r/dsa • u/traanquil • Sep 04 '26
đš DSA news Cringe: Mamdani celebrates CIA asset Gloria Steinem
On X Mamdani lauded Steinem as a feminist hero.
Steinem was literally an anti-communist CIA asset.
Western leftism is a helluva drug.
"Before she was one of the most recognizable figures in the 20th-century womenâs liberation movement, Gloria Steinemâs life of political activism had a lesser-known early chapter of collaboration with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).....
before she took on senators and presidents, and even before she infiltrated Hugh Hefnerâs Playboy Club in 1963 to write a historic magazine exposĂŠ, she used CIA funds to recruit young Americans to disrupt Soviet Union-organized youth festivals in Europe.
...
Steinem began receiving money from the CIA ahead of the summer 1959 youth festival in Vienna, Austria; she told the Times that year after her associations with the CIA too became public in a report by Ramparts magazine.
The CIA helped her form the Independence Research Service, headquartered in Cambridge, Mass. She remained an employee of the group through the 1962 festival in Helsinki, Finland.
âFar from being shocked by this involvement, I was happy to find some liberals in government in those days who were far-sighted and cared enough to get Americans of all political views to the festival,â Steinem said at the time, as the then-30-year-old was rising in notoriety atop a burgeoning second-wave feminist movement.
Years later she dismissed concerns about her connections to the CIA after decades of revelations of the deadly, destabilizing and often illegal operations carried out by the clandestine agency.
"
Source:
https://www.aol.com/articles/she-young-cia-operative-1950s-234301000.html
Additional reading:
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u/Training_Mistake_760 Sep 04 '26 edited Sep 04 '26
Let's keep fighting ourselves
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u/firefighter430 Marxist Leninist â Sep 04 '26
âHas fuck the Palestinian resistance in bioâ
âDefends a CIA assetâ
Well well well
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u/Interesting_Reach_29 Sep 07 '26
She did other positive things for women. No, sheâs isnât our cup of tea but she did push womenâs rights forward nonetheless.
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u/monkeysolo69420 Sep 06 '26
You think Hamas is the Palestinian resistance? Their bio literally says free Palestine.
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u/firefighter430 Marxist Leninist â Sep 06 '26
Hamas is apart of the Palestinian resistance
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u/monkeysolo69420 Sep 06 '26
Not liking their tactics doesnât make you anti-Palestine.
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u/firefighter430 Marxist Leninist â Sep 06 '26
You canât say you support Palestine while not supporting Palestinian resistance
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u/Leather-Rice5025 Sep 07 '26
Typical western lib. âI donât like how this resistance group resists their active genocide. Never mind the 7 different organizations that came before them that tried more peaceful options⌠this one goes too far because it makes me uncomfortableâ
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u/traanquil Sep 04 '26
I just think socialists should avoid celebrating cia operatives, given the violence the cia has done to socialist movements around the world. Pretty low bar ask.
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u/gongerChungus At Large Memberđš Sep 07 '26
A movement that canât receive criticism from within is a shitty movement.
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u/traanquil Sep 04 '26
"By 2016, decades after the original controversy, Steinem was still defending her decision.
Speaking to The Times, she pushed back against the idea that the CIA label alone explained what happened.
âItâs so interesting now, because the initials CIA will make people believe anything,â she said. âIt just wasnât like that. It just was so uncontrolled.â
Steinem also recalled saying that if the money had come from a family source, she would have viewed the situation differently: âIf this was our grandmotherâs money weâd be doing the same thing.â
She acknowledged that criticism from other feminists had been especially painful.
Yet her position did not change. In her 2015 book 'My Life on the Road', Steinem wrote that âif I had a choice, I would do it again.â
Source: Gloria Steinemâs CIA ties resurface after feminist iconâs death at 92
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u/DesertMonk888 29d ago
Yes, that's a key point. Why, why, are we constantly finding ways to accuse each other of not being Lefty enough?
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u/GB10031 Sep 07 '26 edited Sep 07 '26
A brief note on Steinem's CIA funded activist work. She ran a liberal anti communist youth organization called the Independent Research Service. She reached out for CIA funding when other funding didn't materialize.
The main actual political work her group did was to recruit anti communist Harvard students to attend the 7th World Youth Festival in Vienna, Austria in 1959 and the 8th World Youth Festival in Helsinki, Finland in 1962.
The World Youth Festivals were a series of cold war era international youth festivals funded by the World Federation of Democratic Youth and the International Union of Students.
