Liberty_Tree
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- Joined
- May 27, 2009
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- 655
Oliver Anthony - Rich Men North Of Richmond
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqSA-SY5Hro
I've been selling my soul
Working all day
Overtime hours
For bull$#@! 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
Living in the new world
With an old soul
These rich men north of Richmond
Lord knows they all just want to 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
Cause your dollar ain't $#@!, and it's taxed to no end
'Cause of rich men north of Richmond
I wish politicians would look out for miners
And not just minors on an island somewhere
Lord, we got folks in the street, ain't got nothing to eat
And the obese milking 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
Young men are putting themselves six feet in the ground
'Cause all this damn country does is keep on kicking them down
Lord, 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
Living in the new world
With an old soul
These rich men north of Richmond
Lord knows they all just want to 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
'Cause your dollar ain't $#@!, and it's taxed to no end
'Cause of rich men north of Richmond
I've been selling my soul
Working all day
Overtime hours
For bull$#@! pay
* "KMFDM - Anarchy", Kaitlyn Taylor ( youtube.com/user/t3rabyt3 ), Nov. 18, 2007,
Mirrors: "KMFDM - Anarchy", try to KillMich^^ ( youtube.com/user/HummerRXT ), July 28, 2009, https://youtube.com/watch?v=uAOoiIkFQq4; "KMFDM - Anarchy", dalemierdaaaaa, Feb. 12, 2011, https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZPAS8Wa8v4c .
Right-Wing Influencers Just Found Their Favorite New Country Song
In “Rich Men North of Richmond,” a singing farmer in Virginia blasts high taxes and obese people on welfare, and even appears to allude to Jeffrey Epstein
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/...anthony-conservative-country-song-1234805701/
Joseph Hudak (11 August 2023)
Right-wing influencers are losing their minds over a new country song that just appeared on streaming services today. “Rich Men North of Richmond” is a passionate screed against the state of the country sung by Oliver Anthony, who identifies as a farmer living off the grid with his three dogs in Farmville, Virginia. In a video Anthony posted to YouTube earlier this month, he says he started writing songs in 2021 after he “wasted a lot of nights getting high and getting drunk.”
Raw, solo songs with titles like “I’ve Got to Get Sober” and “Ain’t Gotta Dollar” helped cultivate a small following, but it was the recently released performance video of “Rich Men North of Richmond” — in which the red-bearded Anthony performs the song on a resonator guitar in a field with a deer blind behind him — that caught the attention of conservative personalities like country singer John Rich and commentators Dan Bongino and Matt Walsh. “The main reason this song resonates with so many people isn’t political. It’s because the song is raw and authentic. We are suffocated by artificiality,” tweeted Walsh, vowing to promote any album Anthony releases on “all of my platforms.”
A look at the lyrics, however, may suggest another reason why “Rich Men North of Richmond” is appealing to right-wing influencers. Anthony rails against high taxes and the value of the dollar, but also wades into some Reagan-era talking points about welfare.
“Lord, we got folks in the street, ain’t got nothing to eat/and the obese milking welfare,” he sings. “Well God, if you’re 5 foot 3 and you’re 300 pounds/taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds.”
The real head-turner though is an apparent allusion to Jeffrey Epstein’s Caribbean island, where the billionaire and convicted sex offender allegedly introduced underage girls to powerful associates: “I wish politicians would look out for miners/and not just minors on an island somewhere.”
In his straight-to-camera introduction video, Anthony, who according to a post on YouTube cites Hank Williams Jr., no stranger to political songs, as his biggest influence, says he sits “pretty dead center down the aisle on politics and always have,” and that “it seems like both sides serve the same master — and that master is not someone of any good to the people of this country.”
It's a pleasure to meet you
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmxyMJd7IQ8
He also talks about “human trafficking,” which he admits is alluded to in the lyrics “Rich Men North of Richmond.” “One of the worst things a human being can do is take advantage of a child,” he says in the video. “I think I drew the line on being quiet when I started to see that becoming normalized. And I’ll leave that at that.”
One conservative influencer compared “Rich Men North of Richmond” to Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town.” “The 2 most viral country songs of the last month are: Jason Aldean’s ‘Try that in a Small Town’ Oliver Anthony’s ‘Rich Men North of Richmond,” the account DC Draino tweeted. “You might notice a theme there… People are starved for music that speaks to them about today’s problems.”
Anthony, meanwhile, sings that he’s simply just one of many trying to navigate a complicated 21st century: “Lord, it’s a damn shame/what the world’s gotten to/for people like me and people like you.”
