity to isolate and try out some of his mind control techniques on these girls. And again, Lynn, we should be clear, she is very adamant that the only brainwashing that she ever got was her brainwashing into the bourgeoisie and into the consumerism of the 1960s that she received from her parents and from her schooling and that what she experienced with Charlie was a D programming but at least my take is it was more of a re programming and in the case of Lynn at this point in time there's nothing suggesting that she was sort of discreetly programmed to perform certain tasks, but rather that she was inducted into this way of thinking that essentially revolved around

Manson and his sort of faux guru persona, his Christ-like self-image, and his mystique of a genius totally unrelated to any formal education. What we'll call the Manson schstick. Yeah, exactly, exactly. It is a real schick. You know, all the while, at his core, just a con man sex trafficker. You know, he's out to get his nut, so to speak. But the group grows, right?

So they trade the van for a school bus a la Ken Keezy, and they travel around on what they call the magical mystery tour, which, you know, the Beatles album of the same name came out in November 1967. And during this time, they spend a lot of time at the so-called spiral staircase house in Topanga County, in Topanga Canyon, which, according to Ed Sanders book, the family, it was a hangout for Satanists and other occultists and all sorts of other outcast groups. And, you know, over the months and years, they pick up some new members. Pubescent teen by the age of 13 or 14 years old, named Diane Blake, was passed off from one roving hippie couple to the Manson group. a Scientologist by the name of Bruce Davis joined the group

of a wild child I would say maybe one of the more famous Manson family members Susan Atkins Susan Atkins A.k.a. Sadie Mae Gluts joins the group and

And then, you know, you have the 25-year-old Hollywood rich girl, Sandra Good. And they, you know, they go around the country. They, I should say, they go around the west and the southwest. They go from, you know, Las Vegas and Sacramento, sleeping in their bus in strangers' homes, outside in the forest, in the deserts. And they have this trip, right? and eventually though Charlie decides to take the gang back down to Southern California

back to the LA scene to set up some meetings with some record industry guys some meetings with guys in the recording industry and this promise that you know they were going to cut an album it's it's so poignant and so again just really really and the bullseye of the spectacle what they're up to on this trip right and it is so telling about this idea of the

manson schick that you mentioned and the distinction between the mythological understanding that kind of Manson was a unique figure or an innovator of this family, hippie, communal living lifestyle, when the opposite was true. He's just a spectacular representation of it and a particularly nefarious one at that. So first, if you go through the biographies of all of these people that kind of glom on to the group at this time to a person, at least for the women, right? The men have an obvious sort of libidinous motivation to join up with the promise of a lot of sex with these girls and drugs and rock and roll and freedom and whatever, but the girls

themselves like Diane Lake, aka Snake, by age 13 or 14, she had already been passed around by her hippie parents among other groups and subjected to all kinds of sexual abuse. The same goes for Sadie Mae Glutz, Susan Atkins, who the source of her fame was her professed bloodlust, right? She's the one who confessed to the crimes, the Tate La Bianca murders, with such vivid pride of accomplishment in the violence that she had meted out. And then Sandra Good, who was a little bit older and, like we said, came from a wealthy family. she also was a product of abuse and neglect her dad was like a stockbroker in southern California adjacent to all these celebrities and had spent her whole childhood in just

the most acrimonious marriage breakup imaginable that she was caught in the middle of and kind of left for dead by her narcissistic social climbing parents. So it just makes perfect sense that these sort of traumatized people would revolve around this father figure who's anywhere from 10 to 20 years older than they are at age 33, at the time and that they take off on this trip and they even painted the bus on one of these trips they painted it with the letters Hollywood Productions so the spectacle the simulation aspect of the whole thing and that they themselves conceived of it as an acting out of a Beatles song and album is telling about the degree to which this was a cultural

reproduction in action and it was being carried out by a guy with much different plans than the movement building or the consciousness expanding goals that his followers attributed to him. This was a guy who had evolved from being just a con man with a sort of buttoned up fancy bum persona to a hippie guru who could convince anyone of anything. And if you can do that, he thought you could be a rock star. And that was what he sought to be when he took the family back down south, where, as luck

would have it, they'd get in real tight with Dennis Wilson, the drummer of the Beach Boys. What do you think, Dick? Should we tie it off there and pick back up. up in sunny Southern California next time around. Before we do, I think it's time to give out our shoutouts to our Patreon family in the doctoral candidate and research assistant tears. We love you. We know you. We see you.

And everyone else is going to hear about you right now. Thank you so much to David, Frank, the Wizard of Choice, Fern, Caleb, Kelly, simply Antochie, Annie, John, Mike, Al, and Mick G. You want to do the honors? For now, I'm Don. And I'm Dick. Saying farewell.

And keep digging. Just to say your love's not enough. If you can't be true, you can tell those lies, baby, but you're on that fooling you. Can you feel those feelings real? Look at your game, girl. Oh, look at your game, girl.

If you can't feel, and the feelings ain't real, then you better stop trying, or you're gonna play crying. Stop trying, or you're gonna play crying. That's the game. Sad, sad game, mad game. Sad game. Sad game.

Sad game.