Steinem’s personal views and CIA political goals aligned. Her brand of social revolution, promoted by American tax dollars, was meant to counter Soviet-sponsored revolutionary messaging. Public funds were intended to slow the Soviet scourge while showing America’s alternative democratic face.
When I was in college I read a number of Steinem pieces. I did not learn about her involvement with the CIA (bad) and views on trans people (arguably worse) until much later in life. Once again Second Wave feminism disappoints me! Interesting how well this lines up with Gabriel Rockhill's theories on the Compatible Left of the american midcentury. Ah well, rest in piss I guess
Heidi Blake reports on how the defining figure of the manosphere built a fortune—and became a political force—by systematically exploiting women.
Well-written and horrifying. I was particularly struck by the bit about how the ineptitude of police in investigating the Tates arguably set all this in motion. Of course the police wouldn't give a shit, half of cops love the shit that Tate does.
I am always a bit suspect of stories that position individual right-wing figures as Great Men, and I think in the grand scheme of things Tate is less of a central figure than he is a smooth operator in a Western political environment that has little cause to fight him.
His base in Romania is, of course, pertinent here -- a post-Soviet state plundered by capital in a revenge drive against the population for daring to attempt a more equitable way of life. Of course the Tates flourish there, the goal of American policy of the last hundred years has been to carve up the Eastern European nations for precisely this sort of horror and human rights abuse. This is what the United States has created.
Which again is why I think if I have any major qualms with this (incredibly in-depth) work of biographical journalism it is the fact that the author does not seem to grasp the political dimensions here, at least not fully. Tate is not a leader of a new movement, he is a beneficiary of a very old one -- anticommunism, at the hands of the United States.
Tate's particular brand of hyper-misogyny, right-wing agitprop, et cetera -- this is what the last century has been set up to create. Horrors upon horrors.