Gloria Steinem, CIA Asset?

0:001975 was a strange year for the women's liberation movement, also referred to as second wave feminism. On the one hand, legal dominoes had been falling in its favor. In 1972, Title IX was enacted. In 1973, the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade legalized abortion nationwide. Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 allowed women to get credit and loans in their own name for the first time. And after decades of failed attempts, Congress had finally passed the Equal Rights Amendment. Although, it would still need 38 states to ratify it in order for it to cross the constitutional finish line. But the movement was also splintering from within.

1:03Often along the lines of which women they spoke for and overlooked. What did women's liberation seek? Liberation from? And how best to achieve it? Liberal feminists sought equality under the law. Liberal feminists said, no, fuck the establishment. They wanted liberation from sex rules and gender roles. Lesbian separatists and radical lesbians wanted liberation from men, period. Meanwhile, black feminists who might not have called themselves feminists since the women's liberation movement was so thoroughly white-coded, they were asking why the default women in women's liberation seemed to be college-educated, middle-class, white women. What about things like for sterilizations, welfare, housing discrimination? And in the midst of all of those debates, in early May 1975, the Red Stockings Feminist

2:04Collective issued a press release announcing what it called, glorious dinums CIA cover-up. This is conspiracy she wrote, I'm Kristen Conger, grab your red string and follow along. Last episode, we talked about how the FBI spied on the women's movement in the 1970s as part of its infamous domestic spying program, Cointelpro. Based on what we know, the Bureau didn't attempt to directly manipulate the movement, like it had with civil rights, labor and anti-war movements. Mostly the feds were dispatching female informants all over the place to figure out what all these women were talking about. But the specter of state surveillance is powerful, regardless.

3:07For the women's liberation movement, it heightened pre-existing tensions and severed waning solidarity with suspicion. On May 9, 1975, five women assembled around a small table, one of whom is wearing very 1975-around sunglasses indoors. They called themselves the Red Stockings, and some of them were members of the original feminist group, the Red Stockings, who had disbanded in 1970. They gathered for a press conference. Now this press conference was strategically held at a convention for liberal and radical journalists. They knew their audience. And so these five women, constituting the revived Red Stockings, came forward to present allegations that Gloria Steinem was in league with the CIA.

4:11Now this did not make headline news around the nation, but it was seismic within the feminist community at the time. Now for a little bit of CIA context, and perhaps why the Red Stockings decided to publish these sensational claims about Steinem, on December 22, 1974, The New York Times published a front page bomb shell by investigative reporter Seymour Hirsch. Quote, the Central Intelligence Agency, directly violating its charter, conducted a mass massive illegal domestic intelligence operation during the Nixon administration against the anti-war movement and other dissident groups in the US, according to well-placed government sources. End quote. That operation had a mass intelligence files on at least 10,000 Americans, and Hirsch's

5:13reporting uncovered further evidence of quote, dozens of other illegal activities by members of the CIA in the United States, beginning in the 1950s, including break ins, wire tapping, and the surreptitious inspection of mail. By law, the CIA is only allowed to spy on people outside the country. Spying on people inside the US, that's for the FBI, and of course, they weren't happy to hear about the CIA's anti-war ops, not because it was again totally against the law, but because the CIA was stepping on the FBI's toes. CIA officials at the time didn't deny that its agents were authorized to follow around and photograph anti-war demonstrators, but they insisted it was legitimate. As in, higher ups were convinced that the KGB or other foreign agents were behind the

6:19anti-war protest movement. So sure, maybe it was illegal, but they were just fulfilling their duty of protecting Americans from outside threats, right? Yeah, wrong. This is why, as we visited last episode, the church committee hearings were held. That's also why 1975 was dubbed by the press The Year of Intelligence, because this whole thing was just snowballing between the Pentagon papers, the Co-Intelpro revelations, and now Operation Chaos, which was the name of the CIA's illegal anti-war infiltration, all of that was coming to light. And the fact that they were accusing Gloria Steinem of being in league with the CIA, given the CIA's quickly souring reputation as being just as bad, perhaps as J. Edgar Hoover's

7:24FBI, was all the more reason for people to freak out. Here's an excerpt from the article The Red Stockings Later Published, detailing the alleged cover-up and its implications for Ms. Magazine and the feminist movement at large. We now have documentation that Gloria Steinem knowingly worked for a CIA-financed group on a full-time basis from at least 1959 to 1962. She never disclosed this group with CIA-finance until after the information was already exposed, and the press named her as the group's co-founder. In a later New York Times interview, she defended her own actions and those of the CIA-funded group. We have questions about Steinem's motives for entering the women's movement in 1969

