There’s a strange smell in the air lately, and it’s not summer rain or county fair hot dogs.
It’s something much older, darker, and more unsettling.
It’s the musty stench of Charles Manson’s long-dead ideology, still managing to crawl its way into headlines, parole hearings, and the halls of California’s corrections bureaucracy.
This time, the name-making news is about Patricia Krenwinkel. At 76, after 55 years behind bars, she’s been recommended for parole again. She didn’t just commit murder. She was one of the Manson Family’s most zealous apostles, stabbing victims, scrawling “Death to Pigs” and “Helter Skelter” in blood, and pushing the kind of psychotic narrative that makes horror films look like bedtime stories.
Let’s not whitewash what happened here. The Manson Family wasn’t a band of misunderstood hippies. They were foot soldiers for a deranged puppet master who convinced them that a race war was coming and that murder would be their twisted ticket to survival and salvation.
And while Charles Manson may be buried, his legacy still draws breath through people like Krenwinkel and others who once called him “Jesus.”
The Cult of Evil
Charles Manson killed no one directly. That was the genius of his evil: he convinced others to kill for him.
His influence was so powerful, so all-consuming, that young women such as Krenwinkel abandoned their families, surrendered their identities, and gave themselves over to a man who preached apocalypse as if it were scripture.
He used drugs, music, and psychological abuse to dissolve their sense of self.
He turned them into something worse than followers.
He turned them into believers.
And once you’ve believed something that deeply, that murder is not just permissible, but divine, it takes more than a few decades in a correctional facility to scrape that off your soul.
Krenwinkel, like Leslie Van Houten before her, is one of the tragic case studies of what Manson’s manipulation could do. She wasn’t mentally ill in the traditional sense.
She was mentally hijacked. Her moral compass was shattered and repurposed by Manson’s megalomania.
So it’s not just about one woman’s parole hearing. It’s about whether our system truly understands what it’s dealing with with evil that doesn’t just commit crimes.
It recruits others to commit them in their name.
The Forgotten Victims
When parole boards speak of rehabilitation, they often do so through a lens clouded by legal jargon and bureaucratic optimism.
They see change.
They see age.
They see sorrow.
But do they see Sharon Tate, eight months pregnant and begging for her baby’s life?
Do they see Abigail Folger stabbed repeatedly in a frenzy so violent that even seasoned homicide detectives had to step outside?
What about Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, murdered in their own home the following night?
The Manson murders weren’t just about taking lives. They started a revolution of terror. That’s what made them different.
That’s what makes them unforgettable.
Every time one of these killers is recommended for parole, it sends a quiet tremor through the families of the victims, families who have lived with the weight of these crimes for over five decades.
And it sends a louder message to the rest of us: that time served might, just might, be enough to erase one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century.
The Strange Comfort of Monsters in Cages
There’s a reason we’re uneasy about releasing serial killers, cult murderers, or terrorists back into the world.
It’s not about vengeance. It’s about memory.
There’s comfort in knowing that some evil stays locked up. Society agrees that some lines are so red that they can’t ever be uncrossed.
Charles Manson himself was denied parole 12 times. Each time, the state rightly saw the risk of unleashing a man whose charm, even in a prison jumpsuit, was still capable of influencing minds.
Krenwinkel might be older. She might be remorseful. But let’s not pretend that someone who helped drive a carving fork into a man’s abdomen can be fully rehabilitated through self-help groups and a GED program.
Still, we must wrestle with the question: is rehabilitation even possible in a case like this?
Can Redemption Exist After This Much Darkness?
This is the moral crux. If the justice system is rooted in punishment alone, then parole would never exist. But if it’s meant to include the possibility of transformation, then even someone such as Patricia Krenwinkel must be allowed the dignity of review.
That doesn’t mean release.
That doesn’t mean freedom.
It means we have to look into the face of real, historic evil and ask whether the human being beneath it ever came back. And if she did, what do we owe her? Anything?
The answer isn’t simple.
It shouldn’t be.
But what’s clear is this: whatever change she claims, whatever remorse she shows, none of it rewrites what happened in August of 1969.
The blood never dries.
The pain never fades.
And the evil that Charles Manson infected his followers with should never be normalized, minimized, or softened.
Evil is Still Evil, Even if It Has Wrinkles
California’s Board of Parole Hearings has opened the door once more to letting one of Manson’s lieutenants walk free. The full board and Governor Gavin Newsom will review the decision.
The nation should, too.
Because this isn’t just about Patricia Krenwinkel, it’s about memory. About justice. About whether we still have the courage to stare evil in the face and say: you may age, you may cry, you may regret, but you don’t get to walk among the living again.
That’s not cruelty. That’s clarity.
The media covered up Biden’s decline until it couldn’t. Now they’re pretending that they “just found out.”
PJ Media called it early and loudly. Join PJ Media VIP and use code FIGHT for 60% off.
