Charles Manson is why Beyonce shouldn't have a big fanbase

The title for this might have been weird but give me a second you’ll see why. So we all know that #prettyprivilege is a thing. People who are deemed better looking by our beauty standards are just treated better by society. Beautiful women are flown around the world and paid extravagantly just for being sweet. There are entire industries built on marketing and capitalizing on beauty. People who are socially deemed as beautiful are also more persuasive. Years of watching movies and shows with beautiful, honest and trustworthy protagonists have built the association in our heads. We’re more likely to be influenced by and trust beautiful people. And if those beautiful people are rich, famous and talented? There are people who are willing to do literally anything they ask.

So it's the 60’s and there’s this hippy musician who goes by the name of #CharlesManson. Charles Manson was an American criminal and cult leader. In mid-1967, he formed what became known as the Manson Family. Manson's followers committed a series of nine murders at four locations in July and August 1969. According to the Los Angeles County district attorney, Manson plotted to start a race war, though Manson and others involved long disputed this motive. At the time the Manson Family began to form, Manson was an unemployed ex-convict who had spent more than half his life in correctional institutions for a variety of offenses. Before the murders, he was a singer and songwriter in the Los Angeles music industry, mainly through his association with Dennis Wilson, drummer and founding member of the #BeachBoys. The group even recorded one of Manson's songs, "Cease to Exist," retitled "Never Learn Not to Love", as a B-sided single, but without a credit to Manson.

If you listen to Mansons interviews you can see that he is very articulate and well spoken. He was also very charismatic and handsome in an offbeat way. (pre-swastika forehead tattoo imo....even though it is part of his image) But other than being a decent musician and well spoken orator, Manson was no different than any crackhead rambling on the street. But that's when celebrity culture comes into play. Celebrities in our culture are idolized and worshiped as if they’re more than humans. There are tons of celebrities today that could start their own wars. If #Beyonce tells the Beehive to take over Russia, it's over for Russia.

Celebrities are worshiped and put on this pedestal, and Manson is the one that took his cult following to the extreme. After being discharged from prison for the second time, Manson began attracting a group of followers, mostly young women, from around California. They wanted to hang out with their favourite quirky rockstar. They were later named the "#MansonFamily". The group was involved in the murder of Gary Hinman in July 1969, then gained national notoriety after the murder of actress Sharon Tate and four others in her home on August 8 and 9, 1969, and Leno and Rosemary LaBianca the next day. Tex Watson and three other members of the Manson Family executed the Tate-LaBianca murders, acting under Manson's specific instructions. Manson Family members were also responsible for other assaults, thefts, crimes, and the attempted assassination of United States President Gerald Ford in Sacramento by Lynette Fromme.

Manson had not committed a single murder but he didn’t need to. He had these women under his spell. His spell being his charm and celebrity. Once you’ve reached a certain level of notoriety people automatically put you on a pedestal. The media took the Manson story and ran with it. Up until the moment of his death in 2017, Charles Manson was in the public consciousness and made the news every few years. The media painted him as this magician who can control people. Americans were given a villain they can be scared of.