One feminism received laundered money and a soft landing in the popular memory. Another current, the one carrying the class analysis and the anti-imperial edge, received infiltrators, indictments, deportation orders, and bullets."

 Emancipatory Education

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"The facts aren’t in dispute, and they were never secret. From roughly 1959 to 1962, Steinem directed the Independent Research Service, an operation funded almost entirely by the CIA, whose purpose was to send non-Communist American students to the World Youth Festivals in Vienna and Helsinki to blunt Soviet influence. The money moved through a chain of cutout foundations before it reached her. Ramparts exposed the arrangement in March 1967. Steinem didn’t deny it. She defended it, and said that if she had the choice she’d do it again. Take her at her word. The question that matters isn’t what was in her heart. The question is what the state was buying, and what it was destroying at the same time.

Because there’s a second column in this ledger, and the tributes never print it.

While the CIA was underwriting a liberal, gender-first, anti-Communist internationalism through people like Steinem, the same state was running COINTELPRO. That program operated from 1956 to 1971, and its Black nationalist directive, opened in 1967, named the goal plainly in Hoover’s own memos: prevent the rise of a messiah who could unify the movement. This wasn’t surveillance in the abstract. It was Fred Hampton dead on his mattress in December 1969 in a raid coordinated with the FBI. It was the systematic gutting of SNCC and the Black Panther Party. It was Assata Shakur driven into exile and Angela Davis put on trial for her life. Reach further back and the pattern holds. Claudia Jones, a Black Communist who in 1949 theorized the superexploitation of Black women, the triple burden of race and class and sex decades before the vocabulary caught up, was deported by that same state in 1955.

Set the two columns side by side. One feminism received laundered money and a soft landing in the popular memory. Another current, the one carrying the class analysis and the anti-imperial edge, received infiltrators, indictments, deportation orders, and bullets."