The Left has become obsessed with the astounding success of the previously unknown singer-songwriter Oliver Anthony (born Christopher Anthony Lunsford). His recent three-minute ballad “Rich Men North of Richmond” has earned much progressive invective. One unintended result of his critics’ disdain is that it serves as a reminder of why the Democratic Party lost long ago its former base in the white working class, which should be a source of shame for party members but often is not.
The hysterical leftist attacks on Anthony came quickly. Rolling Stone dismissed the song, calling it a “screed” filled with “Reagan-era talking points,” while New York magazine accused the lyrics of “cruel, reactionary sentiments” that “exploited white resentment.” The Washington Post declared that “business lobbyists and right-wing politicians have told versions of this distorted story for decades,” and The Nation hissed that the “lyrics chime in with the dominant social myth of Trumpian politics.” Apparently Anthony’s detractors thought either that he was a hillbilly racist crooner spreading a crazy, deplorable political agenda or, contrarily, that he should have aspired to write like an academic, laying out a systematic and coherent critique of postmodern America instead of penning a short song that was listened to across the globe.
The chattering classes’ contempt did not matter. In summer 2023 the song hit number-one status on the major charts despite its artist having no prior widely known work, much less a Nashville recording contract. Indeed, it is the first song in history to debut at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart without the artist having any prior chart history. The song’s message is certainly populist and comes at a time of widespread cultural and social discontent. So, is its anti-elite messaging the reason why the song went viral? Yes and no. Yes, because populist protest in the age of maga resentment is increasingly seeping into what previously had become mostly politically correct country music. And no, because thousands of such country protest songs quickly die in obscurity. But not Anthony’s ballad.
The song’s ostensible theme is abject despair over the shrinking real wages of the working classes: “I’ve been sellin’ my soul, workin’ all day/ Overtime hours for bullshit pay.” That plaint is mostly factual, given that real middle-class wages adjusted for inflation have over the last half century largely calcified outside of a brief period of recovery from 2018 to 2020. And, more recently, wages have taken a hard hit from the inflation that began in 2021 and may have been one catalyst for Anthony’s despair. Indeed, despite enormous technological advances in consumer comfort and appurtenances, the Pew Research Center reports that the middle class has fallen from 61 percent of the population a half century ago to roughly half of current America—largely due to the relative percentage growth of both the well-off and the poor.
Note that Anthony’s portrait of twenty-first-century America is not quite of the same stuff as Johnny Paycheck’s famous 1977 hit “Take This Job and Shove It” (written by David Allan Coe). That emblematic Seventies pushback was more a whine about individual assembly-line monotony and factory boredom, not necessarily national cultural and economic decline. It was oddly ill-timed, coming as it did on the threshold of a new globalist era of massive manufacturing layoffs and outsourcing that saw German, Japanese, and South Korean automakers soon grab vast swaths of the domestic car market‚ since the American Big Three products were seen as unreliable and uneconomical.
After Anthony rails against high taxes, a worthless dollar, and ossified wages, he suddenly and strangely pivots both to Jeffrey Epstein—as the incarnation of the corrupt rich—and the subsidized morbidly obese as proof of the baleful effects of the entitlement industry on the poor. Variatio in themes and expression, as the ancients remind us, is the key to good prose and poetry, and Anthony’s song is anything but predictable in its targeting of both the masters of the universe and the welfare class.
Perhaps what also distinguished Anthony’s effort from the plethora of mostly forgotten working-class blues songs was a raw, almost tragic sincerity that resonated throughout the lyrics. “Rich Men North of Richmond” is a mixture of lamentation for and resignation to things that are not going to change until it is too late, if ever. For millions of those with an “old soul,” the new world of today seems unrecognizable:
Livin’ in the new world
With an old soul
These rich men north of Richmond,
Lord knows they all just wanna have 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.
