Mae Brussell

Part two.

Mae Brussell was a housewife in Southern California when President Kennedy was assassinated in nineteen sixty-three.

She became obsessed with the Warren Commission's investigation, acquired the entire twenty-six volume set, and spent years examining the testimony, tracing connections, and accumulating files on people and organizations she believed were implicated in the assassination.

By the end of the decade, she had become a fixture of the conspiracy underground, producing a remarkable body of research.

Paul Krassner, the publisher of The Realist, referred to her as the bionic researcher.

If the spectacle of the Manson murders had helped discredit the hippies, Mae Brussell began to suspect that this had been the point all along.

She connected the family to Operation Chaos, the CIA's illegal domestic spying program, COINTELPRO, military LSD experiments, and government research into mind control.

She described Manson as a patsy.

It's also a, a conspiracy.

Manson murders, like Helter Skelter, uh, ostensibly is a crime, but, you know, going back to even the s- like, '70s, Mae Brussell was doing, like, her reporting on, like, it being a conspiracy, that it b- had, like, a military psyop element.

Oh, yeah.

Uh, only for her to, only for her to be slandered by what's his face, Tom O'Neill-