8:24to 1970, so soon after her defense of the CIA. We are suspicious of her sudden rise to prominence as a quote, women's liberation leader. At a time when, unlike other prominent women's liberationists, she was active in no women's group, she had not written a feminist book, won a congressional seat, or played a superb game of tennis. In fact, she was unknown to most women in the movement, or at best, known to women readers of New York magazine as one of the sympathetic journalists. The Red Stockings then zeroed in on Miz magazine. Although Miz occasionally deals with women's issues in a feminist context, we feel that it is basically a capitalist, commercial enterprise. Three possible explanations for the existence of Miz come to us.

9:27In the first place, it might be a legitimate journal growing out of the liberal wing of the movement, a media counterpart to the national organization of women. Two it might be an encrustation on the movement arising from outside, rather than from inside, and owing its existence and politics to money from corporations and to people from outside the feminist movement. Three it might be a CIA instigated and or controlled parallel organization serving simultaneously to supplant a legitimate movement voice and to gather information on radicals. What were they talking about? There are kernels of truth. That CIA financed group, the Red Stockings referred to, was the innocuous sounding independent research service. And Gloria Steinem, then a recent Smith College graduate, started working for them in 1959.

10:34Now some accounts I've seen say that Steinem was a co-founder of the group. I've also seen that she was brought on and then made one of its directors. I'm not exactly sure which one is accurate, but the group's primary task was recruiting American students to attend Soviet-sponsored youth festivals in Europe to basically serve as public representatives of how great capitalist democracy is. According to political scientists Karen Paget's 2014 book Patriotic Betrayal, quote, long before Steinem became a feminist icon, she was one of the few women in the NSA, CIA Club, the NSA being the National Student Association, which the CIA had infiltrated to keep tabs on and steer the growing youth movement toward anti-communism. Because remember, this is the late 1950s, so McCarthyism and the Red Scare is very much in full force.

11:40One detail though that will become relevant in a second is that one of Steinem's jobs for the 1959 Vienna Youth Festival was collaborating with free Europe Press to publish a daily newspaper in six languages that they'd surreptitiously distribute to students from Soviet countries. So yeah, it was a propaganda operation. And to execute it, Steinem recruited a journalist at S. Quire magazine named Clay Falkner, put a pin in clay. The CIA funded student program abruptly came to a halt though when its activities were made public in 1967. That February, The New York Times reported, quote, a New York freelance writer disclosed yesterday that the Central Intelligence Agency had supported a foundation that sent hundreds of Americans to world youth festivals in Vienna

12:40in 1959 and Helsinki, Finland in 1962. That New York freelance writer was glorious Steinem. And she told The New York Times that the CIA was a major source of funds for the foundation, the Independent Research Service, since its formation in 1958. Almost all of the young persons who received aid from the foundation did not know about the relationship with the intelligence agency, Ms. Steinem said. The way Steinem told it to The Times, she spearheaded the Independent Research Service out of a desire to see American youth's political activism taken more seriously. But since it was the red scare, nobody wanted to fund anything involving communism, like sending a few hundred students abroad to a communist propaganda festival, even if to unwittingly serve as counter propaganda. So, Steinem said, some friends of hers at the National Student

13:47Association tipped her off that the CIA might free up cash for it. And rather than being sketched out, Steinem told The Times, quote, far from being shocked by this involvement, I was happy to find some liberals and government in those days who were far-sighted and cared enough to get Americans of all political views to the festival. Steinem also insisted the CIA hadn't meddled in their youth festival work or used it as a domestic surveillance front. Quote, I was never asked to report on other Americans or assess foreign nationals I had met. Maybe not. But then there's also Clay Feltner, that S. Choir guy, Steinem recruited for the 1959 Vienna Youth Festival. He was instrumental in Steinem's subsequent career as a journalist. He was her editor at S. Choir

14:48in 1962 when Steinem notched her first byline in a National magazine. That story was about birth control and evolving sexual morays on campus. Feltner ascended from S. Choir to then become the publisher of New York magazine where he hired Gloria Steinem in 1968 as a contributing editor. In late 1971, Ms. Magazine was previewed as a supplement to New York magazine before its standalone publication launched in January 1972. The red stockings connected all of these dots and with correlation equaling causation and there being no coincidences according to conspiratorial thinking all of this could have been puppet mastered by the CIA once tainted by CIA money. You can never untaint yourself, especially when you were on the record in 1967,

