Hillbilly Anthem: With His Viral Protest Song, Oliver Anthony Is This Year’s J.D. Vance

Here we go again.

In 2016, I read Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance’s moving, insightful memoir of growing up in the struggling white working class of Appalachia. Vance was, and is, a young man who wrote with critical passion about his people and their despair. He criticized structural economic reasons for their suffering, but also criticized self-sabotaging cultural beliefs and practices.

As a white man who grew up in the South among people like Vance’s family, the book resonated with me. Hillbilly Elegy had been out for about a month, and had sold modestly. I thought this was a story more Americans should know about, so I contacted Vance and asked for an interview for The American Conservative, where I then worked.

It was an ordinary interview about the themes in the book, but it went megaviral, crashing the servers at the magazine twice over a weekend. Suddenly, J.D. Vance was everywhere. Because it was an election year, and because he was an articulate man who graduated from Yale Law School, the media went to him for insight about the Donald Trump phenomenon (Vance, back then, was not a Trump supporter; he has since changed his mind.)

The book sold millions of copies, was translated into a number of foreign languages, and became a Hollywood film in 2020. In 2022, Vance, powered in part by the support of former President Trump, won a race for U.S. Senate in his native Ohio, and is now sitting in that imperial city north of Richmond, Virginia, making laws with other rich men and women.

J.D. Vance is young, only 39 years old. I think he’s going to be president some day. Hope so, anyway. He and I became friends, and I am a strong believer in him as a potentially transformative leader. Now, as Vance plans a fall trip to Europe, his first official visit as a U.S. Senator, I’m telling all my European friends to watch his rising star.

I’m also telling my European friends to watch a new star just born in America, and following the J.D. Vance path: Oliver Anthony, a young working-class troubadour from rural Virginia, who has found instant stardom with his megaviral protest song, “Rich Men North Of Richmond” (the title refers to Washington, D.C., which is due north from the Virginia state capital). The reception given to Anthony, as compared to J.D. Vance’s debut, tells us a lot about where America is culturally and politically, seven years after the Trump election.

Not much is known about Anthony’s background. He doesn’t even have a record deal, but his self-recorded country songs have been burning up the streaming charts in both the United States and around the world, virtually overnight. Only one week after its release, “Rich Men North Of Richmond” has been viewed over 12 million times on YouTube. He’s ginger-haired, with a red beard like a burning bush, and a raw, powerful voice that is the polar opposite of the slickly produced pop country songs of contemporary Nashville.

Oliver Anthony makes roots music—and it seems to come from a place of real pain. In an online introduction, he said he lives alone in the country with his dogs, and started making music a short time ago when he got fed up with himself for hiding from his problems by getting drunk and getting high. So fast has his internet-driven rise been that while he recently played to about twenty people at a farmer’s market in North Carolina; just last weekend, hundreds showed up to see him.

Anthony says he was for a long time an angry agnostic, but a month or so ago, crushed by depression, he fell on his knees and asked for God’s help. Now he is on the cusp of superstardom. At his farmer’s market show this past Sunday, he opened by pulling out a Bible and reading from Psalm 37. Nobody saw that coming. But then, nobody saw Oliver Anthony coming either—not even Oliver Anthony.

Anthony’s breakout hit, “Rich Men North Of Richmond,” is a standard protest song against the indifference of Washington politicians to the struggles of the working man. The narrator sings of working long hours for little money, and being taxed to death while the value of the dollar sinks due to inflation. He complains about Washington elites wanting to control what we think and what we do. He also registers an inelegant jibe about elites ignoring coal miners to pay attention instead to “minors” (underage girls) on Jeffrey Epstein’s island.

The most controversial lines are Anthony’s criticism of “the obese milkin’ welfare.” He goes on:

Well, God, if you’re 5-foot-3, and you’re 300 pounds,

Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds.

Young men are puttin’ themselves six feet in the ground,

’Cause all this damn country does is keep on kickin’ them down.

For this, Anthony was called “fatphobic,” and a disciple of Ronald Reagan, who left office thirty-five years ago. American liberals gripe that Anthony is “blaming the victim” here. What they don’t grasp is that Anthony comes from a working-class Scots-Irish culture that loathes people who can work, but who won’t. I grew up in the same cultural milieu. My late father, who grew up very poor in the rural South during the Great Depression, had a lot of compassion for people struggling to make a living. But like everybody else of his class, he had no respect for men and women whom he judged as lazy.

It’s remarkable how the American Left has made government dependency into a virtue. Oliver Anthony’s message to the obese man sitting on his couch eating junk food is that he should get off his backside and get to work. Why is this wrong? Anthony has criticized himself for falling into drugs and alcohol as a false solution to his problems. It’s a matter of self-respect and dignity, which do not come with a welfare check.

