Meghan’s Gloria Steinem Tribute: Whose Obituary Is This? | The Royalist

Please remember to like and subscribe! Check out my Substack: https://theroyalist.substack.com/ Gloria Steinem died this week at 92, at home in New York, still working on the cause she had given six decades of her life to. She was one of the most consequential Americans of the twentieth century. Within hours, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, posted a tribute to her on Instagram. I have now read that tribute six times. And in this video I am going to read it out in full, in order, so nobody can accuse me of cherry-picking, and then tell you exactly what I think it reveals. Because here is what I cannot get past. It is a tribute to Gloria Steinem in which the star of the story, paragraph after paragraph, is Meghan. We go through it line by line. The word "mentor," deployed in the opening breath. The public Gloria, summarised not as sixty years of organising and arguing and building, but as the handful of occasions on which the two of them were in the same shot. The private Gloria, rendered as five clauses in which Gloria is the subject of every sentence and Meghan is the object of every verb. And the counsel during hard times, which may be entirely innocent, or may be doing rather a lot of work. Then there is the bracelet. Meghan tells us Gloria gave her one engraved with "linked, not ranked," and that she wears it with pride. So we conduct an audit of rank (birthright, restyled children, the Sussex name, and a house manager announcing her by title to an apparently empty room in front of a journalist). It is beyond parody. We look at the Balenciaga precedent and the pattern it exposes: proximity upgraded into partnership, attendance into collaboration, a lunch written up as a summit. We look at the blacked-out faces in a memorial carousel and ask who, exactly, that serves. And we look at the one genuinely wonderful passage in the whole post, which is wonderful precisely because Meghan is not in it. A simple tribute would have been unimpeachable. She had a real relationship with a remarkable woman. She could have banked it. Instead she spent it. Check out my new book - The Dukes / Dukes of Hazard - here!: United States: https://a.co/d/0gmvpeQz Australia: https://amzn.asia/d/01Y4mpkj UK: https://amzn.eu/d/01mSqQKa #Meghan #MeghanMarkle #DuchessOfSussex #GloriaSteinem #PrinceHarry #Sussexes #RoyalFamily #RoyalNews #TheRoyalist #TomSykes #MeghanNews #HarryAndMeghan #RoyalCommentary #Montecito #LinkedNotRanked #Feminism #MsMagazine #RoyalGossip #BritishRoyals #Archie #Lilibet #Balenciaga #InstagramTribute #CelebrityNews #RoyalScandal