Oliver Anthony didn’t hold back when he took to Facebook a few weeks back to share his thoughts on the current state of the world. After a relative hiatus on social media, save for a few announcements, it was a return to form for ol’ Oliver.
Life has been a whirlwind for the Virginia native ever since he released his debut single, “Rich Men North of Richmond,” back in 2023. The video of his in-the-woods performance was originally uploaded to YouTube and quickly went viral, racking up millions upon millions of views before Anthony was even able to release the song on streaming platforms.
Now, a couple of years and over 300 million streams later, Oliver Anthony is still navigating his way through the music industry, proving wrong those that said he’d have just 15 minutes of fame following his viral hit. Well sorta… to be fair, he hasn’t managed to follow up “Richmond” with another hit, but it also seems like being a famous musicians isn’t the plan for Oliver Anthony. The success of “Rich Men North of Richmond” has given the artist the flexibility to do as he wishes when it comes to his music, and he hasn’t wished to do all that much as of late. In a recent video that he posted on social media, he admitted that he was being a bit of a hermit lately.
But sticking with his prior statements through music, he railed against politics and the modern state of the world:
“I haven’t made a video talking about the world since before Charlie Kirk was shot, and I mean where the heck do you even start. There’s just absolutely horrific stuff in these Epstein files that hasn’t gotten nearly any media attention. It’s sort of dismissed as comedy, but it has been that way since before the Pizza Gate scandals.
This stuff is like … that’s the whole intention. Same way with this World War III, like all of these crazy headlines. There’s so much different opinion about all of that, and it’s almost impossible to keep up with anything that is going on right now.
There’s just too much information, and that is kind of my whole point, you see in my unprofessional opinion since more recent times or quite arguably even going back to the industrialization of this country, politics has never really served the purpose of putting people on platforms to be able to lead anyone. It’s there to sway public opinion.”
It does feel like that at times.
The country singer piggybacked off of that point and said the algorithms that are created and utilized by the technology we all interact with every day only makes the swaying of opinions that much worse. And he’s worries that as artificial intelligence continues to advance, things will only deteriorate even more:
“The point is, these people really are our baby daddies, though. We are like that chick on Facebook that is complaining about him one minute and moving back in with him the next. Because we still use, I mean look at consumer commerce recently since COVID. We are giving them all of our money.
The money that isn’t stolen from us in taxes by like the Hamburglar or whatever friendly Governor that you have that is over-taxing you. If we are not giving it to them through taxes, we are giving it to them through commerce. And the economic development directors in these states, they are loving to put in these data centers, and these data centers is what is sort of establishing all of this. They are building an army to replace us effectively everywhere.”
I know… not exactly the “Tuesday pick-me-up” that you might have been looking for, but it’s what fans have come to expect from Anthony. It’s also not any kind of Earth-shattering information here… but Oliver certainly doesn’t mind taking to social media for the occasional rant about the state of the world.
You can hear Oliver Anthony’s full Facebook rant in the video below:
In the weeks following the rant, he’d perform a few different shows, and he has a few more on the calendar:
