How Charles Manson Became a Hero of the American Far Right

gained no real traction at the time, but eventually its articles were gathered and bound as (1992), a book described by scholars of the far right as “required reading” for contemporary neo-Nazis, “a foundational text — one arguably rivalling even in contemporary fascist gravitas” and “a neo-Nazi Bible,” held responsible for the spread of online “SIEGE culture” and real-world terrorist networks.SiegeSIEGEMein Kampf

Today, therefore, this culture’s celebrated predecessors are Hitler, Tommasi, Mason himself, Manson. And is undoubtedly the key source for understanding the of Manson that dominates the far right. But to understand Manson’s own ideas during the years Mason was promoting him, the key source is a far less public one, namely, the astonishing correspondence between the two men.andideaSIEGE

Some years after first finding out about Manson, Mason finally reached out. He initially entered into correspondence with Lynette Fromme and Sandra Good, who were at that time still incarcerated themselves and still very close to Manson. They then made the introductions, and in 1981 Mason sent off an initial letter to Manson.

Thus began a correspondence that lasted a decade, maybe longer, and that offers an extraordinary point of access into Manson’s thinking during this period, reveals the extent to which it was Manson who determined the content of Mason’s writing in , and also makes clear where the two men’s respective ideas diverge.Siege

As Kathleen Belew has shown, it was broadly during this same period, between 1975 and 1995, that white power consolidated into a new social movement. It was not a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan but a movement that managed to bring together previously distinct and even mutually exclusive right-wing and racist groups.

And crucially, unlike earlier right-wing and racist violence, white power was directed against, rather than in defense of, the state. “The white power movement sought revolution and separation — the founding of a racial utopian nation,” writes Belew, who adds that many in the movement “connected ideas of a radical political future with belief in imminent apocalypse.”

The principal catalyst here was the Vietnam War or, rather, veterans who brought the war home, because they were traumatized, because they were inappropriately demobilized and reintegrated, and because they felt betrayed by their own government.

White supremacist Louis Beam, for example, who is credited with popularizing “leaderless resistance,” was a veteran who by his own account remained forever stuck in the “rice paddies and skies of Vietnam” and who recognized no difference between the enemy abroad and at home (and at home that enemy did include the state).

Many in the movement experienced the 1980s as a downturn, and certainly this was true of Mason. Names known to scholars of the radical right pepper his letters, but Mason’s incessant refrain is that the movement is in dire straits. For the far right, the 1980s felt like far less fertile soil than the early twenty-first century would prove to offer, though even then, during that new century’s first decade, Kaplan could still characterize the movement as “tiny and fractious.”

But Belew’s more recent retrospective gaze reveals an upward trajectory and a distinctly new, strident radicalism. “The old ways have failed miserably,” Beam wrote in his 1989 . “Out with the conservatives and in with the radicals! Out with plans for compromise and in with plans for the sword!” At that point, Mason had been railing against conservatism in the movement for about a decade, often in radically antipasséist language influenced by Manson.Essays of a Klansman

When Mason first began mentioning Manson to others in the movement, it did not go over well. Though some simply dismissed it — “I’ll consider that this is your latest fantasy and that it’ll be gone in a couple of months” — others fretted: “Now you’ve got me scared,” said one, and another, “Does he plan to become a party member?”

But for that very reason, according to Mason, Manson could serve as a kind of litmus test, or “threshold,” something to separate the wheat from the chaff: “Manson represents the great divide between those persons who imagine there still are choices to be made casually on the basis of Establishment mores and those who have a profound, individual sense of ‘no going back.’”

Besides, there was the matter of brand recognition and impact: “Charles Manson exerts a fascination over Youth today, in the entire West.” So, undeterred by the fact that movement veterans were nervous about having a notorious murderer and madman join their ranks, Mason continued to promote Manson in : “I have done what I could to inject — subtly and overtly — as many of Manson’s ideas into Movement thought as possible,” he wrote in 1986.Siege

Indeed he had, and frankly it has not been sufficiently appreciated how extensive was Manson’s influence on Mason, a man whom scholars of the far right have characterized as “one of the most influential ideologues to rethink fascism in the face of twenty-first-century realities.” Comparing the correspondence with the newsletter, it is clear that Manson’s language came to shape Mason’s.

