By John Kass

August 16, 2023

There’s a new song out now that is choking the American political establishment with its own rage.

The mincing media ferrets in their employ are eager to use their teeth on Oliver Anthony, the farmer songwriter from Virginia, for exposing the often-hidden side of their face. They’ll try gutting the innocent man for the sin of singing the truth in “Rich Men North of Richmond.”

 

Listen:

 

The country will be ripped up no matter what is done now. The threads of the national unravelling were pulled viciously for years. The left will try to destroy Oliver Anthony. To leave him untouched would be unthinkable, and they would douse him with real or imagined sin and light it on fire. But before they burn him for speaking truth to their power, but first I wanted to mention something that happened years ago.

You might think of it as an  epiphany.

I’m not a songwriter like Oliver Anthony. But on a hot afternoon in August, I went to the movies with Betty and knew America just wouldn’t ever be the same.

There was no stopping the coming change being hinted at. A terrible change with no happy ending. But once you got the hint–and no one who loves America wanted the scent of it–you knew change was inevitable.

The hint was hidden deep in a modern Western “Hell or High Water” with Jeff Bridges as the crusty Texas Ranger and Chris Pine and Ben Foster as Army desperate veterans and bank robbers.

The screenplay was written by Taylor Sheridan, creator of “Yellowstone.”

Hollywood kisses Sheridan’s ass now. His screenplays and shows make money. But his name wasn’t a big name then, and so, the film didn’t pick up the big Oscar. The big Oscar was then was reserved for a coming-of-age movie about a young black gay man. Somehow, I missed it.

Sheridan’s “Hell or High Water” was a great movie nonetheless, one that stays with you for a long time. Even when you think you’ve left it behind, it’s still there, like a wolf or a rat on the edge of your sleep, ready to gnaw some part of you.

Our usual habit after a movie was to go to a pie place for a piece of pie and talk about the picture, about the scenes and surprises and our favorite parts.

But back then I wasn’t in the mood for pie. I wanted to go off by myself for a bit and smoke alone for a bit, sip whiskey and think about what I’d seen. And about what was coming for us all.

There was fine acting and wonderful lines. One of my favorite character actresses, Daley Dickey, who played a hillbilly gangster Meth queen in the superb “Winter’s Bone” was in it. Her dry eyes had seen plenty of pain.

My favorite part of “Hell or High Water” wasn’t even an actor or a line.

It was stray red graffiti, the color of dried blood, spray-painted on a dusty wall of a sun-bleached Texas town:

“3 tours in Iraq but no bailout for people like us.”

That was it. That was the axle of this film, the spine of it, the explainer of motive, the foreshadow, and I’ve yet to see a better modern movie.

But that was 2016 and you know what happened a few months later to the entitled Democrat Hillary Clinton.

And now we’re in August 2023, another election year but this time Democrats keep piling on the Trump indictments without any sense of shame, and something new comes along.

That song by Oliver Anthony. I watched the video a few days ago, as it was going viral with tens of millions of views.

Conservative Republicans like it. Leftist Democrats hate it and prepare the rat (or ferret) cage for Anthony. Corporate legacy media which leans far left is already hating on the song, and  they’re ignoring it the way they tried to ignore Hunter Biden’s laptop from hell and all the brilliant reporting done by The New York Post and Miranda Devine, that was suppressed by media and Big Tech.

The lyrics are forthright, like Americans and direct like Americans. But there is deep anger, if not rage in Anthony’s voice as he sings his song in front of a deer stand:

I’ve been sellin’ my soul, workin’ all day / Overtime hours for bullshit pay / So I can sit out here and waste my life away / Drag back home and drown my troubles away.

It’s a damn shame what the world’s gotten to / For people like me and people like you / Wish I could just wake up and it not be true / But it is, oh, it is.

“Oliver Anthony’s beautiful, angry song about the people who run roughshod over ordinary Americans and seek to control their lives is the clearest expression of populism since Donald Trump used his own voice to reshape the Republican Party,” wrote my friend Professor Charles Lipson in his excellent recent essay on Real Clear Politics, “Rich Men North of Richmond is Authentic Voice of Populism.”

The moment I heard Anthony’s voice I knew his was a song for The Forgotten. I had to write about this. But the professor beat me to it. Lipson knows the costs and danger of American populism. He’s studied it for much of his life. He knows that Donald Trump also lives by it, but also that Huey Long died by it. Mr. Trump may be an effective, resourceful and powerful politician, but he’s not my cup of Tea Party.

I just don’t like the way he’s been treated by his political opponents, the Intelligence Apparatus of the Kemalist Deep State, and corrupt corporate legacy media. And I worry for my country.

It might be worth mentioning here that the Republican half of the Washington establishment (or Washington Combine) was threatened years ago by conservatives in the Tea Party and the Rich Men North of Richmond were compelled to send a handler to simmer the Tea Party down. They sent an emissary, U.S. Rep. Dick Armey to talk sense to the country folk and suburbanites, treating the populist fiscal conservatives as so many fools. Armey didn’t need to use a hard Texas twang to tame them. And you could almost see Mitch McConnell off to the side, fishing for straw to chew on like some ridiculous character from “Hee-Haw.”

McConnell survived, but then, roaches always do.

And right now—after all the Democrats have done using the Department of Justice to attack and crush Republicans, criminalizing free speech and reducing the rule of law to the status of a banana republic. The constant pressure does not leave diamonds. It leaves raw wounds. The Democrats and their corporate media allies seem not to care about the consequences of their actions. Sooner or later it will turn and then Republicans, feeling put upon and in righteous rage will demand that their local Republican prosecutors indict Democrat presidents they way Democrat hacks are doing now. The screaming is that of baboon island echoing along the Potomac.

This America is a dry tinderbox just waiting for a spark. Complicating matters is the biased media desperately leaning left, hushing those Americans who want to ask questions about their nation, a media that participates in ridiculing dissent even as media brags that it speaks truth to power.

Living in the new world with an old soul/These rich men north of Richmond

Lord knows that they just want total control/ Wanna know what you think, wanna know what you do

And they don’t think you know, but I know that you do

‘Cause your dollar ain’t shit, and it’s taxed to no end, ’cause of rich men, ’cause of rich men.

They’ll do what they have to do to destroy him and they will. They can’t let it slide. They must attack before the people start asking questions.

One I wish they’d ask is “Democrats? What happens after the music stops?”

Does everyone get a chair?

And after the Democrats use the law as their weapon, and criminalize political speech and encouraged by their media cheerleaders, then what? Won’t Republicans demand the same? Of course they will. They’re itching for it now, aren’t they? Grabbing for the tomahawks and war clubs just like our nation’s forefathers did in the French and Indian War.

The way the Bolsheviks devoured the Mensheviks in Russia.

Trump is also pushing for angry confrontation–I’m not saying he wants violent confrontation, just angry–but Democrats and their prosecutors who ignore some violent crimes in big cities are herding the rest with sharp sticks and spears. Pushing Republicans around with sharp sticks might just work in the short term.

People who know me know I love dogs. I’d never hurt a dog. But most dogs will cower if you provide enough pain. Even tough dogs. Sooner or later you’ll run into one dog that obeys instantly and waits. And when you turn your head, that dog is ready for you and you won’t have time to scream.

By then Oliver Anthony’s angry song of American protest will be as soothing as a lullaby compared to what will be raging in the nation. There are no happy endings now, no lullabies. Only pain to come.

There has been too much idle idiotic talk of armed political violence. People who talk like this are worse than fools. They’re demonic. My father lived through such a time after World War II, when one side poked the dogs with spears until the dogs decided not to lie down and take it.

It always starts with politics, and more politics, he said. The streets are full of politics. The people in the coffee houses. Politics and politics. And then blood gets in your eyes.

And you’re so angry. But you can’t see clearly because of the blood.

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