Anthony's Razor

The New York Times and National Public Radio cope with the Oliver Anthony phenomenon.

Oliver Anthony, video still (source)

A couple of weeks ago, Newsweek ran an opinion piece titled “Blaming Progressives for Crime Is the Height of Privilege.” How is blaming progressives for crime the height of privilege? The essay never gets around to explaining it. In fact, the author doesn’t like this whole “privilege” business.

I'm deeply woven into a world that frowns on crime and helps provide for my wants and needs. The stakes are simply too high, whether it be because of the danger to my person—in or out of prison—or to my livelihood or the people I love.

Take away these supports—I'm not a fan of the term privilege, sorry—and you have a man who is very desperate indeed. A man willing to take risks, either to get what I want, or maybe even because frankly, Dear Reader, I don't give a damn.

Said author, deputy opinion editor Jason Fields, seems to be saying that his lack of need to commit crime is privilege. It’s not my purpose today to challenge this view, which is self-evidently silly anyway, or the copy itself, which sounds like it was written for an audience of third-graders, by a fourth-grader. Instead I’d like to deduce for what purpose it was written.

Progressives are taking damage, deservedly, to their credibility for endorsing policies around policing that are grotesquely ineffective. As Fields himself admits,

I live in Washington, D.C., where carjacking has become a serious problem. There was an effort by the City Council to actually lower the penalty for this scary, scary crime. It was stupid, Mayor Muriel Bowser was against it, and when the Council overrode her, Congress stepped in.

I say the Council's effort was stupid largely because it doesn't feel right. Still, I don't know what stiffer penalties do once a certain threshold has been reached.

What an actual journalist would do is reach out to a domain expert who advocates for stiffer penalties and solicit his thoughts on the matter. What Fields does is squirt his ink into the water to obscure a cogent analysis. Fields had just finished making this assertion:

People on the right—who are often the rural poor and are predominately white—say if there were just enough police boots on the ground, the fear of those boots would be so strong, crime would simply go away.

They blame “soft on crime” liberal governments in cities, where crime has increased somewhat. This is not a return to the days of crack that wrecked our urban landscape, with six people a day killed in New York City in 1990. In fact, crime is lessening in New York, the largest most Democratic city around, even if people are still feeling fear.

But the 2023 publication by the Council of Criminal Justice to which he links to cite the claim that crime is lessening says plainly that motor vehicle theft is up an astonishing 34% over the same period last year. I can’t speak to the homicide numbers in New York relative to 1990, but the same CCJ report notes that “Violent crimes remain elevated compared to 2019, the year prior to the COVID pandemic and racial justice protests of 2020.”

Fields arrives at this eye-popping conclusion:

People in big cities vote Democratic because they want to help those who are in most need and are willing to give a hand up in the hopes of getting one when they themselves are down. The vision of the left is a vision of hope and help. Whether they can deliver. Sometimes, if not always. The right offers jackboots and Billy [sic] clubs, with little to show for it other than broken skulls.

To the reasonable intimation that reducing penalties on a skyrocketing crime may result in a further increase of said crime, Fields replies:

• People thinking this are white, and should be discounted.

• They are on the right, and should be discounted.

• Some of them are rural and poor, and so all of them should be discounted.

• In this particular instance, an obviously bad progressive proposal was opposed by the mayor, and failing that, Congress. You should assume that this is what happens in general, and that progressive extremism is not a danger to you.

• There is no practical reason that the progressive proposal to reduce penalties was bad. It was merely intuitively bad. The problem is subjective, since it’s hard to reason about a hypothetical point of diminishing returns on hypothetical raises of severity of penalty.

• Crime is decreasing. There is no need to examine if this is actually true.

• People are not really in any greater danger than in times past, they are merely “feeling fear.”

• Recent progressive proposals regarding crime are bad, but the ones desired by people on the right are worse.

• Progressives are kind and want good things for society. People on the right are fascists, right down to their jackboots.

Who is the audience for this codswallop? Certainly no conservative, communicated to in hope of changing his mind. For that matter, conservative never appears in the article. Fields refers to such persons throughout as “the right.” No, the essay is aimed at a progressive hearing of news that embarrasses progressive causes, and is in need of comfort and some simple talking points that he can throw around to deflect criticism. For instance, that blaming progressives for crime is the height of privilege.

Which brings me to the case of Oliver Anthony.

As is widely known, but will one day need to be reminded to future readers, Anthony catapulted from near-total obscurity to the Number 1 spot of the Billboard 100 for a song called “Rich Men North of Richmond,” recorded in an unadorned and gently edited video shot by radiowv, a media concern that covers West Virginia music. That a ginger rose to such renown with a song that appeared to criticize the regime was deeply dismaying to progressive sensibilities. Progressives needed reassurance and some simple talking points.

Last week the New York Times provided them.

The song’s populism unmistakably leans rightward, resulting in an original track perfectly primed for a hyperpolarized moment when conservatives perceive themselves as embattled and politics unrelentingly washes into every other aspect of culture, be it sports, movies or pop music.

Translation: the song leans rightward, and thus should be discounted. Conservatives are not actually embattled, they merely perceive themselves thus.

[T]he stunning success of Mr. Anthony, whose real name is Christopher Anthony Lunsford, testifies not only to the potency of confrontational works that cater to an audience that believes it is underserved, but also to something else: the increasing savvy of promoters and fans — including conservative ones — who have mastered digital platforms and guerrilla marketing tactics to dominate the very culture industries that they say have marginalized them.

Translation: said audience is not underserved, it merely believes itself thus. Said audience thinks that the culture industries have marginalized them, but the viral success of this song proves that this conception is at least mistaken and probably hypocritical.

Polarizing lyrics also ginned up the discourse. Mr. Anthony gives voice to the longstanding conservative critique of public assistance — he sings of “the obese milkin’ welfare” and adds, “Well, God, if you’re 5-foot-3 and you’re 300 pounds/taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds” — and links politicians to “minors on an island somewhere.”

Translation: The critique is conservative and should be discounted. Jeffrey Epstein died under unsurprising circumstances while in jail for prostituting underage girls to, apparently, no one, and having questions about this is conspiracy theory.

…those who purchase downloads are overpaying with purpose. “You do that out of a sentimental attachment to an old way of listening, or because you’re getting something else out of it,” [Jaime Brooks, a musician and cultural commentator] said. One such thing, she added, could be “representation for their favorite artists on the charts, which means something to them. And now you’ve got these people with an obvious stated interest in using the charts to give the impression that their niche beliefs or views are popular.”

Translation: “Rich Men North of Richmond” does not actually represent popular beliefs or views. The beliefs are, rather, niche and driven surreptitiously by interested actors, not organic and real.

This underdog mentality among conservatives in creative fields has long been a talking point and consumer motivator in book publishing, where right-wing titles by the likes of Mark Levin and Dinesh D’Souza routinely ascend sales lists.

Such books exploit concentrated promotion on one television channel — Fox News — and the power of a specific yet deep appeal above sales across the ideological spectrum, according to Eric Nelson, the editorial director of the conservative imprint Broadside. (Broadside and Fox News are both owned by companies led by Rupert Murdoch.)

Translation: Persons attached to the claim that deep, cross-ideological appeal inheres to Anthony’s song and similar successful productions are conservative and should be discounted.

Not to be outdone, progressive regime media outlet National Public Radio chimed in.

"Rich Men North of Richmond" seems to fit into a deep vein of protest music, decrying the fat cats who would take advantage of the working man…. Scratch the surface, however, and you also find extremist and conspiratorial narratives.

One line, in particular, stands out for its association with a known conspiracy theory: “I wish politicians would look out for miners / And not just minors on an island somewhere.” It's a reference to the Jeffrey Epstein scandal: Epstein died in jail four years ago this month, but within far-right circles, there continue to be conspiracy theories about the circumstances around his death. Anthony also makes snide remarks about overweight people that appear to evoke Reagan-era tropes of welfare queens: "Well, God, if you're 5-foot-3 and you're 300 pounds," he chastises, " Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of Fudge Rounds."

Elsewhere, Anthony talks about human trafficking and people taking advantage of children, which is a baseless but common QAnon narrative.

Translation: The critique is conservative and should be discounted. Jeffrey Epstein died under unsurprising circumstances while in jail for prostituting underage girls to, apparently, no one, and having questions about this is conspiracy theory.

On a newer song released Wednesday called "I Want to Go Home," he warns that the U.S. is now on the brink of a new world war.

