Oliver Anthony Schools National GOP and Conservatism, Inc.

As CHQ Chairman Richard A Viguerie has been preaching for many years the chief

impediment to governing America according to conservative principles isn’t the Democrats, it is the Republican establishment.

The latest example of the DC-based GOP’s tone deafness and hypocrisy was the decision to use country music sensation Oliver Anthony’s hit “Rich Men North Of Richmond” during the first Republican presidential candidates debate.

Clearly, no one at the RNC or FOX ever actually listened to the words of Mr. Anthony’s overnight hit, because, as he was quick to point out, “It was funny seeing my song at that presidential debate because I wrote that song about those people, you know, so for them to have to sit there and listen to that, that cracks me up,” Anthony said in a YouTube video uploaded Friday.

Anthony claimed his song “has nothing to do with Joe Biden,” according to reporting by Erin Keller of the New York Post.

“It’s a lot bigger than Joe Biden,” he claimed.

“The one thing that has bothered me is seeing people wrap politics up in this. I’m disappointed to see it. Like, it’s aggravating seeing people on conservative news try to identify with me like I’m one of them.”

The song’s lyrics reference hungry “people in the street,” “obese” citizens “milking welfare” and suicide rates of young men.

“I hate to see that being weaponized. I see the right trying to characterize me as one of their own, and I see the left trying to discredit me, I guess, in retaliation,” he said in the video.

Mr. Anthony is right, “this” is a lot bigger than Joe Biden. The national Republican Party, its congressional leaders and their DC-based “conservative” allies have demonstrated time and again that they could care less about the people Mr. Anthony was singing about – America’s forgotten workers and their families – and every so often they drop the mask and admit it.

In “Oliver Anthony’s Fuzzy Lament” Mark Antonio Wright, National Review’s executive editor, spoke for DC’s Conservatism, Inc.

My brother in Christ, you live in the United States of America in 2023 — if you’re a fit, able-bodied man, and you’re working “overtime hours for bullshit pay,” you need to find a new job.

If “find a new job” or learn to code is the best the foundational publication of the modern conservative movement can come up with in response to the alienation of millions of American workers and their families our movement is in deep trouble.

However, this isn’t the first time National Review has adopted this sort of Malthusian view of the plight of America’s displaced workers and their families.

Back in 2016, Kevin D. Williamson, formerly of National Review, attacked America’s forgotten blue-collar citizens in even harsher terms.

Williamson, who has never done anything in conservative politics except pontificate for various elite journals, took to the pages of National Review, to explain in Malthusian terms why the “benighted white working class” that powered Donald Trump’s 2016 election should just blow away and die.

In Williamson’s formulation Trumpism is not just a bad set of ideas, it is “immoral.”

It is immoral because it perpetuates a lie: that the white working class that finds itself attracted to Trump has been victimized by outside forces. It hasn’t. The white middle class may like the idea of Trump as a giant pulsing humanoid middle finger held up in the face of the Cathedral, they may sing hymns to Trump the destroyer and whisper darkly about “globalists” and — odious, stupid term — “the Establishment,” but nobody did this to them. They failed themselves.

White workers who have lost their jobs and had their quality of life devastated by forty years of liberal folly and establishment Republican cronyism with Big Business are immoral for wanting a government that will actually serve the interests of its citizens?

With thinking like National Review’s, is there any wonder why the blue-collar silent majority is revolting against the elites of both political parties?

As we pointed out in our 2016 article “Kevin D. Williamson and National Review Are Scum” [archived version here] the fellows at National Review, The Weekly Standard, Fox and other outlets who were banging away at the MAGA Movement’s lack of conservative intellectual bona fides haven’t borne the impact of Washington’s complete rejection of limited government constitutional conservativism.

None of them have been put out of work by an illegal alien.

None of them have had to train their H1-B foreign guest worker replacements.

Few have their children in public school rooms swamped with non-English speakers.

And few are subjected to the daily humiliations at the hands of politically correct bureaucrats, school administrators, and corporate managers that make them feel like strangers in their own country.

So little wonder that Trump’s message that he was going tear down the Washington establishment and the idea of an outsider candidate who is going to make America great again and is beholden to no one is a powerful attractant to the forgotten men and women of America’s country class.

As Rick Manning, president of Americans for Limited Government, put it so well back in 2016, those who would crucify blue-collar workers on the corporate crony trade altar are no better than those who would sacrifice the same group to their green gods — they are both despicable.

We take Oliver Anthony at his word that he is not political, but the response to his hit song is indicative of a powerful undercurrent in American politics. In 2016 Donald Trump received the vast majority of the votes of those alienated voters because he actually empathized with their plight and promised to do something about what he called the “politician-made disaster” of the decline in American manufacturing, mining and other industrial employment.

The fans of Mr. Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond” aren’t stupid, they understand who is for them and who is not, and if the Republican Party and the conservative movement want their support and their votes, they are going to have to do better for them than Mark Antonio Wright and National Review telling them to “learn to code” or go find a better job.

• Donald Trump

• Tucker Carlson interview

• Milwaukee GOP debate

• Kevin D. Williamson

• Republican establishment

• National Review

• Rich men north of Richmond

• illegal immigration

• trade

• school administrators

• H1B Visas