For left-wing critics, just as perplexing as the lyrics and Appalachian-accented singing was Anthony’s odd biography. He dropped out of high school at the age of seveteen and worked at a number of factory jobs in North Carolina, his last at a paper mill, where he fractured his skull. As he shared on Facebook, “I worked 3rd shift, 6 days a week for $14.50 an hour in a living hell.” These details did not quite support the usual media stereotype of a privileged, downward-punching, white Trump voter “deserving of cruel mockery,” a phrase used by New York magazine’s Eric Levitz to summarize the Left’s attitude toward Anthony. Levitz himself was willing to credit Anthony with an “incoherent right-wing populism”—apparently in contrast to Levitz’s own assumed more coherent progressive empathy for, firsthand experience of, and solidarity with New York’s urban dispossessed. But another leftist critic, James Field, writing of the song for the website Pajiba, admitted that
He’s got blue-collar roots . . . . He appears to be a genuine country boy, not a cosplayer. I’m skeptical of Twitter accusations that “Rich Men North of Richmond” shows a racist, Neo-Confederate mentality rather than a simple dislike of D.C. politics. D.C. is only a 2-hour drive due north.
The broader message, tone, and music of the song are also unusual, especially when compared with most contemporary corporate pop, auto-tuned and algorithmically designed. Anthony’s voice and resonator guitar abruptly change pace and intensity. The ballad roars, only to grow suddenly quiet and solemn. Loud accusations against the contemporary world are followed by a softer, doomed call for deliverance from it: “Wish I could just wake up and it not be true/ But it is, oh, it is.” His tragic voice wails that our current nightmare is no dream, but all too real.
Anthony has a resonant, and at times powerful, voice. The composition of “Rich Men North of Richmond” is far more complex than it might first appear, which perhaps additionally explains why the song quickly gained so many listeners. Indeed, sometimes Anthony uses rhyming tercets and quatrains rather than the usual couplets: to/you/true, or pounds/rounds/ground/down, and at other times he uses simple line-ending epistrophes, or word-repetitions in lieu of rhyme: away/away or do/do.
In personal tone as well, Anthony does not quite come off as an heir to the choleric but humorous 1970s stars Merle Haggard and Johnny Paycheck. Instead he is more bewildered, less confident, and more earnest than mocking, angry, or cynical. He confesses that he has struggled with depression and alcohol. And Anthony concedes that he is not even a great musician or singer. Nor, prior to his populist song, had he enjoyed much success in self-recording his own songs on his mobile phone.
As he earned millions of fans—plus hundreds of media interview requests, lucrative recording-contract offers, and live-performance invitations—Anthony strangely declared no interest in cashing in while he was hot and enjoying what in the music business is often a transitory window of opportunity for profit and fame. He had no calculated plan to reach stardom through climbing the ladder of ginned-up celebrity status: “I’m sitting in such a weird place in my life right now. I never wanted to be a full time musician, much less sit at the top of the iTunes chart.”
As to his astronomical success and the doors it immediately opened into the multi-billion-dollar country-music industry, Anthony continued to sound strangely diffident, even defiant. Reports had it that the currently rural, trailer-dwelling, and broke Anthony may have initially declined over $8 million in recording opportunities and likely far more in advertising and endorsements. When he found out that his newfound fame had spiked ticket prices to his performances, he canceled a concert, apologized to his fans, and offered refunds—consequently alienating his irate booker.
In another confessional, Anthony rejected the trappings of typical popular-music success:
I don’t want six tour buses, fifteen tractor trailers and a jet. I don’t want to play stadium shows, I don’t want to be in the spotlight. I wrote the music I wrote because I was suffering with mental health and depression.
He added for emphasis that he needed “no editing, no agent, no bullshit”—given that he described himself as “just some idiot and his guitar.”
If there is a consistent target in Anthony’s dirge, it is the artificiality, insecurity, and inauthenticity of members of America’s corporate and professional classes—of any political persuasion. Anthony ended a description of himself with an ecumenical call for tolerance, unity, and national purpose:
I am sad to see the world in the state it’s in, with everyone fighting with each other. I have spent many nights feeling hopeless, that the greatest country on Earth is quickly fading away.
Yet he wants to offer some sort of hope that America will overcome its current madness and return to normality: “I want to be a voice for those [dispossessed] people. And not just them, but humans in general.” He has seen the harmful effects of technology on the lives of all citizens:
I hate the way the internet has divided all of us. The internet is a parasite, that infects the minds of humans and has their way with them. Hours wasted, goals forgotten, loved ones sitting in houses with each other distracted all day by technology made by the hands of other poor souls in sweat shops in a foreign land.