Mason really leans into Manson’s discourse of authenticity, for example, so that increasingly enemies inside the movement come to be called “fakers” who are “role-playing” and so on, and Manson himself is identified as the exemplary “Non-Faker.” Very obviously too — and this matters in terms of tracking the movement’s new radicalism — Mason’s modernism came from Manson, a man forever obsessed with being “new” and “now” (or “nuness,” his neologism meaning “no past or place in the past and no thought of future”).

“The most important word is NEW! You can’t carry the past into a NEW world,” Manson wrote to Mason. This is also why Manson chides him for any idolatry of Rockwell, or of Hitler for that matter: “If you got no dead heroes, you can be yourself more.” “Your [] dragging the past on your back,” he warns him, then counsels with the rather Baudelairean “if you’re trying to march Wagner’s music back through with a marching band dressed in 1814 garb you wake up negative thought” and “Fat sloppy people in German dress with armbands on don’t help.”sic

Soon Mason can publish a line about “the entire Right Wing” that might as well have been written by Manson: “If they haven’t been living in 1933, they’ve been living in 1865.” Modernism was also why Manson urged Mason to drop the name National Socialist Liberation Front — “That’s preposterous and it has to go,” he quotes Manson — and adopt instead the name Universal Order. “One world. One government. One mind.” One index finger.

Universal Order had a long shelf life. “As we move farther towards the Universal Order, we become more on the offensive with our world view. Wild wishes for the end times,” read a website launched in the 2010s.Siege Culture

But according to Nikolas Schreck, Manson had already broken with the Universal Order in the late 1980s, and in retrospect one must wonder about the fact that when Manson recommended the name change, he did also insist that Mason swap out his emblem’s right-facing swastika over an automatic weapon for a left-facing swastika between a set of balancing scales.

Though in the aftermath of the Tate–LaBianca murders no one on the Right recognized themselves in the Family, in retrospect of course one can see why Manson seemed to Mason a kindred spirit, obviously starting with the swastika, even if it did face the wrong way for a Nazi. There was also Manson’s allergy to miscegenation, including repeat references to the figure of the black rapist and the need to “save” white women and children, both well-worn white racist tropes.

To the extent that it meant an imminent, apocalyptic war of the races, “Helter Skelter” must have seemed simply a traditional truism to Mason, who overlooked the fact that Manson and the Family believed that black’s victory over white was karma, and instead focused on promoting the Tate–LaBianca murders as a political attack on the degeneration of a formerly white system.

But the crucial element was what Mason imagined Manson’s political project to be:

Of course, Mason’s embrace of Manson may have looked mad to more traditional American Nazis in the 1980s, which were after all the heyday of Manson’s most infamous performances on national television, but politically none of this was at odds with the increasingly alienated white power movement.

In other respects, however, Charles Manson did not fit well within the white power movement. Manson was never an anti-communist, and to put it mildly, he disliked the (Christian) church. His “Family” was far from nuclear, he promoted free love, and he was neither straight nor cisgender.

He and the Family partook in the romanticization of the Old West, imagining themselves as cowboys and Indians and pioneers at Spahn’s and in Death Valley, but unlike white power ideologues, Manson never saw this land as “empty.” And while Manson was a fan of the founding fathers, he was sooner a supporter of Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa than of the movement-supported Contras in Nicaragua. So even if he was happy to erase the boundaries between war and peace at home, Manson was not a supporter of American empire.

a racial-socialist colony in Death Valley . . . TRIBES of White Warriors, bands of White Men with their Women and Children who have drawn together and then pulled away from the System to allow it to fall without taking them with it.

