Commentary Culture Investigations

Our normal review of the Elitist Media evening news presented us with something so rare it may as well have been a unicorn. When’s the last time you saw a super-clean report on ANYTHING having to do with a Stand-Your-Ground case? And yet, that’s exactly what happened at the CBS Evening News. Watch the report in its entirety, as aired on the CBS Evening News on Thursday, September 3rd, 2026: UNICORN: @CBSEveningNews demonstrates the proper way to report a Stand-Your-Ground case (To wit: Broward County, FL drops charges against the woman that shot a man dead at a Walmart parking lot.) pic.twitter.com/cb1QVTz3ws— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) September 4, 2026 TONY DOKOUPIL: Let’s turn to South Florida, and newly released video from a shooting earlier this summer at a Walmart parking lot. The prosecutor says the woman who gunned down a 62-year-old man at point-blank range, killing him, is not facing charges. CBS’s Jason Allen has the explanation and the video, which is disturbing.MELISSA PAYNE: I was going to back it to that spot.JASON ALLEN: New video released by the Broward County State Attorney shows the moments after a woman fatally shot a man over a parking spot outside a Walmart, to explain their decision not to charge her.PAYNE: (unint) …what are you going to do, what are you going to do?ALLEN: It happened in June. Melissa Payne was driving the car circled in yellow. And Bart DiGuglielmo was in the SUV, both going after the same spot. She ended up with it. And after parking several rows over he came back and began threatening her, according to witnesses. For about a minute and a half, she pointed a gun at him while backing away before firing one shot into his abdomen. She was briefly taken into custody.PAYNE: I told him, “It’s not going to go well for you. Please.” All the guys telling him: “Sir, sir, it’s not worth it. Leave her alone.”ALLEN: Prosecutors today cleared Payne, based on Florida’s Stand Your Ground law, saying the State would not be able to overcome her claim that she was in fear of great bodily harm.The family of DiGuglielmo has been pushing for charges since the shooting happened, saying it was not self-defense. The toxicology report showing he had amphetamines, THC, and anti-depressants in his system. Tony.DOKOUPIL: Jason. Thank you.A Florida “Stand Your Ground” (SYG) case is normally viewed by the Elitist Media as an opportunity to wax hysterically about guns. More often than not, abuses of SYG are presented as serious defenses, which then gives the media an opportunity to further argue against the statute.That’s not at all what happened here. Per the statute:776.012 Use or threatened use of force in defense of person.—(1) A person is justified in using or threatening to use force, except deadly force, against another when and to the extent that the person reasonably believes that such conduct is necessary to defend himself or herself or another against the other’s imminent use of unlawful force. A person who uses or threatens to use force in accordance with this subsection does not have a duty to retreat before using or threatening to use such force.(2) A person is justified in using or threatening to use deadly force if he or she reasonably believes that using or threatening to use such force is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the imminent commission of a forcible felony. A person who uses or threatens to use deadly force in accordance with this subsection does not have a duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground if the person using or threatening to use the deadly force is not engaged in a criminal activity and is in a place where he or she has a right to be.The report corroborates that this is what happened here. Correspondent Jason Allen showed video of the deceased man aggressively stalking the woman, even as she had a handgun trained on him. He then cited the prosecution’s rationale for dropping the case, which is that “he would not be able to overcome her claim that she was in fear of great bodily harm.” There was no anti-gun editorializing, just simple reporting of the facts on the ground. Allen then closed his out report by pointing out that the decedent had amphetamines, THC, and antidepressants in his system. The end result is a super-clean report that came out the exact opposite of what the Elitist Media normally do in cases like these- a report as rare as a unicorn sighting.

During the course of researching so many books on Ronald Reagan, I’ve thought to myself numerous times: Wow, that would make a great movie.
My colleague Mark Joseph thought the same. One day in 2004, he called about making one of my Reagan books a movie. Twenty years later, the movie became reality, based on my 2006 work, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism, starring Dennis Quaid. That film is a deep dive into the life of Ronald Wilson Reagan, with the thread being his long crusade against atheistic, militant Soviet communism and his plan to peacefully win the Cold War. (READ: “Reagan Gets a Director’s Cut—and Hinckley Shares Some Words.”)
