There's a danger in any anti-elite movement that, at some point, it goes beyond opposing elite arrogance and starts opposing knowledge itself. You can see a strain of this in the Chinese Communist Revolution where professors were routinely denounced and made to kowtow by their own students who had become Red Guard revolutionaries following Mao. Mao taught that only the "pure people" who worked with their hands were virtuous. Those who taught subjects in schools were considered to be corrupted by capitalism and therefore were enemies of the revolution.
In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge took this even farther, murdering anyone who had an education. Universities and schools were shut down. Libraries were burned. Intellectuals were the lowest of the low.
Needless to say, any culture that comes to glorify ignorance and to see books and reading as corruption is doomed. You can't have a functioning society of the kind we're used to in the 21st Century without a lot of advanced technology and medicine and those things don't happen absent a lot of very smart people who've spent years accumulating very specific knowledge.
So it worries me to see someone like Tucker Carlson, who has a huge following, entertaining the idea that algebra isn't necessary or maybe isn't real math.
Tucker Carlson asks why algebra puts letters into numbers.
— Max 📟 (@MaxNordau) September 7, 2026
Jess Elofson explains: "I think just to fuck with you."
They discuss how they've never met anyone in their life who uses algebra, which is "fake math" for people "in the matrix."
They conclude that caring about algebra… pic.twitter.com/p6VKLrgrLd
I've never heard of the guy he's talking to. His name is Jess Elofson and he's apparently a sculptor and artist who has a BA from the University of South Dakota. He is not a math major, in other words. So I guess it's no surprise that an art major doesn't see the value of math but why is Carlson playing along with this?
I don't know how to see this as anything but a desire for ignorance. Algebra, after all, isn't advanced math. It's something a lot of people learn in eighth grade. But importantly, you can't proceed to higher math (trigonometry, calculus) without first learning algebra. So this is practically a call for math education to stop with Middle School.
What would happen if we stopped caring about teaching math? Well, we would run out of engineers pretty soon and all of the things they build would gradually stop being built. That's everything from electronics to bridges to dams to cars, airplanes and ships. No more cell phones or advanced medical devices. No more rockets, skyscrapers or televisions. The number of things that Tucker Carlson uses every day which would cease to exist in a generation without engineers who use algebra is hard to overestimate.
Can he possibly be this dumb?
The answer is maybe so. Because if he really doesn't know anyone, not one person, who uses algebra, then he has a very limited set of friends. No engineers in the bunch. Nobody who might explain to him why algebra is the foundation of nearly everything he takes for granted.
And that's not to mention the ridiculous use of the phrase "goy slaves" by his guest. Carlson just laughs along with that. I have no doubt this is why Jess Elofson ended up on Tucker's show. He's yet another huckster trading in anti-Jewish tropes. And let's face it, that's all Carlson is about these days. If you have something negative to say about "the Joooos!" you're treated like a genius on his show. It's the skeleton key that unlocks his entire worldview. This is literally the argument he's pushing now:
Jewish math pic.twitter.com/tIcSkM2KSi
— Am Yisrael Chai 🐙 (@AmYisraelChai_X) September 9, 2026
The Jewish conspiracy theories really don't come into this one at all. Here's a good summary of algebra's history:
A little clarification about algebra.
— David Wurmser (@Wurmserscribit) September 8, 2026
The word comes from Arabic. And yet, almost nothing else of it comes from Arabs.
The term was coined to describe the work of a 9th century AD Persian mathematician, Al-Khawarizmi.
Not Arab. He was, again, not al Arab but a Persian.… https://t.co/Rn4PwHmxxe
The word comes from Arabic. And yet, almost nothing else of it comes from Arabs.
The term was coined to describe the work of a 9th century AD Persian mathematician, Al-Khawarizmi.
Not Arab. He was, again, not al Arab but a Persian.
And, while I wish and would be proud as a Jew to lay some claim to this critical and most indispensable field of human evolution, its origins sadly were not Jewish, at least recently until the enlightenment.
But even the Persia al-Khawarizmi was far from the first.
Before that, indeed well over a millennium before that, in the 3rd century BC, in Greece, Diophantus (not a Jew, but a Socratic-era contemporary of the Jewish Hasmoneans) used symbolic abbreviations as variables and unknowns to create exactly the sort of substitutions Carlson and his guest rail against as a Jewish conspiracy.
And he was not even the first Greek doing this. Pythagoras and Euclid, which includes equations every current kid in high school encounters in their first exposure to algebra, were three hundred years before that in the 6th century BC.
India has a hallowed place in the evolution of algebra in the 5th and 6th century BC with the great mathematical thinkers Aryabhata and Brahmagupta. The former in Aryabhatiya used symbols as substitutes in equations to develop astronomical observations. The latter outlined formal rules for arithmetic operations using zero and negative numbers, alongside systematic methods for solving quadratic equations in the Brahmasphutasiddhanta. Even before that, in fact a half millennium before that in the 13th century BC, we have in India Bhaskara II developing Bhaskara's lemma and the Chakravala method employed in global geographic calculations and astronomy.
Egypt and Babylon got into the act over four centuries before that. The Rind Papyrus from 1650BC already discusses Algebraic problem solving with variables of linear equations, and concurrent clay tablets from Babylon discuss linear and quadratic polynomial equations. Algebra was clearly already being used in ancient Babylon 4000 years ago, including a form of the quadratic equation.
The “retard” woke Reich has really worked overtime in this Tucker broadcast to earn its name.
And so too do those who seek to make algebra beyond its name some sort of Arab contribution to humanity.
Finally, there are some good reactions to this clip. Here's Asmongold who is basically saying that from this point on no one should take Carlson seriously.
Asmongold says from this point onward nobody should be taking Tucker Carlson seriously
— AutisticClips (@AutisticClip) September 8, 2026
“This is the most pathetic thing I have ever seen Tucker say.” pic.twitter.com/f6ep0CJKzc
There's a pretty funny reaction from Nick Fuentes who is distraught to find that he's been knocked out as the top antisemitic podcaster by a guy who thinks algebra is a Jewish plot. I'm not going to post it, but it's out there.
Editor's Note: President Trump is fighting to ensure America's kids get the education they deserve.
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