Duane Aubin
Jul 21, 2017 · 2 min read

Casting aside, I’d be more interested to see Tarantino tackle the exploration of whether in fact the “Manson family” was contrived as part of Nixon’s well-documented strategy to undermine the hippie/anti-war movement.

John Ehrlichman said “ The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we DID.’ “ (https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/)

Even as Nixon won the White House in 1968, yet the hippie movement continued to grow, so the disruption efforts had to step up to another level. It entirely makes sense that the idea to “frame some hippies for a heinous crime” should emerge to meet that urgency. How effective could this tragic event suit their purposes? People forget that, in 1972, Nixon won with the largest election landslide in American history to that point — which would have seemed most unexpected. After years of steadily growing anti-establishment clamour, Nixon’s surge to such popularity along with the erosion of trust in the identity of the hippie movement and its equally rapid decline as a social force was a remarkably quick reversal — the kind that hinges on a single, really big, traumatic event.

More specifically to the case, one single matter has always intrigued me — could the degree of calculated, tactical stealth and expertise exhibited in the Tate/Labianca murders possibly have been possessed by people with no such specialized training, let alone executed while all allegedly high on drugs at the time?

At any rate, a dramatization of the official story of this sad episode in American history just seems so…pedestrian and inauthentic.

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    Duane Aubin

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