Anthony’s sincere desire for American unity apparently bothers the white-nationalist Right as much as the woke Left. Consider his statement from a recent interview:
We are the melting pot of the world; that’s what makes us strong—our diversity. We learn to harness that and appreciate it and not use it as a political tool and to keep everyone separate from each other.
No wonder that he was immediately denounced on Twitter by a white nationalist as a “fake.”
Most significantly, Anthony reiterates that he is neither a Democrat nor a Republican: “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. That shit’s got to stop.” He was especially critical when, during the first Republican presidential primary debate, Fox News played an excerpt of his song to elicit commentary from the assembled debaters.
“It was funny seeing it in the presidential debate,” Anthony wrote,
because it’s like, I wrote that song about those people. That song has nothing to do with Joe Biden. You know, it’s a lot bigger than Joe Biden. That song is written about the people on that stage and a lot more, not just them, but definitely them.
That was probably a wise criticism to ensure his nonpartisan status. Yet Anthony must know that the vast majority of disparagement of his ballad comes from the left, while his support is found more on the right—a natural result of any disinterested assessment of the targets of his condemnations.
One example of the fundamentally universal appeal of Anthony is that his song did well outside the United States. It was number thirteen in New Zealand, number three in Canada, and on the charts in Australia, the United Kingdom, and Ireland, reaching number two on the Billboard Global 200. This reveals that his concerns do not just resonate in relation to America’s culture wars but speak to a broader transnational populism, or perhaps more specifically to the middle-class losers of globalization across the world.
What else drives the Left to write ad hominem attacks on Anthony and to deride his stunning success? Is it because one line in his ballad references sex trafficking of children: “I wish politicians looked out for miners/ And not just minors on an island somewhere”?
Some left-wing critics seemed to believe that this was some kind of allusion to a QAnon conspiracy (The Nation said the song was “in the wheelhouse of the QAnon movement”) instead of simple commentary on the obscenely large number of politicians and celebrities who are documented to have visited Epstein’s “Pedophile Island” in the Caribbean. Anthony seems to be saying something like, Our politicians are off partying on Epstein’s island while working people are suffering and dying.
Perhaps another bother is the assumption that Anthony’s song revives a once-blockbuster country tradition of mocking progressive cultural change, going back over half a century to Merle Haggard’s more comical and folksy 1969 number hit, “Okie from Muskogee”
We don’t make a party out of lovin’
We like holdin’ hands and pitchin’ woo
We don’t let our hair grow long and shaggy
Like the hippies out in San Francisco do.
Critics believe that Anthony is a simple flash in the pan—perhaps a welfare-basher of the Guy Drake sort, whose first and only country hit, “Welfare Cadillac” (“the welfare checks make the payments on this new Cadillac”), swept the nation in 1970, only to vanish along with its composer/performer.
More recently, Jason Aldean’s minatory “Try That in a Small Town” skyrocketed to the top of the country charts, with a similar though sharper message that left-wing, urban America is nihilistic and thus antithetical to an older, more traditional culture—one that is increasingly exasperated and angry.
Sucker punch somebody on a sidewalk
Carjack an old lady at a red light
Pull a gun on the owner of a liquor store
Ya think it’s cool, well, act a fool if ya like
Cuss out a cop, spit in his face
Stomp on the flag and light it up
Yeah, ya think you’re tough
Well, try that in a small town
See how far ya make it down the road.
Anthony, for his part, blasts a shrinking dollar, inordinate taxes, haughty and clueless politicians, and welfare milkers as a way of illustrating the same divide between the two Americas, now an abyss grown much wider and deeper than a half century ago during the era of Merle Haggard and Guy Drake. Or as Anthony put it,
Lord, we got folks in the street, ain’t got nothing to eat
And the obese milking welfare
Well, God, if you’re five foot three and you’re three hundred pounds,
Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of Fudge Rounds.
The last stanza about subsidized sweets and welfare injustices set the Left off, with charges of Reagan-era “welfare bashing” (Slate) and “fat shaming” and of course “racism” (Vox). But working Americans have had a distaste for welfare for many decades. Anthony simply reflects the irritation of those who daily do hard physical labor while millions of other capable Americans choose not to endure what can become drudgery.