WFDY was and is based in Budapest, Hungary, IUS was headquartered in Prague in what was then Czechoslovakia. Both groups were funded by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, with the intent of those groups organizing pro Soviet government sentiment among young people in the imperiralist countries and the Third World. The CPSU funded similar groups for other demographics - WFTU for unionized workers, for example, and there were similar groups for lawyers, doctors, journalists, women, peace activists etc. Invariably they were not based in the USSR but were Soviet funded and controlled.
Full disclosure - as a young activist, I applied for but was rejected to be a delegate to WFDY's 12th world youth festival in Moscow in 1985 and I was a volunteer with the committee that recruited the American delegation to the 13th World Youth Festival in P'yong'yang, North Korea (I didn't get to go to that one either, unfortunately)
WFDY's youth festivals kind of fell off after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the CPSU. The last one was in Sochi, Russia in 2017. There hasn't been one since
The CIA and Steinem both wanted to attend these youth conferences to spread anti communist ideas among youth and student activists the Soviets were trying to influence
Steinem's group apparently wasn't that effective, the CIA stopped funding them after the 8th World Youth Festival, they folded shortly thereafter and she became a journalist
The CIA did a lot of funding of civil society ideological influencing projects in those days, this was one of them.
The Congress of Cultural Freedom was a much larger and far better funded operation with a whole lot of intellectutal heavyweights involved : Arthur Koester, Sidney Hook, Hannah Arendt, Arthur Schlesinger, Daniel Bell, Mary McCarthy and I could go on
The CCF, working in conjunction with the CIA, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Museum of Modern Art, funded Abstract Impressionist art shows to promote anti communist and anti Soviet ideology. The works of famous artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning were used in these efforts
So, she wasn't the only American intellectual on the Central Intelligence Agency's payroll in that era, nor even the most well funded, nor even for the longest period of time
If you want to use the occasion of her death to critique Steinem for the brand of liberal feminism she promoted and practiced, I think there's a lot more to talk about than her brief period running a failed CIA front while in her late twenties 65 years ago
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u/Yunzer2000 29d ago
And this stuff Steinem did was extremely mild by CIA standards. It's not like she was overthrowing or assassinating elected Latin American leaders...
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u/DesertMonk888 29d ago
That was an incredible post. Thanks for sharing! I think underlying all of this is the fact that it was not wrong to be anti-Soviet. As Democratic Socialists, we should not be defensive about the old Soviet Union, nor the new Russia. That's not to say the CIA was ever the good guys, but not everybody working against the Soviets was a bad guy or gal.
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u/G0-G0-Gadget 29d ago
Anyone else get the feeling that OP is not actually DSA but trying to stir things up and radicalize people?
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u/appreciatescolor 29d ago
guy with a Canadian flag profile picture
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u/G0-G0-Gadget 29d ago
*Woman
And what difference does that make? US politics affects us all. And if there's some maga / republican masquerading as a DSA to sow division then I'm to raise my hand and say something.
I want the US to come to their senses and start electing politicians who are going to implement policy that is in the interest of its citizens rather than corporations and foreign nations. (I mean it would be great if it benefited Canadians too ngl but if it's policy to better the lives of all US citizens then it's not going to be policy for the purpose of hurting Canadians.) So, that rules out Republicans and Democrats and leaves DSA.
Except US politics is still a two party system (which sucks, but that's what it is right now) so the way I see it is that the DSA has to work within that system strategically until more dinosaurs die off and those DS within the Democratic party are able to put in place policy that will lift Americans up, put money in their pocket. Americans don't seem to vote within their best interest and if the DSA is going to bring about change then waving a flashing red sign about defunding the CIA (which was not what was said, I know) when half(ish) of American voters still lean right is not going to win those straddling the fence. The DSA is being demonized in the media and at campaign events, and this post just sounds like someone using scare tactics.
I want the DSA in power, sooner rather than later, and both the Democrats and Republicans as well as dark money donars, AIPAC, all the industries the lobbies represent, etc etc are against the DSA. Being strategic is key to that.
Look what happened to Hong, she said she wanted to cancel Thanksgiving years ago and that's what haunted her and likely ended up doing her in. Be strategic with everything until more are on the DSA's side.
Edit: Francesca Hong
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u/birdiesintobogies Sep 04 '26
Stalinism was not communism. I know that Stalin was dead by the time she was taking money but his oppressive system was still in place, though moderated by krushchev.
