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Gloria Steinem comes back from India in 1958 and almost immediately enters the Cold War student apparatus. Through former officers of the National Student Association, an organization later exposed as having received covert CIA funding, she gets connected to the CIA and establishes the Independent Service for Information on the Vienna Youth Festival, later the Independent Research Service. CIA money then finances her operation sending American students to the 1959 Vienna Youth Festival to counter the Communist-led international youth movement. This is where the institutional genealogy becomes interesting. The National Student Association was not some isolated CIA front operating outside the American student left. The Student League for Industrial Democracy, SLID, was affiliated with the NSA throughout much of the 1950s. SLID was itself the student organization of the League for Industrial Democracy, the old social-democratic and anti-Communist organization descended from the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. Then in 1960 SLID becomes Students for a Democratic Society, SDS. In other words, Steinem's CIA relationship and the organization that became SDS occupied overlapping institutional territory within the postwar American student movement. This means the supposedly spontaneous "New Left" did not emerge from nowhere. One of its principal organizational ancestors developed inside a Cold War student ecosystem in which anti-Communist social democracy, the National Student Association, organized labor and covert American intelligence operations repeatedly mixed. So the chronology is unreal: Steinem returns from India in 1958, makes contact through the NSA network, obtains CIA support and funds for her student operation in 1959, and in 1960 the Student League for Industrial Democracy reorganizes itself as SDS. The institutional environment from which SDS emerged was already deeply entangled with the anti-Communist infrastructure of the Cold War. The CIA is remarkably pragmatic. Half the US left, "Marxists" and even "Communists", came from SDS. Thier irons in the fire: Tom Hayden — SDS; Port Huron Statement; later Campaign for Economic Democracy Bernardine Dohrn — SDS; Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM); Weatherman / Weather Underground Bill Ayers — SDS; Weatherman / Weather Underground Mark Rudd — Columbia SDS; SDS national leadership; Weatherman / Weather Underground Jeff Jones — SDS; Weatherman / Weather Underground David Gilbert — SDS; Weather Underground Kathy Boudin — SDS milieu; Weather Underground John Jacobs (J.J.) — SDS; Revolutionary Youth Movement; Weatherman Naomi Jaffe — SDS; Weatherman / Weather Underground Brian Flanagan — SDS; Weatherman / Weather Underground Ted Gold — Columbia SDS; Weatherman Bob Avakian — SDS; Revolutionary Youth Movement II; Revolutionary Union; founder/chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA (RCP) Mike Klonsky — SDS national secretary; RYM II; October League; Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) Carl Davidson — SDS national leadership; RYM II; later New Communist Movement Noel Ignatiev — SDS/Sojourner Truth milieu; Sojourner Truth Organization Paul Buhle — SDS; founder of Radical America Todd Gitlin — SDS president; later prominent New Left intellectual Carl Oglesby — SDS president; New Left theorist Greg Calvert — SDS national secretary; New Left activist Paul Potter — SDS president; antiwar movement Alan Haber — first SDS president; later New SDS Heather Booth — SDS; civil-rights/New Left organizing; later Midwest Academy Wade Rathke — SDS organizer; later founder of ACORN Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz — SDS/New Left milieu; later Cell 16 and radical feminist/Marxist politics David Dellinger — closely allied with SDS rather than an SDS product; National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam — SNCC, later Black Panther Party and All-African People’s Revolutionary Party; interacted heavily with SDS but not an SDS product

Latest update of the exact same fucking game I played in 2001 in college- how the fuck can you people still be enamored with this recycled crap? Sam shit over and over and over again. American Empire celebrates pure slop.