15:53essentially praising the CIA for being so liberal-minded. To this day, though, to be clear, there's no evidence to support such a sweeping claim. Not that Gloria Steinem had zero CIA affiliation, but that the affiliation carried on and then became a full-blown mission encompassing the top tier of the New York publishing world to essentially brainwash millions of American women into de-radicalized feminism. The red stockings hadn't uncovered any information that wasn't already publicly available, but they presented the facts as justification for their foregone conclusion that Steinem, Ms. Magazine, and the CIA stole the movement from the radicals. And their sense of betrayal makes sense. The red stockings were there from the beginning,

16:57they had coined the slogan, the personal is political, and it was the red stockings that made women's consciousness raising groups a key feature of second-wave feminist organizing. But, of course, it was Gloria Steinem and her glossy Ms. Magazine, who became the household name and photogenic face of women's liberation. But we also need to zoom out for a second and look at the bigger picture of what was happening within the movement. This is from Sydney, Layton Sim Stern's book, Gloria Steinem, her passions, politics, and mystique. Quote, in addition to the genuine existence of outside agitators, red stockings was responding to changes within the feminist movement. During the late 60s and early 70s, the original radical feminist theories emphasized women's similarities to men and analyzed women's socially constructed role in order for women to achieve

18:01equality. Gender polarization was to be replaced with some form of androgyny. From about 1973 on, a more woman-centered analysis came to predominate, emphasizing women's differences from men. Rather than urging women to seek androgyny, a wide variety of feminist thinkers celebrated qualities more associated with females, empathy, for example, and a lower propensity to violence, and suggested that the culture itself be changed to reflect more of the traditional feminine values. At its best, this analysis offered an improvement over the original radical feminist impulse and a blueprint for change. At its worst, it led back to a Victorian concept of women as more virtuous, more moral, less rational, as emotions were often praised over

19:03intellect, and more in need of protection. So where did Gloria Steinem come from? The red stockings weren't totally out of pocket to question Steinem's swift feminist celebrity. It was manufactured to an extent by the media. That and Steinem's grassroots activism and organizing, like both things are true, but this bit of the background always raised a question of Steinem's authenticity. Gloria Steinem's breakout in journalism came in 1963. She went undercover as a Playboy Bunny cocktail waitress at Manhattan's Playboy Club. A bunny's tail was published in Show magazine, and I gotta say, it does plausibly

20:07seem CIA inspired since she was just one year out from the IRS Independent Research Service, and going undercover. That piece launched a successful career as a freelance magazine writer. Steinem had regular bylines in glamour magazine, vogue, life, look, ladies' home journal, and yes, you will notice that those magazines skew women's aisle, because at that time women were expected to write mostly for women about women things. Now speaking of women things, Steinem's feminist awakening happened a little later in her mid-30s. It was 1969, and she was covering an abortion speak out for New York magazine. She'd had an abortion in her early 20s, but she hadn't told a soul. She later described it as one of the moments when you ask,

21:10why? Who said? And talk about full circle. The red stockings organized that abortion speak out. The piece she ended up writing for New York magazine was titled After Black Power Women's Liberation. It made her a name in the movement because it was one of the first times women's liberation got national media attention and took the cause seriously. In the book Mass Media and the shaping of American feminism, 1963-1975, Patricia Bradley noted, at the time of her feminist awakening, Steinem was already a local celebrity, and at the first breath of her connection to what was now becoming a hot media issue, she was immediately transfigured into a timely celebrity. All Clay Feltner was also instrumental in all of this, not because he was setting Gloria Steinem

22:17up to become some feminist celebrity. He wanted New York magazine to be the celebrity. In 1968, he did the unthinkable for a national publication at the time and assigned Gloria, a woman, to cover politics. He also had hired a publicist for the magazine, whose job it was to get their coolest, most photogenic reporters booked on radio and TV shows. Gloria Steinem was about as cool and photogenic as it got. One Steinem jumped aboard women's liberation. She was media trained for the moment, and diminishing but true. Her looks and style captured attention because editors and producers were like, oh my god, feminists can look like this, a hot woman for women's liberation, who also has a well-decorated apartment. Now this is a story we can sing our teeth into. I mean, I'm paraphrasing, but truly, even women's magazine

