Why Do Journalists Hate Poor Men South of Richmond?
The #1 Billboard song today is “Rich Men North of Richmond”.
The song is an elegiac ode to the working class sung by Oliver Anthony, a laid off paper mill employee (see here). Oliver recorded the song on an iPhone with no vocal training and no grand ambitions of becoming famous – he just wanted to speak his truth.
When offered an $8 million dollar recording contracts, Oliver turned it down and stuck to that truth – “I don’t want to be in the spotlight. I wrote because I was suffering with mental health and depression.”
On the surface, this should have all the makings of a late summer feel-good media story – American Idol happening in real life.
However, the reaction from the mainstream media has been anything but warm.
Good Morning America told its viewers that the song was an example of a racist dog whistle. Time Magazine claimed that it “misses the point.” The NY Times used the song to write a long think piece on the history of civil rights and race in rural Virginia.
Even BBC chimed in and said that the song “was dividing America.”
If you read these reviews and then listen to Rich Men North of Richmond, what you come away thinking is not that Oliver is somehow problematic. You come away wondering how did journalists go from being the guardians of the public to the bodyguards of America’s technocratic elite.
In the past, it wasn’t like this. Journalists were opposed to “the man” and not actively in league with him. Journalism as a profession was breathed into life by the muckrakers like Ida Turnbull and Upton Sinclair who took down large corporations with their investigative reports.
But things have changed and that change started with a shift in leftist ideology (journalists are generally on the left) away from class politics and towards identity politics.
Today, mainstream journalists do not define the world through the lens of class struggle but through a new identity matrix based on an individual’s race, gender and sexual orientation.
In this new victimization Olympics, what matters is not that Oliver Anthony fractured his skull working a minimum wage job while living at home with his diabetic mother and sings his pain in order to better face it – what matters is that he is a cis-gendered heterosexual white male from the south and as such always to be viewed as being at the top of the victimizer hierarchy and regarded with suspicion.
When he speaks, it is your job as a journalist to closely study his words and make sure he is not trying to take the country back to Jim Crow – and to sternly warn the American public of your suspicions as such.
Conversely when a black female singer like Cardi B sings a song like WAP, your job is not to castigate her for her sensationally lewd lyrics but to instead find a way to celebrate her for engaging in a frank discussion of vaginal lubrication as the NY Times did.
The way mainstream journalists reacted to WAP versus Rich Men North of Richmond seems almost farcical but make sense when understood through the lens of identity politics.
What is left unsaid in all of this is how this turn away from focusing on class struggles towards identity politics is a massive win for those who are the current winners in the class struggle.
In the past, if you were a fat cat, you had a gun trained on your back by journalists. Today, it is easy to get them to put their gun away.
You just go all in identity politics.
Pay Ibram Kendi $50k to give a talk about white supremacism, change the sign on the bathroom to an androgenous squiggle, lead a gay pride event. If you do these things, the journalist won’t write stories about how you are getting paid 1,000 x more than your employee. They will call you a progressive stalwart of ESG values.
You can continue to be the Rich Man North of Richmond who just wants total control and journalists today will not only not attack you but will celebrate you for being such.
These days journalists seem to want you to have total control…