If one were looking for a dramatic flashpoint in that effort, at least regarding Reagan’s direct efforts with Mikhail Gorbachev, it might be captured in one word and place: Reykjavik. That is, the enormously consequential 30-hour engagement between Reagan and Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland, Oct. 11-12, 1986. From the first time I sat in the Reagan Library in Simi Valley in the summer of 2001 reading declassified MemCons (Memoranda of Conversation) between Reagan and Gorbachev at Reykjavik, I thought to myself: Wow, that would make a great movie.
Alas, what were the chances of that happening? Modern movies are saturated with sensationalism, over-hyped bunkum, with shouting and screaming actors, with moronic, mind-numbing action sequences. There were no car chases at Reykjavik. No explosions or people falling from buildings or presidents jumping from airplanes onto the lava rock below. There was no sex or vulgarity. Moreover, Hollywood has little interest in heavy dialogue — even riveting, real dialogue between pivotal leaders whose words literally reduced nuclear stockpiles and changed history.
Plus, of course, Hollywood has been corrupted by politics. Even though everyone back in the day credited both Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev with ending the Cold War (Gorbachev himself credited Reagan), Hollywood leftists are so poisoned by ideology that they surely wouldn’t make a movie highlighting the grand historical achievement that was Reykjavik. (READ: “My Response to the Reagan Critics and Haters.”)
Fortunately, we’ve arrived at a long-awaited, blessed moment in which new, independent film companies and technology have made it possible to move beyond Hollywood’s vagaries and to start making movies apart from the toxicity of Tinsel Town and cost-prohibitive budgets. Seizing the moment is a group that has at long last given us a movie about Reykjavik, and it’s superb and well worth your time. (RELATED: Reagan, Gorbachev, and The Brink of War That Changed the World)
A Bipartisan Message
The film is called The Brink of War, produced by SK Global and 2521 Entertainment and distributed by Angel Studios. It’s written by Michael Russell Gunn in his directorial debut. The producer is John Logan Pierson, with Tristan Roche as the co-producer. This group has given the world a story increasingly rare and badly needed today, one in which adversaries and bipartisan diplomats work together to build bridges rather than demonize one another.
The Reagan and Gorbachev characters are played by Jeff Daniels and Jared Harris, respectively. An English actor, Harris does a fine job with Gorbachev (and a Russian accent). Among other quirks of Gorbachev’s personality, Harris captures the general secretary’s unappreciated angry demeanor. Despite hagiographical portrayals of Gorbachev by Western admirers, the man was a hothead. A minor criticism is that Harris looks older and more tired than Gorbachev, but that’s no big deal. Likewise, Jeff Daniels doesn’t look much like Reagan (he looks more like Reagan’s brother Neil). Nonetheless, he makes you forget about the lack of physical resemblance and draws you into the depth of the affable Reagan character.
Nancy Reagan is played by Hope Davis. She isn’t caricatured as catty and flaky as she is in so many over-the-top portrayals. Well, not totally. In one scene, she has an astrology chart on her desk as she suggests to Ronnie during a phone conversation: “Well, Mars is ascendant, so we have that going for us.” I can’t vouch for whether that exchange truly happened, but it’s plausible.
As for Nancy’s counterpart/rival, Raisa Gorbachev is played by Branka Katic, a pretty actress who makes the atheist-Marxist Soviet “first lady” more appealing than she really was. Katic actually grew up under Raisa’s crappy communist system. The Serbian actress lived in communist Yugoslavia and escaped.
An amusing addition is the cast of four Reagan arms negotiators, whom the president chides as his “four Democrats”: Max Kampelman, Paul Nitze, Richard Perle, and Ken Adelman. (Adelman corrects Reagan, noting that he’s a Republican. Indeed he was, though never very conservative. Adelman endorsed Kamala Harris in 2024 and urged voters to support her as the heir to Reagan.)
Particularly central to the film is U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz, who is played splendidly by J.K. Simmons. Shultz’s eyewitness testimony carries the narrative, from the opening scene where Reagan fears he has failed, lamenting to Shultz as the summit finishes, “It’s over.” The movie sequence then jumps back to their arrival at Reykjavik. Shultz repeatedly bucks up Reagan with lines like, “It was your military buildup — you got us here, sir — you got them to the table.”
Shultz is so central that the film credits close with a dedication to him. That isn’t undue, given his role as Reagan’s right-hand man at Reykjavik. His notes have long been the dominant voice of record on Reykjavik, all the way until his death on Feb. 6, 2021 (Reagan’s birthday) at the age of 100.