Yet the lines that follow the condemnation of taxpayer-funded fudge cakes indicate that American culture has reduced young men to a condition of learned helplessness. Just last week, the suicide rate in America hit an all-time high, with the highest rates falling on working-class white males. Anthony’s words recall parts of J.D. Vance’s memoir in which he chastised men from his own hometown who fathered children they wouldn’t support, and who were too lazy and disorganized to keep their jobs. Vance’s book was in part a protest against the corruption of his own people, and a call to them to accept and assert their own human dignity by turning from their destructive ways.

The parallels between Hillbilly Elegy and “Rich Men North Of Richmond” are obvious. But the differences in how the two statements have been received tells us a lot about where America is today.

Vance is a leading Republican politician today, but he was not involved in politics when his book was published. He was known as a conservative, but was a critic of Donald Trump. The media celebrated his book as insightful, and hailed a new public figure giving voice to overlooked people.

Oliver Anthony, by contrast, was instantly coded as right-wing by the American media, even though he said in a nine-minute online introduction that he is a political centrist who believes both major parties “serve the same master.” And, in his song “Doggon It,” Anthony sings, “Republicans and Democrats, Lord, I swear they’re all just full of crap.”

To be fair, it is true that conservative media and influencers first picked up on Anthony and popularized him, probably because country music is especially popular with conservatives. But with the exception of his lines about the fat welfare cheat, Anthony’s song about the working man being ground down by rich and powerful politicians and social forces is the kind of message that was once common on the Left.

It is more than a little strange that a protest song calling out rich politicians for their indifference to the pain of working people is considered to be right-wing in America today. There’s a reason for that—and Europeans who want to understand American politics need to pay attention to it.

It’s mostly about Donald Trump. The American media are overwhelmingly liberal, and anything that they think might be even slightly pro-Trump, they treat with hostility, even contempt. Rolling Stone magazine, born in the 1960s as a self-conscious voice of the counterculture, was quick to denounce the Anthony song as right-wing nonsense. This is what happens when you become the Establishment you once despised.

The Anthony song, though, does not really echo particular MAGA themes. If the Left wishes to frame all frustration with the political, economic, and social situation in the United States today as Trump-adjacent, they are only going to make it more likely that Trump is re-elected. Polls show that the American people right now are angry, despairing, and losing faith in institutions. Oliver Anthony’s fairly generic protest song would not have rocketed to the top of the charts if Americans were a happy people.

It’s also the case that Oliver Anthony is a rural white working-class male—the scariest person alive, according to American liberals. If a black rapper rushed in from the outside with a hip-hop protest anthem that electrified the public, the TV networks, National Public Radio, the major newspapers and magazines—all would be falling all over themselves to celebrate the people’s superstar.

The media love rebellion, but only of a certain kind. For example, three years ago this month, the female rappers Cardi B. and Megan Thee Stallion released a gargantuan hit that went by the initials “W.A.P.” The initials stood for a vulgar term referring to female genitalia. The pornographic song was degenerate beyond words (read the lyrics yourself if you doubt me), and virtually overnight became the biggest streaming song in history.

The mainstream media loved it. Alyssa Rosenberg of The Washington Post called the song and its accompanying video “among the filthiest things I’ve ever seen in mainstream American popular culture”—and said we need more things like it.

A gynecologist gushed in The New York Times that she was “thrilled” to hear a musical celebration of vaginal “lubrication.” On NPR, a female cultural critic named Taylor Crumpton praised it as “an iconic song about women’s sexuality and empowerment.”

When the radio host interviewing Crumpton played a clip of conservative commentator Ben Shapiro reading the trashy lyrics in a critical tone of voice, Crumpton accused Shapiro of racism and sexism. “He’s dehumanizing Megan and Cardi,” she fumed. This, about a song in which the two black women rap, in ways that would make a pornographer blush, about selling their bodies. 

Rich and famous urban black women singing about having kinky sex with men for money, cars, and bling—hey, that’s empowering, that’s the kind of rebellion against society we need. But a white male nobody from Farmville, Virginia, banging his guitar and complaining about poverty, the surveillance state, and rich, out-of-touch elites? Quick, somebody shut this reactionary bigot down!

This week, I met with a group of Hungarian college students, who asked about American politics and the coming 2024 election. I wish I had thought to turn my laptop around, show them the “Rich Men North Of Richmond” video, tell them that it is the No. 1 song on U.S. streaming platforms, and ask them what they think this means. Knowing very little about American politics, cultural or otherwise, they probably would have guessed it meant that there was going to be a big swing to the Left in 2024. What else could a rural country singer denouncing the rich and powerful possibly mean?

Wrong. This simple country protest song is a political bellwether, one that American and European media will almost certainly miss. I have been thinking that there is no way Donald Trump could win the White House again. But, having seen the electrifying response to “Rich Men North of Richmond,” and how the left-wing media have driven the self-proclaimed centrist Oliver Anthony into the arms of the populist Right because of their deep aversion to the white working class, I think, incredibly, that Trump will probably pull this off. Oliver Anthony may or may not be a Trump supporter, but Donald Trump is the only political figure carrying his mad-as-hell tune.