This is part of a hopefully ongoing series in which I dissect the previous decade using media as a lens. As a first installment this is old, written about a year ago, and was published elsewhere on a website now defunct. I hereby resurrect it here, warts and all. Next installment: how The National Fucked Us Over. Cheers. Shaka.

Those of a conspiratorially-minded constitution will probably already be aware of this, but a particularly bizarre one – as with all the good ones, it doesn’t have so much of an urtext but is rendered in variations the lucidity of which depends on your interlocuters sobriety or lack thereof, or how frequently they starting gumming themselves – involves the C.I.A. using what we now term “identity politics” to stifle proliferating socialist movements in 1970’s America. As with all good conspiracy theories, there’s more than a kernel of truth to it. Declassified documents reveal a sinister level of adroit manoeuvring by intelligence agencies on this front: when Black rights, Queer rights and Women’s rights movements throughout America were reaching peak agitation levels, Intelligence agencies didn’t stoke the fire exactly – but they did see a way it could be weaponised against the most unholy of Evils, Communism. It wasn’t as simple as sending a conventionally beautiful woman with a mission of collapsing socialist rhetoric to a women’s rally, although there was that. They augmented this predictable approach by bringing out the agent provocateurs. To those galvanised by the prospect of much-needed equality…