Manson’s cult was framed as the counterculture’s pure evil personification

Evidence

Elsewhere in Los Angeles, California, police arrested the alleged perpetrators of the past summer’s Tate-LaBianca murders. Almost immediately, a Life magazine cover story introduced America to the pure personification of evil—Charles Manson, the wild-eyed, bearded ex-con LSD Svengali of a “Love and Terror” hippie cult-cum-harem that squatted in an abandoned movie ranch and, like the Motherfuckers, called itself “The Family.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1496

Categorization

• XREF: The establishment press manufacturing Manson as the face of the counterculture parallels the reader’s ‘why culture stagnates now’ shelf material on moral panics.