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Not All Propaganda is Art is a new miniseries from Benjamen Walker, the host of Theory of Everything. It’s a story about three writers who got caught up in the cultural cold war, both as collaborators and as targets! It’s also a story about propaganda that made the world we live in today. 

Not All Propaganda is Art tells the story of three writers who got caught up in the Cultural Cold War between the years of 1956 and 1960: New Yorker writer and “little magazine” champion Dwight Macdonald, British theater critic and “angry young man” Kenneth Tynan, and legendary Native Son novelist Richard Wright, who at this time was living in exile in France in protest of American racism. All three collaborated with and were targeted by American, British, and French security agencies in Cold War propaganda battles over contested intellectual ideas like the critique of mass culture and politically engaged art.

Through the use of archival audio, interviews, original research, and dramatizations of historical records, Not All Propaganda is Art will reveal the secrets behind a number of cultural cold war operations while reckoning with the roots of our current battles over propaganda, media, disinformation, and the interplay between art and politics, amounting to a secret history behind operations that continue to shape the world we live in today. Additionally, the series will unveil new evidence linking 1950s youth revolutions to Western propaganda and present new discoveries related to the mysterious death of Richard Wright in 1960.