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Notes -
This is a month old, but Tucker Carlson had a bizarre interview with a Jeff Elofson.
TW if you're an elderly teacher with a sensitive constitution.
In it, Tuckers asks 'Why does algebra put letters into numbers?'
His interviewee concludes that those who use 'fake math with letters' are 'good little goyslaves'.
The clip is both baffling and hilarious, it reminds me of these memes I've seen, and it's almost surprising that it did not come with an Onion logo in the corner.
This clip looks so bad that I had a hard time making sense of it. Carlson is clearly an educated guy, but now that I look at his wikipedia page, he barely graduated. So it is perhaps possible that basic math has somehow escaped his understanding.
On the other hand, this may be part of a strategy to connect with the lower classes 'we love the poorly educated'.
Another possibility I could see is associating some basic ignorance with the kind of people who unironically use the prefix 'goy' as in 'goyslop'. Not a good look.
My preferred explanation is that Tucker is tired of all his success after getting fired from Fox News, which if I recall correctly had to do with the release of his text messages critical of Trump's low-brow appeal. So he's trying to tank himself, somehow.
Maybe I'm extrapolating too much, but this kind of public attitude is worrying for the future of America.
On one hand we have the math-computer wizards and their AI(SI?) transhumanist revolution and on the other hand we have this.
The guy he's interviewing is clearly an idiot. I can't find much information other than that his name is Jess, not Jeff, and he's some kind of ceramic artist from South Dakota who claims to live on a farm but apparently lives in the suburbs. Anyway, the other thing Tucker clipped from this interview is the guy claiming that the CIA paid Jackson Pollock large amounts of money to make "art" that was terrible for the express purpose of fucking with the Soviets, who wouldn't understand it. There seems to be some kind of agreement on Tucker's part that the abandonment of all the aspects of traditional painting that the Russians supposedly valued is indicative of American decadence blah blah blah, complete with pro-Russian undertones and blaming drug overdoses on bad art.
Aside from the entire premise being ridiculous, it evidences a complete lack of understanding of art history, which probably makes the opposite point that Tucker (and by extension his target audience) would intend. The Russians would not be shocked by something like Pollock, least of which because there was an entire Russian tradition of avant-garde art, the most notable proponent of which was Vasily Kandinsky. This mostly dates from the beginning of the twentieth century, but it was suppressed following the Bolshevik revolution for being "bourgeois". Abstract art did not appear suddenly in the late 40s, but developed for a half-century prior to that, longer when you consider that movements like Impressionism were considered abstract at the time relative to traditional court painting. The Soviets not only knew about this, but consciously rejected it. The emergence of an artist like Pollock would have proven the Communist point about the decadence of capitalism, but is this the point that a conservative like Carlson wants to make?
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/17/unpopular-front
The point is that the truth of the claim is far, far narrower than what is suggested.
It’s like a motte and bailey where the motte is “a core foreign policy goal of the CIA was to fracture support for Stalinism in Western European communist student and bohemian art circles, so they funded abstract contemporary art that made the socialist realism promoted as state art in the USSR seem dated, illiberal and boring to this small, niche group of leftists who already hated the United States, capitalism, the wars in Korea and later Vietnam etc” and the bailey is “the CIA deliberately promoted the replacing of traditional classical American styles of art with degenerate, abstract and ugly contemporary art to fracture American society and make us all gay abortionists”.
Actually, none of the art was for ‘fucking with the Soviets’, it was all for shaping the opinion of socialist-adjacent groups, students, professors, artists, hippies, cultural commentators, literary journal contributors and so on in the American sphere who slowly turned against the Soviet Union in the decades leading up to 1990, which was a far greater priority.
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