File under "OK groomer"
The far right’s fixation on pedophilia is dangerous
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-the-far-rights-fixation-on-pedophilia-is-dangerous/
Michael Coren (11 August 2023)
Michael Coren is an Anglican priest. His latest book is The Rebel Christ.
I’ve just experienced another attack on social media. The harassment on X, as Twitter now calls itself, usually lasts around 36 hours, and while most of the nasties are trolls and bots, I can’t pretend that the hundreds of comments don’t have an effect. I’m a priest, progressive, outspoken. No point in complaining. But a disturbing new aspect of these bombardments are the repeated and constant false accusations of pedophilia – not a libellous dribble, but a flood.
It’s not really about me of course, and I’m in good company. Last month in Belleville, Ont., when Justin Trudeau was swarmed by a right-wing mob, one of the hysterical shouts clearly heard was that he was a child molester. It’s grotesque nonsense about the Prime Minister that swamps social media. In fact, there aren’t many politicians and activists on the left who haven’t been accused of this awful crime.
And with a horribly convenient timing, a new movie, Sound of Freedom, is currently the talk of the far right. Jim Caviezel (who played Jesus in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ) stars as Tim Ballard, a former government agent who rescues children from sex traffickers. As the critic Sam Adams wrote perceptively for the online magazine Slate, it “arrived in theatres surrounded by a cloud of innuendo put forth by its star and its noisiest right-wing supporters – conspiratorial insinuations about who doesn’t want this story to be told and what real-world traffickers are really up to.”
Rescuing children is one thing, and entirely admirable, but this phenomenon goes much further than that. Mr. Caviezel himself has spoken of “the whole adrenochrome empire,” describing the substance as “an elite drug that they’ve used for many years” that is “10 times more potent than heroin” and “has some mystical qualities as far as making you look younger.”
Adrenochrome, zealots claim, can only be obtained from adrenal glands in a living human body, thus the need to abduct children. It’s obscene and dangerous quackery, but that doesn’t help convince the cult of the credulous. This rubbish has its origins in a QAnon belief that powerful, international figures intent on resetting the world, controlling people and destroying religious freedom are also kidnapping little boys and girls.
That was the lunacy behind Pizzagate in 2016, when thousands believed that a pedophilia ring led by those at the highest levels of the Democratic Party was operating out of a Washington pizza restaurant. More than a million messages were sent on Twitter supporting the fantasy, eventually leading to employees being harassed, followed by a shooting and then an arson.
There’s always been a strong dose of homophobia involved, through the venomous old canard of gay men being groomers, in spite of all the facts and evidence. Facts and evidence, however, are the last things relevant in all this. The trans issue magnified the paranoia, and it’s been pushed into the mainstream by a new generation of right-wing politicians.
When Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill was being debated, for example, Governor Ron DeSantis’s press secretary Christina Pushaw wrote that anyone who opposed the legislation was “probably a groomer.” In 2020 on NBC, Donald Trump spoke of his supporters as being “very strongly against pedophilia and I agree with that. And I agree with it very strongly.”
These statements have enormous influence on the gullible. Bizarre ideas about superwealthy and secretive cabals imposing godless liberalism, fears of children being sexualized or stolen, a terror of change – all this has been empowered by the increasingly media-savvy secular and fundamentalist Christian right.
The disorder may be unique in details but not in theme. In medieval Europe, antisemitic blood libels accused Jews of kidnapping and killing children so as to use their blood, usually for the Passover ceremony. Pope Innocent IV condemned the libels as early as 1247, but they continued, even as late as the last century. They led, inevitably, to pogroms and murder.
Scratch the surface of modern conspiracy theory and antisemitism often appears, but today the accused are usually singled out not by race but ideology, and that includes politicians and public figures considered to be left-of-centre, or even people who support vaccinations, abortion rights, LGBTQ equality, or climate justice policies. This might sound fanciful, but the evidence is sadly abundant.
It’s particularly tragic as children increasingly suffer under a culture of poverty, food insecurity and forced migration. Ironically, those roaring about pedophile rings tend to ignore all of this and are often downright opposed to legislation that may help children. As well, child abuse and human trafficking are genuine issues and have to be taken extremely seriously; baseless and hateful hyperbole only worsens the situation.
There’s no indication that this horror show is diminishing, and it has to be condemned by conservative leaders who consider themselves to be moderate and responsible. They may not be to blame, but their relative failure to speak out simply won’t do. If something doesn’t change soon, I genuinely fear that violence will occur, and judging by the temperature, volume and numbers of the far right, that violence could be of the worst possible kind.