Charlie was just a vindictive coward.
He sent his minions to carry out a vengeance killing - he wanted to pay back Terry Melcher, hot record producer who didn’t make Charlie the rock star that Charlie wanted to be.
All the rest - the whole “Helter Skelter; igniting a race war” stuff was sensationalist B.S. cos Charlie had national news cameras pointed at him.
“Helter Skelter; igniting a race war” was the creation of the prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi.
Buglisiosi knew he couldn’t prosecute Manson on the genuine motives for the killings without exposing the music industry’s links to drugs and crime, so he fabricated the Helter Skelter story.
As Manson himself said: “Mr. Bugliosi is a hard-driving prosecutor, with a polished educa- tion. Semantics, words. He is a genius. He has got everything that every lawyer would want to have except one thing: a case. He doesn’t have a case.”