Lorraine Ali’s piece “Charles Manson was a white supremacist. Why can’t pop culture seem to admit it?” published in today’s Los Angeles Times makes an important point: the late Charles Manson was an unrepentant white supremacist. And as Ali notes, this point is not as well known as it should be, and Hollywood is a big reason Manson’s racist motivations continue to be overlooked. Ali writes about the recent Quentin Tarentino film Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood and the Netflix crime drama Mindhunter, and notes that both of them:
decline to seriously confront Manson’s white supremacist ideology — or unpack the role it played in his cult and his crimes. Manson remains a riddle, so untouchable that he scarcely appears in Tarantino’s film, while his motives for murder baffle the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit in “Mindhunter.”
It shouldn’t be surprising that the FBI and other US law-enforcement agencies are so often “baffled” by white supremacists — after all, the FBI etc. are conservative organizations, they have long underplayed the white-surpremacist threat, and they continue to be baffled about how to defend against it. But why are Quentin Tarentino and Mindhunter creator Joe Penhall signing on to this “we’re baffled about Manson’s motivations” bushwa? The Manson Family’s depraved crimes were motivated by Manson’s “prophecies” of an apocalyptic race war. Why suppress such an essential fact about this evil, evil man?