National Review crashes and burns over "Rich Men North of Richmond"

Oliver Anthony and the sorry state of NR

I was not going to write about Oliver Anthony’s brilliant song, Rich Men North of Richmond, because I have nothing worthy to add. The video puts all other commentary to shame. North of Richmond refers to the federal government, which is too large, too powerful and too uncaring.

But Mark Antonio Wright, executive editor of the Never Trump National Review, butted in with a Learn-to-Code column attacking Anthony for daring to complain about DC’s treatment of the working class. It lectured Anthony to be more like Woody Guthrie, the Nazi apologist and communist.

Anthony’s song says:

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

Wright responded, “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.”

Get a job?

That’s it?

Ahh, yip-yip-yip-yip-yip-yip-yip-yip
Mum-mum-mum-mum-mum-mum, get a job
Sha-na-na-na, sha-na-na-na-na

Wright said, “There’s plenty of them out there — jobs that don’t require a college degree, that offer good pay (especially in this tight labor market) and great benefits, especially if you’re willing to get your hands dirty by doing things like joining the Navy, turning wrenches, fixing pumps, laying pipe, or a hundred other jobs through which American men can still make a great living. If you’re the type of guy who’s willing to show up on time, every time, work hard while you’re on the clock, and learn hard skills — there’s a good-paying job out there for you. Go find it.”

He’d need to row a boat.

Those jobs disappeared to Red China and other sweatshop nations. National Review repeatedly mocks factory workers by claiming this was the free market. The antebellum South could have made the same argument about its slavery, couldn’t it?

The irony is that while a guy in the suit says learn to code, those coding jobs have gone overseas as well. And miners have plenty of the skills that Wright waxed about poetically, but the mines are closing and the company towns that are not far from where the singer lives have turned into opioid dens.

From North of Richmond, Wright demands a grand economic plan from Anthony. Wright wrote, “I wish Oliver Anthony the best, and I’ll give his next single a listen, but he should consider singing about what makes America a great land — a land of opportunity, not of guaranteed success.”

Ah, there is another irony. Wright calls for celebrating what makes America great while working for a magazine that has mocked Make America Great Again for 8 years, beginning with Trump’s announcement for the presidency, when its news story called him a witless ape. It celebrated the end of his first term with a news story, “Witless Ape Rides Helicopter.”

National Review opposed Trump’s nomination and called Trump’s supporters Nazis in a story slugged, “The Father-Führer.”

Here’s the final irony of the column: He praised Woody Guthrie, a communist who supported the invasion of Poland at the start of World War II. Wright evoked Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land, which was written as a protest against Irving Berlin’s God Bless America. Wright said Anthony should write a song like Guthrie’s.

Wright is from Oklahoma so sure he knows something about the most famous Sooner Crooner. And that something is not — as he politely put it — “politics [that] were juvenile and absurd.”

Guthrie was a Stalinist and for nearly two years a Hitlerist until Hitler broke his secret pact with Stalin to carve up Europe and invaded Russia.

Okie historian John J. Dwyer laid out the truth about Guthrie.

Dwyer wrote, “Would historians honor a man who publicly backed Adolf Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939? Would scholars praise a man who wrote for an official publication of the American Nazi party? Would media promote the merits of a musician, if he had forthrightly supported Germany over the United States during World War II?

“The answer to those questions, of course, is no. The National Socialist (Nazi) movement led by the murderous Hitler was so vile that Americans would not honor anyone who was an ally, a ‘fellow traveler,’ of that movement, regardless of whether the person formally joined the American Nazi Party.”

Actually, the answer is yes because Guthrie was all those things but he is hailed today as some sort of working class hero by the pointy-headed crowd.

Well, as Joe E. Brown said at the end of Some Like It Hot, “Nobody’s perfect.” You have to separate the artist from the artwork — except in this case, This Land Is Your Land is pretty wormy, too.

Dwyer wrote, “The earlier version of Guthrie’s 1940 song contained two additional verses not found in later iterations. One verse attacked the concept of private property. One of the omitted verses in This Land Is Your Land, called ‘the most radical of all Guthrie’s songs,’ read: ‘Was a big high wall there tried to stop me, A sign was painted said: Private Property, But on the back side, it didn’t say nothing—, This land was made for you and me.’”

Guthrie’s economic solution to the very real problems Anthony sings about was to turn the economy over to the Rich Men North of Richmond. Instead of bullshit pay, Americans would be working for no pay for the government.

Wright is wrong. There was nothing juvenile or absurd about Guthrie’s politics. He was cold and calculating. He was not a useful idiot but a rather diehard supporter of the ruthless Stalin and the Satan he served.

Dwyer wrote, “When Nazi Germany invaded Poland from the west and the Soviet Union Communists of Joe Stalin invaded Poland from the east, Guthrie chose to publicly defend Stalin. Guthrie wrote in an official Communist newspaper that Stalin had acted to help Polish workers and farmers. Guthrie’s column, ‘Woody Sez,’ appeared in the People’s World, the West Coast version of the Communist Daily Worker, for more than six months. According to Klein, all that was left in the American Communist Party after the Soviet invasion of Poland was ‘a hard core of true believers.’”

When Hitler turned on Stalin, Guthrie turned on Hitler. To cover up his past support, he slapped a label on his guitar, “This machine kills fascists.” He was as phony then as National Review is now.

NR has a lengthy history of sneering at conservatives outside of Manhattan and Washington. In his infamous “The Father-Führer” screed, Yale grad Kevin D. Williamson wrote, “So the gypsum business in Garbutt, New York, ain’t what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down.

“The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs.

“Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.”

His knowledge of the middle class consists of watching South Park mock MAGA.

Wright carries on Williamson’s tradition of insipid resentment of conservatives who go mudding. The answer is the same: Get a U-Haul, loser.

What could be worse than preferring a song by a Nazi sympathizer over a MAGA American’s? John Nolte has the answer: “National Review was publishing gushing articles about Jeffrey Epstein years and years after his conviction for procuring underage prostitutes.”

That NR story said, “Much has been written about the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics and Martin Nowak’s work. . . . Whatever his ignominy, Epstein’s continued bond with Nowak and PED emphasizes that nature is not fastidious nor judgmental, nor is its dynamic always gradual.”

PED. Of course someone pimping children would call his program PED. It was his way of bragging that he got away with it. Well, he did, didn’t he?

Oops.

Nolte pointed to this passage in the Rich Men song, which may be what really ticked off NR.

I wish politicians would look out for miners
And not just minors on an island somewhere

But don’t be “fastidious nor judgmental.” And don’t you dare complain about our government.

That an executive at a magazine that routinely mocks Trump and anyone else who wants to Make America Great Again aligns himself with Guthrie also makes sense because the communist and Nazi movements in Guthrie’s day feigned patriotism just as hard as National Review does today.

Wright demands that Anthony “consider singing about what makes America a great land,” but what makes America great are the very things National Review now opposes. It has become another publication for the Rich Men North of Richmond.

And communists.

And Nazi apologists.

And pedophiles.