23:22editors at the time were like, well, yeah, I mean, it's not like we could put someone some militant, hairy-leg lesbian in on the cover. So thank god, we had Gloria as we could finally talk about it. I don't be honest. Part of me just does not want to believe that somehow the CIA in the 1960s had such a finger on the pulse and such an awareness of women's unrest, not just in the broader culture, but also on the left, that they were able to position Gloria Steinem years ahead of time to collect the bylines, get the media attention, have her become a hot item in the New York media scene just in time for her then to discover feminism, put all the pieces together, write a powerful piece that got a lot of people thinking and talking, and next thing you know, like she's the face of the movement, and the CIA did it all, because the CIA not only is patriarchy, it

24:25knows patriarchy. Like where does Occam's razor come in on all of this? Initially, Gloria Steinem said nothing. She didn't care to dignify it with a response, but Ms. Magazine did put out this statement. The Red Stockings press release makes us sad, but we must not forget that the real culprits are the people in power who create such crazy suspicions and who profit by them. We feel the CIA part of the affair is negative energy. The only accurate information is that Gloria Steinem worked for the Independent Research Service 14 and 16 years ago, and that group received some funds that came directly through foundations, some from the CIA, and that this information Gloria herself made public in 1967. We feel that the Red Stockings conclusions and implications drawn from these

25:30dated facts are absurd. It is consciousness raising to consider the 1950s parallel to this kind of journalism, when people were accused of being communist simply because they had attended communist supported events in the past. The parallel seems exact. Popular paranoia that settled on communism in the 50s may now in the 70s settle on the CIA. Fighting within the women's movement over such unfounded assertions as the Red Stockings charges can only prevent all of us from spending time on the important outside struggles that are really necessary. We welcome constructive editorial criticism of Ms. Magazine and recognize anyone's right to extend it. We only wish the Red Stockings editorial comment could have been presented in a more valid context. The Los Angeles Free Press added this

26:34note at the end of the press statement that by a more valid context, spokesperson for Ms. Joanne said, a straight editorial discussion or criticism of the magazine not tacked on to this absolutely crazy CIA junk. It also noted that the press statement came from some of the editorial staff of Ms. Magazine. Not everyone was on board for the denial, but the controversy didn't evaporate from there. It incited enough concern among Ms. Magazine staffers and the broader feminist community that Steinem eventually published a lengthy statement, again calling it a McCarthyite attempt to derail the movement's progress. In that statement, Steinem for the first time, disavowed her CIA involvement, quote, I naively thought then that the ultimate money sourced

27:37it in matter. Since in my own experience, no control or orders came with it. Parentheses. It is painfully clear with hindsight that even indirect control-free funding was a mistake if it couldn't be published. But I didn't realize it then. End quote. And during this time, again, this was not a national news story, but God imagine. Just imagine if threads existed back then. If, oh God, if blue sky existed back then. We would have never heard the end of it. And in fact, I guess we still are not hearing the end of it because I'm talking about it right now. But I went back in red. Gorya Steinem's very lengthy response to the red stockings that she kind of was finally pushed to publish. And she released it only to like a handful of feminist publications at the time. She explicitly says, like, look, I did not release this nationally

28:43because this doesn't need to become a national story. They're just going to twist it into just more spectacle of like, oh, look, the women are fighting with each other. But fine. For the sake of the movement, let's go through all of these arguments. And you know, she maybe could have used another round of edits. Because in the same way that the red stockings expose is just dripping with conspiracism and creating the spider web plot of how Gorya Steinem has somehow puppet mastered second wave feminism into just being a watered down commercial product. But likewise, Gorya Steinem's response was also dripping with a negative tone and presuppositions of like, this is also some kind of a plot. Here's an excerpt. I'm writing about

29:49a tabloid style press release that was distributed to the national and local media in New York City on May 9th and then sent to the feminist press. It bears no clear attribution to the person or persons who wrote it, financed it, or are legally responsible for its content, but is identified only by red stockings, the name of a New York feminist group whose original 10 or 12 members disbanded five years ago. Considerable space in the release is also devoted to attacking me personally, accusing me of lying about everything from my feminist convictions to the experience of my own childhood. Ironically, the text then appropriates the criticisms made by me and others, that the women's movement in general and Miz magazine in particular have not been radical enough.

30:50A paragraph with the subhead, bizarre kind of exemplifies this tone I'm talking about. Does it seem as bizarre to read such denials as it does to write them? In a way, I hope it does. Because otherwise, we may be moving into a period of suspicion when such statements become a commonplace necessity, especially for women, since we seem more likely than men to be thought of as acting under someone else's control. Perhaps some of us have grown up on so many news reports of the US government's subversion of revolutionary movements in this country and others, that almost any betrayal seems possible. If so, the writers of this release, consciously or not, assist the ultimate subversion of immobilizing us through mistrust of each other.

31:51This is again from Sydney Stern's book Gloria Steinem, Her Passion's Politics and Mystique. Complete silence would have been preferable. Gloria could not have done a worse job on her own behalf. There was probably nothing she could have said that would have convinced the Red stockings that she wasn't allied with the CIA. Some accusers still suspect her. But Gloria Steinem responded as if she had something to hide. Apparently incapable of presenting her own history and a straightforward, unapologetic that was then, this is now manner. She would only get as far as explaining the Cold War context before she began to use torturous explanations that made her sound guilty of something, even if it wasn't clear what. For example, she never could and still does not, simply present the IRS, Independent Research Service, not the Internal Revenue Service,

32:54as a CIA front organization as it was. Instead, she described it as an operation in which, quote, some of the American participation was partially funded by foundations that were in turn funded by the CIA. Of course, the funding was indirect. Why would the CIA have to set up a separate operation if it could have issued the checks itself? In short, apparently unable to believe she could be appreciated, trusted, loved as she was, Gloria seemed compelled to make all the details fit her image. Anything that contradicted it was a threat that had to be countered with every weapon at her disposal. Steinem statement, hardly satisfied her critics, who weren't confined to the radical fringe. The National Organization of Women Leader Betty Friedan scolded Steinem.

33:59She doesn't answer the charges sufficiently, and it's dangerous to dismiss real evidence of infiltration for Dan told The New York Times. In her book The World Split Open, journalist Ruth Rosen pegged for Dan as seeming determined to keep the conspiracy alive. On television programs, she would announce that she refused to discuss Steinem and the CIA connection, and would then proceed to do so, even if just by implication. This is from the book Gloria Steinem, Her Passions, Politics and Mystique, by Sydney Laydenson Stern. Friends of each party attribute the Red Stockings attack to both genuine political differences and to genuine personal jealousy. Once Betty for Dan became involved, the personal element could hardly be missed. Betty had been

35:00muttering about Gloria's CIA connection for years, but those who worked with Betty paid her no mind, attributing it to jealousy, or to her concern about outside agents disrupting the movement. They considered Gloria's previous association with the CIA irrelevant to her feminist activities. And one reason I do think that this whole Gloria Steinem CIA conspiracy theory has lived on is because libel lawyers got involved. So long story short, this whole Red Stockings piece, on Gloria Steinem, was part of this larger anthology feminist revolution that this group of Red Stockings, the reconstituted Red Stockings, were looking to publish. They got a contract from Random House to publish feminist revolution, and they were planning to include all of their

36:04press release on Gloria Steinem and this whole spider web of intrigue that they presented. It seems like Random House was fine to move ahead with the publication, but then Gloria Steinem called the publisher. She didn't even bother calling the book's editor. She went straight to the top of Random House and said, basically, look, if y'all publish this, you're going to be hearing from my lawyers. And they not only heard from Steinem, but everyone else mentioned in the piece. Random House got legal letters and complaints from Clay Fulkner, the Women's Action Alliance, Warner Communications, and Washington Post publisher Catherine Graham. Women's Action Alliance was a group Gloria Steinem had started, and the Red Stockings implicated Warner Communications and Catherine Graham and their conspiracy theory for helping

37:07fund the launch of Ms. Magazine. Libelsoots were being threatened, and ultimately Random House was like, yeah, we're going to pull that. So they ended up in the late 70s. It took a long time to actually get the thing published because of all the legal threats, but they ended up publishing feminist revolution without the bit on Gloria Steinem and the CIA, which of course the Red Stockings took as further evidence of what? Cover up. That was a lot of power being thrown around to censor of feminist anthology. And even if the claims were libelous, that kind of move will only further entrench conspiracies. As all of this was going on, the Times also reported, quote, ironically, in the midst of a CIA controversy, the Federal Bureau of Investigation designated Ms.