Impressively, the filming was done on-site in Reykjavik at the now-historic Höfði House where the president and general secretary locked horns in four long face-to-face meetings. The shots of the surrounding landscape and raging seawater are visually alluring. Kudos to the cinematographer, Magdalena Gorka, for her lovely work. Gorka, too, experienced life behind the Iron Curtain — growing up in Poland.
Ending Nukes and Debating Religion
As for the historical backdrop and film focus, it was at Reykjavik, the second summit between Reagan and Gorbachev following Geneva the previous year, that the two leaders took extraordinary strides aimed not at limiting the growth of tens of thousands of nuclear weapons (as previous negotiators had sought), but at actually reducing their number. In an incredible series of steps that stunned the world, the president and general secretary pursued a deal to abolish all of the two superpowers’ nukes — every single one of them, at every level, on the ground, in silos, on subs, long range, short range, intermediate, you name it.
Within the context of these intense negotiations was Gorbachev’s obsession with the Strategic Defense Initiative and desire to limit, if not banish it completely, as well as Reagan’s commitment to keeping SDI. At one point, remarkably, Reagan went so far as to offer to share the anti-nuke missile shield with the Soviets. Such a shield would allow both sides, the United States and the USSR, to protect their countries from incoming missiles from future rogue regimes. Also dominant within the negotiations was Ronald Reagan’s passion for protecting human rights for Soviet refuseniks, Russian Jews, Pentecostals, Soviet-born cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, and more. For Reagan, nothing was more important than these basic human rights, a fact that annoyed Soviet officials who never gave a damn about morality in their genuinely evil empire. Theirs was a system that, as Reagan put it in the film, “subjugates every citizen, denying them not just basic rights, but their God-given free will.”
Throughout the two-hour film, the pair take the gloves off. Reagan is shown for what he was during these finest of hours: calm, composed, confident, witty, in command, and profoundly dedicated to the abolition of not just an evil empire but nuclear weapons.
The dialogue is the heart and soul of the film, as it should be. Unfortunately, the dialogue isn’t a direct cut-and-paste from the official notetakers and was subject to the scriptwriter’s embellishment. Of course, that’s expected of a movie, and I don’t object to it, so long as the thrust of the dialogue is consistent with reality. To that end, a particularly lively exchange occurs during the afternoon session on day one of the summit. Reagan and Gorbachev go toe to toe and blow for blow, with George Shultz and Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze accompanying them.
As the two leaders start rolling with major breakthroughs, Gorbachev lights up, smiles, and cheers: “Good. We are making progress!” Reagan responds with a colloquialism, “Seems like Christmas has come early.” Shultz agrees and laughs, though Gorbachev and Shevardnadze are confused by the expression and assume it’s a theological statement by the Christian president. Gorby’s frown returns as he grimly objects in classic commie-atheist fashion: “What does your religious holiday have to do with this?” A genial Reagan calmly responds, “Nothing, sorry, I forget you’re all atheists,” but then adds, “Although it seems to me the Party is about the same as a church. You’re true believers in the Party, right?” Gorbachev and Shevardnadze look at one another, offended. Gorby barks from across the table: “What exactly do you mean?” Reagan explains what the Soviet general secretary knows about the official Party-Marxist line on religion: “I mean you deny religion, as hokum, bunk, nonsense. There can’t be an Almighty Party if there’s an Almighty God above it. So your people can’t worship. They have to worship the Party.”
Confronting this undeniable truth makes Gorbachev fume: “To paraphrase the words of our theology: religion is a false prophet to the people, promising them things that they themselves must achieve.” Reagan’s rejoinder: “And yet you make them wait in line for bread and shoes and milk. And then deny them the hereafter that would suggest that their suffering is temporary. They’ve got nothing to look forward to, this life or the next. No wonder they’re so pissed off.” (For the record, Reagan rarely swore, even with a mild word like “pissed off.”) Here, Shevardnadze interjected: “The Soviet people are not ‘pissed off,’” prompting Reagan to reply with a rather good observation: “Then why do they want to leave? Why do you have to keep them locked up behind walls — like the one in Berlin? Why not tear it down?”