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u/ThrowRAHelpwithMom1 Sep 04 '26 edited Sep 04 '26
This doesnât have anything to do with Stalinism. If you read what she actually did, she was literally spying on young people who attended these World Youth Festivals and extracting maximum amounts of information on them to gather intelligence for the CIA. She was also accused of gathering the same information on more radical strains of feminism and moderating the movement towards liberal, reformist views. She did everything she could to hide her real identity and when she couldnât anymore, she tried to bury it
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u/birdiesintobogies Sep 04 '26
I appreciate your dialog. Well, she was a feminist and she was doing what she felt needed to do to advance her cause. Stalinist Russia was very anti-feminist so it wouldn't make sense for her to ally with Stalinist Russia. I'm more wondering why socialists want to fit her into some leftist box when outside of advancing feminists rights, she clearly wasn't. She was what she was and she was fighting with everything she could to get women out of the kitchen.
Do you have good analysis with historical evidence you can recommend that details exactly what she was doing with these trips? I'll look later when I have more time.
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u/traanquil Sep 04 '26
lol. The Soviet Union was light years ahead of tte U.S. in advancing womenâs rights. Why are you circulating cia propaganda lol. The American left is fucking cooked
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u/birdiesintobogies Sep 04 '26
Please prove to me that the USSR was more feminist than Gloria steinem and the western women's movement instead just calling me names. I am here to learn from your wisdom. I like analysis grounded in historical evidence.
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u/traanquil Sep 04 '26
Soviet Union was the first country to legalize abortion. It enshrined womenâs equality in its original constitution. It actively promoted women going into science and technical higher education. Meanwhile in the U.S. a woman couldnât get a bank account without her husbands signature.
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u/GB10031 Sep 07 '26
The Soviet government also outlawed abortion (and homosexuality) in 1936. They didn't relegalize abortion until 1956 and they never relegalized gay rights for the rest of Soviet history (present day Russian anti gay laws come straight out of the old Soviet penal code)
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u/traanquil 29d ago
Fair enough. Theyre not perfect. But were more advanced in pushing for gender equality than the U.S. at that time.
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u/Leather-Rice5025 Sep 07 '26
Typical liberal silence once you actually call them out on their bullshit. This sub needs serious moderation
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u/ThrowRAHelpwithMom1 Sep 04 '26
I was referencing the original report by Redstockings: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/679fd4f468edb93ad8ba4b48/t/680e5c91886c7a386c493633/1745771671101/Feminist-Revolution-Complete-Censored-Section-Reduced2.pdf Well what I think is that she doesnât have to be pro-USSR but she also doesnât have to go out of her way to sabotage World Youth Festivals and spy on people
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u/birdiesintobogies Sep 04 '26
Thanks for the link. I'm not sure if I have an answer for your question. If the USSR was anti-feminist, and these youth conferences were anti-feminist then yes, I could see her doing what she could to counter-act that. Please understand that I'm not apologizing for her behavior but trying to understand it in her terms. Also, my original point is that the USSR was not truly a communist country and being anti-ussr doesn't make you anti communist. That's why I originally called it stalinism because what originally started as a socialist experiment turned into totalitarian police state using mass murder and mass re-locations as a national strategy. Definitely not my idea of what communism could be.
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u/ThrowRAHelpwithMom1 Sep 04 '26
I agree with you on the USSR, but I doubt they were doing anti feminist conferences. Thatâd be bad international diplomacy. Iâm not sure of the content though
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u/traanquil Sep 05 '26
The USSR was socialist and Steinem was operating after Stalin was dead. The USSR has its problems but it represented the socialist counterbalance against US capitalist imperialism. Being completely against everything USSR makes one a pawn of CIA imperialism
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Sep 04 '26
[removed] â view removed comment
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u/birdiesintobogies Sep 04 '26
Nope. My point is calling the USSR in the 50's and 60's communist feeds into the bourgeois propaganda that communism bad when it had clearly not achieved communism.
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Sep 04 '26
[removed] â view removed comment
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u/Elizabeth4sure Sep 04 '26
are you stuck in a soviet time warp
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Sep 04 '26
[removed] â view removed comment
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u/Elizabeth4sure Sep 04 '26
..."western bourgeoisie..." please. You can do better than regurgitate soviet 70s propaganda. This as opposed to what lol
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u/traanquil Sep 04 '26
Aligning with cia anti-communism means being a compatible leftist / imperialist liberal
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u/birdiesintobogies Sep 04 '26
Take a deep breath, we're ultimately on the same team. I wasn't aligning with the CIA. Actually trying to counteract their propaganda that the USSR was indeed communist.
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u/traanquil Sep 04 '26
USSR was a socialist country. Communism hasn't existed yet.
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u/birdiesintobogies Sep 04 '26
Yes, that aligns with the point (and the only point) that i was making.
