Oliver Anthony’s ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’ Is an Instant Smash Among Conservatives, While Progressives Wonder if He’s a ‘Plant’

Is viral sensation Oliver Anthony too good to be true? Too “right” to be true? Or an authentic working class hero, which is something to be?

Since the Virginia native’s “Rich Men North of Richmond” song began taking off from out of nowhere less than a week ago, the Appalachian country-folk singer has been acclaimed by freshly minted fans as a phenomenon of the people and accused by detractors of harboring ugly right-wing attitudes or suspected of being an “industry plant.”

The suspicions of progressive music fans have largely to do with the fast numbers he’s racked up as an independent artist with supposedly no industry backing whatsoever. The “Rich Men” video (hosted not on his own YouTube page, but that of a site that promises “real music, real people, real cuture” [sic]) has racked up 12 million views in six days. The red-bearded upstart has accumulated 341,000 Twitter/X followers within days of registering on the site. On the iTunes downloads chart, he has the top three songs as of this writing, and five of the top 10. And while paid downloads are hardly a solid measure of broad success nowadays, Anthony’s breakout tune has cracked the top 10 on a much more indicative one, Spotify’s daily USA Top 50.

It’s a phenomenon not unlike the recent rise of Jason Aldean’s similarly right-rousing “Try That in a Small Town,” but with a literally friendlier face. His critics maintain he is punching down as well as up, with the song’s lyrics about “the obese milkin’ welfare” (“Well, God, if you’re 5-foot-3 and you’re 300 pounds / Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds”) as well as the supposed fat cats in Washington, D.C. that are ostensibly the main target of the tune.

What’s known about Anthony, who has a minimal news or paper trail up to this point, comes largely through a YouTube monologue he put up a few days before releasing “Rich Men.” In that speech, he declares himself nonpartisan: “I sit pretty dead center down the aisle on politics and, always have,” Anthony says, facing the camera from behind the wheel. “I remember as a kid the conservatives wanting war, and me not understanding that. And I remember a lot of the controversies when the left took office, and it seems like, you know, both sides serve the same master. And that master is not someone of any good to the people of this country.”

But if an artist is known by the fans they keep, the highest-profile fans Anthony has quickly accumulated are very much on the right side of the aisle — insta-supporters like former Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, firebrand commentator Matt Walsh, former Mumford & Sons banjoist-turned-political gadfly Winston Marshall and far-right country figure John Rich, who said he has had long conversations with Anthony and offered to produce and finance a full album. If Anthony wants to prove the centrism he professes by picking up some less partisan public figures as fans, he may have his work cut out for him, given the way he’s instantly been embraced as a hero to the right.

Whether Anthony really is an ideologue in good old boy’s clothing remains to be seen. He has several other songs up on YouTube or TikTok, and he refers to pot a lot more than he does politics. (Sample lyrics: “Ain’t gotta dollar / And when the sun goes down / On this itty bitty town / We can light up a bowl n’ pass it around.” And: “Well the liquor and the bowl / They’vе been saving my soul / From the pain that the world’s put on me.”)

When he does stick with social issues, he doesn’t seem like a political scientist, exactly: The only three “issues” he addresses in his plaints against politicians are high taxes, welfare queens and child trafficking. His focus on the latter, which is the sole topic he addresses in his YouTube monologue, has led to the suspicion that he may harbor or represent QAnon views, since that is a key bugaboo of that movement, although he has been limited in how conspiratorial he has publicly gotten. “I wish politicians would look out for miners / And not just minors on an island somewhere,” he sings, a slightly confusing couplet that seems to indicate belief in a government cover-up having to do with Jeffrey Epstein.

And yet non-fans may have to admit that, in the brief glimpses of him in public so far Anthony has a less belligerent, more conciliatory-seeming persona than that of, say, the perpetually glowering Aldean. This past week, in playing what was said to be his first public gig ever, at a farmer’s market, he promised to pose with each one of the thousands that showed up.

Yet there’s a sense of righteousness in his undertones that may extend beyond his judgment of obese women. At his public gig, he opened the show by reading a lengthy biblical passage from Psalm 37. His recitation ended with the words “But the wicked will perish. Though the Lord’s enemies are like the flowers of the field, they will be consumed, and they will go up in smoke.” With that promise, he closed the good book, and the crowd erupted in enormous cheers — whether for the promise of the damnation of enemies, or just the promise of the music starting up, it was hard to tell.