Anthony avoids carefully crafted phrases about “work requirements”; instead, he just says what he—along with many other people—sees and concludes. Surveys, after all, reveal that the vast majority of Americans favor “guaranteed jobs,” not welfare or an assured income. More specifically, Anthony has replied to his critics that his invocation of the obese on welfare was aimed more at the addictive junk-food industry and the poor choices parents make in buying sugar-laden foods for their families than it was at the sufferers themselves.
In Appalachia, the kind of welfare that populists usually criticize is not food stamps, but more often Social Security disability payments. Upwards of 20 percent of the residents of some Appalachian counties are on ssdi. There is widespread derision of the abuse of disability income. Anthony’s implication is that honest people who work for low wages go hungry while too many dishonest disability cheats eat plentifully if unwisely. Appalachia is also very racially homogeneous. And this type of welfare is not racially coded, unlike in the urban areas, where Anthony’s projectionist critics live. Of course, their very criticism engages in far worse stereotyping than his song does.
Anthony’s invocation of the Lord (twice) should not disturb his critics, given that it is a staple of the black gospel music revered in bicoastal communities. And his use of “bullshit” surely does not bother the Left’s sense of propriety, for they of course have none. In the end, perhaps the real rub then is that almost all his critics do live “north of Richmond” and naturally see themselves as the urban rich and powerful targeted in the song. Or to quote the satirist Horace: mutato nomine de te fabula narratur—“the name may be changed, but the story is told about you.”
In truth, reviewers of Anthony’s music have little credibility to criticize his language or tone, since the popular songs of rap and hip-hop—quite unlike “Rich Men North of Richmond”—are replete with anti-Semitic, homophobic, misogynistic, and violent lyrics that usually earn little if any rebuke from progressive elites. At about the same time “Rich Men North of Richmond” was atop the charts, at number two on many charts was the violent, misogynistic, foul-mouthed, and ugly song “Fukumean”—an offering from the rapper and convicted felon “Gunna.”
I won’t dignify Gunna’s creepy lyrics by transcribing them here in full. But given the hourly violence of our major cities, Gunna’s call to “fuck up the city” seems to provide context for Anthony’s wish that the present world would just go 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.
One wonders who has the greater grievance against contemporary culture: the law-abiding Oliver Anthony living on $14.50 an hour in a used trailer in Appalachia or “Gunna” bragging about his violence against women and his city—while riding in his Bentley Flying Spur, a luxury car whose price comes in at about $300,000?
Oddly, we have read little elite commentary on the ridiculousness and crudity of Gunna’s monotonously grotesque hit “Fukumean,” much less its pernicious influence on the public. Perhaps what most bothers the elite is not just the disdain Anthony has voiced for the beltway crowd north of Richmond and the damage that the latest generation of the best and brightest has done to the country, but the scarier suspicion that millions of Americans—or indeed far more people in the English-speaking world abroad—agree wholeheartedly with Anthony’s diagnoses and venting.
That ambivalence might even account for why a nervous David Brooks wrote yet another worried column—“Are the Elite Anti-Trumpers the ‘Bad Guys’?”—or why, after the 2016 election, a temporarily conflicted and confessional Peggy Noonan, at least for a few months, offered lots of commentary of the “How Global Elites Forsake Their Countrymen” sort.
What prompts such elite fluctuations and occasional self-doubt?
What prompts such elite fluctuations and occasional self-doubt? They seem to recognize that an affluent professional class of highly educated, properly credentialed bicoastal whites have been the singular beneficiaries of the transformation of the national economy into a globalized marketplace. The new economic rules of the twenty-first century rewarded those in tech, finance, law, academic administration, entertainment, and sports, whose saleable services and goods earned a now-huge global paying audience—as opposed to those whose muscular labor could be replaced abroad. The resulting lucre that accrued to these elites convinced them that their new inflated salaries and profits were also proof that they were all-wise, moral, and deserving of their influence.
The Democratic Left is not alone in this conviction. As Anthony noted, there are plenty of Republicans north of Richmond who seem to be bothered by the fact that Anthony’s three-minute, country-western elegy lacks the reason, precision of thought, and compelling diction of a William F. Buckley or a Roger Scruton. For example, one notable critic of Anthony was National Review’s Mark Antonio Wright, who scoffed, “If you’re a fit able-bodied man, and you’re working ‘overtime hours for bullshit pay,’ you need to find a new job.”