The diplomatic Shultz tries to intervene to tone down an increasingly heated exchange over communism, capitalism, commercialism, immigration, media, and even cinema, but no luck. Reagan cracks an insulting joke about Soviet bread lines. The tit-for-tat ends with these fireworks:
Gorbachev: And you believe you are the only one with public relations problems, Mr. President… you see: we both answer to the people.
Reagan (with a cool smile): Yes, but my people — if they criticize me publicly — don’t get sent to the gulag.
Gorbachev (insulted and angry): And my people can’t shoot me.
Ouch. Now that was a gut punch to Reagan. Of course, Gorbachev’s people had no right to bear arms — itself a problem in a totalitarian dictatorship. Reagan’s people — John Hinckley included — have that right, and oftentimes to the detriment of public safety, even the safety of the president of the United States.
That exchange certainly hits Reagan in the film. It hit me as intriguing but not something I remembered from the MemCons or anywhere else. And truth be told, it never happened. Gorbachev never said that to Reagan. That line — that powerful punch from the general secretary — was made up.
Relatedly, I’m fairly certain that there was writer’s embellishment in the repeated moments in the film when Reagan is shown shaking in his sleep and tormented by nightmares of being shot on March 30, 1981. The film opens with Reagan haunted by that memory as he stands in a dark suit staring out at the crashing waves of the sea. He’s lost in the memory of gunshots ringing outside the Washington Hilton, “pop, pop, pop.”
Traumatic as that moment had been for Reagan, I’m not aware of it haunting him like this at Reykjavik or anywhere. The film nonetheless accentuates that theme. At one point, he’s shown changing his shirt, and we see the bullet scar under his left armpit.
Nonetheless, even when embellished, this theme serves to properly underscore the very real reality that Ronald Reagan felt that God spared his life that moment in March 1981 precisely for the purpose of engaging the Soviets and seeking to peacefully end the Cold War. Reagan alludes to that in one exchange with Gorbachev.
That overwhelming sense of a deeper, divine purpose affected and drove Reagan throughout his presidency. It was a crucial factor in why he was at Reykjavik and everything he did with Gorbachev to end the Cold War.
The Beginning of the End
Though Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev left Iceland without a deal, they initiated what turned out to be the beginning of the end of the Cold War. For that crucial rest-of-the-story assessment on what would ultimately happen, George Shultz is given the last word. In a moving soliloquy as the film closes, the Shultz character faces the audience and explains: “The press thought it was a failure at the time. Even I had my doubts. But a year later Reagan and Gorbachev signed the first arms reduction agreement in human history. Since then, nuclear weapons have been reduced to less than 10 percent of their Cold War peak.”
Here, the film flashes to newsreel footage of Reagan and Gorbachev signing the INF Treaty at the White House in December 1987. The agreement reduced intermediate-range nukes to zero on both sides. Shultz continued: “Two years later, the war was over and just as Reagan foresaw… the Soviet Union ended.” Here again, newsreel footage of young people sledgehammering the Berlin Wall and Rostropovich amidst the rubble.
And then, the money line of the whole film and summit, as Shultz wraps up: “A few years after that, when Gorbachev visited me out at Stanford, I said: ‘When we met, the Cold War was at its most dangerous point and then three years later it was over… What was the beginning of the end?’ He replied with one word: ‘Reykjavik.’”
Personally, that really struck me, given that when I visited George Shultz in his office at Stanford in July 2003, I asked him that same question. His answer: he told me what Gorbachev told him at that office: Reykjavik.
I smiled in appreciation. I wouldn’t be surprised if I said something like, “Wow, that would make a great movie.”
Well, finally, thanks to this group of filmmakers, it is.
READ MORE from Paul Kengor:
Reagan Gets a Director’s Cut — and Hinckley Shares Some Words
Whatever Happened to the Spare Tire?
Toy Story 5 and the Vanishing America of Toy Stores and Churches

The race for control of the Senate next January is a dead heat. Conventional wisdom suggests the contests in swingy states like Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina and Georgia could prove decisive. And they might.
But it’s possible that the fate of the chamber known as the “world’s greatest deliberative body” will come down to a state not usually considered all that swingy: Texas. Everything is always bigger in Texas, and that now includes the stakes for control of the Senate.
For over a decade, Democrats have touted the purported inevitability of Texas turning blue. “Demographics is destiny,” Democrats bellowed, taunting Republicans by pointing to the state’s burgeoning Hispanic population.
