Cathy Smith

Feminism was once a revolutionary force, a creed born out of struggle, resilience, and the dream of a world much different from what we had been given. It was born from the pain of millions of women working, poor, Black, Indigenous, women of color who refused to take the world as it was. And yet, today, feminism is an idea manipulated, diluted, commodified, and often controlled by those very forces that it initially came into being to dismantle from the military-industrial complex to corporate media giants; feminism today hardly resembles its initial mission of radical social transformation. This has happened because things are ingrained in how our media landscape rolls along.

We hardly notice how forces remake feminist discourse into more palatable, consumer-friendly, and politically neutral forms. The corporations that run the media, the intelligence agencies that shape public opinion, and the political powers that remain in control have combined a grand symphony of influence that has redefined feminism, replacing its radical edges with a glittering but hollow vision of empowerment. It is time to reclaim the radical roots of feminism to inspire a new generation of activists to fight for real change.

This shift has been both personal and political for me. As feminists raised under the promise of equality yet increasingly witnessing that promise detached from any meaningful material reality, it is hard to escape how feminism has been co-opted and used to prop up the same structures of power that continue to oppress us all. This essay reflects on how corporate interests, the military-industrial complex, and intelligence agencies have branded feminism, focusing in particular on the role of Project Mockingbird, media conglomerates, and the influence of Israeli intelligence operations such as Unit 8200.

I will also be looking at how these forces have led to the creation of 'pseudo-feminism' that does little to challenge the power structures we need to dismantle. The personal is political, and my reflections herein are committed to showing how the framing of feminism in today's mass media – concerning corporate power, identity politics, or geopolitical interests – exhibits the symptoms of a collective disempowerment that has managed to render real change unimaginable for women. But it is not too late. Reclaiming feminism is essential for real change, and we must empower ourselves.

The Corporate Media and the Co-optation of Feminism

I often reflect on the different streams of feminism that I grew up with and the stories of women such as Gloria Steinem, Angela Davis, and Audre Lorde– women who looked upon feminism as an instrument that would help them dismantle some of the most strongly creaked systems of oppression. What hit me about their work was that it wasn't a struggle to get women into positions of power or recognition in the existing systems but the overthrowing of the systems themselves.

Steinem was never fighting for women to be CEOs; Davis didn't want women in the academy but a world where Black women could resist the structures of white supremacy and class domination. Audre Lorde wasn't demanding equality; she demanded an end to patriarchy, racism, and heteronormativity. They were not seeking an adjustment by the status quo to "include" women, but rather, changing that status quo.

Yet, when I glance around me today, I sense that something is very different about feminism today. All I see on BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post, and Salon– even at the wider Disney and Comcast outlets feels very sanitized and marketable versus what those women were fighting for. That's what wasn't there in my mind when I read them: How do we go from radical edges of feminism to a neoliberal version, primarily focused on individual empowerment and "winning" within?

Today's feminism celebrates individual success– celebrity feminists, self-help books, and empowerment slogans. However, such messages rarely urge women to question the structures of capitalism, patriarchy, and imperialism that propagate oppression. Seldom, if at all, are women encouraged to tear down those very structures that placed them in their position of marginalization.

This process of co-optation is not an accident. Through the work of corporate interests, feminism has been reshaped and repackaged to suit the interests of the powerful. Project Mockingbird was the CIA media infiltration operation during the Cold War, setting a precedent for how intelligence agencies could use media as a tool of narrative control. Although it may have been officially dissolved decades ago, this operation's legacy runs very deep in modern-day media. Today, corporate giants such as Disney, Comcast, ViacomCBS, and AT&T dominate much of the global media landscape.

These companies may be neoliberal in their political biases and use media to circulate the narratives servicing those interests. But when it does, most of the time, the representations of feminism come out in capitalism-oriented forms– for instance, a call for participation by women within the system, rather than changing the inherently unequal system. The feminist movement, represented this way by corporate giants in the media, stopped challenging the power structure; instead, it worked within those structures. Think of the feminist narratives churning from Disney: the female leads in those films are strong and independent, capable of "making it" on their own. Characters rarely deal with any systemic critique.

They don't challenge patriarchy; they fit into it, becoming icons of individual success within a capitalist, patriarchal world. The same process of sanitization and individualism reproduces across other mainstream outlets, from NBCUniversal's Today Show to ViacomCBS's MTV, giving us a version of feminism that is market-friendly but without the bite to make real change.

The Role of Intelligence Agencies and Digital Manipulation

Intelligence agencies, particularly those committed to psychological operations and digital propaganda, play a significant role in shaping the public's idea and understanding of feminism. Today, digital platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are not neutral arenas for free expression.

They are battlegrounds where ideas, identities, and movements are constantly shaped, nudged, and influenced.

The rise in Israeli intelligence operations epitomizes this manipulation, most notably those conducted by Unit 8200. Unit 8200 is an elite cyber-intelligence unit of the Israeli military focused on digital warfare, surveillance, and psychological operations. Its operatives, many of whom later become key figures in Silicon Valley and Israeli tech firms, are experts in data mining, algorithmic control, and social media manipulation. Their work shapes how we engage with the digital and, in turn, how causes like feminism get framed. Such units can penetrate grassroots social movements, hijack hashtags, and create content reflecting geopolitical or corporate interests.