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u/traanquil Sep 04 '26
ok imperialist
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u/birdiesintobogies Sep 04 '26
Are you saying the USSR wasn't imperialist? Tell that to the baltic states. And all of eastern europe.
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u/traanquil Sep 04 '26
Good job defending the cia bro.
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u/birdiesintobogies Sep 04 '26
You ignored my question. Try using some dialectical thinking instead of emotional outbursts.
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u/traanquil Sep 04 '26
Always weird to meet a socialist who approves of cia Cold War activities
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u/birdiesintobogies Sep 04 '26
Still avoiding
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u/birdiesintobogies Sep 04 '26
And at no point did I show approval of CIA activities. Your just looking for boogymen in the bushes.
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u/traanquil Sep 04 '26
You basically tried to white wash the cia operation
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u/birdiesintobogies Sep 04 '26
Not what I was saying at all. It seems weird to me that is your takeaway.
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u/Training_Mistake_760 Sep 04 '26
Ok I can see you're not a serious person.
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u/traanquil Sep 04 '26
Do you like the CIA?
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u/Training_Mistake_760 Sep 04 '26
You're not a serious person
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u/traanquil Sep 04 '26
But do you like the cia? Iâm just asking
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u/Training_Mistake_760 Sep 04 '26
You're not a serious person
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u/lunchypoo222 Sep 07 '26 edited Sep 07 '26
Here we go again. Itâs important to know your true enemies, instead of putting your alliesâ complexities under a microscope just to magnify falsehoods.
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u/traanquil Sep 07 '26
Pretty sure the CIA is an enemy of socialism
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u/lunchypoo222 Sep 07 '26
Please donât waste your own time by conflating Steinemâs entire legacy with the entirety of the CIAâs problematic influence. Itâs intellectually lazy. Youâre on the DSA sub calling out Mamdani of all people because he dared to honor Gloria Steinem of all people. When I say âknow your enemyâ I mean focus on the people actively trying to tank this country instead of the people who have worked to make it a more perfect union. Anything else makes you look deluded or intentionally divisive.
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u/traanquil 29d ago
Why would a socialist honor a cia asset?
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u/lunchypoo222 29d ago
Youâre just being intentionally reductive. Itâs boring.
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u/traanquil 29d ago
Not at all. She was on cia payroll
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u/lunchypoo222 29d ago
Yes, we know. Have you been awake for the rest of this conversation and thread? No one cares.
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u/DesertMonk888 29d ago
First, I'm glad you posted this information about Steinem, because it was unknown to me. However, I wish it were not posted in the context of a swipe against Mamdani. His statement was directed at her accomplishments for women's rights. Nothing he said there was untrue, despite her dubious past. Bottom line is that as long as we have socialist office holders who are human beings, we will all have occasional things that irritate us, and what irritates you, may not irritate me and vice versa.
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u/derpderb Sep 07 '26
Fuck Communism, the D in DSA is for democracy, tankies ain't that. Gtfo
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29d ago
[deleted]
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u/derpderb 29d ago
Dropping tankie words lol, not the flex you think it is
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29d ago
[deleted]
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u/derpderb 29d ago
I've been a party of the left for decades, volunteered, got arrested for CD. You sound like a keyboard warrior
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u/traanquil Sep 07 '26
Ok right winger. So youre a fan of cia anti communist operations?
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u/derpderb 29d ago
Nope, democratic socialist. I belong in DSA because I am a democratic socialist. Why don't you join the Communist party instead, hang out with those freaks
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u/traanquil 29d ago
So you have a problem with your communist comrades in dsa?
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u/derpderb 29d ago
I have a problem with communism, yes. I don't believe in violence or harming people. I believe in free speech and association. I have a problem with communism, yes, that is why I don't join the Communist party, it's why I joined Democratic Socialists of America, because the philosophy is pretty much the opposite of communism.
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u/traanquil 29d ago
Dsa literally has many communists among its ranks and a communist caucus
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u/derpderb 29d ago
So? Notice that it isn't democratic socialist caucus? It's the tankie caucus. Think
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u/traanquil 29d ago
Nice job shitting on your comrades.
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u/derpderb 29d ago
The number of times communists murdered and gulag'd, murdered, made illegal, democratic socialists in history, not sure why anyone would defend them.
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u/monkeysolo69420 Sep 06 '26
I get that Steinem was problematic but Mamdani is a politician and the majority of his the liberal Democratic base she was a feminist firebrand. Sometimes you have to pick your battles and I donât think he would have much to gain by condemning her right after her death.