Whatever larger issues are evoked by the legal and cultural aspects of the Manson case, there can be no doubt about the shocking nature of the murders, or of the sadistic qualities of the people who committed them. Manson was a white supremacist, a person with abhorrent ideas about race and civil rights. According to Bugliosi and to the testimony of those who knew him, he was obsessed with Nazism (the appendix to the book features no fewer than nine references to Adolf Hitler). His purpose in commanding his followers to write on any available flat surface in the blood of his victims did not originate from the random sadism of a sick mind. 

Manson imagined that it was something that the Black Panthers would do: “The plan was to ‘push the blame on to the Black Panthers,’” according to Danny DeCarlo, by using paw prints and words in vogue among Black nationalists, such as “pig” (148). Manson’s vision of Helter Skelter was racially motivated, according to Gregg Jakobson: “he said that those were the people who would die in Helter Skelter...one third of mankind...the white race” (321). The difference between Manson and the terrorists who killed demonstrators and citizens in the south during the civil rights era is not as clear cut as it first appears.