That argument seemed to die in 2020, when President Donald Trump made historic gains in Texas’s heavily Hispanic Rio Grande Valley region. And if the triumphalist chest-thumping might have died in 2020, then it really died in 2024, when Trump won about one-fifth of Black men and nearly half of all Hispanics nationally.
What about now?
The polling average in the Lone Star State’s Senate showdown shows a marginal lead for Democratic challenger James Talarico, the far-left state representative. Talarico is running against Ken Paxton, the controversial state attorney general who trounced incumbent John Cornyn in the spring GOP primary runoff after a Trump endorsement. (RELATED: John Cornyn Is Owed No Revenge at the Expense of His Own Party)
It is easy to dismiss the Talarico threat as a false alarm. I lived in Texas in 2018, when Lone Star Democrats similarly felt confident then-Congressman Beto O’Rourke would defeat the incumbent GOP senator, Ted Cruz. That didn’t happen. In a similar tough midterm cycle during a Trump presidency, Cruz narrowly prevailed.
Paxton suffers from softer support within the GOP, whereas Democrats are more unified in their support for the joker…
But what if this time is different? Talarico might not win. In fact, I don’t think he will. But it is crucial to understand how to best prevent a leftist, “Christian”-cosplaying caricature like Talarico, who argues that the Annunciation justifies abortion, from getting a job promotion to Washington. (RELATED: James Talarico: The Wolf in Sunday’s Clothing)
Many polls in Texas tell a similar story: Paxton suffers from softer support within the GOP, whereas Democrats are more unified in their support for the joker who has called capitalism “oppressive,” predicted the oil and gas industry is “not gonna last,” and has called for Americans to pare back “meat consumption.”
Yes, that’s right: The guy taking a sledgehammer to the oil and gas and cattle industries is seeking statewide office in Texas.
But Paxton needs to increase his support among Texas Republicans. My former state is a massive and complicated one. Texas is still in many ways culturally conservative, but it is also economically vibrant and home to dozens of Fortune 500 companies. Its metropolises have sprawling suburbs, full of moms who care more about pocketbooks and safety than the culture war. (RELATED: Advice for Ken Paxton)
And Paxton has undeniable baggage. He cheated on his wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, who filed for divorce last year. In 2020, Paxton’s top legal deputy, Jeff Mateer, reported him to the FBI over concerns of corruption and abuse of office. Just this summer, Paxton showed dubious judgment while vacationing in London — over July Fourth, no less — with a paramour. His divorce isn’t final yet.
Warts and all, Paxton was still the superior choice in the GOP Senate primary over Cornyn, a flaccid empty suit whose stances on salient issues like gun rights were long far out of step with Texas conservatives. Moreover, for better or worse, ethical qualms about candidates can only register so much in the era of Trump.
The way to shore up Paxton’s support within his own party isn’t to relitigate the GOP primary. And it certainly isn’t to outright dismiss Paxton’s ethical issues, either. Rather, the path forward is a simple, time-tested one: Expose the genuinely radical nature of Talarico.
Talarico didn’t stop his Christian sermonizing by invoking Jesus’ conception to justify abortion — a gruesome act he loves so much that he has called for a de facto federal abortion service. In 2021, Talarico pledged his loyalty to the transgender cause by asserting, on the Texas House floor, that God Himself is “nonbinary.” Despite running for Senate in the most prominent border state, Talarico has said that America’s southern border “should be like our front porch.” A former teacher, he once said his “most patriotic” students were the illegal alien ones. Talarico has referred to the American flag as a “complicated symbol.”
Exposing that is Paxton’s path to victory. Some financial support from the well-heeled MAGA Inc. super PAC wouldn’t hurt, either.
So, pound the airwaves with relentless negative ads. That’s not pretty, but this isn’t Hollywood or Broadway. This is Texas.
READ MORE from Josh Hammer:
Clarence Thomas Played the Long Game. He Won.
Florida Is the New Ground Zero for Both Political Parties’ Civil Wars
The Electoral Integrity Issue Isn’t Israel — It’s Islam
To find out more about Josh Hammer and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2026 CREATORS.COM

Gloria Steinem died this week at 92, and this weekend I’ll bet you won’t find a single legacy corporate media outlet willing to print anything but hagiography about her.
And that’s a shame, but of course it’s typical. The Left’s icons are forced down our throats no matter their inconsistencies, lies, blunders, and sins; the Right’s icons get called “divisive” and “controversial.”
