Charles Manson’s 25-year-old girlfriend Star says they’re getting married, but the aging criminal ringleader scoffs at the idea.

Isn’t that just like a man?

In the Rolling Stone interview that’s got everyone talking, the 79-year-old cult leader calls Star’s marriage claims “a bunch of garbage….We’re just playing that for public consumption.”

The crimes that made him infamous occurred in 1969, but well into a new century, Charles Manson still sells papers and apparently needs little to no introduction. When TIME picked up Rolling Stone‘s semi-scoop, it didn’t even feel obligated to explain why he was in prison.

“Charles Manson” is practically a brand, like Coke or Nike. Everyone knows what he”€”or, more accurately, his “Family” of flaky young followers”€”did, right?

Everyone, it seems, except his young love.

At the of age 19, a friend turned Star on to Manson’s jailhouse writings on radical environmentalism. She claims that at the time, she”€™d never heard of the Tate-LaBianca “Helter Skelter” slayings that had shaken the world long before she was born. Even after Star found out that this “Charlie” fellow put the “gore” in “Al Gore,” she remained besotted.

She now lives in Corcoran, California, all the better to visit her beloved, who resides in the state prison there. With her long, straight, center-parted brown hair and that “x” carved between her eyebrows, Star looks like she’s just stepped out of a Spahn Ranch “Family” snapshot.

No one even passingly familiar with the left’s twisted history can possibly be surprised that Manson presents himself as a typically misanthropic friend of the Earth. His “ATWA” philosophy contends that air, trees, water, and animals are the most sacred things on the planet, and all are being irresponsibly consumed by us greedy humans.

Yes, even air. In his Rolling Stone interview, Manson justifies murder in the cause of “saving” the air from being inhaled by undeserving people. At one interval, he describes the (we hope) imaginary torture and killing of an infant to make his point, in terms so graphic the Stone‘s scribe can’t bring himself to repeat them in print.

To his credit (or something like it), at least Charles Manson has been preaching this anti-human ecology guff for decades. Back in the 1980s when he was still allowed to do television interviews, he railed on The Today Show about the melting polar ice caps.

“Maybe I should have killed four or five hundred people,” he continued, “then I would have felt better, I would have felt like I’d really offered society something. The truth is the planet Earth is dying.”

If you factor out all the murder chatter, Manson sounds like any number of far more wealthy, powerful, and respected “progressives.” Being crazier, he’s also more candid: Manson simply takes leftist “environmentalism” and “social justice” to their logical conclusion”€”mass genocide.

(Although not quite: Note that neither Manson nor any of these other “population bomb” types we’ve been listening to since the 1970s ever has enough courage of their convictions to kill themselves, unless you count Jim Jones’s “revolutionary suicide.”)