Translation: The looming possibility of World War III is of a piece with the claims of QAnon. A song lamenting said possibility is conservative extremism.

Jared Holt is a senior researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. He said this isn't new: political movements, including extremist ones, have always understood the power of cultural artifacts like music or movies in normalizing their ideas.

Translation: Oliver Anthony is an extremist. The proof is that we have used the word extremist twice in the last seven paragraphs. It won’t be the last - we’re going to call the critics of the Dixie Chicks that too.

Meanwhile, Anthony has benefited from some remarkable signal boost. While the video for "Rich Men North of Richmond" was posted online just two weeks after the work of a nearly anonymous fellow — within days, commentators like Joe Rogan, Laura Ingraham and Matt Walsh were praising him publicly.

Translation: The widespread interest in the song is neither organic nor real. Persons attached to the claim that deep, cross-ideological appeal inheres to Anthony’s song are conservative and should be discounted. (Joe Rogan is not a conservative but has been lambasted as such for treating objects of progressive hatred as if they were human beings.)

“The reason country works so well for this is,” [country music journalist Marissa A. Moss] observes, “is because people assume that country music is ‘real,’ that it's ‘authentic.’ This is a straight, white, cis-gendered man in a forest with a guitar singing. And that will always code as true to people, even to people who don't like country music and who don't know anything about it. It's so deeply ingrained in the recesses of our collective pop culture.”

Translation: People thinking this are white, and should be discounted.

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Within days, progressive partisans caught a break when Anthony objected to the use of his song as part of the recent Republican presidential candidate debates. Anthony, who has described his politics as “dead center,” said that he “wrote this song about those people,” which was picked up immediately as the subheadline of the ensuing coverage at the New York Times. Progressives evidently needed further reassurance, and the Times was able to report that the song wasn’t exclusively about them.

But absent throughout the coverage at NPR and the Times was recognition that Anthony can perform like he does because he has been, and continues to be, in agony, and that “Rich Men” resonates because much of the country is in agony as well. Moreover, they’re not in agony over issues that progressives think they should be in agony over, but inflation, taxes, dim hopes for the future, being constantly lied to by the government, and increasing autocracy. Many though hardly all of them are white. Many of them feel little allegiance to conservatism but have understood that progressives like those on the DC City Council regard them with disdain and will act contrary to their interest and basic sense; this is not merely a matter of perception but true perception. The acknowledgement that Oliver Anthony’s pain is both real and culturally significant is nowhere to be seen.

Also absent is Anthony’s participation in these exercises. He “did not respond to requests for comment,” said the first Times piece. “NPR reached out repeatedly to Anthony for an interview but received no response,” they noted. Anthony “could not immediately be reached for an interview on Friday evening,” said the second Times piece, as if they might have ever reached him.

That made it all the more delicious when

The Free Press

published their interview with Anthony this morning.

Meet Oliver Anthony: The New Voice of America’s Working Class

The Free Press was founded by

Bari Weiss

, who fled Jew-hatred and cratering standards at the New York Times. It was from this article that we learn the source of Anthony’s music:

“I was feeling like my body was starting to fall apart, and it got to a point where I was questioning how much longer I’d be able to be around and sing these songs and do this stuff, so I was like, ‘Well, let me just go ahead and start getting everything uploaded, so at least if, God forbid, I die of a heart attack in my thirties, there’s some legacy there,’ ” he said.

The struck me as the supreme reason to make art: because you have something to express, and a limited time to manifest it before you are called to the beyond and lose your opportunity.

“The fact is that Americans don’t get accountability from politicians because journalists stopped demanding it of themselves,” wrote Mark Hemingway recently. “And in doing so, they have earned your hatred and no one’s respect.” That’s putting it too strongly, as some genuine journalists (including

Rupa Subramanya

, author of this interview) remain, and while the rest have earned your hatred, you’ll only degrade yourself if you render it to them.

But Anthony exhibits the severity of the discipline you have to exert to cut off the false from the real. One must cut off the false art from the real art, cut off the false journalism from the real journalism, cut off regime conservatism from conservatism of conscience, cut off the progressivism that apologizes for autocracy and warmongering from the progressivism of people and peace. Who is ready to wield Anthony’s Razor?

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