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When investigative reporter Tom O’Neill sat down on Rob Schmitt Tonight to argue that the CIA’s public confessions don’t add up and that Charles Manson may have been the product of a deeper, darker experiment, he was speaking from two decades of reporting and a best-selling book that forced a lot of comfortable explanations into the harsh light of facts. O’Neill’s 2019 investigation CHAOS and the new Errol Morris documentary built from it have dragged a sleepy official narrative into public view, insisting Americans deserve straight answers about the national security state’s sins.
O’Neill’s central claim is simple and damning: the seams on the official story don’t just fray, they unravel when you follow the money and the personnel into San Francisco in the late 1960s, where a CIA-linked psychiatrist named Louis “Jolly” West cultivated access to the same counterculture that birthed Charles Manson. He lays out a pattern—MKUltra funding, LSD experiments, and a medical establishment that all too often acted as a shadow arm of intelligence—and asks whether the monster we blame on drugs and cultish charisma might instead have been hammered into shape by programs the government now claims were failures.
We already know the CIA ran MKUltra and related programs; congressional investigations in the 1970s, declassified files, and historians have documented drugging, hypnosis experiments, and the destruction of records that would have explained a lot more if they’d survived. Americans of every political stripe should be alarmed that entire swaths of what our intelligence services once did to fellow citizens were buried, and that the official paper trail was deliberately erased. Those are not conspiracy fantasies but documented facts that demand oversight and reform.
Skeptics will say O’Neill’s work is speculative, and to be fair the book and documentary do not offer a smoking-gun memo that reads “brainwash Manson.” But the absence of a perfect government paper trail is precisely the problem conservatives have warned about for years: a permanent administrative state that covers its tracks and rewrites its own history. When independent journalists piece together patterns the way O’Neill has, citizens should demand hearings, not sneers from elites who prefer secrecy.
What should worry every patriot is less the debate over a single murder cult than the broader pattern this story reveals: institutions that were supposed to protect Americans instead experimented on them in secret, and the same metropolitan elites who enabled that secrecy now lecture the rest of the country about trust and expertise. O’Neill’s persistence in digging through archival rot and reluctant witnesses is the kind of reporting this country needs more of—relentless, inconvenient, and unwilling to accept the official bedtime story.
Conservatives should welcome this controversy because it validates a core principle: power unchecked becomes abuse, and we must insist on sunlight and consequences. Demand congressional review, demand accountability from agencies that were allowed to act above the law, and refuse to let the comfortable class get away with rewriting the past to protect themselves. If the Manson case turns out to be more than the work of a charismatic killer, then the cost of secrecy has been measured in lives—and every American deserves to know the truth.