38:09Steinem a security risk. Considering Ms. Steinem for a consulting position on its program of sex discrimination legislation, the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division asked the FBI to conduct a security clearance check. The FBI concluded that it would be inadvisable to hire her because of what it called her leftist associations. Two leftist for the FBI and the Justice Department, not leftist enough for the leftist feminists. Legendary rock music critic Ellen Willis was both a former Red Stockings member and a Ms. magazine editor. She'd resigned from Ms. over the publication's Liberal Politics and connected the Steinem controversy to those surrounding Jane Alpert, the FBI, and female fugitives that we talked about

39:16at the end of last episode. She told the Times, all of this is tied up together and boils down to the question of, are you a radical or are you not a radical and what do you think of the male left? Based on what feminists were saying at the time, it seems like it also boiled down to the question not of if women's liberation had been infiltrated to destroy, but rather who the infiltrators and underminers were. Perhaps those answers might explain why their ideologically diverse movement couldn't just get along. In a way, it would be a much simpler pill to swallow than reckoning with the organic messiness of undertaking a feminist revolution that achieved so much and yet still let so many women down. It's interesting to you to see how some of the feminists who were genuinely

40:25angry about the political direction of Ms. and really did feel like it was kind of co-opting the militancy of the original movement, how they look back and see how that kind of got twisted into this singular personal attack on glorious Steinem. Sydney Stern interviewed Ellen Willis for the glorious Steinem biography and Willis told Stern, you know what? I didn't actually like the Red Stockings press conference and the whole kind of tabloid story about glorious Steinem that they presented. I had issues with that, but I kept my criticism private. I went to them directly whereas I took my issues with glorious Steinem and Ms. Magazine public and that was unfair. But at the time she kind of justified to herself being so publicly against Ms. and Steinem because of the way

41:29that glorious Steinem and Ms. Magazine responded to the Red Stockings press release in the way of just like this is McCarthyite nonsense and who are these people. Whenever we're talking in conspiratorial terms it is essential to remember that conflicting truths don't just cancel each other out. Power struggles and personality clashes are common features of mass social movements. Women's liberation wasn't unique in growing more contentious the bigger it got and more media attention it attracted. But also by the mid 70s political and cultural tides were turning toward backlash and second wave feminism had entered what I'll call it's rationally paranoid era. Women's liberation stalled out in part due to the women involved and also FBI surveillance of

42:33the movement accelerated the fracture. The state's weaponization of intelligence agencies, law enforcement and the courts to disrupt and influence the era's leftist activism as well as the public perception of their political aims was and remains toxic. And to me the whole reason worth talking about this are these reactions that can happen are the ways that people can turn on each other and that we can purity test ourselves to death in a broader environment and context of true oppressive surveillance and infiltration. And we see in the figure of glorious stinum and this incident that she could not kind of reconcile the two that like stern points out

43:33in the glorious stinum biography that she felt compelled to make these details fit her image whether consciously or not to borrow stinum's own phrasing regarding the red stockings. And what does it mean to if we look at the even bigger context of the time when conservative women led by figures like philish laughley are organizing them against the feminist movement against the equal rights amendment. And meanwhile feminists are fighting with each other about glorious stinum working for a CIA front which by conspiracy logic means she's always working for a CIA front. Preston Power, glorious stinum. I did not plan this episode with the news of her death but

44:35it does feel appropriate because I think the important thing to remember is that we are people and we are flawed in that movements are necessarily full of friction. But when the friction becomes not about politics and about the personal when the political becomes too personal perhaps maybe that's a sign that things are moving off the rails because I don't need to tell y'all by the end of the 1970s the women's liberation movement had faded out. Feminism wasn't over but the movement was. An old Betty for Dan was probably sitting there, chain smoking sigs in her New York apartment thinking goddammit glorious stinum that CIA agent she really did it that beautiful woman that I hated so much she really did it can you tell I'm not a big fan of Betty for Dan?

45:36yeah I know she did important stuff but wow a tough figure to to to really reckon with. Thank you so much for listening I'm Kristen Conger this has been conspiracy she wrote for sources. If you want to fact check me check my source list go to conspiracyshearote.com slash episodes if you would like to support this show and get ad free episodes because ad suck join the cabal go to patreon.com slash conspiracy she wrote and support this one woman show. Oh would you? I would be so tremendously grateful um and if you are a feminist conspiracy theorist and you still believe that glorious stinum was a CIA plant uh well

46:37I'd love to hear from you. Let me know let me know what you think let me know why it matters and let me know whatever lessons you take away from it today.