Above all, Manson did not overlap with the white power movement on the environment, so that although Mason adopted Manson’s Death Valley–based survivalism, environmental degradation had little to do with it. And this also filtered right into their most basic divergence, which Mason summed up in a 1983 issue of as follows:Siege

Indeed, in multiple letters, Manson corrected what he thought was Mason’s understanding of Manson’s views on race or otherwise differentiated those views from Mason’s. Mason’s views are quite straightforward, informed by a white supremacist means-end utilitarianism. Manson’s views, meanwhile, remained contradictory as ever.

On the one hand, he continued to believe that races are best maintained rather than mixed and, as of old, recommended that one should only have sex by race: “Only put that rod in something that looks like you,” he writes, and “I’ve only fucked white guys” (though he immediately adds he also “fucked a phony Jew when I didn’t have better sense” and in another letter that he “even fucked a cow once”). But as in the 1960s, he argued that this was as much to preserve other races as it was the white race because, historically, miscegenation had led to the disappearance of people of color.

Plus he continued to hold whites in contempt above all others: “There is no white people in the truth,” he writes, and “I get more respect from black brown yellow + red more than I do my own,” or he might snark about “this white pride B.S.” He insists that, from fear of black people, whites use other whites to defend themselves — “You wouldn’t believe the things they have done to me with their fear of black people” — though often, such whites appear in his letters as “PJs” and “PCs,” meaning “phony Jews” and “phony Christians,” that is, categorized along lines of authenticity.

He tells Mason that he has a friend who is Jewish, and that he feels “they have a place in this world. The real Jews do.” “Look,” he writes in 1986, “I never ask my people to hate anyone because of race.” In fact, as in the 1960s, Manson’s imagination still settled on a “separate but equal” elite order, but by the 1980s it had hypertrophied, somehow become even more maximalist and militarized. So, whereas James Mason would “send black back” — to Africa presumably — Manson countered with this vision:

This is an astonishing rainbow-fascist, eco-totalitarian dream of epic, even biblical, proportions. But it’s not King Charlie ruling a black planet, nor the James Mason–inspired whites-only world promoted by SIEGE culture.

The Manson people look upon and accept the NS Movement in America with curiosity, some admiration and some dismay. “Hate,” they say, “is not going to get it.” Trying to live in another time and place isn’t going to get it either. To our charges of a monstrous, Jewish conspiracy, they simply counter with the stated belief that people today have a death wish for themselves. We say that without unpolluted, White blood, there’ll be no civilization left. They say that without an unpolluted world, there can be no White Race . . . or any other race for that matter.

I would make them the ZZ like the SS only worse (better). The white SS & the Black SS and then do away with the PJs and PCs in the middle. Then I’d put Green back on the land with the air force & army & the navy [&] would empty the zoo & all wildlife back [&] make a garden & only there children could return to earth garden.

If initially Manson was too much for Mason’s veterans in the neo-Nazi movement, perhaps ultimately the movement was too much for Manson. Racist and separatist though he was, Manson just never advocated for the elimination of people of color. Aside from the fact that the most important fault lines in his thinking were determined not by race but by what was “real” — and obviously he had no problem with the idea of eliminating an entire world of “phonies” — Manson was also simply too antiwhite.

That does not mean that Manson’s letters, at least during the 1980s, were not crammed with racist remarks and antisemitic tropes, because they most certainly were. And in fact, even if part of what the expression “PJs and PCs” captured was whiteness, one suspects that because whiteness was also firmly tied to “money,” the phony/real binary had by the 1980s also become entangled with antisemitism for Manson, though arguably one could read all this as a class-based critique too, because Manson often argued that the powerful used race to keep down the powerless.

Finally, for the record: Manson’s interest in Adolf Hitler during the 1960s has been overstated — there exists only the most minimal evidence — but it is impossible to read the letters he wrote to James Mason and come away with anything but the certain knowledge that “AH” was one of Manson’s most prominent discursive tics during that period.

Nonetheless, Manson’s views diverge from Mason, neo-Nazism, the far right, and SIEGE culture. It seems important to mark the differences, not least so as to be able to delineate the various strands that make up white radicalism in late modern American culture, and because maybe it matters that in some respects contemporary white supremacism outstrips the extremism of a man whose very face has long been a symbol of the country’s most radical racism.