Think of all the ways Palestinian feminism is consistently marginalized or erased in mainstream feminist spaces. Meanwhile, the struggles of women-occupied Palestinians, whose lives are taken as a norm in routine violence from the Israeli military, fall into the pale in comparison, where Western feminism is celebrating Beyoncé or Sheryl Sandberg. These voices are silenced, and their positions become obscured by the forces interested in the status quo–for instance, Israeli technology companies or their intelligence operations aiming at suppressing the anti-imperialist narrative.

This makes Unit 8200 and its digital operations silent yet powerfully shape global discourses. In that context, but in their own right, one can't help but note how feminist movements have increasingly become subjugated by the logic of those same digital platforms. Algorithms created by Israeli-linked technology firms curate the visibility of feminist content.

By doing so, BuzzFeed and The Huffington Post, among other proponents, become complicit in neoliberal corporate-friendly feminism by pledging themselves to give more prominence to content in line with their corporate backers' interests. Most often suppressed or marginalized are the radical feminist ideas critical of imperialism, capitalism, and Zionism. Anti-imperialist feminists–most notably the voices of Palestinian women silenced by more marketable versions of feminism that bank on empowerment, identity politics, and celebrity activism.

Pseudo-Feminism and the New Neoliberal Left

This changing vista is not only a problem of media hijacking but symptomatically represents a particular political shift that has characterized the left.

Over the years since the 2016 US presidential elections, the 'assured victory' of Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump was almost paradigmatic, signaling an ever-widening gap separating liberal elites and the left working-class base. That assured victory story came atop a politics of identity within which women and people of color, along with members of the LGBTQ+ community, would take leading places in this present structure instead of smashing this very structure.

That story then got blown to smithereens by the subsequent election of Trump and revealed how removed the political establishment had become from the lived experience of working people, specifically women of color and subaltern communities.

A bleeding edge left dominated by identity politics emerged after this disillusion. This new left is entirely satisfied with a form of individualistic empowerment that installs people in systems, often using the yardstick of women in key positions to measure change rather than seeking the dismantling of the structural injustices that perpetuate such systems.

This representation-revolution distinction feeds into a broader narrative propagated by corporate media, wherein feminism is an avenue toward personal success, not collective liberation. Here, feminism is not about dismantling the structures of oppression but rather a means of survival within them. In this context, the co-optation of feminism by neoliberal elites serves to pacify dissent and transform it into a product that can be sold to consumers, making radical ideas a form of passive consumption.

The personal impact of this transformation is deeply unsettling. I've watched as movements that once held promise–movements calling for the liberation of Palestine, the overthrow of capitalism, or the end of imperialist wars have been co-opted into corporate media's sanitized, neoliberal agenda. I've watched how the stories of women in struggle fighting against military occupation, economic exploitation, or police violence have been overshadowed by the stories of women "winning" within systems that continue to oppress them.

The struggle for feminism has become a commodity sold to the middle and upper classes, packaged nicely and quickly digestible. In contrast, the struggles of the working class, particularly women, were relegated to the margins.
Reclaiming Feminism from the System

Quite obviously, this is not what feminism is or was. The radical edges who insisted that feminism meant the denuclearization of capitalism, imperialism, and patriarchy are silenced by the interests of the corporate, military, and intelligence complex. What's before us here is pseudo-feminism put together and packaged by forces not interested in changing the system and bringing down inequalities. From corporate media to digital manipulation, intelligence operations have become an instrument of maintaining the status quo rather than challenging it.

It is only in return to those roots that the struggles of women in the Global South, Black women, Indigenous women, and working-class women who have always understood that feminism is not just about equal representation but about dismantling systems of power oppressing us that feminism can be meaningful again. Only under this revolutionary optic will we reclaim feminism as a movement for real justice and liberation.

Well, I think you're getting at what I am, anyway —perhaps this "neoliberal transgender war" is what Kamala Harris is in. It's just that, when you think about it, Harris has always fallen between two stools: on the one hand, she is part of the neoliberal establishment and thus aligned with corporate interests and more moderate policies. She also tries to represent the left wing on specific issues, especially those related to LGBTQ+ rights, which is very much seen as central to the progressive agenda nowadays.

This "transgender war" aspect has increasingly, in recent years, become one of those cultural flashpoints that's tough to navigate. You have on one side, this demand for complete, unfettered rights and protections for transgender people, really aligning with a progressive agenda. But then, on the other hand, you've got voters–many of them in more moderate or swing states–who see these issues as polarizing or overreach by a government that already feels out of touch.

For someone like Kamala, who has a history of being more centrist, those kinds of high-stakes cultural issues would have posed a real dilemma. She couldn't lean too hard into the progressive side without alienating moderate voters who were already skeptical of her and the Democratic Party. In such a situation, remaining neutral or indecisive would have portrayed her as being aloof or unable to take a firm stand condition, hardly inspiring confidence.

In the end, I think it wasn't just the transgender issue specifically but how it symbolized her struggle to balance the competing factions of the party while facing the broader, more cynical mood in the country. That's a recipe for losing traction.

References

• Chomsky, N. (2011). How the media shapes our opinions. Haymarket Books.
• Fuchs, C. (2017). Social media: A critical introduction. Sage Publications.
• Herman, E. S., & Chomsky, N. (1988). Manufacturing consent: The political economy of the mass media. Pantheon Books.
• Watzman, H. (2019). Unit 8200: The Israeli intelligence agency's digital warfare and its influence on media. International Journal of Cybersecurity, 8(3), 45-58.