Oliver Anthony, the Farmville, Virginia based singer-songwriter, is officially having a moment.
The country music sensation burst onto the scene when a performance of his song “Rich Men North of Richmond” went viral. The song debuted at the number one on the Billboard Hot 100, which made him the very first artist to ever sit atop the chart without having prior charting history.
Anthony released another song titled “I Want To Go Home,” which shares many of the small town, anti-government themes that the viral hit had. Many fans have clung to his “stick it to the man” mentality with his music, but a recent interview with Fox News that Oliver gave have some of his conservative fanbase worried.
To be honest, I don’t think anything he said here is controversial. Anthony’s music has done its best to bring people together, and this statement that he gave definitely aligns with that idea.
However, some people are calling him a “sell out” and “woke,” simply because he utilized the word “diversity” in his answer.
This is what he said:
“I just want people to start appreciating each other as human beings and look beyond political differences and ideologies, and a lot of the things I see corporate media and education doing, which is making everyone identify each other’s differences and not their similarities… I want people to appreciate each other and each other’s struggles.
I don’t see our country lasting more than another generation the way we’re headed. We’ve got to go back to the roots of what made this country great in the first place, which was our sense of community… we are the melting pot of the world.
And that’s what makes us strong, our diversity. We need to learn to harness that and appreciate it and not use it as a political tool to keep everyone separate from each other, you know?”
The above quote takes place around the four minute mark of the video below:
Personally, there doesn’t seem to be anything too flashy or controversial with that statement.
He’s mostly been pro-America with his songs, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that he would be proud to talk about the “melting pot” that is our country. He’s basically saying that diversity is a strength, not a weakness, and that’s about all.
Clearly Oliver Anthony was just trying to bring people together with the statement, but leave it to X (formally called Twitter) to cut the clip out of context and serve it up as “such a let down” from a “sellout” artist:
The more you look into him and his manager, the more of a democrat he reveals himself to be.
— Dan Stilwell (@realdanstilwell) August 23, 2023
He was never with us to begin with. It’s all a set up
— SS (@ss_scmb) August 22, 2023
You show me a melting pot of diversity and I’ll show you a dangerous horror to be avoided like the plague.
— Eric Worsthorne (@EricWorsthorne) August 22, 2023
Damn, thought we had a real one. He switched up so fast
— Arthur (@Arthur0xF) August 23, 2023
People need to stop falling for grifters…
— raf (@defi_raf) August 22, 2023
He was never anything other than a grifter… we warned you but you guys ate it up 🤷🏻♂️
— boxingMD (@BoxingMD1) August 22, 2023
Sucked in, your darling got Lib-pilled.
— James Jansson 🟦 (@jamesjansson) August 23, 2023
Of course, a number of fans defended him, calling for the full context of his statement:
Just another exhausting day on the interwebs…
