People often ask me how I made it to the right side — the sunny skies of Texas conservatism — after spending my early professional years on the progressive left. It is a long story (I am writing a book), but one of the reasons is Gloria Steinem, who passed away on Wednesday.

I know some frown on speaking ill of the dead, but since Steinem characterized people like me who support President Donald Trump as an “obstructionist minority,” who are “hooked on hierarchy and opposed to equality,” I figure she has it coming.

There’s no doubt Gloria Steinem is an American icon. As the founder of Ms. Magazine in 1972, she shined a light on discrimination against women that had been virtually invisible before. Rape was basically a free crime.

Domestic violence was impossible to prove. Job discrimination was open and direct. Women couldn’t get their own credit and while Title IX passed about the same time, women and girls weren’t really able to get into sports until Ms. Steinem pushed those issues into the mainstream. So let’s give her that.

But after a couple decades of battling for solid causes like “equal pay for equal work,” Steinem transformed the women’s movement into just another dark progressive front betraying American women who thought she cared about them.

She led the fight to block the confirmation of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, insisting that his accuser, Anita Hill, should be believed despite the fact that she came forward with no credible or corroborating evidence.

Shortly after, in what felt like whiplash, she took an epic stand in support of former U.S. Sen. Bob Packwood, R-Oregon who was accused of sexual harassment – groping, cornering women on elevators and in offices, forceful kissing. Nearly a dozen women came forward and went on the record.

Packwood was a feminist hero and his case shocked the women’s movement, but instead of condemning him, Steinem led many feminists to circle the wagons.

Apparently without seeing the irony of having attacked Thomas just a year before, Steinem said of Packwood, “We all deserve to have our lives judged in context.”

The context, of course, was that Packwood was a Republican who supported abortion — or in Steinem’s words, “a courageous champion.“

Before long it was revealed that Packwood had actually kept diaries detailing his exploits and confirming many of the allegations that women had made against him. Steinem backed down from vocally supporting him, but she never hit him hard. It took almost 3 years to get him out of Congress.

Steinem was also one of the most prominent defenders of former President Bill Clinton when he was impeached for lying under oath about having an affair with a 23-year-old intern in his office. He was 51 at the time. In a line that will undoubtedly go down in history and reappear in her eulogies this week, Steinem said, “we will not stand idly by as a Congress dominated by men impeaches the first president elected by women.”

Steinem testified before Congress and wrote an op-ed in the New York Times insisting that there was no pattern of sustained sexual harassment from Clinton — despite testimony from Kathleen Willey, Paula Jones and Juanita Broaddrick.

It is hard to imagine a more textbook description of sexual harassment.

And by 2016, she apparently completely forgot that she’d given Bill Clinton a pass for the intern, calling Trump the “sexual harasser in chief.”

Her final betrayal of American women came in 2020 when Steinem came out in support of women’s rights for men who say they are women — so-called “trans people.” After a lifetime of fighting for women’s rights, in the end, she apparently got confused about what a woman is.

As I said, how did I get from the far left to the far right — one big reason was Gloria Steinem. RIP.

Sherry Sylvester is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and the former Senior Advisor to Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick.