The news of Gloria Steinem’s death on September 2, 2026, at 92, invited the familiar ritual of American remembrance. Obituaries saluted the journalist who became the most recognizable public face of second-wave feminism. Yet a serious account of Steinem’s life must begin where tributes often hesitate. Before she confronted senators, presidents, and the editors who were initially hesitant about promoting Judeo-Leftist causes like second-wave feminism, she directed an organization that operated with covert CIA support.
The tension between that beginning and the radical branding later attached to her career forms the central mystery of her political life. Steinem’s early story carried none of the polish that would later make her an icon. She grew up in Toledo and Washington while caring for a mother who struggled with serious mental illness after her parents separated. At Smith College, where she graduated in 1956, she developed the analytical and writing skills that would define her journalism. She then spent 2 years in India as a Chester Bowles Asian Fellow, an experience that proved unexpectedly transformative. During her South Asian sojourn, she encountered Gandhian community organizing firsthand, absorbed the principle that social change can be brought about through direct local action, and carried that model of activism back to the feminist movement she would spend the next 6 decades building.
She returned to a United States at the height of the Cold War. From 1959 to 1962, Steinem directed the Independent Research Service, which sent American delegations to the World Youth Festivals in Vienna (1959) and Helsinki (1962) to counter Soviet influence at gatherings that attracted young people from across the world. When Ramparts magazine exposed the CIA’s broader funding of American civil-society organizations in early 1967, Steinem confirmed her own role publicly. The Washington Post reported on February 18, 1967—the original article is preserved in the CIA’s own FOIA Reading Room—that Steinem “acknowledged in an interview yesterday that she worked closely with the Central Intelligence Agency” to organize American participation in both festivals, and that “almost none of the people who went to Vienna or Helsinki with the Research Service knew that the CIA was helping to pay for their trip.” The Helsinki budget alone exceeded $100,000. Steinem was unapologetic, describing the CIA officials she worked with as “liberal, nonviolent and honorable” and saying she would work with them again.
Steinem defended the people she had encountered while working as the director of the Independent Research Service. “I found them liberal and farsighted and open to an exchange of ideas. I never felt I was being dictated to at all.” She also called the agency “the only one with enough guts and foresight to see that youth and student affairs were important.” The New York Times highlighted how Steinem had a flexible relationship with the CIA. “I was never asked to report on other Americans or assess foreign nationals I had met,” the Jewish feminist activist recounted.
The 1975 feminist MORE conference proved the most explosive public airing of the controversy. The Redstockings—a radical feminist collective—distributed a 16-page tabloid press release charging that Steinem had covered up a decade-long association with the CIA and that Ms. magazine was endangering the women’s liberation movement. When Redstockings attempted to include a chapter documenting Steinem’s CIA connections in their book Feminist Revolution, Steinem’s attorneys threatened Random House with a libel suit unless the chapter was removed. In time, Random House complied.
In that same year, the conservative writer John D. Lofton Jr. used this facet of Steinem’s early career as the crux of his Human Events column,“Ms. Steinem’s CIA Connection.” Lofton said Steinem had objected when he called her a former CIA collaborator, denied any relation, and threatened a lawsuit. He wrote that he first removed the reference, then revisited the record and concluded, “I am convinced that what I originally wrote was fair comment.” Lofton reported that Steinem acknowledged she had understood that CIA-linked foundations partly financed her organization, though at “extremely long distance and with no control.” He also reported her view that the money “seemed like a good use, better than buying planes and bombs.”
Whatever the CIA episode revealed, Steinem spent the rest of her life planting her flag on nearly every cause the left could name. Steinem helped build the National Women’s Political Caucus (co-founded in 1971 with Shirley Chisholm, Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, and Fannie Lou Hamer), the Women’s Action Alliance, Ms., the Ms. Foundation for Women, Voters for Choice, Choice USA, and the Women’s Media Center—a network of interlocking institutions that embedded feminism in American political life rather than leaving it on the margins. She supported Shirley Chisholm’s 1972 presidential bid, testified for the Equal Rights Amendment, campaigned for abortion rights, opposed apartheid, and spoke at the 2017 Women’s March in Washington. On November 20, 2013, President Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor
A regime friendly activist through and through, Steinem moved easily among journalists, donors, Democratic politicians, nonprofit leaders, celebrities, and global women’s organizations. She raised her fist alongside Dorothy Pitman Hughes, worked for Angela Davis’s defense campaign, co-founded the Women’s Media Center with Jane Fonda and Robin Morgan, and backed Hillary Clinton in 2008 and 2016. On foreign policy, she opposed the Vietnam and Gulf wars while protesting apartheid South Africa and championing feminism during America’s nation-building experiment in Afghanistan.
Her record on Israel and Palestine has been a subject of controversy among principled advocates of Palestinian liberation. Steinem was born to a Jewish father and a Protestant mother, and she expressed that identity in conditional but pointed terms: “Never in my life have I identified myself as a Christian, but wherever there is antisemitism, I identify as a Jew.” In 1975 she signed a letter—spearheaded by Betty Friedan and co-signed by 60 prominent women including Bella Abzug, Nora Ephron, and Beverly Sills condemning the United Nations resolution equating Zionism with racism as “an implicit denial of Israeli statehood and incitement to worldwide antisemitism.”
As a liberal Zionist who criticized the excesses of the Jewish state but never called for its outright abolition, she later backed joint Israeli and Palestinian women’s advocacy, criticized Israeli settlements, and called Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu “a conversational bully” after dining with him in the 1980s, and extended that label to his treatment of elected women leaders decades later.
Palestinian scholar Nada Elia saw through Steinem’s more optics-focused Zionist advocacy. Writing after Steinem’s death, Elia acknowledged being “immensely grateful for every woman, including Steinem, who demanded that we have bodily control and legal abortion, as well as financial autonomy,” and praised individual essays like “If Men Could Menstruate.” But she reserved her sharpest language for the pattern she detected across Steinem’s career: when Steinem signed a statement in late 2023 denouncing alleged Hamas rapes of Israeli women on October 7, Elia noted she “never said anything about the meticulously detailed reports by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and B’Tselem, all documenting sexual torture by Israeli security forces of Palestinian men, women, and children.”
The contradiction, in Elia’s reading, exposed the limits of Steinem’s own stated principle: “To assert that human rights are indivisible, while defending Zionism, which dispossesses Palestinians, is to deny the very humanity of the Palestinian people.” For Elia, this was not a flaw to be contextualized but “the powerful ideology that calls for our eradication.”
Beneath the veneer of grassroots protest, Steinem served as a subversive Jewish agent of an imperial order hostile to Middle America. While she adopted anti-war stances to maintain countercultural authority among useful idiots on the Left, her true legacy was the dismantling of historic Christian family structures and the export of cultural degeneracy via early CIA backing. She stands as a seminal 20th century operative who dismantled traditional order at home while coordinating with state organs to export that same kind of decay abroad.
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Especially noteworthy was Steinem’s courtship with Mort Zuckerman the Jewish media baron who was a committed Zionist. Zuckerman financed MS magazine which was a commercial failure and given Zuckerman’s experience in publications such as THE NY POST and THE ATLANTIC obviously knew it wasn’t a financial transaction so much as idealogical. Steinem traces her roots back to Rosa Luxembourg the violent Polish idealogue who nearly overthrew Christian Germany in the aftermath of WWI. Zuckerman was one of THE ELDERS who met at the 92nd Street YMCA to control blowback after the Madoff scandal, another likely Zionist conspirator.
Made fridged perhaps from ritual chid abuse, she shared her hatred of men all over the world.
My least favorite JAP, for sure.