Yes, indeed—according to Wright, those born in Appalachia who fail to earn college degrees have no business working for long at $14.50 an hour jobs, given the oh-so-plentiful employment at much higher compensation in the hill country of eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, western Pennsylvania and Virginia, and southern Ohio.
Joe Biden would agree, given he once urged miners to try coding: “Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program, for God’s sake!” That was a less callous suggestion than Hillary Clinton’s early 2016 prognostic warning to West Virginians: “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” One would have thought a fossil-fuel-short America, struggling with unaffordable electricity prices brought on by mandated and subsidized but nonetheless inefficient wind and solar power, might welcome a vibrant clean-coal industry.
“Roger Scruton would have thought this country hit was worthless.”
One libertarian critic, David Henderson, writing for the website Econlib, complained that Anthony doesn’t understand that “some rich people want to reduce the amount of power the government has over us.” Finally, another commentator on the right, Stephen Daisley, writing for The Spectator, penned an article that was subheaded “Roger Scruton would have thought this country hit was worthless.” The Scottish opinion journalist further groaned of the song’s lyrics, “That is dreck. Doggerel. Objectively bad writing. . . . ‘North of Richmond’ is a squall of hoary nostalgia and pedestrian populism.” Daisley apparently assumes that Anthony should have been a polished literary polemicist rather than a talented failure turned wildly successful singer who wrote from the underbelly of America—a vantage point quite different from Daisley’s own perch.
We should remember why the song fixates on rich men north of Richmond, and not, say, the rich men south of San Francisco, that is, Silicon Valley, the incubator of our cultural meltdown. The populist complaint is also not directed much farther north of Richmond, for example, at those involved in international finance in New York. Instead, Anthony focuses on the main commuter corridors of the vast federal administrative state connecting the Washington, D.C., suburbs southward down to Richmond, Virginia, where the federal government exercises enormous political, cultural, social, and economic “control” over the middle class.
Richmond also iconically resonates as the capital of the defeated and humiliated Old South. The city still invokes for some in the American South a sense of the futile resistance of the working classes, as voiced in The Band’s now largely ostracized and often-banned 1969 song “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” That song of impotence, defeat, and humiliation—good working-class men fighting for a bad cause—was made famous by Joan Baez’s 1971 melodic rendition. In both cases, the allusions to the Southern geography are not so much chauvinistic as tragic, evoking an impoverished working class trapped in either a doomed cause or a toxic landscape.
Members of the Washington aristocracy now enjoy privileges as never before. The power their expansive policies hold over all of us has never been greater. Much of their influence is in part inherited or the result of incestuous government–academia–media–politics networking. As race replaced class as the new barometer of victimization and oppression, the wealthy and blessed of all races focused on the poor white working class as the bogeyman of “white privilege,” “white rage,” “white supremacy,” and just plain old “whiteness.” In the case of progressive white elites, they square the circle of their “white privilege” by performance-art condemnations and caricatures of the supposed red-state maga racists of the Oliver Anthony sort.
For this particular elite, rural America’s assumed bias, racism, and sexism offer a tempting target for virtue-signaling, airy lectures, and self-righteous stereotyping. Through a near-medieval sort of exemption, elite progressives relieve the burdens of their own racial guilt by transferring the charge of supposedly unearned white “privilege” to those who rarely had any innate advantage at all. But now the targets are onto the con and are beginning to push back.
America’s progressive project has now become absurd to a point beyond caricature.
It was certainly not the Jason Aldeans and Oliver Anthonys of the world who turned the cores of our major urban areas into pre-civilizational wastelands, but rather the self-acclaimed masters of the universe. In truth, America’s progressive project has now become absurd to a point beyond caricature. A San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland, or Seattle is becoming not just unlivable, but ridiculous. On Nob Hill or in Pacific Heights, motorists leave behind signs like “Nothing Here” or “Car Unlocked” in the windows of their parked vehicles to stave off smash-and-grab thefts. So much human feces litters the sidewalks of San Francisco that residents rely on an app to tell them which spots to avoid. Iconic stores flee the city, since they can no longer bear gargantuan shoplifting losses that rarely garner arrests, much less indictments. How could the blue cities of the men north (or west) of Richmond contain the nation’s greatest riches and cultural opportunities and yet also America’s most glaring moral and civilizational failures?
