You will be told to keep it down. You will be called edgy, angry, reckless, dangerous, misinformed. You will be warned to think before you speak, but the only ones worrying about your volume will be those who fear your voice. Truth is treated as noise by those who live securely behind their own proof of lies. We’ve been told who to hate, we’ve been told who to trust, we’ve been told when to mourn, we’ve been told what to fear. And with each order, they’ve made the world quieter, emptier, and easier to control. A country where anger, grief, heartbreak, and dissent are classified as symptoms instead of signals. Turn it up until they know your name. Shatter the windows. Wake the neighbors. They tell us to be disarmed. Let’s make sure they can’t sleep.
the day after Ruby attempted suicide by banging his head on the walls of his jail cell.
Gather close, children of the static.
Tonight’s sermon is brought to you by the Un-United States Government,
that eternal pharmacy of the damned,
and by one Dr. Louis Jolyon West —
Jolly, for short.
A nickname that tells you everything and nothing, which is exactly how the good doctor liked his patients.
Now… I’m not here to tell you whether Charles Manson was a monster or a kid who wrote bad folk songs until the nation decided to turn him into an exorcism ritual for everything it feared about itself.
That’s not my job.
My job is to peel the wallpaper off history and show you the termite tunnels beneath.
Follow me.
Picture Jolly West in his tweed jacket —
a man who looked like he’d apologize
before cutting your consciousness into strips.
A man who weaponized curiosity
and called it compassion.
He’d inject you with questions
before the syringe even touched your skin.
They say he treated broken minds.
I say he manufactured them wholesale.
He was the kind of doctor
who could hand you a glass of water
and three days later
you’d be confessing crimes you didn’t commit
in languages you didn’t speak.
Some say Manson spent time in his orbit.
Some say coincidence is just God hiding the blueprints.
Some say neither Jolly nor Charlie ever met.
And some—
some of us just ask the one question
you’re not supposed to ask in America:
Who benefits when a nation goes mad?
Look around.
Chaos is an industry.
Fear is a commodity.
And the human mind—
well, that’s just clay for the sculptors
who sit in the windowless rooms
three floors below the truth.
But tonight…
tonight we honor Charles.
Not the killer,
but the songwriter he might have been
before someone decided
his chords needed more dissonance.
I imagine him strumming in some halfway house,
dreaming of fame
while a doctor in a lab coat
scribbled notes about “suggestibility thresholds”
and “malleability of identity.”
It doesn’t matter what’s true.
It matters what’s plausible.
And America…
America has a way of making the plausible feel like prophecy.
