Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything

ToE's Cultural Cold War miniseries concludes with three stories about containment and death. Richard Wright delivers his final lecture on Black Spies in Paris, Dwight Macdonald’s Mass Cult & Mid Cult finally debuts & flops, and Kenneth Tynan discovers the limits of social and cultural protest. Support ToE and get access to the incredible exclusive bonus companion series to Not All Propaganda is Art by subscribing at https://theoryofeverything.supercast...

]Richard Wright died from a mysterious illness on November 28th, 1960. Or was he murdered? Tune in for a new listen to the final chapter of Richard Wright’s life: forged letters, fake terrorist groups, fraudulent doctors and French Radio.

In 1959, Anti-Americanism surged in the UK. England seethed over America’s treatment of its Prime Minister who was smacked down for daring to use diplomacy to resolve the crisis over divided Germany. In 1959 England also fretted over a new American export: the Beatnik. The British foreign office forcefully responded with a report advocating for “ an increased effort in the field of press, radio and television in the U.K. to say the right kind of things about the Americans...

In the summer of 1959, Nixon and Khrushchev argued over a washing machine in a backstage kitchen in Moscow, while American Cold War intellectuals gathered in the Poconos to defend Kitsch

In the fall of 1958, Kenneth Tynan moved from London to New York and upon arrival, clashed with Hollywood mogul Samuel Goldwyn over socially engaged art and the politics of apolitical culture on live TV. At the same moment New Yorker writer Dwight Macdonald went West to report on “New” Hollywood's ambitions to create commercially and artistically successful films. We also meet two of Professor Macdonald’s former students from a Mass Culture course he taught at Bard College in 1958...

In 1956, Richard Wright spoke of islands of free men at the first Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris. James Baldwin critiqued the event for Encounter, the CIA’s propaganda magazine. We take a close listen to the original recordings. 

In 1956 London Theater critic Kenneth Tynan helped launch a youth movement committed to exposing social and political issues on stage, on screen and in literature. We take a close look at the operators and opportunists behind England’s Angry Young Men.

In 1956, New Yorker writer Dwight Macdonald joined Encounter, a magazine secretly backed by American and British security agencies. He arrived in London just as British Influencers turned a young Existentialist named Colin Wilson into England's answer to Jean-Paul Sartre. Meanwhile, the CIA incited a youth rebellion in communist Hungary...

In the 1950s the CIA weaponized culture to capture hearts and minds in Europe and Africa. We meet three writers (Richard Wright, Kenneth Tynan, and Dwight MaCdonald) who got caught up in this battle both as collaborators and targets between the years of 1956 - 1960. We also meet a propagandist responsible for the CIA’s cinematic version of 1984 (Operation Big Brother) and “books that don’t smack of propaganda” aimed at European Intellectuals - including James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son.

Not All Propaganda is Art BONUS CONTENT TRAILER: Propaganda Notes and Sources