But I didn’t come here to lionize Gloria Steinem, and I didn’t come to go along with the picture the propaganda press is going to paint of somebody who spent the better part of a century driving a wedge between the sexes. Rather, I’m going to give a fair accounting of a legacy which is mixed, at best, and a challenge. (RELATED: The Demonic Possession of Liberal Women)
Because if we’re going to celebrate this “icon” of second-wave feminism, then I want the celebrants to handle a few questions I have.
For example, why aren’t any of these glowing portrayals of Steinem by the Left trashing her as a CIA asset?
She was one, you know.
From 1958 to 1962, Gloria Steinem ran something called the Independent Research Service. It helped to send American students to international youth festivals, which sounds innocent enough, except that’s little more than a cover story. In point of fact, what the Independent Research Service was actually doing was recruiting photogenic young liberals to disrupt Communist confabs for kids in Vienna and Helsinki. This all came out in 1967 when the New York Times and Washington Post ran stories exposing the organization and its CIA funding, and Steinem was quite open about what she’d done. Steinem told the Washington Post the outfit was “liberal, nonviolent and honorable,” and later said she would do it again.
Don’t get me wrong. The Independent Research Service might have been the best thing Gloria Steinem actually did. Assuming the good-looking liberals she sent to Europe didn’t then get turned by the KGB and become Soviet assets, which, given the CIA’s standard performance, is exceptionally possible.
And assuming Gloria Steinem herself wasn’t turned.
Because the movement she attached herself to and soon fronted was precisely the kind of thing the Comintern would have loved.
When Steinem was later running around the country trashing every American institution as a conspiracy against women, after coming to public view as a CIA minion, the irony probably should have been discrediting. It wasn’t.
Why?
Probably because Gloria Steinem was the one second-wave feminist who didn’t prove Rush Limbaugh’s later-arriving maxim that feminism was invented as a means of giving unattractive women access to mainstream American society. (RELATED: The Biology Feminism Can’t Explain)
Gloria Steinem was a looker. That’s why people paid attention to the subversive and divisive things she said. She was the most bankable face of that movement, which spent lots of time and energy attacking concentrated and unaccountable power, and she was a CIA asset.
Anybody on the Left want to explain how that happens?
Limbaugh was right, of course, and Steinem was the exception that proved the rule. Betty Friedan was the rule itself. Friedan was old and plain and not especially charismatic or engaging, but Friedan actually did real work for the feminist movement; not that much of it has aged all that well from a societal standpoint, but she wrote The Feminine Mystique and co-founded the National Organization for Women. She did that while Steinem was gracing magazine covers and going to galas. (RELATED: When Women’s Liberation Disappoints)
Will it admit that the feminism of Gloria Steinem rewarded celebrity and fame rather than honest arguments about relations between the sexes?
And it would be nice if somebody would justify this, particularly in an age when some astonishingly large percentage of American females are recording themselves engaging in utterly shallow, banal, and mindless behavior while attempting to monetize themselves as “influencers” as part of female empowerment. Is this what second-wave feminists were going for? If not, then why was Gloria Steinem the face of the movement? Was it not eminently foreseeable that feminism would devolve into AOC and “Same, Lindsay” when it chose cute and shallow as its avatar?
They called Betty Friedan jealous and difficult and played out. I’m not going to say they were wrong. But when Friedan noted that Gloria Steinem was, essentially, Maneater Barbie, she wasn’t wrong, either.
Will modern feminism admit this? Will it admit that the feminism of Gloria Steinem rewarded celebrity and fame rather than honest arguments about relations between the sexes?
Because if not, then why were we subjected to a feminist icon who was a sex symbol?
Gloria Steinem was a human jungle of inconsistencies.
Take her positions on Bill Clinton, after all. In March 1998, after the devastating Kathleen Willey 60 Minutes interview, which came while the president was in court with Paula Jones, the woman it seems quite clear he sexually assaulted, Gloria Steinem explained in a Times op-ed that even if the allegations against Clinton were true, he was “not guilty of sexual harassment.” (RELATED: Believe All Women — Unless They’re Inconvenient)
Why? Because he had “taken no for an answer.”
Which was not, and is not, in evidence.
Steinem went further. The Monica Lewinsky case, she wrote, meant that “yes means yes.”
Welcome sex, she said, “is about as relevant to sexual harassment as borrowing a car is to stealing one.”
This was OK? Clinton was just shy of 50; Monica was 22 years old. He was the president, and she was a college kid. Would it have been OK if Clinton was a Republican?
Nobody bothered to ask her about that at the time, of course. Because shilling for male Democrat politicians acting in ways which, in the honor society feminism destroyed, might well have earned Clinton a hospital stay or worse from an angry husband, father, or brother was just accepted as the price of celebrity.
A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do, you know.
Then came Harvey Weinstein, which put that mentality and excuses for the Clinton power imbalance issues to the test, and Steinem was finally confronted with her inconsistency on the most basic tenet of feminism, and she gave us a mealy-mouthed explanation. Steinem said she “wouldn’t write the same thing now” because “there’s probably more known about other women now.” But she said she was glad she wrote it then.
How iconic.
Around that time, Steinem was asked by Bill Maher why Bill Clinton’s wife Hillary, who you’d think would have been her burden to carry, was having so much trouble securing the votes of young women. Steinem explained that they were for Bernie Sanders because “when you’re young, you’re thinking, where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie.”
Maher was irritated, and he said that if he’d offered that line, she would have swatted him one. Steinem laughed. A few days later, when the resulting firestorm materialized, she claimed she was “misinterpreted.”
Apparently she’d been “misinterpreted” on other things. Like, for example, Steinem famously said that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, and that marriage in this country had been “the model for slavery law.” Millions of women took that to heart. But in 2000, when her value as a celebrity and sex symbol had declined, she married a Manhattan Beach millionaire NGO activist named David Bale, a native South African and British citizen with visa problems (David Bale’s son from his second marriage, the one before Steinem came along, is the actor Christian Bale). Asked about getting hitched after she’d trashed the institution her whole life, she said she hadn’t changed, but marriage had.
David Bale got to stick around in America; he jokingly called himself Mr. Steinem as he followed his more-famous wife around, and then he died of lymphoma three years after the wedding. Marriage had changed indeed.
There were others. I’ll be polite and not mention Gloria Steinem, feminist icon and Playboy bunny.
So besides the inconsistency, what legacy do we get from Steinem and the second-wave feminism she fronted?
Sure, there were things pre-Steinem America needed to offer in order for more harmony between men and women. But to get those fixes, was it necessary to get all of the package?
Steinem’s feminism treated ordinary men, marriage, and child-rearing with open suspicion. The legacy corporate media, the people slobbering all over her now, gave her an open platform to do it. She spent decades as the public voice insisting men were, structurally and individually, the problem to be managed rather than partners to be won over.
And how’s that working out for America 60 years on?
Marriage rates? In the toilet.
Birth rates? Well below replacement. Dangerously below, in fact.
Relations between men and women? So terrible that there are women posting on social media that gender reveals tell them whether they’re going to have a girl or an abortion.
That’s what happens when your movement is fronted by, and this is my best compliment for Gloria Steinem, an exceptionally gifted packager of other people’s grievances. Gloria Steinem was the unbought voice of American women, and she did real, lasting damage.
We can thank Steinem for abortion becoming the sacrament of female citizenship — the one economic activity immune to regulation. We can thank her for making the two-parent household a lifestyle option rather than the normal way children are raised, and giving us all the friendly outcomes that has produced. We can thank her for teaching educated women that domestic life was a trap; that certainly contributed to a fertility collapse among the people who read Ms. Magazine, which she founded and ran.
She had almost nothing to say to the waitress in Toledo — Steinem’s own hometown — except that she should be angrier at her husband than at her rent. Working-class women got lectures about representation. Upper-middle-class women got careers, nannies, SSRIs, and a magazine that sold all of it as liberation.
And what you get with cute and shallow fronting your movement is absolute silence when sexually confused men decide they want to join your sports teams, hang around in your bathrooms and locker rooms, and take advantage of the legal protections and affirmative actions you’ve wrangled out of the men. That’s how feminism morphed from insisting sex was a political category to insisting sex was assigned.
By then Gloria Steinem had nothing to say. By then she was just another faceless, gormless has-been lefty activist, too afraid to even declare what a woman is.
Yes, I have a lot of questions. But I won’t spend much time on them. I know the answers won’t come as fast as the name-calling and the invective. And that is Gloria Steinem’s real legacy.
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