One might compare this disconnect with the elite’s indifference to the fact that Chinese-fabricated, Mexican-cartel-supplied fentanyl, shipped over an open border, will likely kill a hundred thousand Americans this year. And the overdosed dead will inordinately be young, white, rural males of the lower classes, whose suicide rates are as disproportionate to their population numbers as are their fatal overdoses. The white male working class, especially south of Richmond, experiences the highest suicide rate of any major demographic; it has suffered a greater decline in life expectancy than either blacks or Hispanics. And with reparatory admissions policies at the most selective universities, qualified white working-class males without legacy affiliations, rich parents, athletic scholarships, or alumni or faculty connections are more or less disqualified from admission.
As for Anthony’s invocation of “total control,” the former champions of free speech now applaud the weaponization of the fbi, cia, and doj—labeling expression deemed politically problematic or ideologically unorthodox “hate speech,” “misinformation,” and “disinformation.” And the old liberal idea that “democracy dies in darkness” has transmogrified into the fbi’s secretly hiring, on White House orders, eager social-media companies to censor the news.
It perhaps requires an unfettered thirty-one-year-old mind and a raw voice from the Virginia hinterland to remind the nation that never has a cultural elite done such damage and yet remained so unaccountable and self-satisfied. Our supposed betters sent thousands of working-class Americans over to Afghanistan to fight “terrorism” only to decide after twenty years of squandered blood and treasure simply to skedaddle while turning the entire country and billions of dollars in munitions and weapons over to Taliban terrorists. And the reason? Was it to ensure that a near-senile Joe Biden could meet a self-imposed deadline to claim credit by the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 for alone ending the two-decades-long American misadventure in Kabul?
As defeated American soldiers fled for their lives, which sight was more surreal—a pride flag waving over an abandoned billion-dollar embassy or a George Floyd mural soon to be pressure-washed away by barbarian terrorists? Or is the true nightmare our president’s complete neglect of the toxic fumes that engulfed East Palestine, Ohio—just the sort of heartland working-class place that supplied nearly 75 percent of those killed in Iraq and Afghanistan? Had the fires of small-town Lahaina, Maui, torched Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard, would Biden have found time to visit immediately?
So if Oliver Anthony’s song is occasionally incoherent and full of episodic anger, why again does its furor still resonate nationwide—and globally? Its popularity reflects a tripartite exposé of what enrages most people outside the American bicoastal corridors: excused lying, unapologetic hypocrisy, and insular arrogance.
Lie to an irs auditor, or on a federal gun application, or under oath in a deposition, and, if you’re a resident of Middle America, you will either go to jail or spend what little money you have fighting a government indictment. Contrast that reality with the years of exemption extended to a drug-addled Hunter Biden, whose illegally registered gun turned up in a dumpster near a school. Or ponder our medical guru Anthony Fauci preposterously claiming under oath that he never subsidized gain-of-function viral research in Wuhan. Or recall the former first lady, senator, and secretary of state Hillary Clinton asserting that she never deleted thousands of subpoenaed emails or smashed summoned devices, or had anything to do with veneering payments of hundreds of thousands of dollars to sandbag her opponent’s campaign with the lies about “Russian collusion.”
Remember the fifty-one “intelligence officials” who, just before the 2020 election, apparently expected Americans to believe that clever gremlins in the Kremlin produced a replica of Hunter Biden’s laptop and fabricated the photos of guns, drugs, and prostitutes, as well as the emails with Biden inside talk and the unhinged daily musings? Have we forgotten the smug testimony from the likes of the former cia head John Brennan, or the former director of national intelligence James Clapper, or the former interim fbi director Andrew McCabe as each brazenly and feloniously lied while under oath—and presciently expected no legal consequences?
Or consider the huge homes of the climate-change-sanctimonious Al Gore or the green-sermonizing John Kerry, along with their private jets. Or try to make sense of the “pay your fair share” Biden-family shakedown consortium, with its web of twenty tax-avoiding companies, or the election purist Mark Zuckerberg warping the 2020 balloting by spending $419 million to take over the work of state registrars, while simultaneously working with the fbi to ban the dissemination of inconvenient pre-election truth on social media.
In sum, the rich men north of Richmond are by now beyond guilt and shame and simply assume that as winners they are entitled to the spoils.
Wish I could just wake up and it not be true
But it is, oh, it is.
